Christiana, Pennsylvania, in 1851,

 a group of African Americans and white abolitionists fought with a Maryland posse intent on capturing four men who had once been enslaved.


The violence came a year after Congress passed the second fugitive slave law, requiring the return of all of those who escaped slavery. Those four men, John Beard, Thomas Wilson, Alexander Scott and Edward Thompson, had escaped enslavement of the Gorsuch family of Maryland and took up residence in Lancaster County. Serving out a warrant under the law, wealthy slaveholder Edward Gorsuch led a posse of slave catchers into Lancaster County. Hearing that they were on the farm of William Parker, a free African American, they tried to arrest the four men. When the posse arrived, Parker’s wife, Eliza, blew a horn, summoning sympathetic neighbors.


Fighting broke out, and the elder Gorsuch was killed and his son wounded. The four men and Parkers escaped to Canada, but authorities arrested 38 others, including four white Quakers. All were charged with treason. The first man brought to trial was one of those Quakers, Castner Hanway, who was mistakenly believed to be the leader. The jury acquitted Hanway, and authorities released the other 37 men. In Canada, Parker continued his abolitionist activities, becoming a correspondent for a newspaper owned by Frederick Douglass.


(Photo: Samuel Hopkins and Peter Woods, pose outside the remains of William Parker’s home in 1896). In 1851 they drove off a posse of Maryland slave catchers, killing one and wounding two.


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