The Town That Started the Civil War – Nat Brandt

Oberlin, a small college town in northern Ohio, became a center of the national battle against the Fugitive Slave Act in 1858 and 1859. The event that created the conflict started on September 13, 1858 when an Oberlin resident, a runaway slave named John Price, was kidnapped by slave hunters with arrest warrants from Kentucky.

Oberlin, Ohio was a very socially progressive community, maybe the most progressive in the nation, in the 1840s and 1850s. It was a fully racially integrated town with a large population of African-Americans, both freemen and escaped former slaves. Men and women of both races worshiped together, dined together, studied together, and lived next door to each other in harmony.

The kidnaping of John Price mobilized virtually the entire community to recovered and free the former slave from his captors, which they succeeded in doing. The book describes the legal and political conflict that event created among local, state and federal authorities and how it all played out.