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

by Kate Masur

In the spring of 1841, two court decisions that reinforced African Americans’ rights in Ohio exacerbated existing tensions in the city. The case of State v. Farr involved seventeen Ohioans whom a lower court had found guilty of riot for encouraging the escape of a group of enslaved people in transit from Virginia to Missouri. The Ohio Supreme Court overturned their convictions on a technicality, but the chief judge, in announcing the decision, declared that a slave “became free when brought to this State by his master.” Around the same time, the Court of Common Pleas of Hamilton County (which encompassed Cincinnati) insisted that in Ohio, “liberty is the rule, involuntary servitude the exception.” Both decisions affirmed the “free soil” principle—that is, the idea that no one could be claimed as a slave in a place where slavery did not exist in law.