Dr. Hiram Rutherford played a key role in Abraham Lincoln’s famous slave case, the only instance in Lincoln’s career in which he represented the rights of a slave owner. Robert Matson brought enslaved people from Kentucky each year to work his farm north of Independence until after the harvest, using a common loophole in Illinois law that allowed enslaved people to be held in the state while in transit. In 1847, Matson’s enslaved worker Jane Bryant argued with his housekeeper and future wife, Mary Corbin, who threatened to have Jane and her children sent south to be sold. Jane’s free husband, Anthony, sought help from Gideon Ashmore and Hiram Rutherford in the village of Independence, now Oakland, and they hid the runaways in Ashmore’s hotel. Matson then sued them for the loss of his property and hired Usher Linder and Abraham Lincoln as his attorneys. Lincoln argued that under the law the runaways should be returned to Matson because he had publicly declared that they were not held permanently in Illinois but were there for temporary labor. Although the trial ended with freedom for the Bryant family, Rutherford and Ashmore recognized that they could not remain in Illinois because Black Codes in the state constitution discouraged free Black people from living there. Many abolitionists, including Abraham Lincoln at that time, favored returning freed enslaved people to Africa, and with help from Rutherford and Ashmore and a donation from Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon, money was raised to send the Bryant family to Liberia. In 1848, Reverend S. S. Ball of the Colored Baptist Association of Illinois traveled to Liberia to report on conditions and found the Bryants in a deplorable situation, wishing to return to America, which he could not arrange.