BOOK REVIEW : Worthy Look at a Hotbed of Abolition : THE TOWN THAT STARTED THE CIVIL WAR <i> by Nat Brandt</i> Syracuse University Press $29.95, 336 pages, illustrated)

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was clearly a law that “begged to be disobeyed,” writes journalist-historian Nat Brandt in this fascinating and meticulously researched account of the rescue of a captured fugitive slave by an integrated band of Oberlin, Ohio, citizens--the famous 1858 Oberlin-Wellington Rescue case.

Brandt correctly calls the title of his book an “exaggeration” bearing a “kernel of truth.” While the highly publicized Oberlin Rescue did not actually start the war, it was certainly one of the final steps on its inexorable path. It proved that abolitionists were prepared openly to break the law, just as Harpers Ferry proved that they were prepared to start a war.

The Act permitted slave catchers to range freely in the North in search of runaways. Alleged fugitives were denied benefit of trial or right to testify in their own defense. Kidnaping--both of free blacks and of slaves--was the order of the day.

And the law was partial--to say the least. Federal commissioners decided whether an alleged fugitive was actually an owner’s property. While a decision for the owner netted the commissioner $10, a decision for the fugitive only gave him $5. Worse, in Northern eyes, any ordinary citizen who refused to help capture a runaway faced imprisonment, as well as a $1,000 fine. The Act drove many Northerners, not particularly sympathetic to blacks, into the anti-slavery camp.

For abolitionists the issue was “conscience.” For others, the issue was sectional tyranny--a reaction against the South’s attempt to legalize slavery throughout the country.

Meanwhile, dramatic slave rescue efforts became the norm. None more clearly demonstrated the conflict between law and conscience--as well as the fight against sectional tyranny--than the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue.

Pro-slavery Democrats and anti-slavery Republicans fought for control of border state Ohio. And Oberlin, a college town, belonged to the staunchly Republican Western Reserve, whose counties were known as “the most abolitionist” in America. Oberlin believed in abolition, women’s rights, temperance and racial equality.

What was most “peculiar” about Oberlin in l9th-Century America was the fact that it was totally integrated, from its college classrooms to its churches and public schools. There were black merchants and professional men on Oberlin’s main street, and black voters at Oberlin’s polls--conditions that existed no where else in Ohio outside the Western Reserve, and barely anywhere else in America.

On Sept. 13, 1858, runaway slave John Price, who had escaped (like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Eliza”) over the frozen Ohio River, was betrayed, for $20, by 14-year-old Shakespeare Boynton, the son of a local Democrat. Price was seized by U.S. marshals on the road outside Oberlin and taken to the nearby town of Wellington to await transport South.

But before the slave catchers reached Wellington, Oberlin had sounded the alarm. Men, women and children, black and white, in buggies, wagons and carriages all made for Wellington to snatch Price--without bloodshed--from his captors.

The “rescuers” were hailed as abolitionist heroes. Of the 24 from Oberlin, half were black. Among them were two future members of John Brown’s “army” and Charles Langston, whose brother John Mercer Langston, an Oberlin graduate, was the first black man elected to public office in America (in 1855 from a Western Reserve township). Poet Langston Hughes was a descendant.

The trial was politically rigged from start to finish. The Democratic Buchanan Administration had no intention of letting Oberlin’s community rescue set a precedent. Oberlin, “a defiant hotbed of abolitionism,” had to be “taught a lesson.”

Both the grand jury (of which Shakespeare Boynton’s father was a member) and the trial jury (on which a federal marshal sat) were packed. Neither contained a single Republican. The judge attacked the “sentiment prevalent in the community which . . . makes the Conscience of each individual in society the Test of his own Accountability to the laws. . . . “

The only defendants actually tried--the white Simeon Bushnell and the black Charles Langston--were found guilty. The others refused to post bond, remaining in custody to protest legal injustice.

Their confinement became one of the “most unusual in penal history.” Treated as privileged guests by sympathetic jailers, the “rescuers” (“Not feeling very guilty,” they stated) played host to “no less than 4,000 visitors”--including an entire Sunday School class and John Brown.

And they were ultimately triumphant. As the hostile to Oberlin Cleveland Plain Dealer put it: “The Government has been beaten at last . . . and Oberlin, with its rebellious Higher Law creed is triumphant. . . . As goes Oberlin, so goes the United States in 1860.”

And so it went. Brandt has skillfully re-examined an important moment in history.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “The Bear Flag” by Cecelia Holland (Houghton Mifflin).