Scholarship
Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 68-69.
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…