g for the immediate end to slavery. Among the resolutions passed was that Friends should be “careful to hear testimony against slavery and to provide for such people of color as have had their freedom secured and to instruct them in learning.” Though it didn’t say anything about fugitive slaves, such language was an invitation to accommodate them.
Also attending the meeting was a young man whose name would become synonymous with the antislavery movement, Benjamin Lundy. He had moved to Mount Pleasant in 1811 and got a job working as a saddle maker for Jesse Thomas. Originally from New Jersey, he moved to Wheeling, W. Va., just across the Ohio River, less than 10 miles from Mount Pleasant where he learned the saddle and harness making trade. It was in Wheeling, which lay between the slave breeding centers of Maryland and Virginia, and the new developing plantations in need of slaves in Kentucky and Missouri, where he saw the chain gangs with as many as 100 slaves shackled to each other on their way to their new masters. It compelled Lundy to write in his diary that his “heart was deeply grieved at the gross abomination; I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of distress, and the iron entered my soul.”
Lundy moved about 10 miles south to St. Clairsville in 1816 and formed the area’s first antislavery society, the Union Humane Society. Its first meeting was held in his home and was attended by five persons. But within six months, eight local chapters had formed with a total of 500 members. Antislavery sentiment was so strong in the region that it persuaded Osborn to move to Mount Pleasant and publish the nation’s first antislavery newspaper, The Philanthropist, in 1817. Lundy, who had previously written a circular expressing his opposition to slavery under the pseudonym of “Philo Justitia” was enthusiastic about the paper and began submitting articles under that name. Following a trip to Missouri, and learning upon his return that Osborn had given up the paper, Lundy moved back to Mount Pleasant in 1821 and began publishing his own antislavery paper, The Genius of Emancipation. The house where Lundy lived during his second residence in Mount Pleasant remains today and is a National Historic Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places. It later shared a common wall with the village’s Free Labor Store, which sold goods not produced through the toil of slaves and which operated from 1848 to 1857.
Lundy only lived in Mount Pleasant for about a year before moving on again. It was the beginning of his one man crusade to end slavery and led to the publication of The Genius in many locations. His crusade separated him from family, and saw the premature death of his wife in 1826 and the raising of his five children for much of the time by friends. It also took him to such various locations as Haiti, Mexico, and Canada in search of places for the colonization of fugitive slaves and free blacks. He died in 1839 in Illinois, reunited with his children, but never seeing the fruits of his efforts.
By the time of the first convention of the Ohio Yearly Meeting, Mount Pleasant is believed to have begun aiding fugitive slaves. It was during the War of 1812 when slaves served the American army that they became aware of the freedom that awaited them in Ohio and other places north of the Mason-Dixon Line. They would escape through Wheeling, Va., swimming across the Ohio River to Martins Ferry. On occasion, it is said that David and Benjamin Stanton, members of one of Mount Pleasant’s earliest pioneer families, visited the marketplace in Wheeling and took fugitive slaves to Ohio, concealed in their wagons, by way of Martins Ferry. With the antislavery publications coming out of Mount Pleasant, word spread that the village was a haven for fugitive slaves. Michigan Underground Railroad conductor Nathan Thomas, who grew up in Mount Pleasant and left during the 1820s, wrote in his autobiography that “many a panting fugitive from slavery” passed through the village. Thomas described two specific incidents: one in which a fugit