Congress passed Fugitive Slave Laws in 1793 and 1850 that allowed federal marshals to arrest enslaved people who had escaped to the North and return them to their southern owners, and also to arrest northerners suspected of aiding runaway slaves. These laws were contested throughout the North, including in Ohio, where a case that received national press centered on Addison White, an escaped slave who arrived in Mechanicsburg in August 1856. There he met abolitionist Udney Hyde and stayed at Hyde's farm while Hyde recovered from a leg injury. After White's master Daniel White learned his location, he came to Mechanicsburg in April 1857 with federal marshals. When they tried to seize Addison and arrest Hyde for violating the Fugitive Slave Law, Hyde's daughter ran to town and returned with residents carrying pitchforks and shovels to fight the marshals. Fearing for their lives, the marshals withdrew, but later returned and arrested Charles Taylor, Edward Taylor, Russell Hyde, and Hiram Gutridge, saying they were taking them to Urbana for a preliminary trial on charges of harboring and protecting a fugitive slave, though they instead headed south to Kentucky. After learning of the arrests, many Champaign County citizens rode out on horseback to free their neighbors. The Clark County sheriff joined the pursuit but was shot near South Charleston while trying to stop the marshals. The running battle ended in Lumberton near Xenia when the Greene County sheriff arrested the marshals. The case was finally settled when the people of Mechanicsburg paid $900 for Addison White's freedom. During the Civil War, White joined the 54th Massachusetts Infantry and after the war returned to Mechanicsburg to work for the city's Street Department. He and his second wife Amanda are buried in nearby Maple Grove Cemetery.
