The Christiana Riot
Near Intercourse, Pennsylvania
On September eleventh, eighteen fifty-one, a confrontation at a farmhouse near Christiana, Pennsylvania, became one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of American resistance to slavery. Maryland slaveholder Edward Gorsuch arrived with federal marshals to recapture four escaped people he claimed under the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty. He went to the home of William Parker, a free Black man who was sheltering the fugitives.
Neighbors gathered. Fighting broke out. Edward Gorsuch was killed.
The event sent shockwaves through the nation. To abolitionists it was an act of righteous resistance. To the South it was evidence that the North would not enforce federal law.
The Christiana Riot helped deepen the sectional crisis that would culminate a decade later in the Civil War.
