Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North

Armed resistance at Christiana to a federal marshal with a warrant issued under the new Fugitive Slave Law presented a challenge of immense political significance. In the eyes of pro-slavery Southerners, and ultimately of federal prosecutors, treason was the crime committed here, and the traitor was a white man named Castner Hanway, who allegedly directed the black mob in its attack on the federal posse. If the laws of the nation could be resisted with impunity, if citizens were free to “levy war” against the government as embodied in its legislative enactments and law-enforcement officials, then the very survival of the Union was at stake. Nothing less than conviction and execution of white abolitionist “leaders” would satisfy the honor of Edward Gorsuch’s family, the State of Maryland, and Southerners who identified with the slain slave owner who died what they saw as a hero’s death defending their rights under the law. Nothing less than acquittal of all the rioters on all counts would appease the most radical abolitionist, who appealed to a higher law and a superior justice than that found in the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

So the lines were drawn in a fashion that pushed the Christiana riot and the government’s response to center stage in the national political drama. No other fugitive slave case…had the same political significance at the time. Whatever the comparative importance of these other cases in law, whatever effect they had on firing the abolitionist movement and drawing the lines of conflict over the fugitive slave issue, no other fugitive episode struck the raw nerve of Southern honor so painfully or had the same impact on public opinion throughout the nation.

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.

The Catalyst for violence, the lightning bolt that started the riotous blaze, was a confrontation between Gorsuch and the man known in freedom as Samuel Thompson, one of the fugitives from his farm.  Both men were angry by the time that Parker overheard part of their verbal exchange:  "Old man, you had better go home to Maryland," said Samuel.
    "You had better give up, and come home with me," said Gorsuch.  Thompson then knocked his former master on the side of the head with a pistol, which felled him to his knees.  When the slave owner tried to rise from the ground, he was clubbed again, perhaps a couple of times.  Thompson shot him once, then several others poured more bullets into the body, and in what by this time was probably a purely symbolic gesture, an unspecified number of participants whacked him across the top of the head with corn cutters, emulating the scalping of a fallen enemy from another cultural tradition of American violence.

On September 8, 1851, Gorsuch took an express train to Philadelphia, arriving ahead of his party.  On September 9, he secured four warrants authorizing capture authorizing capture of his slaves under the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Law adopted the previous year.  The fugitive-slave commissioner, Edward Ingraham, also instructed Henry H. Kline, the “notorious, lying slave-catching Deputy Marshal Kline” as he was known in the anti-slavery press, to head the Gorsuch posse… Initially, the slave-catching expedition traveled in four separate groups for the purpose of making their arrival less conspicuous than it might otherwise be…
    Right from the start there were problems, which boded ill for the enterprise.  Kline’s wagon broke down, and he was forced to walk his horses back and hire another.  The delay caused Kline to miss the prearranged rendezvous and, and he was left wandering about the Lancaster countryside conspicuously looking for the Gorsuches.  Kline’s cover story, that he was chasing horse thieves, was a transparent ruse… [because] knowledge of the warrants secured by Edward Gorsuch and was sent by the “Special Secret Committee” to warn Lancaster’s black community what the marshal and his posse were up to.  According to William Parker, Gorsuch had been had been noticed “in close converse with a certain member of the Philadelphia bar, who had lost the little reputation he ever had by continual dabbling in negro-catching as well as by association with and support of the notorious Henry H. Kline, a professional kidnapper of the basest stamp.”

Surrounded by some of the richest land in the state, [Lancaster] was beautifully located, contained regular streets crossing at right angles, and some 8,000 inhabitants in 1839. Soon to benefit from the opening of the Conestoga and Susquehanna Navigation Canal, it was the seat of one of the wealthiest counties in the Commonwealth. A brick courthouse at the central square, churches of all denominations (Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Moravian, Reformed, Methodist, Quaker, Roman Catholic, and even African), as well as a market house, jail, college, and museum attested to the city’s importance, and the many Germans, among them the Amish in their distinctive clothing, enlivened the streets. Although the city itself was usually Democratic, the county, with its many sects, was unfailingly Anti-Mason or Whig…