“RETREAT FARM.” HOME OF THE GORSUCHES.
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 outraged neighbors this distinction made little difference.
The incident of most note occurring in the immediate 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 stigmatized as “the outrage 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 fugitives. Here in March 1851 a posse, claimed to be led by a rather notorious member of the “Gap gang,” entered the Chamberlain house, severely 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 wagon. 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 acting for his master. It was believed he died from their ill treatment of him.
And there were reprisals! William Parker—of whom this narrative 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 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 authenticity 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 outlaws 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 apprehensions 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 opposition 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 mangled corpse 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 indictment of more persons for treason than were ever before or since tried for that crime in the United States; the acrimonious relations of two neighboring commonwealths for years; the open exultation of many persons over the killing and wounding of citizens engaged in a lawful undertaking, and the chagrin of many other orderly and law-abiding people that the law of the land had been violated in bloodshed and its officers successfully resisted.