Partisans Quick to Make Capital out of the Occurrence—The Democrats Aggressive—The “Silver Grays” Apologetic, and the “Woolly Heads” on the Defensive—Effect of the Christiana Incident on the October Elections.

Thaddeus Stevens in September, 1851, was serving his second term as Representative of the Lancaster County district. As an antagonist of Southern ideas relating to slavery, he “strode down the aisles” of the House with a good deal more erectness of bearing than Ingersoll in his famous nominating speech ascribed to the “Plumed Knight” from Maine; and he struck the shield of his adversaries with a much louder ring than was given out at the impact of Mr. Blaine’s lance. To his individual and official view—law or no law, constitution or no constitution—slavery was “a violation of the rights of man as a man”—freedom was the law of nature. Like Mirabeau, “he swallowed all formulas.” But he was a lawyer, as well as a politician and moralist, and while he announced his “unchangeable hostility to slavery in every form in every place,” he also avowed his “determination to stand by all the compromises of the constitution and carry them into faithful effect”—much as he disliked some of them, they were not “now open for consideration,” nor would he disturb them. This again was practically an admission of the abstract legal right of the master to reclaim the fugitive.

Mr. Stevens was first elected to Congress in 1848, when Gen. Zachariah Taylor was elected President, and when he died (July 9, 1850), and Fillmore, Vice President and a Northern Whig, succeeded him, Stevens had been elected to a second term, which lasted until March 4, 1853.

[Pg 47]In those “good old days” a Congressman had some influence in the matter of Federal appointments. The United States Marshal, who executed warrants and picked jurors in Eastern Pennsylvania, was Stevens’ personal and political friend, Anthony E. Roberts. Mr. Roberts, who was a native of Chester County, was then 48 years of age and long a prominent citizen of New Holland. He had been sheriff of Lancaster County elected in 1839 as an avowed anti-Masonic candidate, favored by Stevens. He was with him an active anti-Mason and was a candidate for Congress in 1843, but was beaten by Jeremiah Brown. President Taylor appointed him Marshal in 1849, and he filled the office until the incoming of Pierce’s administration.

The Intelligencer and Journal, then edited by George Sanderson, was the regular organ of the Democratic party in Lancaster County. It was a weekly publication, and at that time a vigorous and exciting campaign for the State election in October was in progress. Col. William Bigler of Clearfield County was the Democratic nominee for Governor; General Seth Clover of Clarion County for Canal Commissioner, and for Judges of the Supreme Court the first ticket presented by the Democratic party under the new elective system bore the illustrious names of Jeremiah S. Black, Somerset; James Campbell, Philadelphia; Ellis Lewis, Lancaster; John B. Gibson, Cumberland, and Walter H. Lowrie, Allegheny.

The Whig County organ was the Lancaster Examiner and Herald, published and edited by Edward C. Darlington, who was a conspicuous leader of what was then known as the “Silver Gray” faction of his party—being opposed by the more aggressive anti-slavery men, of whom Thaddeus Stevens was the leader, and whose followers were derisively styled “Woolly Heads.” The candidates of the Whig party on the State ticket were: for Governor, William F. Johnston, Armstrong County (a candidate for re-election); for Canal[Pg 48] Commissioner, John Strohm, of Lancaster County, and for Judges of the Supreme Court, Richard Coulter, Westmoreland; Joshua W. Comly, Montour; George Chambers, Franklin; William M. Meredith, Philadelphia, and William Jessup, Susquehanna.

The fact that the entire Supreme Court membership, then numbering five, was to be elected, greatly increased popular interest in the result. Pennsylvania was an October State. The Darlington faction of the Whig party was in the ascendancy and Darlington himself was on the ticket for Senator. Moses Pownall, of Sadsbury Township, was one of the Whig candidates for the Assembly. The regular Democratic County ticket had not yet been nominated, but the opponents of Mr. Buchanan, who were stigmatized as disorganizers and “Frazer Ponies,” had named a County ticket.

The first local publications of the tragic occurrences in the Chester Valley appeared respectively in the Intelligencer of September 16 and the Examiner of September 17, and their local reports of the affair are illustrative not only of the laggard journalistic enterprise of that day, but of the intense partisanship which characterized newspaper management, colored the reports of news occurrences and generally pervaded all journalistic work. The Intelligencer’s account of the affair was printed under a Columbia correspondent’s “Particulars of the Horrible Negro Riot and Murder,” and the editorial additions to this report commented on the disgraceful conduct of the “Abolition Whig Governor, absenting himself from the seat of government” on an electioneering tour, while riots and bloodshed prevailed throughout the Commonwealth, and citizens of an adjoining State were “murdered in our midst.” All these outrages, it charged, could be traced to the Executive of the Commonwealth—Governor Johnston was then serving his first regular term—“roaming about in quest of votes, instead of being at his post to enforce the utmost rigor of the law against the white and black murderers.”

“AFTER THE WAR.”
“MAMMY KELLY” WITH THE YOUNGEST GREAT GRANDCHILD OF EDWARD GORSUCH.

[Pg 49]Further down the same column the editor rejoiced that Hanway and Lewis and nine negro accessories had been arrested and were in prison awaiting trial for murder. District Attorney John L. Thompson and Alderman J. Franklin Reigart were warmly praised for “ferreting out and arresting the guilty ones,” while the deposition of Deputy Marshal H. H. Kline was presented as a most satisfactory account of the “whole transaction.”

The Examiner promptly declared it to be a “dreadful tragedy” and “one of the most horrid murders ever perpetrated in this County or State.” Manifestly with one eye upon the political consequences to the State and local Whig ticket, and the other toward the Abolition faction of the Whig party, to which Editor Darlington was opposed, his newspaper frankly admitted that an awful responsibility rested somewhere, and the Examiner believed it to be “our duty to speak loudly and distinctly to those individuals who evidently have urged the blacks to this horrid measure.” It deprecated all attempts “to make political capital out of the Sadsbury treason and murder by connecting Governor Johnston’s name with that melancholy affair. Intelligent readers will regard such efforts with feelings of disgust and contempt.” But for the white persons under arrest and charged with murder and treason, it had no condonation. “Their passions had been inflamed by Abolition harangues and incendiary speeches franked by members of Congress until they had come to look upon treason to the laws of their country as a moral duty, and upon murder as not a crime.” It declared that this was especially perceptible and prevailing in Sadsbury and the eastern end of Bart; it recalled with special disapprobation the public meeting held at Georgetown, when the Griest resolutions were passed.

Much indignation was expressed by his political opponents that Governor Johnston, passing through Christiana on his[Pg 50] way from Harrisburg to Philadelphia, on a campaign tour, the morning of the affair, did not get off his train at Christiana where lay the dead body of the Marylander, slain on Pennsylvania soil; though many other passengers did so and the t............