Meantime the dead body of Edward Gorsuch was taken by rail to Columbia, and via York on the Northern Central Railroad, to Monkton, where a throng of mourning neighbors met it and great local excitement prevailed. There being no convenient hearse and the distance too long for pall-bearers, it was carried by the four-horse team of Eliphalet Parsons to Mr. Gorsuch’s home. There, after a brief service by Rev. Vinton, it was committed to a family burying ground, where the body has rested undisturbed for sixty years. This private graveyard on the Gorsuch farm is located on an eminence in the midst of a fine orchard of apple trees, and overlooking the wide expanse of country to the southwest and traversed by Piney Run, a tributary to the Gunpowder. The graveyard is about twenty-five by thirty-five feet, surrounded by a massive stone wall, without any gate or entrance. The former opening to it was walled up by direction of and with a legacy left for that purpose by a son Thomas. There remain three low gravestones, of uniform pattern, the central one of which has the initials “E. G.” The occupants of the other two graves are unknown, and there is nothing to indicate who they were. Rev. John S. Gorsuch, son of Edward and who was very conspicuous in the agitation over his killing, was formerly buried in this graveyard, but his remains have been removed therefrom. He died at 32 of typhoid fever the March after his father, and while attending a M.E. conference. The little graveyard is overgrown with myrtle. Human hands have not desecrated it in any way, but there is evidence that the gnawing teeth of rodent vandals have been at work on the graves.
THE GRAVE OF EDWARD GORSUCH.
CHAPTER IX.
Before the Trial.
Popular Discussion Precedes the Arraignment—Legal Questions Raised by Eminent Lawyers—Judge Kane takes High Ground Against Treason—The Selection of the Jury—A Representative Panel.
Pending the arraignment of the prisoners in the United States Court for treason, the affair was made the subject of extended popular discussion. Fiery Southern journals and orators reflected the views that had been early expressed by Governor Lowe to President Fillmore, for his own State of Maryland, that if slave owners could not without incurring the risk of death pursue their property North and reclaim it, Secession and Disunion were inevitable. Quite as fierce and fiery champions of Abolitionism retorted with equal fervor and contempt for a league with iniquity and a covenant with slavery, and for a “flaunting lie” that flung the banner of freedom over a human race in chains. The great mass of conservative citizens stood for both law and liberty; and heard with sympathetic ears Webster’s great and eloquent pleas for “Liberty and Union—one and inseparable.”
Joshua R. Giddings, in a speech at Worcester, in the early part of November, before the trial, publicly rejoiced in the killing of Gorsuch and that the fugitives “stood up manfully in defense of their God-given rights and shot down the miscreants, who had come with the desperate purpose of taking them again to the land of slavery.”
It is a notable coincidence that just at this time the National Era, an Abolition paper in Washington, D. C., edited by Gamaliel Bailey, was beginning to publish as a weekly serial the first and copyrighted edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Neither the authoress nor the general reading public then appreciated the power and interest of the work, nor until it appeared later in book form.