In Champaign County, a fugitive slave named Ad White resisted the attempt of the slavehunters to take him, in 1857, and fired upon one of the United States marshals, whose life was saved by the negro’s bullet striking against the marshal’s gunbarrel. The people and their officers took the slave’s side, and the case was fought in and out of court. The sheriff of the county was brutally beaten with a slungshot by the marshal who had so narrowly escaped death himself, and never take a thousand dollars for him; the money was promptly raised and paid over, and White lived on unmolested. [Illustration: Slavery issue 232] As late as the summer of 1860 a fugitive slave was arrested near Iberia, in Morrow County. A party of young men caught one of the marshals and shaved his head, while others beat his comrades. Rev. Mr. Gordon, President of Ohio Central College, stood by trying to prevent the punishment, but he alone was arrested. He was sentenced to prison, where he lay till Lincoln pardoned him. The pardon did not recognize his innocence, and he would not leave his cell until his friends forced him to do so. By this time the damp jail air had infected him, and he died, shortly after, of consumption. One would think that such things as these would have cured the Ohio people of all sentiment for slavery, for they had no real interest in it. But even in the second year of the Civil War, which the love of slavery had stirred up against the Union, the famous anti-slavery orator, Wendell Phillips, was stoned and egged while trying to lecture in Cincinnati. Before this time, however, events had gone so far that there was no staying them. One of the earliest and chiefest of these events was the attempt of John Brown to free the slaves in Virginia. He had already fought slavery in Kansas, where it was trying to invade free soil, and in 1859 he thought that the time had come to carry the war into the enemy’s country. He did this by placing himself with a small force of daring young men, several of his own sons among the rest, in the mountains near Harper’s Ferry. He hoped that when he had seized the United States Arsenal at that point, and given them arms the slaves would join him, and help to fight their way to the free states under his lead. But when they were attacked in the Arsenal, Brown and his men were easily overpowered by a detachment of Marines sent from Washington; several of his followers were killed; a few escaped; the rest suffered death with their leader on the gallows at Charlestown.