On Monday evening, February 17, resident Nathan H. “Nat” Brandt, veteran journalist, news writer, and author, will present a special program: Mrs. Stowe’s Legacy - Two Slave Rescues.
Nat will tell the story of two rescues in the antebellum period -- that of a slave named Jane Johnson and her two children in Philadelphia, and that of John Price, a runaway slave from Kentucky found by bounty hunters hiding out in Oberlin, Ohio.
These stories epitomize the lengths to which ordinary citizens would go to help slaves become free in violation of federal law. The two rescues, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, illustrate what became the most powerful social force in the North influencing public response to the issue of slavery.