Formal legislation and statutory enactments6 could not repress the instincts of humanity. Involuntary bondage7 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 degenerate9 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 humane10 and philanthropic elements of slaveholding citizenship to prevent constantly recurring11 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 discriminate12 between the worthy13 and the unworthy in slave or master. There was no time in the quick trips between the stations of the Underground Railway to ascertain14 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 aspiring15 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.
[Pg 14]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 commonwealth16. The more numerous and important strain of blood, occupying the wider and richer upper domain17, was composed very largely of the so-called Pennsylvania German sect18 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 Scotch19-Irish Presbyterian and the Friends; between them there was considerable friction20, if not antagonism21; they had for nearly a century represented different views of society and government. Their variance22 was very distinct in their respective early attitudes toward “the Indian question.”
It has been made the subject of forcible contrast that the prevailing23 Quaker settlement of Fulton and Western Drumore townships took on the more placid25 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 illustrated26 by the more turbulent flow and rugged27 hillsides of the Octoraro. Both streams find their outlet28 in the Susquehanna, and at very nearly the same sea level. But in the days of the Fugitive29 Slave Law and of local defiance30 of it the North bound bondsman generally made his way to the Chester Valley by Pleasant Grove31 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[Pg 15] members were the more aggressive in their hostility32 to slavery. The Presbyterian works out his humanitarianism33 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.” Rev8. Lindley C. Rutter, long the beloved pastor34 of Chestnut35 Level Presbyterian Church, was one of the most fearless and outspoken36 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 miscegenation37 and degeneration, many of the mulatto, quadroon and octoroon people sprung from these racial intermarriages were very respectable, honest and industrious38 citizens.
On the north side of the Mine Ridge39, that range running westward40 from Gap across Lancaster County, during the “fifties” there was a considerable amount of outlawry41 on the part of an organized “gang,” whose depredations42 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, millers43, 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 laborers44 beyond the Octoraro hills were no less cause for alarm among the free or fugitive colored people than they were of intense resentment45 and indignation on the part[Pg 16] 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 conflagration46 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 rumor24 they had been exaggerated enough to further inflame47 it; numerous persons supposed or known to be ex-slaves resided and worked in the neighborhood and were the subjects of a qualified48 popular protection. There had been outrages on one side and some reprisals49 on the other.
In 1850 it was alleged50 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 lodged51 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 miscreants52 angered at his denunciation of slave catchers and kidnappers.
“RETREAT FARM.” HOME OF THE GORSUCHES.
[Pg 17]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 outraged53 neighbors this distinction made little difference.
The incident of most note occurring in the immediate54 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 stigmatized55 as “the outrage3 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 fugitives56. Here in March 1851 a posse, claimed to be led by a rather notorious member of the “Gap gang,” entered the Chamberlain house, severely57 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 wagon58. 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 acting59 for his master. It was believed he died from their ill treatment of him.
And there were reprisals! William Parker—of whom this narrative60 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[Pg 18] 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 authenticity61 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 outlaws62 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 apprehensions63 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 opposition64 to the law.”
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[Pg 19] mangled65 corpse66 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 indictment67 of more persons for treason than were ever before or since tried for that crime in the United States; the acrimonious68 relations of two neighboring commonwealths69 for years; the open exultation70 of many persons over the killing71 and wounding of citizens engaged in a lawful72 undertaking73, and the chagrin74 of many other orderly and law-abiding people that the law of the land had been violated in bloodshed and its officers successfully resisted.
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1
citizenship
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| n.市民权，公民权，国民的义务(身份) | |
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gateway
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| n.大门口，出入口，途径，方法 | |
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3
outrage
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| n.暴行，侮辱，愤怒；vt.凌辱，激怒 | |
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outrages
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| 引起…的义愤，激怒( outrage的第三人称单数 ) | |
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5
kidnappers
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| n.拐子，绑匪( kidnapper的名词复数 ) | |
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6
enactments
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| n.演出( enactment的名词复数 )；展现；规定；通过 | |
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7
bondage
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| n.奴役，束缚 | |
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8
rev
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| v.发动机旋转，加快速度 | |
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9
degenerate
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| v.退步，堕落；adj.退步的，堕落的；n.堕落者 | |
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10
humane
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| adj.人道的，富有同情心的 | |
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11
recurring
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| adj.往复的，再次发生的 | |
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12
discriminate
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| v.区别，辨别，区分；有区别地对待 | |
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13
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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14
ascertain
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| vt.发现，确定，查明，弄清 | |
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15
aspiring
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| adj.有志气的；有抱负的；高耸的v.渴望；追求 | |
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16
commonwealth
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| n.共和国，联邦，共同体 | |
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17
domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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18
sect
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| n.派别，宗教，学派，派系 | |
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19
scotch
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| n.伤口，刻痕；苏格兰威士忌酒；v.粉碎，消灭，阻止；adj.苏格兰(人)的 | |
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20
friction
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| n.摩擦，摩擦力 | |
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21
antagonism
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| n.对抗，敌对，对立 | |
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22
variance
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| n.矛盾，不同 | |
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23
prevailing
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| adj.盛行的；占优势的；主要的 | |
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24
rumor
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| n.谣言，谣传，传说 | |
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25
placid
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| adj.安静的，平和的 | |
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26
illustrated
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| adj. 有插图的，列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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27
rugged
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| adj.高低不平的，粗糙的，粗壮的，强健的 | |
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28
outlet
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| n.出口/路；销路；批发商店；通风口；发泄 | |
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29
fugitive
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| adj.逃亡的，易逝的；n.逃犯，逃亡者 | |
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30
defiance
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| n.挑战，挑衅，蔑视，违抗 | |
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31
grove
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| n.林子，小树林，园林 | |
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32
hostility
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| n.敌对，敌意；抵制［pl.］交战，战争 | |
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33
humanitarianism
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| n.博爱主义；人道主义；基督凡人论 | |
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34
pastor
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| n.牧师，牧人 | |
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35
chestnut
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| n.栗树，栗子 | |
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36
outspoken
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| adj.直言无讳的，坦率的，坦白无隐的 | |
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37
miscegenation
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| n.人种混杂；混血 | |
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38
industrious
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| adj.勤劳的，刻苦的，奋发的 | |
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39
ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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40
westward
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| n.西方，西部；adj.西方的，向西的；adv.向西 | |
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41
outlawry
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| 宣布非法，非法化，放逐 | |
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42
depredations
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| n.劫掠，毁坏( depredation的名词复数 ) | |
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43
millers
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| n.（尤指面粉厂的）厂主( miller的名词复数 )；磨房主；碾磨工；铣工 | |
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44
laborers
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| n.体力劳动者，工人( laborer的名词复数 )；（熟练工人的）辅助工 | |
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45
resentment
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| n.怨愤，忿恨 | |
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46
conflagration
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| n.建筑物或森林大火 | |
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47
inflame
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| v.使燃烧；使极度激动；使发炎 | |
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48
qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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49
reprisals
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| n.报复（行为）( reprisal的名词复数 ) | |
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50
alleged
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| a.被指控的，嫌疑的 | |
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51
lodged
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| v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
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52
miscreants
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| n.恶棍，歹徒( miscreant的名词复数 ) | |
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53
outraged
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| a.震惊的，义愤填膺的 | |
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54
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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55
stigmatized
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| v.使受耻辱，指责，污辱( stigmatize的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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56
fugitives
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| n.亡命者，逃命者( fugitive的名词复数 ) | |
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57
severely
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| adv.严格地；严厉地；非常恶劣地 | |
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58
wagon
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| n.四轮马车，手推车，面包车；无盖运货列车 | |
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59
acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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60
narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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61
authenticity
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| n.真实性 | |
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62
outlaws
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| 歹徒，亡命之徒( outlaw的名词复数 )； 逃犯 | |
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63
apprehensions
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| 疑惧 | |
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64
opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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65
mangled
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| vt.乱砍（mangle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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67
indictment
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| n.起诉；诉状 | |
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68
acrimonious
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| adj.严厉的，辛辣的，刻毒的 | |
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69
commonwealths
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| n.共和国( commonwealth的名词复数 )；联邦；团体；协会 | |
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70
exultation
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| n.狂喜，得意 | |
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71
killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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72
lawful
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| adj.法律许可的，守法的，合法的 | |
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73
undertaking
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| n.保证，许诺，事业 | |
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74
chagrin
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| n.懊恼；气愤；委屈 | |
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