Arrests were numerous and somewhat indiscriminate and the charges varied, some relating to State and others to Federal laws, and many of them involving capital crimes and death penalties. All of them called for appearances and preliminary hearings before J. Franklin Reigart, Esq., an alderman of Lancaster City. He was a cousin of the late Emanuel C. Reigart, Esq., and mingled the pursuits of letters and law. His handsome picture in lithograph is the frontispiece of his somewhat bizarre biography of Robert Fulton, now something of a curio, once the ornament of many centre tables in Lancaster County.
Alderman Reigart was kept busy for some time issuing warrants and having hearings that attracted great attention, numerous and distinguished lawyers and ever increasing popular interest. Among those taken into custody were Elijah Lewis, storekeeper at Cooperville; Joseph Scarlet, farmer and dealer; Castner Hanway, miller at the “Red Mill”; James Jackson, farmer; Samuel Kendig, all white; and a large number of colored men and women, among them, William Brown and William Brown, 2d, Ezekiel Thompson, Daniel Caulsberry, Emanuel Smith, John Dobbins, Lewis James Christman, Elijah Clark, Benjamin Pendegress, Jonathan Black, Samuel Hanson, Mifflin Flanders, Wilson Jones, Francis Hawkins, Benjamin Thompson, John Halliday, Elizabeth Mosey, John Morgan, boy, Joseph Benn, John Norton, Lewis Smith, George Washington, Harvey Scott, Susan Clark, Tamsy Brown, Eliza Parker, Hannah Pinckney, Robert Johnston, Miller Thompson, Isaiah Clarkson and Jonathan Black. The officers claimed to have captured on the persons or premises of some of them heavily charged guns, dirks and clubs.
The examination of the persons charged before Alderman Reigart for complicity in the affair began in the old Lancaster County Court House, in Centre Square, on Tuesday, September 23, at 11 o’clock A.M. The appearances at this hearing for the prosecution were Attorney General R. T. Brent, of Maryland, John M. Ashmead, United States Attorney, District Attorney John L. Thompson, Colonel William B. Fordney and Attorney General Thomas E. Franklin. For the defense, Thaddeus Stevens, George Ford, O. J. Dickey and George M. Kline appeared.
The testimony of Dr. Pearce, Milton Knott and Deputy Marshal Kline was relied upon to make out a prima facie case. It was at this hearing George Washington Harvey Scott, a colored man (who subsequently changed his testimony in Philadelphia, and swore he was not even at Parker’s), testified that he saw Henry Simms shoot Edward Gorsuch, and that John Morgan afterwards cut him on the head with a corn cutter. Lewis Cooper testified that John Long, colored, was on his premises the evening before the occurrence “giving notice.” He was with Henry Reynolds. Long was described as a dark mulatto, five and one-half feet high, and of slender make. The District Attorney argued that the offense was treason, and asked that the persons be committed to answer at the Circuit Court of the United States. Mr. Stevens made the opening speech before the Alderman, claiming that the defendant prisoners, especially Lewis and Hanway, had not been identified as criminals or offenders; he dwelt upon the local kidnappings that had occurred in the night time, and charged William Bear and Perry Marsh with participation in these offenses; he produced many witnesses to the affair and to prove an alibi for some of the colored men, especially John Morgan, and nothing worse than inaction by Hanway and Lewis.
The women were all discharged; and some of the men. The names of those who were remanded to Philadelphia to await trial in the Federal Courts for treason, together with some others subsequently held, and some indicted in their absence and never apprehended, will be found in the report of the trial later in this history. James Jackson, father of William Jackson, now of Christiana was so well known to Marshal Roberts that he was released “on parole,” though subsequently indicted for treason. Mrs. Parker and Mrs. Pinckney left the vicinity and made their way to their husbands in Canada.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Political Aftermath.
Partisans Quick to Make Capital out of the Occurrence—The Democrats Aggressive—The “Silver Grays” Apologetic, and the “Woolly Heads” on the Defensive—Effect of the Christiana Incident on the October Elections.
Thaddeus Stevens in September, 1851, was serving his second term as Representative of the Lancaster County district. As an antagonist of Southern ideas relating to slavery, he “strode down the aisles” of the House with a good deal more erectness of bearing than Ingersoll in his famous nominating speech ascribed to the “Plumed Knight” from Maine; and he struck the shield of his adversaries with a much louder ring than was given out at the impact of Mr. Blaine’s lance. To his individual and official view—law or no law, constitution or no constitution—slavery was “a violation of the rights of man as a man”—freedom was the law of nature. Like Mirabeau, “he swallowed all formulas.” But he was a lawyer, as well as a politician and moralist, and while he announced his “unchangeable hostility to slavery in every form in every place,” he also avowed his “determination to stand by all the compromises of the constitution and carry them into faithful effect”—much as he disliked some of them, they were not “now open for consideration,” nor would he disturb them. This again was practically an admission of the abstract legal right of the master to reclaim the fugitive.