This Day in Labor History: September 11, 1851
By 
On September 11, 1851, African-Americans and abolitionist whites in Christiana, Pennsylvania engaged in violent resistance against a posse of slave catchers riding up from Maryland to retrieve fugitive slaves in the town. The so-called Christiana Riot demonstrated the growing division in the nation over the use of slave labor in the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the increasing willingness in the North to actively resist incursions to recover slaves who had freed themselves from a life of bondage.
By 1850, slavery was beginning to dominate all facets of American politics. The Mexican War, where the United States engaged in an imperialist war to steal half of Mexico to expand slavery, outraged many northerners and hardened the partisan divides in the nation. Given that the South was largely thwarted in its slavery expansion when the California gold rush led to an influx of northerners who saw their new home as a white man’s state, when Utah was dominated by Mormons, and no one knew what to do with New Mexico, the South demanded more from the North in what became the Compromise of 1850. This was the Fugitive Slave Act. Ever since the nation was founded, slaves who could self-liberate did so by taking themselves and their labor into northern states in order to have freedom and earn money for themselves. Once across the Mason-Dixon Line, they were free, barring kidnapping, although a 1793 fugitive slave law was on the books but mostly unenforced. The Fugitive Slave Act ended this lax period and enabled southerners to reclaim their property no matter where in the North they lived.
For many northern whites, slavery seemed to threaten the future of white settlement of western land, widely considered to be the core of the American dream in the Jeffersonian agrarian perspective that was largely dominant at the time. The rise of free labor ideology that would strongly influence the early Republican Party combined with an increasing awareness of the horrors of how slaves were treated to being move to move some, although not all that many even by 1860, northern whites into open alliance with African-Americans, helping their friends and neighbors maintain control over their own labor through their lives in the North.
This new situation frightened the many freed slaves throughout the North, especially given that most lived relatively near the Mason-Dixon line. Whether in Ohio or Maine, their freedom was now in serious danger. It was nearly impossible for slaves in most of the South to escape North because of the distance. But Lancaster County, Pennsylvania bordered Maryland. And so a lot of Maryland slaves hopped the border to a now-endangered freedom.
Near the end of 1849, four slaves owned by Bernard Gorsuch escaped from the Maryland plantation where they lived to Lancaster County. In 1851, Gorsuch discovered they were in Christiana. He went to Philadelphia on September 8, 1851 to get a warrant for their return, which was required in the Fugitive Slave Act. He then organized a posse of his friends and neighbors to go to Christiana and get the slaves back. The slaves had different ideas. They were living on the farm of William Parker, a freed slave himself. Parker had formed an organization to protect African-Americans from a local white group called the Gap Gang that kidnapped runaway slaves and sent them back to Maryland for money. Parker’s work to help slaves on the Underground Railroad and resist slaveholders had brought him to the attention of the Maryland planters.
When Gorsuch, the federal marshal, and the posse arrived at Parker’s house, he was ready to resist. He refused to let the posse take the slaves. A shot rang out, Parker’s wife rang a bell, and blacks in the neighborhood as well as two abolitionist whites came to help out. A battle ensued that killed Gorsuch and wounded his son. The posse retreated and that evening Parker and the four runaways fled to Canada. They did successfully reach that nation and true freedom.
The South and the Democratic Party in the North was outraged at this lawlessness in the North and demanded retribution. But the local juries disagreed. They did charge two dozen people with treason, riot, and murder. They tried the white abolitionists, but the jury found them not guilty and the state dropped charges against everyone else. It is believed the jurors themselves wanted to make it clear that the state of Pennsylvania would not assist southern planters in the recapture of freed blacks.
But this was hardly an isolated incident. Rather, blacks and abolitionist whites through much of the North began actively resisting enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, making it largely moot in parts of the nation. Conceptions over which form of labor would dominate the country would continue dominating the politics of the United States through the 1850s. Abraham Lincoln’s half-slave and half-free construction was not just about human rights. It was about a labor system. Increasingly, the South was forcing the North to choose which labor system would dominate the nation. And while many northerners had no sympathy for and openly hated African-Americans, the threat of the slave power to dominate white people too moved a lot of support for Lincoln and the Republican Party.
The South of course was all-in on their system of slave labor and would commit treason to defend it in 1860 and 1861.
This is the 157th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.