Oberlin Travel Tips - Oberlin Travel Guide

Either.... Wellington or Oberlin.

Oberlin was founded in 1833as an integrated community. The free blacks of Oberlin celebrated Aug.1 (the date of the abolition of slavery in Jamaica) as the day of Independence, rather than July 4.

Women and blacks were admitted to the college. In 1841 it graduated the first women to earn a college B.A. degree in the United States.

Knowing that Oberlin was the first co-educational college in the United States meant a lot to me.

A large number of the students from Oberlin became abolitionists and went South to lead slaves to freedom. By the time the town officially incorporated in 1852, it was a major terminus of the underground railroad and had helped 3000 slaves escape to freedom.

In 1858, Democrats in Ohio gained control of the state legislature and repealed the personal liberty law that allowed fugitives to apply for a writ of habeas corpus. The fugitive slaves who sought refuge around Oberlin became targets of slave-catchers from the South who entered Ohio under the authority of the federal Fugitive Slave Law. When a US Marshall captured a fugitive slave and took him to Wellington to American House (a hotel which was on the site of Wellington's present day library), a group from Oberlin, including John Mercer Langston, Ohio's first black lawyer, and John Copeland 'rescued' him. This is known as the "Oberlin-Wellington Slave Rescue" which is considered by many to be a direct cause of the American Civil War

The government indicted 37 of the rescuers group for violating the Fugitive Slave Law. While the Rescuers waited in jail, they were visited by John Brown whose father Owen had been an Oberlin trustee in the 1830s.

John Brown recruited 2 blacks at Oberlin for his Oct. 16 raid on Harper's Ferry: John Copeland, and Lewis Leary, whose Irish ancester Jeremiah O'Leary had fought in the Revolution with Nathaniel Greene. Oberlin would also be blamed for causing Brown's raid.

John Mercer Langston organized Ohio's first black regiment in 1863 and became a national leader for blacks after the war, founding the National Equal Rights League, organizing the Freedman's Bureau, becoming professor at Howard University, serving as minister to Haiti and as the only black congressman from Virginia in 1890.

Information from Sources:

* Brandt, Nat. The Town That Started the Civil War. Syracuse University Press, 1990. 315 p.
* Hart, Albert Bushnell, ed. The American Nation: a history from original sources. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904-18.

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