The Christiana Resistance and the Treason Trial of Castner Hanway, 1851

A history of the trial of Castner Hanway and others, for treason, at Philadelphia in November, 1851 (Philadelphia: Uriah Hunt & Sons, 1852). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

This page describes an object featured by Independence National Historical Park: an 1852 pamphlet, written anonymously by "a member of the Philadelphia bar," about one of the most dramatic trials held in the Pennsylvania State House — now Independence Hall.

The Christiana Resistance

Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, people who had escaped slavery could be searched for, captured and returned from anywhere in the United States. On September 9, 1851, Edward Gorsuch, a Maryland enslaver living near Baltimore, obtained federal warrants in Philadelphia for four freedom seekers — George Hammond, Joshua Hammond, Nelson Ford and Noah Buley — whom he believed were hiding in Lancaster County. A deputy U.S. marshal, H. H. Kline, was to arrest them, with help from two Philadelphia police officers.

After a confused journey across Chester and Lancaster counties, Kline joined Gorsuch's party, and a disguised guide — never named — led them on September 10 to Parker's house near Christiana. There, the pamphlet says, the party was met with resistance: an old fish spear blocked the stairs, an axe was thrown, and Kline fired a pistol. Neighbors had been alarmed for years by kidnappers, and word spread quickly. The author estimated that about twenty-five Black men gathered at or near the house — witnesses for the prosecution claimed many more.

Castner Hanway, a white man from the area, rode up. When Kline showed his warrant and ordered him to help make the arrests, Hanway refused, warned Kline that it would be dangerous to try, and urged him to leave. In the fighting that followed, Edward Gorsuch was mortally wounded and his son Dickinson and Joshua M. Gorsuch were wounded. The whole affair lasted about two hours.

Treason charges

Early newspaper reports described an armed ambush. Federal officials, U.S. Marines and fifty of the marshal's police went to the scene, and the federal judges were reported to have called the rioters' offense treason. Prominent Philadelphians petitioned the governor to send a military force to put down what they called an insurrection.

In September 1851, Castner Hanway and at least thirty-eight other Black and white men were indicted for their supposed part in preventing the arrests. The trial was held in November 1851 in the second-floor Circuit Court room of the State House. By its end, according to the park, the charges against Hanway and all the others had been dropped.

About the pamphlet

The author explained that a full stenographic ("phonographic") record had been made for the judges and lawyers, but more than six months later it still had not been published, leaving newspapers as the only public account; the pamphlet was meant to fill that gap for ordinary readers. It drew on that record, local court dockets, prison and court records, the Evening Bulletin and the recollections of people who attended the trial, and it attacked a report on the trials by a Mr. Brent, addressed to a "Governor Lows," as full of "glaring absurdities and incongruities."

At the publishers' request, it opened with a long essay on slavery as a national question since the Revolution, arguing that the Compromise of 1850 — of which, the author wrote, these trials were "one of the earliest fruits" — could not be understood without that history. The essay noted, for instance, that the first census in 1791 counted 40,370 enslaved people in what were then called the Northern states and 653,910 in the Southern.

The full pamphlet can be read in the Library of Congress digital collection.

Sources

• National Park Service, Independence National Historical Park: "A History of the Trial of Castner Hanway and Others – November, 1851."
• A Member of the Philadelphia Bar. A history of the trial of Castner Hanway and others, for treason, at Philadelphia in November, 1851. With an introduction upon the history of the slave question. Philadelphia: Uriah Hunt & Sons, 1852 (Library of Congress).