My grandfather came north into Ohio and Champaign County, and he had not been there very long before he went back to Virginia and married Lavina Talbott, and when they went to live on the farm he called “Pretty Prairie,” he soon found himself deep in Ohio politics, as it seems the fate of most Ohioans to be, and continued in that element all his life. He had his political principles from Henry Clay,--he had been to Ashland and had known the family,--and he was elected as a Whig to the legislature in 1842 and to the State Senate of Ohio in 1854. There he learned to know and to admire Salmon P. Chase, then governor of Ohio, and it was not long until he was in the Abolitionist movement, and he got into it so deeply that nothing less than the Civil War could ever have got him out, for he was in open defiance, most of the time, to the Fugitive Slave Law. One of the accomplishments in which he took pride, perhaps next to his ability as a horseman, was his skill with the rifle, acquired in Kentucky at the expense of squirrels in the tops of tall trees (he could snuff a candle with a rifle), and this ability he placed at the service of a negro named Ad White, who had run away from his master in the South, and was hidden in a corn-crib near Urbana when overtaken by United States marshals from Cincinnati. The negro was armed, and was defending himself, when my grandfather and his friend Ichabod Corwin, of a name tolerably well known in Ohio history, went to his assistance, and drove the marshals off by the hot fire of their rifles. The marshals retreated, and came up later with reinforcements, strong enough to overpower Judge Corwin and my grandfather, but the negro had escaped. The scrape was an expensive one; there were proceedings against them in the United States court in Cincinnati, and they only got out of it years after when the Fugitive Slave Law was rapidly becoming no law, and Ad White could live near Urbana in peace during a long life, and be pointed out as an interesting relic of the great conflict. This adventure befell my grandfather in 1858, when he had been a Republican for two years, having been a delegate to the first convention of the party in 1856, the one that met in Pittsburgh, before the nominating convention which named Frémont had met in Philadelphia. He had attended that convention with Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky, and shared quarters with him at the hotel.