In 1851, four men who had escaped from their enslaver in Baltimore County sparked a battle in the small Pennsylvania town of Christiana. An historic marker on York Road south of Hereford calls what happened a “riot.”
That mischaracterizes what was actually an act of resistance. There are plans to correct that historical record.
The men ran away from a farm owned by Edward Gorsuch and crossed into Pennsylvania. For a time they were protected by Pennsylvania state law, but then Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required runaway slaves to be returned…