PRELIMINARY MANEUVERING IN THE OBERLIN CASE ended up taking considerably longer than the two weeks requested by U.S. Attorney Belden in December, and the case did not actually reach trial until March 1859. The prosecutors elected to try the defendants one by one, leading off with Simeon Bushnell, the unassuming Oberlin bookstore clerk who had been seen driving the get-away wagon. The evidence against Bushnell was overwhelming, as many witnesses had seen him leaving Wellington with John Price. Nonetheless, conviction was not a foregone conclusion. Anti-slavery juries in Boston had been known to acquit defendants in rescue cases, essentially nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act by refusing to enforce it. Cleveland, like the entire Western Reserve, was thick with abolitionists, and it would only take one recalcitrant juror to create a mistrial by refusing to return a guilty verdict out of disgust with slave catching.

Fortunately for the prosecution, Marshal Matthew Johnson was again in charge of assembling the panel from which the trial jury would be selected, and he approached the job with characteristic devotion to the needs of the Buchanan administration. Only a few months earlier, Johnson and other Buchananites had founded a newspaper to serve as the administration's editorial voice in northern Ohio. The National Democrat, as it was pointedly called, was intended to rival the pro-Douglas Cleveland Plain Dealer, which of course meant taking even more fervent aim at Republicans and abolitionists. Acutely aware of Ohio's political realities, the marshal enthusiastically embraced the task of rigging Bushnell's jury.

Although Johnson's official reach extended across the entire northern half of the state, he artfully gathered a forty-man venire without a single member from Lorain County. Man hunting in the Oberlin environs, it appears, extended to suspected slaves but not to potential jurors. Johnson did include ten Republicans on the panel – which was far fewer than their proportion in the district – but that was just for show.