No community in the antebellum North better reflected the growing passion against slavery than Oberlin, Ohio. In many ways, this small college town represented the most advanced of Northern attitudes toward the issue of slavery and states' rights. Home to more than 300 anti-slave societies and a major stop on the Underground Railroad, it had long offered refuge and opportunity to many free blacks, who found a measure of equality there that was rare anywhere else in the United States. In his narrative, based on thorough primary research, Nat Brandt shows how the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue contributed directly to the tensions that led to the Civil War.