CONDITIONS ALONG THE BORDER.
On the Different Sides of Mason and Dixon Line--Conflicts of Ideas
and of Citizenship--Lower Lancaster County a Gateway--Terror of the
“Gap Gang”--The Underground Railway--Outrages by the Slave Catchers
and Kidnappers.
Formal legislation and statutory enactments could not repress the
instincts of humanity. Involuntary bondage of men, women and children
was not consistent with either the spirit of free institutions or the
instincts of a progressive citizenship. As it was impossible to prevent
reckless and degenerate men from abusing the processes of the law by
kidnapping and other forms of crime against the colored race; and as
it was impossible for the most humane and philanthropic elements of
slaveholding citizenship to prevent constantly recurring barbarities
and horrors resulting logically from the legal recognition of property
and traffic in human flesh and blood, so it was impossible to forbid
thousands of good men and women throughout the North--in all other
respects law-abiding people--to secretly aid and even to publicly
promote the escape of slaves fleeing from slavery. Nor could those
who thus kept their conscience while they broke the law discriminate
between the worthy and the unworthy in slave or master. There was no
time in the quick trips between the stations of the Underground Railway
to ascertain with precision whether the passenger was fleeing from
just or unjust treatment, whether he had the character of a criminal
escaping deserved punishment, or of a bondman aspiring to a condition
of freedom; nor to judge and determine the individual merits and the
legal rights of the owner. Behind lay Slavery--beyond blazed the North
Star of Freedom.
Lower Lancaster County was at the gateway of this path. For a
comparatively short distance--only about five miles--the Mason and
Dixon line forms its Southern boundary. Only two of its townships are
in contact with Maryland, Fulton and Little Britain, and the last named
barely touched the edge of the Southland of Slavery. In its citizenship
Lancaster County represented all the principal elements which enter
into our composite commonwealth. The more numerous and important strain
of blood, occupying the wider and richer upper domain, was composed
very largely of the so-called Pennsylvania German sect and church
people, who had little fellowship with the negro race, little interest
in or sympathy with its cause and very slight personal contact with
its members. In the lower townships the principal elements were the
so-called Scotch-Irish Presbyterian and the Friends; between them there
was considerable friction, if not antagonism; they had for nearly a
century represented different views of society and government. Their
variance was very distinct in their respective early attitudes toward
“the Indian question.”
It has been made the subject of forcible contrast that the prevailing
Quaker settlement of Fulton and Western Drumore townships took on the
more placid aspect of the Conowingo, whose smooth meadows and flowery
banks characterized these localities; while the eastern end of Drumore,
Colerain and Little Britain had peculiarly the type illustrated by the
more turbulent flow and rugged hillsides of the Octoraro. Both streams
find their outlet in the Susquehanna, and at very nearly the same sea
level. But in the days of the Fugitive Slave Law and of local defiance
of it the North bound bondsman generally made his way to the Chester
Valley by Pleasant Grove and Liberty Square, rather than by Kirkwood
and Nine Points.
Of the two “schools” the Hicksite branch of Friends was not only
the more numerous in the Lower End, but its members were the more
aggressive in their hostility to slavery. The Presbyterian works out
his humanitarianism rather more directly through the law than around or
under it; and, while in many households of this faith, colored servants
and farm hands found trusted and long continued employment, the general
attitude of the Scotch-Irish to the slavery question was different from
that of the Quaker; socially the blood of the negro was more offensive
to the more aggressive race.
There were, of course, far more than enough exceptions to “prove the
rule.” Rev. Lindley C. Rutter, long the beloved pastor of Chestnut
Level Presbyterian Church, was one of the most fearless and outspoken
of the local Abolitionists. Likewise “Father” William Easton, of
the Octoraro United Presbyterian Church. In the neighborhood of
Quarryville, where the German and Scotch Irish elements seemed to
meet, intermixture of colored and white blood was not infrequent; and,
contrary to the general laws of miscegenation and degeneration, many
of the mulatto, quadroon and octoroon people sprung from these racial
intermarriages were very respectable, honest and industrious citizens.
On the north side of the Mine Ridge, that range running westward
from Gap across Lancaster County, during the “fifties” there was a
considerable amount of outlawry on the part of an organized “gang,”
whose depredations now took on the form of kidnapping and again the
less illegal, but by no means more popular, practice of aiding the
recapture and return--regularly or irregularly--of fugitive slaves.
If their raids and robberies were the terror of the farmers, millers,
butchers and storekeepers of the peaceful Pequea Valley, on the south
side of which their strongholds then lay, their incursions into the
homes and haunts of colored laborers beyond the Octoraro hills were no
less cause for alarm among the free or fugitive colored people than
they were of intense resentment and indignation on the part of the
white friends, employers and protectors of the blacks.
While then one trail of the Underground Railroad ran by Columbia and
Bird-in-Hand, whereon friendly hands passed the fugitive from Stephen
Smith to Daniel Gibbons; and a branch led from Joseph Taylor’s, at
Ashville to Penningtonville and Christiana, another had a continuous
line of stations from the Gilberts and Bushongs around May, in Bart, or
later Eden township, out “the valley” to and past the scene of what was
to be the deepest tragedy which ever thrilled this little community.
Popular feeling was not wholly unprepared for it. The conflagration
was not a sudden outbreak. Combustibles had been accumulating. Local
incidents, such as escapes, man hunts, kidnappings and other like
events had occurred to an extent sufficient to excite popular interest;
and by rumor they had been exaggerated enough to further inflame it;
numerous persons supposed or known to be ex-slaves resided and worked
in the neighborhood and were the subjects of a qualified popular
protection. There had been outrages on one side and some reprisals on
the other.
In 1850 it was alleged that an innocent and free colored hired man
named Henry Williams had been seized without right or legal process
and sold into perpetual slavery South. William Dorsey had been taken
from his wife and three children and lodged in the jail at Lancaster.
A gang of three, who tried to take a maid servant from Moses Whitson’s
across the line in Chester County, were forcibly resisted by a lot of
colored men under the lead of Ben. Whipper. The girl was rescued and
her captors terribly, if not fatally, beaten on the Gap hill. A negro
known as “Tom-up-in-the-barn,” living near Gap, was said to have been
captured one morning on his way to thresh at Caleb Brinton’s, and never
got back. The barn of Lindley Coates, in Sadsbury township, was burned
in 1850 by miscreants angered at his denunciation of slave catchers and
kidnappers.
[Illustration: “RETREAT FARM.” HOME OF THE GORSUCHES.]
It was also related that an industrious negro fence-maker had been
violently carried off from his home on John McGowen’s place in the
valley, near Mars Hill, between Christiana and Quarryville. The
narrator of this (Forbes’ “True Story”) does not tell whether the
man was free or a fugitive slave; and to his outraged neighbors this
distinction made little difference.
The incident of most note occurring in the immediate neighborhood,
the influence of which lasted longest, the feeling about which was
most acute, and which figured largely in the “Treason Trials” was
what was stigmatized as “the outrage at Chamberlain’s.” Its scene was
on the “Buck hill,” in the northwestern part of Sadsbury township,
on what is now known as the “Todd place,” west of the back road from
Gap to Christiana and in what was a sort of middle ground between the
operations of the “Gap gang” and the refuge territory of the fugitives.
Here in March 1851 a posse, claimed to be led by a rather notorious
member of the “Gap gang,” entered the Chamberlain house, severely beat
a colored man named John Williams employed there, who made desperate
resistance, terrified the members of the family, and carried off their
bleeding victim in a wagon. It seems he was an escaped slave; but his
captors exhibited no official warrant of arrest nor made any claim of
authority except to declare they were acting for his master. It was
believed he died from their ill treatment of him.
And there were reprisals! William Parker--of whom this narrative will
have more to say--admitted years afterwards that he had helped to beat,
fatally he believed, the captors of a colored girl; that he had tried
to kill Allen Williams on suspicion that he had betrayed Henry; that
he recaptured a kidnapped man on the West Chester road, after shooting
at his captors and being himself shot in the ankle; and that he and
his associates went to the home of a decoy negro, burned it down and
watched to shoot him with smooth-bore rifles “heavily charged” if the
flames drove him into the open.
The leading people of this neighborhood were not only anti-slavery in
sentiment, but they resented what seemed to be lawless invasion of
their peaceful community; they were not afforded means of verifying
the authenticity of the claims made for escaped slaves; the local
people engaged in the business of aiding in slave hunting and slave
nabbing were generally disreputable and sometimes themselves outlaws
and criminals; farmers and mechanics were disturbed in their domestic
service by the frequency with which attacks were made upon their many
and useful colored employees and by the apprehensions to which they
were all constantly exposed. Withal a sense of protection was felt
in the fact that the most powerful leader of the bar of Lancaster
County, and its representative in Congress Thaddeus Stevens, was
outspoken in his denunciation of the Fugitive Slave Law. Political
discussion and sentiment in this immediate locality, far more than in
any other part of Lancaster County, was focusing upon open defiance
of and even physical resistance to the enforcement of the Fugitive
Slave Law. As early as October 11, 1850, at a public meeting in
Georgetown, Bart Township, four miles from the later scene of the
riot--William L. Rakestraw presiding and Elwood Cooper Secretary--a
committee consisting of Thomas Whitson, Elwood Cooper, Cyrus Manahan,
Elwood Griest and Joseph McClelland, reported and published vigorous
resolutions denouncing the fugitive slave bill, and declaring that they
would “harbor, clothe, feed and aid the escape of fugitive slaves in
opposition to the law.”
[Illustration: THE GORSUCH CORN HOUSE.]
This was the state of popular feeling and these were the social and
political conditions prevailing in lower Lancaster County, when the
Gorsuch party set out from Maryland to retake their escaped slaves
by due and orderly processes of law--from which mission the elder
Gorsuch returned a mangled corpse and his son with a shot-riddled
body; in the attempt to execute which the officers of the law were
put to flight; out of which grew the arrest of two score men and the
indictment of more persons for treason than were ever before or since
tried for that crime in the United States; the acrimonious relations of
two neighboring commonwealths for years; the open exultation of many
persons over the killing and wounding of citizens engaged in a lawful
undertaking, and the chagrin of many other orderly and law-abiding
people that the law of the land had been violated in bloodshed and its
officers successfully resisted.