Fugitive communities forcibly armed themselves to resist slave-catchers in free states

Evidence

Pennsylvania had begun a gradual process of abolition in 1780. Christiana was in Lancaster County, which bordered Maryland, a state that allowed slavery. A small community of Quakers and free Black people, some of whom were fugitives, lived in Christiana. Black people had come together to create a self-defense community to fight off anyone trying to bring them back to bondage. In September 1851, an enslaver from across the state line in Maryland, Edward Gorsuch, went up to Christiana to retrieve his human property, four men who had fled north. He brought along his son, his nephew, and a U.S. marshal, all of whom found themselves in a pitched battle with residents armed with pistols and farm equipment. Surrounded by approximately eighty Black people wielding whatever kinds of weapons they could find, Gorsuch was killed and his son and his nephew wounded. The marshal fled the scene, looking for safety. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 797

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The Battle of Christiana is a concrete instance of the kind of self-defense and resistance against an unjust order that ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ examines in ritual terms — here the ‘sacrifice’ is Gorsuch killed in a pitched battle, with legal consequences.
• XREF: The self-defense community of free Black and Quaker residents echoes the runaways/harems and maroon communities motif central to The 1619 Project’s treatment of Black resistance; also connects to the reader’s prior material on silence/decorum toward corpses in a historical-resistance frame. — connects to: Communities can claim sanctuary rights against instrumentarian power — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1699