It's Dred-ful Out There
Tensions were high in this small Ohio town. US Marshals had just captured John Price, and the locals were not happy about it, and so fierce was their opposition, that Marshals grabbed Price and smuggled him to a town down the road, hoping to avoid problems. It had become pretty common for law enforcement to snatch people from their communities and disappear them to places unknown, far away from their loved ones. Even regular folks with no attachment to policing would grab people and traffic them south across the border, knowing they’d be rewarded for it. But as things became increasingly chaotic, some citizens began to take matters into their own hands.
The abolitionists from Oberlin were no joke, either. 17 years earlier, they freed two captured slaves armed with saws and axes. They were not there to mess around this time either, and once they foud out Price was being held down the road in Wellington, they moseyed on down and demanded his release. Unsurprisingly, Johnny Law didn’t oblige and the gathered crowd stormed the building, freeing Price and eventually transporting him all the way to Canada, beyond the reach of slave catchers.
At this point in US history, the Civil War was essentially inevitable, even if most didn’t realize it yet. Thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the states that would, decades later, whine about “states’ rights” passed a law that required the federal government to proactively enforce the slaveholding laws, even in non-slaveholding states. In fact, anyone who knew of a runaway slave and did not help return them to bondage committed a crime in doing so. So while many states had opted out of the cruelty of chattel slavery, they were compelled to support the institution through force of law.
And it only got worse from there as people looked for options to loosen the grip of this evil institution, but they were few and far between. A year before Price and the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, a man named Dred Scott traveled from a slave state into a free one, lived there for many years and asserted that he was no longer enslaved, based on the law. Long story short, Roger Taney, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court declared that not only were the enslaved outside the jurisdiction of the Constitution and could never be citizens, he went on to say they were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
So you could say things were not looking great. On the one hand you have laws being enforced when it’s in favor of human bondage, and in the few cases where a person might find relief, the highest court in the land decides an entire class of people is without protection of the law in any capacity. Regardless of the law, the institution of slavery must be served, and you can spot the early formation of Wilhoit’s Law which expresses that “conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
It’s one of those things conservative folks will balk at, but reinforce it all the same. It’s how we can have a felon for a President, and yet be irate that people will cross the Rio Grande without permission. It's why some can storm the Capitol, and end up with pardons, while others get the bootheel for demanding a reduction in police violence. It’s why Democrats like Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo and others drift to the right when they become embroiled in controversy. They want the protection without the binding. When Kilmar Abrego Garcia is shown to be something other than an MS-13 kingpin, suddenly the government is impotent. The law binds, but doesn’t protect. The same man who goes on and on about “warfighting” and “lethality” also whines about the press being mean, and he gets by because the law protects him, but does not bind, and acts accordingly. He and the rest of them lean on the learned helplessness of cowards.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. - Wilhoit's Law
On every occasion, when marginalized groups have made any kind of headway in American society, Conservatism has reliably been there to wrest power back and reassert itself. As the Redemption and Jim Crow beat back Reconstruction, so too is the current MAGA movement undoing the hard fought gains of the Civil Rights Era, and it’s happening at a frightening clip.
Daily videos of masked men throwing people in vans show up in feeds. Supporters will say they’re only going after “illegals and criminals” but we see the US citizens and documented immigrants being swept up in these dragnets, in the same way freed Black Men were still kidnapped and sent south. They sneak them from town to down, just like they did in Oberlin, avoiding trials and habeas corpus, in attempts to move them beyond the law’s reach. The perpetrators scoff at the idea of oversight.
“They have no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Same as it ever was.
The end result is that this puts the whole country in a tricky spot, and with recent Supreme Court rulings, repairing the damage of the past five months is a task that will extend beyond my lifetime. The conservative party currently serves at the pleasure of their god-king and enough of the opposing party continue to show deference that it’s an uphill battle for the time being. The folks in 1850s Oberlin and elsewhere, were not having it. The folks in LA and many other places around the country are not laying down. Being legally permissible does not make something morally right, then or now.
To make progress though, you’re gonna need, to borrow an English footballing term, get stuck in. No King’s Day was great. Loved it. Waves of popular support against the world’s most pitiful parade was great, but it’s no solution. Abraham Lincoln gave his famous "House Divided" speech only a couple months before the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, and a year after the Dred Scott decision. Now we usually only get the money line, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” but the crucial bit comes shortly after. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
The job isn’t done, and like my girl Natasha said, the rest is still unwritten. There’s no way the Oberlin folks could have known that slavery would be upended seven years later, but they did the right thing, at the right time to the extent that they could. Countless groups and individuals, known and unknown did the same to bring emancipation to the country. It can happen again. A win for someone like Zohran Mamdani is a start, but when Andy Ogles, a man in the middle of his own FBI investigations, immediately called for his denaturalization, because he knows who the law binds and who it protects, it’s evidence that Mamdani’s win is far from enough. Continue to contact your reps and challenge those you see in your daily lives, but it’s going to take a multitude of things, muscular efforts, working in concert for this house to become the thing we want it to become. As long as this administration is hell bent on undoing our progress as a pluralist democracy, we must continue to fight because there will be no shelter here. Dig in wherever you can because the front line is everywhere.
