Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Seeking to make inroads into state politics, the OASS chose state Senator Leicester King as its president. A successful businessman, King was born in Connecticut and had moved to Ohio as a young man. He had once visited Natchez, Mississippi, with an eye toward going into business there, but he was repulsed by slavery and returned to settle in northeast Ohio. There he became a promoter of the Pennsylvania and Ohio Canal, an inland shipping route that connected the Western Reserve with points east. His large home in Warren was known as a way station on the Underground Railroad, and King devoted a portion of his ample resources to helping fugitive slaves reach freedom. The OASS’s selection of King, a Whig, to lead the organization suggested that abolitionists wanted to make themselves heard in the capital, which in 1816 had moved from Chillicothe to Columbus.