Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society, Spring 1961, pages 65-91

On September 11, 1851, a rich, white, Methodist minister from Baltimore, who owned farmland in Pennsylvania, which he staffed with slaves [Yes, in Pennsylvania, on the eve of the Civil War, slave plantations still operated.] came to “reclaim his property,” a certain negro who had sought refuge with a number of free blacks and escaped slaves in Christiana, PA.

What followed was not much of a riot. The slaves and free blacks, under the leadership of one militant Negro “in a felt hat,” fought off the kidnapping attempt of the rich man and his seven followers, routing them and killing the slave-driving minister.

The U.S. marines were called up from Philadelphia to put down the slave uprising, though the blacks had the sense to flee.

Interestingly enough, this became a test f the Missouri Compromise legislation, which, for the reader, revealed the fragile open nature of the American Slave Economy of the time.

The major slaveholders had a very loose reign on their human property. A slave could leave anytime he wanted, with but a handful of overseers to look after many and concentration camp structures impossible in an agricultural setting. Like the white slave a hundred years before, the black slave could escape whenever he wished. However, he was to be hounded, with every man’s hand against him. You see, the slave owners did not just own the slaves, they owned every able bodied white man in the United States, owned his commitment to risk his life and set aside his morality, to do violence and enforce slavery on penalty of fine, enslavement himself under a limited indenture, and ultimately, to be tried and executed for treason.

Imagine, if you will, a world where, Tyrone Jackson and Douzzebag Nasheed steal a rental truck in Baltimore, and drive it to Columbus Ohio. Imagine a world with no police forces to speak of, in which you, as citizen of Columbus Ohio, are legally bound to apprehend and detain Tyrone and Douzzbag, a world where every escaped prisoner is your personal responsibility. Imagine a world in which mercenary bounty hunters and human traffickers could come into your community and deputize you by force.

Imagine further, that our prisons and jails were “free range” affairs, and that when the criminals escaped it was our duty to apprehend and return them whether we agreed with the laws they had been condemned under or not.

So it went in this small Pennsylvania town. An unarmed white man showed up to see what the fuss was and stood by, refusing to take sides between the two armed mobs. Knowing that he would be wanted for the crime of not subduing armed human property, he handed himself over to the authorities and stood trial for treason. The bully men and bounty hunters that came with the Christian Minister Slaver, who had been unable to keep his property on the farm, and who fled like rabbits before the mob of suddenly violent property while he was slain [needlessly, really], were not charged with treason. Of course the case was laughed out of court by the jury, but the southern slave owners were outraged that this unarmed Yankee man would not be executed for high treason for the crime of not subduing a mob of the unruly human property that they themselves had proved unable to control.

Slavery in the United States, 100 years after Peter Williamson was sold like hog, was not about permitting the rich men of a distant state to hold slaves, but about a commitment on the part of poor, unarmed men who may or may not agree with the slave trade, to apprehend any black man not carrying a slave pass. In Pennsylvania, there was at the time, a number of kidnapping gangs who routinely beat and sold free black men into bondage in Baltimore and points south.

The fact is, that once the Indians stopped serving as a mercenary slave-catching force, and the Appalachian Mountain barrier was breached, it would prove impossible for the slave masters to keep slaves who did not wish to remain on these vast plantations, except through the most vigilant cruelty, exemplified by a dedication to violence and evildoing that is stridently kept alive by the descendents of their property, who scarcely realize that their glorying in violent crime today is nothing but a wretched echo of the glorying in violent law of the rich of another day. And, on the part of the slave owners of yesteryear, if they could but see the police force used to control this wage-slave nation, they would be envious indeed!

Thanks to Nero the Pict for the loan of this fascinating periodical.