In 1859, Jim Gray, an enslaved man who escaped from Missouri, was apprehended in Illinois by slave hunters and taken to Ottawa for a hearing before Justice John Dean Caton of the Illinois Supreme Court's northern division. On October 19, Gray arrived at the Ottawa railroad station on East Marquette Street with his legs chained, his arms pinioned, and a rope around his neck as a crowd waited. Abolitionist John Hossack, an Ottawa grain and lumber merchant born in Scotland, protested Gray's treatment and his desire for freedom. The next day, hundreds gathered at the Ottawa courthouse, where Caton freed Gray of state charges but ordered his captors to take him before the United States Commissioner at Springfield under the federal Fugitive Slave Law, a step likely to return him to enslavement in Missouri. As the U.S. Marshal left the courthouse with Gray, several men restrained the marshal, Hossack seized Gray's arm and urged him to come if he wanted liberty, and Gray was escorted outside, jumped a fence, leapt into a waiting carriage, and sped north on La Salle Street, then east on Superior Street, crossing the Illinois & Michigan Canal aqueduct bridge over the Fox River and heading toward Canada. Hossack and several other abolitionists were arrested by federal authorities and taken to jail in Chicago for trial, where Chicago residents treated the Ottawa men as celebrities for helping Gray escape.
