cover image The Town That Started the Civil War

The Town That Started the Civil War

Nat Brandt, Nathan H. Brandt. Stan Clark Military Books, $34.5 (315pp) ISBN 978-0-8156-0243-9

In a work of first-rate scholarship as well as popular history at its most enjoyable, Brandt, former editor of Publishers Weekly , introduces readers to a little-known event that occurred in the college town of Oberlin, Ohio, a stop on the Underground Railroad. Slave-hunters incurred the resentment of the townspeople, a wrath that came to a boil one day in August 1858 when runaway slave John Price was abducted by these bounty hunters. Outraged, Oberlin College professors and students, in company with white and free-black townspeople, rescued Price and hid him in a faculty house, an initially abortive deliverance that would later, after many machinations, prove successful--although 37 of the liberators would be indicted for violating the Fugitive Slave Act. The ``Oberlin Rescue,'' Brant shows, thrust the issue of states' rights vs. civil rights into the forefront of national politics in the widening debate that heralded the Civil War. BOMC and History Book Club selections. (May)