It would not be easy to trace here the course of events which led to these outbreaks. It is no doubt true that the abolitionists were often rash, if not reckless, and that when they were maddened by the coldness or the hostility of the people to the cause of human freedom they did not stop at some acts which, though they were righteous enough, were unlawful. It was unlawful to harbor runaway slaves, but they did it gladly, and they appealed to the passions as well as the consciences of men in their hate of the sum of all villainies, as John Wesley called slavery. They not only met their foes half way, they carried the war into the hearts and homes of the enemy. From time to time wicked and sorrowful things happened to fret their fanaticism and keep it at a white heat. Peaceable negroes were attacked in their homes by ruffianly whites, their cattle killed, their fields wasted; and sometimes they made a bloody resistance. They were not always harmless, and they were not always pleasant neighbors. Slavery was a bad school, for the slaves as well as the masters; and the negroes, when not vicious and dishonest, were degraded and ignorant, for the public schools were shut against them, and they could not read, any more than they could vote or bear witness. So it is not strange that they should have been hunted and harried everywhere in Southern Ohio. In Pike County a whole neighborhood was invaded, and several lives were lost before one of these foolish and wicked persecutions ended. This incident, which was one of many more or less violent, occurred in 1830, and two years later something still more tragical happened. A negro calling himself Thomas Marshall, who had lived several years at Dayton, was caught up in the streets of that town by some men who, when his cries brought the citizens to his help, declared that he was a runaway slave. They took him before a magistrate, and proved their charge; but one of the slavecatchers held out the hope that his master would sell him. The poor slave gave fifty dollars himself toward his freedom, and his ransom was well made up when word came from his owner in Kentucky that he would not part with him for any sum. His captors then took Marshall to Cincinnati, where he was lodged for safe keeping over night in the fourth story of a hotel. When his guards fell asleep, the slave rose and threw himself out of the window to the ground fifty feet below. He was taken up fatally hurt, and he died at dawn.