"The Town that Started the Civil War"
With all the talk of "appeasement" and "political correctness" these days, it's instructive to remember a group of students and faculty and their families at Oberlin (OH) College in the years before the Civil War who would neither be appeased or politically correct regarding the obvious injustice of slavery. And they were willing to go to jail to defy the worst act of appeasement of that era, the Compromise of 1850 and its Fugitive Slave Act, which required equality-minded people in non-slave states to capture or report fugitive slaves for return to their "owners".
Southern slave hunters were not very particular in their forays into northern states -- Black men and women who were born free in the north were also captured and sent into slavery down South.
"The Town that Started the Civil War" is the mostly-untold story of those brave Oberlin residents, whose college was the first in the United States where black and white students attended classes side-by-side on an equal basis.
"The Town that Started the Civil War"
With all the talk of "appeasement" and "political correctness" these days, it's instructive to remember a group of students and faculty and their families at Oberlin (OH) College in the years before the Civil War who would neither be appeased or politically correct regarding the obvious injustice of slavery. And they were willing to go to jail to defy the worst act of appeasement of that era, the Compromise of 1850 and its Fugitive Slave Act, which required equality-minded people in non-slave states to capture or report fugitive slaves for return to their "owners".
Southern slave hunters were not very particular in their forays into northern states -- Black men and women who were born free in the north were also captured and sent into slavery down South.
"The Town that Started the Civil War" is the mostly-untold story of those brave Oberlin residents, whose college was the first in the United States where black and white students attended classes side-by-side on an equal basis.