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.

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.

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.

DEATH OF DR. DAVID RUGGLES.
BY S. ROGERS, M.D.

OF those who took part in the anti-slavery work thirty-five years ago, none was more true to his race than David Ruggles. Residing in the city of New York, where slaveholders often brought their body servants, and kept them for weeks, Mr. Ruggles became a thorn in the sides of these Southern sinners. He was ready at all times, in dangers and perils, to wrest his brethren from these hyenas, and so successful was he ingetting slaves from their masters, and sending them to Canada, that he became the terror of Southerners visiting northern cities.

David Ruggles first became known to me as a most active, adventurous, and daring conductor on the underground railroad. He helped six hundred slaves to escape from one and another of the Southern States into Canada, or to places of security this side of the St. Lawrence. So great were the dangers to which he was often exposed, so severe the labors and hardships he often incurred, and so intense the excitement into which he was sometimes thrown, that his eyes became seriously diseased, and he lost entirely the sight of them.

In 1835 Ruggles founded and headed the New York Committee of Vigilance, which sought to shield the growing number of fugitive slaves from recapture and protect free blacks from kidnapping. Cooperating with white abolitionists Lewis Tappan and Isaac T. Hopper, Ruggles and other black leaders were daring conductors on the Underground Railroad and harbored nearly 1,000 blacks, including Frederick Douglass, before transferring them farther north to safety.

Loring returned to the United States in the winter of 1860-1861, and on 22 March 1861 he was named to command the Department of New Mexico. He did not sympathize with the secession, but, believing in states' rights, he resigned his commission on 13 May 1861, and traveled east to offer his service to the Confederacy. President Jefferson Davis, familiar with Loring's distinguished record, had him named brigadier general to rank from 20 May 1861.