hteous enough, were
unlawful. It was unlawful to harbor runaway slaves, but they did it
gladly, and they appealed to the passions as well as the consciences of
men in their hate of the sum of all villainies, as John Wesley called
slavery. They not only met their foes half way, they carried the war
into the hearts and homes of the enemy. From time to time wicked and
sorrowful things happened to fret their fanaticism and keep it at a
white heat. Peaceable negroes were attacked in their homes by ruffianly
whites, their cattle killed, their fields wasted; and sometimes they
made a bloody resistance. They were not always harmless, and they were
not always pleasant neighbors. Slavery was a bad school, for the slaves
as well as the masters; and the negroes, when not vicious and dishonest,
were degraded and ignorant, for the public schools were shut against
them, and they could not read, any more than they could vote or bear
witness. So it is not strange that they should have been hunted and
harried everywhere in Southern Ohio.

In Pike County a whole neighborhood was invaded, and several lives were
lost before one of these foolish and wicked persecutions ended. This
incident, which was one of many more or less violent, occurred in 1830,
and two years later something still more tragical happened. A negro
calling himself Thomas Marshall, who had lived several years at Dayton,
was caught up in the streets of that town by some men who, when his
cries brought the citizens to his help, declared that he was a runaway
slave. They took him before a magistrate, and proved their charge; but
one of the slavecatchers held out the hope that his master would sell
him. The poor slave gave fifty dollars himself toward his freedom, and
his ransom was well made up when word came from his owner in Kentucky
that he would not part with him for any sum. His captors then took
Marshall to Cincinnati, where he was lodged for safe keeping over night
in the fourth story of a hotel. When his guards fell asleep, the slave
rose and threw himself out of the window to the ground fifty feet below.
He was taken up fatally hurt, and he died at dawn.

The anti-slavery meetings were often broken in upon by mobs and
sometimes broken up. One of these riots took place in 1834 at Granville,
in Licking County, where the Ohio Anti-slavery Convention held its
anniversary in a barn on the outskirts. The members were returning to
the village in a procession when the mob m