1858 (30 page)

John Mercer Langston, a black freedman whose brother Charles was indicted, rose and told the crowd that the government had struck down both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the Fugitive Slave Act and this prosecution. “How shall we meet our duty? To do it, we must make sacrifices—go to prison, or, if necessary, go out on the battlefield to meet the slave oligarchy.” And, in a menacing letter, John Brown Jr., the son of the fire-breathing abolitionist leader, wrote the Rescuers that by the actions of the government, “We are forced into the attitude of resistance to the government. I am glad the work of judicial ‘cursing out’ is progressing not only out of Kansas, but in Ohio.”
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The federal government was not amused by the “Felons’ Feast.” Just three days later, federal marshals burst into a small, local schoolhouse where rescuer William Lincoln was teaching to arrest him. They not only physically restrained the young educator and forcibly removed him from the class but manacled him in front of his students. An angry Lincoln begged to have the tight handcuffs removed, but the marshals ignored him. Lincoln was then taken on a long carriage ride to Columbus and tossed into a tiny jail cell without food or water. When the other inmates were told who he was and why he was there, they cheered him. Lincoln could not sleep and the next day was taken by train to Cleveland, where he was arraigned and finally released, his reddened wrists cut and badly bruised from the tight handcuffs.

The prosecutors smirked over their tough treatment of Lincoln, but it unnerved the nation when it was made public in an article from the
Columbus State Journal
that was reprinted in
The Liberator
, the country’s leading abolitionist newspaper, and other publications. The Oberlin rescue, and the prosecution, was no longer just another slave-rescue account but a national story.

The trials were held in a relatively new, three-story-high stone county courthouse, with handsome arched windows that fronted Cleveland’s busy public square. Reporters from newspapers in several Midwestern states, plus the
New York Herald Tribune
, were in the building to cover it as well as reporters from all of the leading newspapers in Ohio. The media view of the trial was mixed. The
New York Times
correspondent in town, twenty-three-year-old John Kagi, easy to spot anywhere with his lengthy beard, provided sporadic stories. The controversial Kagi had previously worked as a soldier for John Brown in the Kansas wars and was clearly on the side of the defendants. Several other papers provided a pro-defendant view, too. The
Free South
, an abolitionist paper, favored the defendants and its editor even asked William Lincoln to serve as its reporter for the judicial proceeding. The editor of the
Cleveland Herald
wrote at the start of the hearings that “no criminal court ever had a more respectable class of prisoners in the criminal docks,” and added that the trial was “disgraceful to our country.”
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But there were other journals represented in the courtroom whose editors saw the Rescuers as genuine evildoers. The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, Ohio’s paper with the largest circulation and the most influence, as an example, alternately referred to Oberlin as “that Babylon of abolitionism” and “headquarters and hotbed of Negro fanaticism in the North.” Any rallies or protests of abolitionists were referred to as “carnivals.” Not content to write that the Oberliners were charged with breaking the fugitive slave law, the
Plain Dealer
insisted that they were all guilty of treason (their new editor was humorist Charles Browne, who wrote as Artemas Ward).
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The public was divided, too. Most residents of Ohio sided with the Rescuers, while others sided with the prosecutors. A few who considered themselves liberals drew the line at violent interference by U.S. marshals. They shared the opinion of Seth Gates, a liberal on most issues, who criticized his friend, radical congressman Joshua Giddings, for his “audacious letters in justification of the Oberlin law breakers.”
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The federal government did not want to try all of the men together and decided to put Simeon Bushnell, the local printer, on trial first. Then they would proceed with individual trials for the others in a predetermined order agreed upon by both teams of attorneys. The government was confident that it had a solid case against Bushnell. George Belden, the overeager prosecutor, who had bragged, “We will drive those Oberlin fellows
to the wall
,”
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proved without doubt that John Price was a runaway slave and that the slave hunters had legal writs to capture him and return him to his owner. Kentuckian John Bacon, a well-dressed man, appeared in court to tell the story of his ownership of Price.

Numerous witnesses identified Bushnell as one of the men who had spread the word of the kidnapping in Oberlin; others identified him as one of the Rescuers in the crowd at Wellington. Judge Willson admonished the members of the jury that their only job was to determine whether or not Bushnell assisted in rescuing Price. If so, they had to find him guilty under the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Some said the judge was hopelessly biased and called his instructions to the grand jury “an intemperate assault upon the character and motives of conscientious objectors to that law.”
³⁹⁶

Bushnell was certain he would be acquitted. So were all the other defendants, who traveled to Cleveland and sat in the courtroom in a show of support. Dozens of family members and friends went to Oberlin so that they could cheer the not guilty verdict and escort Bushenell back to town for a victory celebration. Their confidence was bolstered following a strong case made by the defense team. They offered standard arguments that the slave catchers each told a different story and therefore all of their testimony was unreliable. They turned the indictment upside down and said that since what the Rescuers had done was a morally good thing, they could not have committed a crime. “There is not one among you,” one attorney told the jury, “that would look upon [them] as a thief or one convicted of a moral wrong.”
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The defense attorney reminded the jurors that in Ohio everyone was free and therefore the defendants not only had the right to rescue Price but were obligated to do so. He told them that, in fact, those slave catchers had kidnapped an Ohio citizen. The Rescuers would have saved that citizen if he were white—skin color did not matter. He reminded them that while slavery was legal under Kentucky’s laws, it was not in Ohio. “How then can the court assume that the law of Kentucky is applicable to this case?” asked Albert Riddle.
³⁹⁸

The convincing Riddle made a passionate plea for Bushnell’s release, and his graphic denunciation of slave hunters and those who assisted them mesmerized those in the courtroom.

He told the jury, “To one of us, every breath, every mouthful of food, or shred of clothing thus enjoyed, is a larceny from the sinews, hearts, and souls of a whole race. I can also understand why, in the half-barbaric profusion and license of southern slavery, these coarse, bloated, bullying, cowardly swaggers—great, hairy maggots warmed into life in the hot, seething carcass of rotten slavery—can exist, and the needs for such existences, for I have seen them among us. But, I repeat it, I cannot comprehend how a mass of feculence can exist at the North, in which God can tolerate life, that outrages human nature by crawling into the human form so abject and vile that it can prey upon and trade in the misfortune of these wretched fugitives from slavery.”
³⁹⁹

The loquacious Riddle appealed to them “as men and as Ohioans” to free Bushnell and the others. He told them that these were “issues involving the common rights, franchises, and liberties of us all as citizens of a great free state.”
⁴⁰⁰

In his charge to the jury, the judge offered the jurors no leeway in their verdict, telling them that if they believed Bushnell had aided in the rescue of John Price in any way they had to find him guilty; no exceptions could be made and the law could not be interpreted by them. Even so, all in the courtroom were startled when the foreman rose from his seat in the jury box and barked out “guilty” when asked for the jury’s verdict. Before any of the defendants in the courthouse or in the audience had a chance to react, the prosecutor further astonished the court by demanding that the next defendant be put on trial right away—Professor Henry Peck. But Henry Peck was not the second scheduled trial. That “honor” belonged to black freedman Charles Langston. The defense lawyers had not even prepared a defense for Henry Peck yet. Judge Willson agreed that Henry Peck should be put on trial—immediately.

At that point, chaos reigned in Willson’s courtroom. There was cheering by those in the chamber who believed the Rescuers were guilty and jeers from the residents of Oberlin and Wellington who thought they should all be freed. Others howled that it was unfair to put Peck on trial next, out of order; no jury should hear a case of a man whose lawyers had not put together a defense. Prosecutor Belden told the judge he was ready to proceed against Henry Peck. Defense counsel Rufus Spalding said that the government appeared ready to try the men out of order, one after the other, in an illegal manner. He would have nothing to do with it; the legal team would offer no defense if Belden went that far.

Belden smirked that he could do what he wanted, and to make certain that the Rescuers remained in Cleveland so he could put them on trial, he wanted them all arrested and thrown in jail. Judge Willson agreed. Another defense attorney, Franklin Backus, was livid. He called the decisions of Belden and the judge “a most villainous outrage on the sense of justice of the civilized world, and no one of the defendants would so stultify himself as to attempt a defense before such a jury…a monstrous proceeding.”
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Belden, fearful of a riot, suggested to the judge that he might let the men go home if they posted $1,000 bail each, an amount they could easily obtain.

The Rescuers gathered in a large huddle in the middle of the high-ceilinged courtroom and engaged in a heated discussion. Marshal Johnson stood by, waiting for them to agree to bail so he could let them leave the building and walk to the train station with their families. The Rescuers had decided to take a bold step, though, one that surprised Johnson and, as soon as it was reported, the entire nation. The Rescuers would not post bail. The men would remain in jail for as long as it took for each trial to be heard, even if that took months. In a “manifesto” they published, the Rescuers said that they were confident the judge and prosecutor were acting out of “personal malice and a determination to humble them.” They were going to “enter a most emphatic protest against the insult and legal injustice which they had suffered,” said rescuer Jacob Shipherd.
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That afternoon, in a light drizzle, the men marched together out of the courthouse and across the public square to the Cuyahoga County Jail. The sheriff in charge of the facility, David Wightman, who privately sympathized with them, was so startled to see the group walking toward his front door, their luggage in their hands, friends at their side, that he did not believe it. He insisted on papers authorizing him to take them as prisoners; the men stood in the rain until the documents arrived some time later.

The Cuyahoga County Jail was a foreboding structure that looked more like the medieval dungeon of a deranged warlord than a nineteenth-century correctional facility. It consisted of two connected, three-story stone buildings, one higher than the other. The roof contained battlements and watch-towers, hence its long-time nickname, “Wightman’s Castle.”
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Wightman told his new prisoners that he welcomed them as guests, not criminals, because, the antislavery sheriff said, “I cannot regard you as criminals for doing only what I should do myself under similar circumstances.”
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