The History of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley Ohio

by Joseph G. Butler

"Here in Northeastern Ohio the anti-slavery movement might be said to have had its birth, and nowhere was the doctrine of state rights more bitterly opposed.  To the south of Mahoning County there was secession sentiment, even in Ohio, but here on the Western Reserve the New England and Pennsylvania blood, with its accompanying strains from New York and New Jersey, imbibed little of the secession heresy.  In the two decades between 1840 and 1860 a heavy foreign immigration had modified the old American strain in the villages of the Mahoning Valley, but these immigrants were largely from England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Germany - men and women who had come here to escape oppressive conditions in their native lands and who were by instinct ardent advocates of free labor and opponents of slavery."