OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Ohio and The Underground Railway-- Pt 3
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by
Darlene E. Kelley
http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374
December 16, 1999
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Historical Collections of Ohio
Diaries of S. J. Kelly
Plains Dealer
Know Your Ohio
by Darlene E. Kelley
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Ohio and the Underground Railroad Pt 3

Cleveland and surrounding counties--

Clevelanders made contribution to the cause of the emancipation because
of 2 geographic factors; the location of the city in the puritan New
England environment of the Western Reserve, and its position on Lake
Erie opposite the shores of Canada, destination of many hundreds of
fugitives from the slave South. The village, town, and city that
Cleveland became during the antebellum years did not wholly reflect the
hard piety and humanitarium zeal for which the surrounding counties of
Yankee settlers were long renouned. Instead, Cleveland was like most
other fast growing northern centers of trade: crass, money-conscious,
pragmatic, and chauvinistic about flag, work,and progress. Clevelanders
were generally skeptical of plans to rearrange society, but like most
northerners they had little regard for slavery as a system. In time they
came to hate the slaveholder's arrogance and help for the slaves plight
in America matched, if not exceeded, that of any other metropolitan
center in North America, with exception of Boston and Toronto.

Beginning with the Western Reserve, Cleveland has had interest of the
plight of slavery. Ben was a fugitive slave, who spent several months in
Cleveland in 1806. In the spring of that year, a small boat transporting
a man named Hunter, his family, and Ben, was upset and driven ashore
just east of Rocky River. Hunter, from Michigan, hoped to resettle in
the Western Reserve. Ben was the only survivor; the others drowned or
died of exposure. After 3 or 4 days, French trappers enroute to Detroit
rescued Ben, returning to Cleveland and leaving him in the care of
Lorenzo Carter.

That October 2 men from Kentucky, one claiming to be Ben's owner.
demanded to see Ben. Carter purportedly stipulated that Ben must consent
to the meeting, which he did. As a precaution, Carter had Ben on one
side of the Cuyahoga River and the 2 men on the other. The owner
reportedly reminded Ben of his former good treatment and Ben consented
to return to him. After the men, with Ben, left they were confronted in
Independance by 2 men carrying rifles who ordered Ben to flee into the
woods, which he apparently did. These men, John Thompson and Jas. Geer,
were considered employees of Carter's. or at least frequenters of his
tavern, so Carter was credited with arranging the affair. Unable to find
Ben, the slave owners returned to Kentucky. For a while it was believed
that Ben lived in a hut, either in Independence or Brecksville. He
eventually made his way to Canada, and nothing more is known of him
thereafter.

If abolition gained few converts, less radical approaches took route
along the Cuyahoga. Most important was the operation of the Underground
Railroad. The completion of the Ohio Canal in 1832 enhanced the
strategic importance of the city in this regard, though the numbers
assisted to freedom, especially by whites, were far lower than legend
long claimed. The belfrey of St John's Episcopal church was suspected to
serve as an occasional hiding place. Others claim to a tunnel under the
church that housed slaves. However that has never been proved. There was
a tunnel, but what it's use was for, was unknown.

Not until passage of the rigerously enforced Fugitive Law in 1859 were
Clevelanders aroused to concerted action. Antislavery meetings drew
crowds, particularly when fugitives told their dramatic stories of
punishment, escape, and freedom. A typical meeting was held at the
Disciple Church in Solon on the 17 and 18 of June 1847, where William
Ferns. a fugitive slave of Oberlin, addressed the afternoon meeting.
Such incidents, as well as the denunciations such as Joshua Giddings at
Cleveland rallies, encouraged other wise law abiding citizens to defy
the hated Fugitive slave law. In 1855, for example, Jas Adams of Big
Kanawha, Va., fled with a cousin through Ohio, along a route used the
previous year by 5 other fugitives from     
his neighborhood heading for Cleveland. A Cleveland antislavery
clergyman, and than a white shoemaker, whom the black travelers met on
the outskirts of town, arranged their passage to Buffalo and from there
to Canada, Such assistance kept the antislavery cause very much alive,
but it rested largely on personal difficulties with which one could
identify, not on larger matters of polity and justice for the race as a
whole.

Cleveland's most dramatic signal of white protest against southern
high-handedness grew out of the famed Oberlin-Wellington Rescue.
Oberlinites mobbed a jail in nearby Wellington to rescue a fugitve, a
long resident in their community. 

His name was John Price, who had escaped from his owner, John G. Bacon.
He fled to Oberlin, Ohio to an underground station. Price lived there
peacefully for two years until he was recognized by a neighbor of his
former master. Bacon sent a slave catcher named Anderson Jennings to
Oberlin, who, with assistants, lured Price out of town and captured him.
The party traveled to Wellington, 9 miles south, and took refuge in the
Wadsworth House, a local hotel.

After the abduction was discovered, the people of Oberlin marched in
silent procession to Wellington to free Price. An estimated 600 citizens
surrounded the hotel, removed Price through one of the windows, and
returned him to Oberlin. They hid him in the house of the future college
president, James H, Fairchild: he eventually escaped to Canada. On Dec
7,1858, 37 Oberlin and Wellington residents were indicted for their part
in Price's escape, as violating the fugitive slave law of 1850. They
were arraigned in Cleveland by the U.S. District Court. The prisoners
pleaded not guilty, and the trial was set for March 1859. Public opinion
was with the indicted.

The trial began on April 5, 1859. The defense was represented by Rufus
P. Spalding, Albert G. Riddle and Seneca O. Griswold and the prosecution
by George W. Belden. The first to stand trial was Simeon Bushnell and
Charles Langston, an African American. They were found guilty, fined,
and jailed. The rest of the cases were continued to the July Court term.
Trainloads of people paraded around Cleveland's Public Square and
delivered dozens of speeches of encouragement to the prisoners from a
platform erected for that purpose. The jailed men wrote antislavery
tracts and printed a newspaper, the Rescuer, during their 3-month term.
The indictments were finally dropped and the men releasd.

As Cleveland whites grew incresingly distressed about slavery and slave
catchers. blacks became more militant. For instance, in Nov.1859 Deputy
Marshall William L. Manson took into custody Henry Seaton, a Kentucky
slave. Although the prisoner was returned to his master without
incident, George Hartmen, who had betrayed Seaton by luring him into a
trap, had to seek refuge from an angry crowd, finding safety only in a
city jail. John Brown, a native of Hudson in neighboring Summit County,
was the most famous beneficiary of Clevelander's pride in protecting the
hunted from their pursuers. At the time of the Oberlin rescurers'
release and celebration assembly, Brown sojourned in Cleveland 10 days,
planning his assault on Harper's Ferry. There was already a price on his
head for his Kansas guerrila activities and killings at Pottawatomie,
but although he passed the federal marshall's office daily, no one tuned
him in.

As the Ohio canal Boatman, John Malvin and some church people cooperated
in aiding fugitives, some local blacks, influenced in part by the record
of race relations across the Canadian border, adopted the idea of
emigration. On 24th of August 1854, the Negro Emigration Convention
assembled in Cleveland to discuss plans for colonizing abroad. It could
be said that the meeting was the birthplace of Black Nationalism---that
is, a new consciousness of Afro-American culture.

Indeed any final assessment of Cleveland's antislavery position must
acknowledge that its racial reform tradition more than matched that of
most other cities. With their ethnic diversity, cities such as Boston,
Cincinnati, New York, and Philadelphia, and smaller places such as Utica
and Rochester were sporadically torn by riots against blacks and
abolitionists, a lawlessness that Clevelander's happily did not share.
Whatever the failings of Cleveland's civic leadership regarding formal
abolition may have been, the commercial climate of the port and the
local in the heart of the Western Reserve made possible a relatively
smooth transition from the era of slavery to the epoch of free-labor
capitalism, to which Cleveland Blacks and Whites made their significant
contribution.
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to be continued in part 4--