The Reverse Underground Railroad in Ohio by David Meyers

Author:David Meyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Before becoming president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes defended many runaway slaves. Library of Congress.

However, Carpenter resisted pressure to make a quick ruling. He took time to review the documents and testimony, although there was ample evidence to return the young man to slavery at once. Supposedly, Carpenter was intimidated by the crowd and spoke in whispers, which required those in attendance to listen very attentively. “After hearing the evidence, he deferred making his judgment until the next day.”206

The Cincinnati Gazette reported that at half past two in the afternoon on October 20, 1853, Lewis Williams was brought before Carpenter for his decision. But an application was made for continuance on the grounds that new testimony had come to light in a telegraph message from Judge Spalding in Columbus. Spalding also expressed the desire to hear the case in his own Circuit Court.

While Carpenter was in the process of conveying his decision to grant the motion, Lewis, who had been sitting with Marshal Dryden, pushed his chair back, ostensibly to gain some leg room. He then slid it back some more, quietly stood up and took a step back. “A friend put a good hat on his head,” historian Charles Greve would later write,

and he moved cautiously toward a part of the room where the colored people were gathered. A number of the abolitionists watched his every movement with anxious fear lest he should be discovered. At the door a passageway was made for him and he passed into the street, through an alley, crossed the canal through the German settlement and stole by an indirect route to Avondale, where he knew the sexton of the colored burying ground.207

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