“My father’s been killed by those people up north and no one is going to pay for it,” said fifteen-year-old Thomas Gorsuch to his bosom buddy, John—according to Christiana Pennsylvania historian Bud Rettew. Rettew recently completed book, Treason at Christiana, tells the story of how the first shots of the Civil War were fired a decade earlier in  Christiana, Pennsylvania. 

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which provided for the return of slaves who escaped from one state into another. Edward Gorsuch, a Maryland slave owner, discovered  a significant amount of wheat missing from his storage bins. Four of his slaves, Noah Buley, Nelson Ford, George Hammond, and Joshua Hammond, anticipating retribution, fled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania along the Underground Railroad. 

They came to the home of William Parker, a tenant farmer who was also an escaped slave from Maryland. Parker had vowed never to be a slave again and pledged to help those trying to escape to freedom. Parker had a home on the farm of Levi Pownall just outside Christiana, a largely Quaker and anti-slavery community. 

Posing as an itinerant clock repairman, Padgett, a scout for an escaped slave bounty hunters, the Gap Gang of Gap, Pennsylvania, noticed some new blacks on the  Levi Pownall farm. They matched perfectly with the descriptions in a circulating bounty notice. Padgett contacted Gorsuch. 

In 1851, leaving behind his younger son, Thomas, Edward Gorsuch, his older son Dickenson, a nephew Joshua, and neighbors Dr, Thomas Pearce, Nicholas Hutchings and Nathan Nelson traveled to Philadelphia and filed papers to take the slaves from Pennsylvania under the Fugitive Slave Law. 

On the early morning hours of Sept. 11, 1851, With Deputy US Marshall Henry H. Kline with two deputies, and the Gorsuch party approached William Parker’s stone house. Parker, his wife, his bother-in-law and sister-in-law, and  the four former slaves took refuge on the second floor of the building, at the top of a narrow staircase. 

As the Gorsuch posse stormed the staircase, Parker’s defenders let loose with a variety of objects including a hand ax that sent the attackers fleeing. Parker’s wife blew a conch horn which was a pre-arranged call to arms in the community. Soon, a crowd of well over fifty, some estimated twice that many, gathered and encircled the Gorsuch posse. The crowd were all Blacks, excepting for three whites, Castner Hanway, Elijah Lewis, and Joseph Scarlet. Kline commanded the Whites to help but they refused. 

As the crowd converged Kline fled, while Gorsuch drew his pistols and held his ground. Chaos erupted and Gorsuch was shot deed and his son, Dickenson was badly wounded by a shot gun blast. The Parker group fled to Canada. 

Maryland and other Southern states threatened President Millard Fillmore with secession unless the Fugitive Slave Law was enforced and everyone involved with preventing its enforcement was brought to justice. Over 140 people were arrested and placed on trial for treason. 

In a trial lasting several months, the principal witness, Henry Kline, frequently changed his story and was cited for perjury. Sensing that their case was weakening, the prosecution elected to focus on one of the white defendants, Casper Hanway. The judge instructed the jury that there were insufficient grounds for a conviction of treason. After a ten-minute deliberation, the jury found Hanway “Not Guilty.” 

Charges were dropped and the judge released everyone to the custody of the authorities of Lancaster to determined if any parties should be charged with murder. Within 24 hours all were turned loose and no one was ever convicted for Gorsuch’s murder. 

Thomas was devastated that his father was killed, his brother badly injured and no one was brought up on charges. He said to his best friend, John Wilkes Booth, “My father’s been killed by those people up north and no one is going to pay for it.” Booth later spoke out against the shooting, claiming that it robbed "the boy, my playmate" of his father. 

On April 14, 1865, in the Ford theater where he had frequently acted, Booth shot President Lincoln.