Edward Gorsuch was also an angry man.  He had, by his lights, been kind to the four prime field hands who had run away from him on the night of November 6, 1849.  He had even promised them freedom when they reached the age o twenty-eight.  That was an economically sensible decision in the border country of Maryland, where slavery had been in decline for decades, and the steady hemorrhaging of slaves north in Pennsylvania made human livestock a poor long-term investment.  But it was also magnanimous, the sixty-three-year-old Gorsuch thought.  After all, he had ever

At least two of [Edward] Gorsuch’s slaves plus [William] Parker, his equally warlike wife Eliza, and several other armed men were holed up on the second floor of the house when the Marylanders and Marshall Kline appeared in the narrow lane outside before dawn on the morning of September 11 [1851]…The tension mounted on both sides as dawn began to break.  Although Gorsuch didn’t know it, several of the men in the garret were panicking and urging surrender.  Eliza, who, William wrote, had endured a slavery “far more bitter” this his own, grabbed a corn cutter and declared that she

Slave hunters also had to contend with a secret black militia led by William Parker, which mobilized on short notice to fend off slave hunters, and recovered kidnap victims, by force if necessary.  Parker, twenty-nine years old in 1851, was born a slave in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and had escaped to Pennsylvania in 1842 by following the railway tracks from Baltimore to York.  He had spent the intervening years working on farms in Lancaster County.  In 1843, he underwent a transformative experience at an abolitionist rally where he listened raptly to an oration by Fred

TIPPECANOE COUNTY, situated in the westerly part of Indiana, and traversed by Wabash river.  Area, 504 square miles.  Face of the country, level.  Seat of justice, La Fayette.  Pop. in 1830, 7,187; in 1840, 13,724; in 1850, 19,377.