J.D. Tuccille on Teaching His Son To Break the Law

In
1858, hundreds of residents of Oberlin and Wellington, Ohio — many
of them students and faculty at Oberlin College — surrounded
Wadsworth's Hotel, in Wellington, in which law enforcement officers
and slavehunters held a fugitive slave named John Price, under the
authority of the Fugitive Slave Act. After a brief standoff, the
armed crowd stormed the hotel and overpowered the captors. Price
was freed and transported to safety in Canada. J.D. Tuccille,
Managing Editor of Reason 24/7, knows these details because his son
recently borrowed from the library The Price of Freedom, a
book about the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, as the incident is
called. He and his wife used it as a starting point for telling
their seven-year-old why they don't expect him to obey the
law — that laws and the governments that pass them are often evil.
They expect him, instead, to stand up for his rights and those of
others, and to do good, even if that means breaking the law.

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