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THE CHRISTIANA RIOT

AND

THE TREASON TRIALS OF 1851

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH

W. U. HENSEL

PREPARED AND PUBLISHED FOR THE COMMEMORATION OF THESE EVENTS, SEPTEMBER 9, 1911

PRESS OF THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY LANCASTER, PA.

PREFACE

The preparation of this sketch and contribution to our local history had been long contemplated by the Editor and Compiler. Born near the locality where the events occurred which are its subject, he has been for more than half a century intimately related with their associations. He has regard for the integrity of motive which alike animated both parties to the conflict. It was a miniature of the great struggle of opposing ideas that culminated in the shock of Civil War, and was only settled by that stern arbiter. He rejoices that what seemed to be an irrepressible conflict between Law and Liberty at last ended in Peace. To help to perpetuate that condition between long-estranged neighbors and kin, this offering is made to the work of the Lancaster County Historical Society.

While it has been written and published for that Society, no responsibility for anything it contains or for its promulgation attaches to any one except the author. Where opinions are expressed--and they have been generally avoided as far as possible in disputed matters--he alone is responsible. Where facts are stated, except upon authority expressly named, he accepts the risk of refutation. In all cases he has tried to ascertain and to tell the exact truth. He worked in no other spirit and for no other purpose; and wherein he has failed his is all the blame.

W. U. H.

"BLEAK HOUSE," August 12, 1911.

THE CHRISTIANA RIOT.

INTRODUCTORY.

I propose to write the history of the so-called "Christiana Riot" and "Treason Trials" of 1851, as they occurred--without partiality, prejudice or apology, for or against any of those who participated in them. As is inevitable in all such collisions, there were, on either side of the border troubles of that period, men of high principle and right motive and also rowdies and adventurers, disposed to resort to ruthless violence for purposes of sordid gain. There were slave-masters who sincerely believed in the righteousness of an institution of ancient origin, while even the more sagacious of their class recognized it as at variance with the divine law and the trend of Christian civilization, and inevitably doomed to extinction. There were on this side of the line many who, believing themselves humanitarians, were mere mischievous agitators, lawless in deed and treasonable in design, reckless of those rights of property which are as sacred in regard of the law as the rights of man. There were, too, in the North wicked slave catchers and kidnappers whose brutalities aroused the just resentment of the communities in which they operated, even when they kept within the limits of strict and technical legal rights.

It was of course impossible, as Mr. Lincoln pointed out, for the republic to endure forever half slave and half free--to run a geographical marker through a great and complicated moral, economic and political issue--especially in view of the far flung border line and the rapidly increasing development of communication and transmission.

If, however, all the great statesmen, economists and churchmen who had struggled with the slavery question since the formation of the Union were unable to solve it, without the awful carnage of a tremendous and long lasting civil war, can it be the cause of special wonder that a handful of Marylanders in lawful search of their escaped property, and a larger group of free and fugitive negroes, with the "embattled farmers" who sympathized with them, should have made the hills of this peaceful Chester Valley echo with gun shots and stained its soil with blood, when Man and Master met in final and fatal contest for what each had been taught was his right?

Numerous attempts have been made to publish reports of this incident which would serve the purposes of permanent history; and, while they have all been helpful, none has been complete. On his return to Maryland after his failure to convict Hanway and the others of treason, Attorney General Robert J. Brent, of Maryland, made an elaborate official report to Governor E. Louis Lowe, who in turn submitted it, with extended comments of his own, to the General Assembly of Maryland, January 7, 1852. From the standpoint of the lawyer and the chief executive of a slave state, both are able deliverances. Aroused by their version of the affair, and especially by their comments on the treason trial, and impatient over the delay in publishing the official report of it, W. Arthur Jackson, junior counsel for the defendant, printed a pamphlet review of it, which shows much ability, has great value and has become very rare. The official phonographic report of the trial, by James J. Robbins, of the Philadelphia bar , is of course a copious fountain of exact information--as well as an interesting exhibit of the "reportorial" efficiency of that day. From all of these I have felt at liberty to draw largely.

"A True Story of the Christiana Riot," by David R. Forbes, 1898, tinged with sectional prejudice, has much matter that was well worthy of preservation, and the new facts it contains, if verified, I have freely used. All of the general political histories of the period refer to the Christiana tragedy as having significance in the intense agitation of the issue raised by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Fred. Douglass' stories of his life and time; William Still's "Underground Railroad," and Dr. R. C. Smedley's "History of the Underground Railroad" have also been subjects of my levy for aid. To them, however, have been added the personal reminiscences of Dr. J. W. Houston, Thomas Whitson, Esq., Ambrose Pownall, Charles Dingee, Gilbert Bushong, Peter Woods, William P. Brinton, Cyrus Brinton and many other residents of the neighborhood in which the riot occurred and from which the prisoners in the trials for life were taken. Access has been had to the diaries and family records of the Pownall, Hanway, Lewis and Gorsuch families; and many other original sources of information, including the local and metropolitan newspapers of that day, whose enterprise and impartiality were somewhat variable. Some of them published full reports of the trial.

For the first time, however, I think, the subject has been studied with some care and consideration for the facts as disclosed and from the point of view occupied at the home of the Gorsuches. The family of Dr. F. G. Mitchell, whose wife is a daughter of Dickinson Gorsuch, and who now owns the property then of her grandfather, Edward Gorsuch, from which the slaves fled, have been especially gracious and helpful, withal fair and generous in their attitude toward an event which brought brutal death to one ancestor and long suffering to another.

J. Wesley Knight, long resident of the neighborhood of Monkton and Glencoe, Maryland, and who was under the roof of the Gorsuch homestead when the slaves escaped, has given me much accurate information as to their previous condition of servitude.

If their contribution to the history of the encounter and the events preceding it presents the relation of the Southerners to it in a far more favorable light than has hitherto attended its narration, no fair-minded student of history can object to the whole truth, even at this late day. That the Gorsuch runaways were not heroic and scarcely even picturesque characters; and that their owners were humane and Christian people, and not the brutal slave traders and cruel taskmasters who figured in much of the anti-slavery fiction, can no longer be doubted. But if the Lancaster County Historical Society exists for any purpose it is illustrated in its apt motto: "History herself as seen in her own workshop." Every such shop must show some chips and filings; and occasionally the more these abound the better will be the craftsman's product. I cannot hope--and I certainly do not desire--this should be the "last word" about the "Christiana Riot"; but the occasion of its Sixtieth Anniversary and the Commemoration seemed to call for a historical review up to date; and the story of its few survivors had to be caught before it was lost.

It may be confidently predicted that when our long-looked-for local Stronghand in imaginative literature shall seek for a theme near at home, he will find it in the dramatic story of the "Christiana Riot"; or when some gifted Lancaster County Son of Song shall arise and strike the trembling harp strings, the scene of his epic will follow the winding Octoraro and lie along the track of the Fugitive Slave.

THE LAW OF THE LAND.

The Early Compromises of the Constitution--Pennsylvania's Move Toward Abolition--The Act of 1826--The Prigg Case--Border Troubles--The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850--Wrongs of Escaped Slaves and Rights of Their Owners.

It is entirely unnecessary for the purposes of this particular story to enlarge upon, or to review at length, the long debate, the innumerable compromises, the many makeshifts and the unending controversies which attended the discussion of the slavery question from the agitation and adoption of the Federal Constitution to the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850--and which then left it utterly unsettled. It is, however, important that a few plain landmarks of the law be kept in sight to guide one who would fitly study the general history of the times and fairly estimate the significance of the local events to be narrated.

The Union of the States was only effected by the adoption of Art. IV; the general purpose of which was to require each State to give full faith and credit to the public acts and records of other States. The exact language of its section 3 was:

"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."

No union could have been effected without this agreement. Whether that federation was a contract from which any party to it could retire, for a violation of it by other parties thereto, need not be discussed here. The affirmative of that proposition was not the creed of any particular party or section. It was originally maintained by New England Federalists; it was later defended by Southern Democrats; it was at last decided adversely in battle and by the sword. While there is now general acquiescence in the result, the final decision was not the prevailing doctrine of the people of the United States in 1851.

Under the Constitution the Right to Reclaim the fugitive slave was no more unmistakable than the Duty to Return him. The Law of the Land gave to each State the right to regulate its own domestic institutions; and that right was expressly recognized and guaranteed even by the Republican party and by Abraham Lincoln long after the outbreak of the Civil War. The slavery questions upon which political parties differed up to 1851 were not disputes as to the rights of slave owners and slaves in Slave States; nor as to the rights of slave owners against their escaped slaves in Free States, but as to the extension of slavery and the status of the institution in the National territories.

The prevailing popular misapprehension on this subject may be easily pardoned when it is observed that so eminent an authority as Oswald Garrison Villard, in his recent excellent biography of John Brown, says the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 "made legal in the North the rendition of negroes who had found their way to Free States." That proposition was recognized by all political parties from 1793 to 1863.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was passed in strict conformity with the Constitution of the United States; and it impressed upon the executive authorities of the several States the duty of arrest, and upon their magistrates the obligation to hear and commit the fugitives for return. That act was generally recognized as just in its essence and object. As late as 1850 even the Free Soil party assented to the legal principle it involved. In execution, however, its processes were greatly abused; unlawful seizures, unwarranted reclamations and ruthless kidnappings were common occurrences in the lower parts of the Border States along the line of Slavery and Freedom. Pennsylvania, after respectful hearing of the Maryland Commissioners and due consideration for their suggestions, enacted the Act of 1826, which made the State Courts the arbiters of claims to fugitives; forbade justices to exercise these powers; and, in the line of Pennsylvania's movements since 1780 to extinguish slavery and protect free persons, it made the free-born children of escaped slaves citizens of Pennsylvania and put them under its protection.

After the Act of 1826 the border troubles, especially between York and Lancaster Counties, Pennsylvania, and Cecil, Harford and Baltimore Counties, Maryland, were much intensified. Mason and Dixon line was the imaginary demarcation between two wholly antagonistic social and political orders. The same person might be a Maryland slave under Maryland law and a Pennsylvania freeman under Pennsylvania law. Owners and agents, armed with Maryland authority to reclaim property, made theirs by Maryland law, were felonious kidnappers in Pennsylvania. The anomalous condition of affairs and the legal difficulties arising out of it are best illustrated by actual facts. A slave woman escaped from her owner, James S. Mitchell, of Cecil County, Maryland, in 1845. During her absence, as a fugitive from his service, she had given birth in New Jersey to an illegitimate child. Through the instrumentality of agents, residing in Pennsylvania, Mitchell apprehended the woman, who together with the child, had been delivered to him at Elkton, in Cecil County. The woman was taken in Pennsylvania by George P. Alberti and James Frisby. These agents, themselves fearing to incur possible responsibilities, had repeatedly refused to take the child with the mother; until finally overcome by the entreaties of the mother herself, they yielded to their feelings of benevolence, and assumed the risk. They were arrested for kidnapping; evidence to show their motives in including the child in the return was excluded, and they were sentenced to long terms in the penitentiary--for permitting it to accompany the mother, whose own recapture and return by them were admittedly lawful. The state of the record of the case was such that it could not be appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Mitchell himself, who had not even been in Pennsylvania, was indicted here for kidnapping the child and was subject to seven years in the penitentiary. The Governor of Pennsylvania issued, and the Governor of Maryland declined to honor, a requisition for him. There were many other cases of which this was a type.

On the other hand, there were unquestionably well-authenticated cases of slaves returned in violation of their legal claims and of free negroes brutally kidnapped and remorselessly sold to slavery without a fair hearing and adjudication of their rights. The offenders were often protected by legal technicalities, obstructions or difficulties, and by friendly jurisdictions North or South.

A case pregnant with great legal and political consequences finally arose under the conflicting claims of Maryland and Harford County on one side and Pennsylvania and York County on the other. It reached the Supreme Court of the United States and the contest was a momentous battle in the campaign of pro- and anti-slavery agitation. Lawyers will find it fully reported in 16 Peters, U. S., 539 :

Edward Prigg, a citizen of Harford County, Maryland, together with Nathan S. Bemis, Jacob Forward and Stephen Lewis, Jr., were indicted in York County, Pennsylvania, O. and T., for kidnapping an alleged free child of Margaret Morgan, in violation of the Pennsylvania law of 1826, which made it a felony, punishable with from seven to twenty-one years imprisonment at hard labor, to carry off, sell or detain a free negro from Pennsylvania. Prigg was the agent--and the others his assistants--of Margaret Ashmore, owner of Margaret Morgan, who escaped from her and fled to Pennsylvania in 1832. Her children, taken back to Maryland by Prigg, were born in Pennsylvania--one of them more than a year after she escaped. Under Pennsylvania law they were free; under Maryland law and the common law principle that "the brood follows the dam" they were slaves. To avert the disastrous results that always follow a conflict of laws between neighbors, Pennsylvania and Maryland agreed that the facts should be the subject of a special verdict, so that after Prigg's conviction and sentence his case might be heard and the issue it involved be determined by the highest Federal Court of final jurisdiction and of last resort.

The United States Supreme Court held that the Federal Constitution self-executed its provisions; that the owner of a fugitive slave could retake him wherever found; and that the National government--not the State governments--must support and enforce this right; that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 recognized this and left nothing on the subject to State regulation. But the Court doubted whether State magistrates or officials were bound to perform any duty imposed upon them in this respect by a Federal law; and the State statute under which Prigg was indicted was held to be unconstitutional and void.

In the discussion Meredith and Hambley appeared for Prigg, and virtually for Maryland. For the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania appeared Attorney General Ovid F. Johnson ; and he frankly stated that the real and substantial parties to the controversy were Maryland and Pennsylvania, whose officials came into that high Court "to terminate disputes and contentions which were arising and had for years arisen along the border line between them on this subject of the escape and delivering up of fugitive slaves. Neither party sought the defeat or the humiliation of the other. It was for the triumph of the law they presented themselves before the Court. They were engaged under an imperative sense of duty in the work of peace; and he hoped he would be pardoned if he added of patriotism also."

Story, of Massachusetts, delivered the Court's opinion. He had been appointed by Madison, served a long time on the bench and was a jurist of high renown; but Taney, C. J., while concurring in the judgment, expressly dissented from the doctrine that the State authorities were "prohibited from interfering for the purpose of protecting the rights of the master and aiding him in the recovery of his property." He thought the contrary to be not only the right, but the duty of the State. The Federal Constitution meant this when it declared "the fugitive shall be given up." He predicted that if the State officials under the State laws could not arrest the fugitive, "the territory of the State must soon become an open pathway for the fugitives escaping from other States." Justices Baldwin and Thompson concurred with Taney; Wayne with Story, and also Daniel, filing opinions. McLean held that Congress might prescribe the duty of State officers. All seven Justices expressed separate opinions.

Taney's forecast was right. Maryland and Pennsylvania--especially the southeastern counties of this State--soon became an open pathway for the fugitive slaves. Their track was lighted from many a window in the households of the Chester Valley; and two main lines of the Underground Railroad ran through Lancaster County, close to where the two lines of the great steam railway which traverses it from east to west are now located.

For this class Lancaster County's then representative in Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, was the boldest and most aggressive spokesman. When, in 1851, he denounced every form of human slavery he was so far in advance of his party that in 1861 a Republican Congress, Charles Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, the first Free Soil Candidate for Vice President, heading the "Ayes," by an overwhelming vote declared that all attempts of the States to override or obstruct the Fugitive Slave Law were unconstitutional and "dangerous to the peace of the Union"; that all enactments to that end should be repealed and there was no authority outside of a State wherein then existed a right "to interfere with slaves or slavery in such States, in disregard of the rights of their owners or the peace of society."

CONDITIONS ALONG THE BORDER.

On the Different Sides of Mason and Dixon Line--Conflicts of Ideas and of Citizenship--Lower Lancaster County a Gateway--Terror of the "Gap Gang"--The Underground Railway--Outrages by the Slave Catchers and Kidnappers.

Formal legislation and statutory enactments could not repress the instincts of humanity. Involuntary bondage of men, women and children was not consistent with either the spirit of free institutions or the instincts of a progressive citizenship. As it was impossible to prevent reckless and degenerate men from abusing the processes of the law by kidnapping and other forms of crime against the colored race; and as it was impossible for the most humane and philanthropic elements of slaveholding citizenship to prevent constantly recurring barbarities and horrors resulting logically from the legal recognition of property and traffic in human flesh and blood, so it was impossible to forbid thousands of good men and women throughout the North--in all other respects law-abiding people--to secretly aid and even to publicly promote the escape of slaves fleeing from slavery. Nor could those who thus kept their conscience while they broke the law discriminate between the worthy and the unworthy in slave or master. There was no time in the quick trips between the stations of the Underground Railway to ascertain with precision whether the passenger was fleeing from just or unjust treatment, whether he had the character of a criminal escaping deserved punishment, or of a bondman aspiring to a condition of freedom; nor to judge and determine the individual merits and the legal rights of the owner. Behind lay Slavery--beyond blazed the North Star of Freedom.

Lower Lancaster County was at the gateway of this path. For a comparatively short distance--only about five miles--the Mason and Dixon line forms its Southern boundary. Only two of its townships are in contact with Maryland, Fulton and Little Britain, and the last named barely touched the edge of the Southland of Slavery. In its citizenship Lancaster County represented all the principal elements which enter into our composite commonwealth. The more numerous and important strain of blood, occupying the wider and richer upper domain, was composed very largely of the so-called Pennsylvania German sect and church people, who had little fellowship with the negro race, little interest in or sympathy with its cause and very slight personal contact with its members. In the lower townships the principal elements were the so-called Scotch-Irish Presbyterian and the Friends; between them there was considerable friction, if not antagonism; they had for nearly a century represented different views of society and government. Their variance was very distinct in their respective early attitudes toward "the Indian question."

It has been made the subject of forcible contrast that the prevailing Quaker settlement of Fulton and Western Drumore townships took on the more placid aspect of the Conowingo, whose smooth meadows and flowery banks characterized these localities; while the eastern end of Drumore, Colerain and Little Britain had peculiarly the type illustrated by the more turbulent flow and rugged hillsides of the Octoraro. Both streams find their outlet in the Susquehanna, and at very nearly the same sea level. But in the days of the Fugitive Slave Law and of local defiance of it the North bound bondsman generally made his way to the Chester Valley by Pleasant Grove and Liberty Square, rather than by Kirkwood and Nine Points.

Of the two "schools" the Hicksite branch of Friends was not only the more numerous in the Lower End, but its members were the more aggressive in their hostility to slavery. The Presbyterian works out his humanitarianism rather more directly through the law than around or under it; and, while in many households of this faith, colored servants and farm hands found trusted and long continued employment, the general attitude of the Scotch-Irish to the slavery question was different from that of the Quaker; socially the blood of the negro was more offensive to the more aggressive race.

There were, of course, far more than enough exceptions to "prove the rule." Rev. Lindley C. Rutter, long the beloved pastor of Chestnut Level Presbyterian Church, was one of the most fearless and outspoken of the local Abolitionists. Likewise "Father" William Easton, of the Octoraro United Presbyterian Church. In the neighborhood of Quarryville, where the German and Scotch Irish elements seemed to meet, intermixture of colored and white blood was not infrequent; and, contrary to the general laws of miscegenation and degeneration, many of the mulatto, quadroon and octoroon people sprung from these racial intermarriages were very respectable, honest and industrious citizens.

On the north side of the Mine Ridge, that range running westward from Gap across Lancaster County, during the "fifties" there was a considerable amount of outlawry on the part of an organized "gang," whose depredations now took on the form of kidnapping and again the less illegal, but by no means more popular, practice of aiding the recapture and return--regularly or irregularly--of fugitive slaves. If their raids and robberies were the terror of the farmers, millers, butchers and storekeepers of the peaceful Pequea Valley, on the south side of which their strongholds then lay, their incursions into the homes and haunts of colored laborers beyond the Octoraro hills were no less cause for alarm among the free or fugitive colored people than they were of intense resentment and indignation on the part of the white friends, employers and protectors of the blacks.

While then one trail of the Underground Railroad ran by Columbia and Bird-in-Hand, whereon friendly hands passed the fugitive from Stephen Smith to Daniel Gibbons; and a branch led from Joseph Taylor's, at Ashville to Penningtonville and Christiana, another had a continuous line of stations from the Gilberts and Bushongs around May, in Bart, or later Eden township, out "the valley" to and past the scene of what was to be the deepest tragedy which ever thrilled this little community.

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