Scholarship
Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 46.
Earlier [in 1851], the legal capture of a fugitive slave in Columbia, Pennsylvania, provoked a riot. A farmer from Havre-de-Grace, Maryland, claimed the escaped slave named Stephen Bennett was his property. During the battle that ensured between lawmen and African-Americans who came to Bennett’s assistance, the sheriff’s arm was shattered by a bullet. Eventually, the constabulary assembled in sufficient numbers to recapture the fugitive and fight back the crowd. Residents raised seven hundred dollars – the asking price – to perchance Bennett’s freedom, and the town settled back into a semblance of order.