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THE LIMITS OF TYRANNY
 THE LIMITS OF TYRANNY

Archaeological Perspectives
on the Struggle against New World Slavery

Edited by James A. Delle

The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville

Copyright © 2015 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville.
All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.
First Edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The limits of tyranny: archaeological perspectives on the struggle
against new world slavery / edited by James A. Delle. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-62190-117-4
1. Slaves—Emancipation—America—History.
2. Slave insurrections—America—History.
3. Antislavery movements—America—History.
I. Delle, James A.

ht1050.l56 2014
306.3'62—dc23 2014001757
 This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one,
and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and
it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit
to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice
and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these
will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows,
or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed
by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

— frederick douglass , 1857

 CONTENTS

Introduction: Archaeology and the Struggle against Slavery xi

James A. Delle

Part I: The Physical Struggle 1

1. “Freedom Began Here”: A Social Archaeology
of Armed Struggle at Christiana, Pennsylvania 5
James A. Delle
2. Consequences of Rebellion: The 1763 St. Jan Rebellion
and the Establishment of a Danish St. Croix 35
Holly Kathryn Norton
3. Resistance and Reform: Landscapes
at Green Castle Estate, Antigua 65
Samantha Rebovich Bardoe

Part II: The Moral Struggle 93

4. “Strike for Freedom or Die Slaves!” David Ruggles
and the Free Black Struggle to End Slavery 99
Linda Zigenbein
5. “Equality of Man Before His Creator”:
Thaddeus Stevens and the Struggle against Slavery 121
James A. Delle and Mary Ann Levine
6. Harriet Tubman’s Farmsteads in Central New York:
Archaeological Explorations Relating to an American Icon 147
Douglas V. Armstrong
 Part III: Beyond the Limits of Tyrants 175
7. Scission Communities and Social Defiance:
Marronage in the Diasporic Great Dismal Swamp,
1660–1860 177
Daniel O. Sayers
8. Including Maroon History on the Florida Gulf Coast:
Archaeology and the Struggle for Freedom on the Early 213
19th-Century Manatee River
Uzi Baram
9. Taking a Closer Look at Retention, Rebellion, and Resistance:
The Three R’s of African-Diaspora Studies 241
Cheryl White

Contributors 263
Index 265
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1. The William Parker House, ca. 1880 8

Figure 1.2. Mid-19th-Century Depiction
of the Christiana “Riot” 13
Figure 1.3. Monument Erected in Christiana in 1911 19
Figure 1.4. Peter Woods and Family at the 1911
Commemoration of the Christiana “Riot” 20
Figure 1.5. Histogram of Artifacts 23
Figure 1.6. Students and Local Volunteers Excavating
at the William Parker House 25
Figure 2.1. Inset of 1719 Van Keulen Map of St. Thomas 50
Figure 2.2. 1780 Oxholm Map of St. Jan 52
Figure 2.3. 1754 Beck Map of St. Croix 54
Figure 3.1. Survey Map of Green Castle Estate 72
Figure 3.2. Green Castle from the Southwest,
Watercolor Painting by Nicolas Pocock, 1804 73
Figure 3.3. Map of Locus 5 74
Figure 3.4. Remnants of Stone Foundation 75
Figure 3.5. Mapped Stones in situ 76
Figure 3.6. Wattle and Daub Houses Constructed
Using Stone Foundations 77
Figure 3.7. Common Rim Types among Afro-Antiguan
Ceramics 80
Figure 3.8. Plain Band Decoration on an Afro-Antiguan
Ceramic Sherd 82
Figure 4.1. The Disappointed Abolitionists, Lithograph
by Edward Williams Clay 102
Figure 5.1. Thaddeus Stevens in the 1860s 122
Figure 5.2. The Gravesite of Thaddeus Stevens 127
Figure 5.3. The Vaulted Cistern Following Excavation
of the Brick Pavement and Underlying Strata 133
Figure 5.4. Interior East Wall of the Vaulted Cistern 135
Figure 5.5. The Façades of the Thaddeus Stevens House
and Kleiss Saloon 138
Figure 6.1. Harriet Tubman 148
Figure 6.2. Tubman Farmhouse 149
Figure 6.3. John Brown Hall Dormitory, Harriet Tubman
Home for the Aged, ca. 1908. 150
Figure 6.4. Tubman at Her Residence 152
Figure 6.5. John Brown Hall, Excavated 152
Figure 6.6. Map of Tubman Properties and Archaeological Sites 156
Figure 6.7. Deposits Associated with the House Fire
at Tubman’s Residence, February 10, 1880 162
Figure 6.8. Stemware Burned in the House Fire
of February 10, 1880 163
Figure 7.1. General Location of the Great Dismal
Swamp National Wildlife Refuge 185
Figure 7.2. Boundaries of the Great Dismal Swamp 187
Figure 7.3. General View of Grotto Area at the Nameless Site,
Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge 189
Figure 7.4. Satellite Image of Two Mesic Islands 190
Figure 7.5. Range of Artifacts Recovered in Grotto
Excavations at the Nameless Site 191
Figure 8.1. Movement of Maroons Down
the Florida Gulf Coast 229
 INTRODUCTION
Archaeology and the Struggle against Slavery

James A. Delle

Historical archaeologists have long maintained that one of the great

strengths of their discipline lies in its ability to give historical voice
to the historically voiceless. As historical archaeology emerged as an
independent field, and the scope of research expanded beyond house
museums and sites associated with “important” historical people, a
general consensus emerged that anthropological historical archaeology
was, at its best, an inherently democratic enterprise, one that sought
not only to tell the stories of the “great” people of history, but of the
common farmers, laborers, and their families—those people too often
forgotten in the traditional telling of documentary history. In the 1980s
and 1990s, archaeologists influenced by the political economic turn in
American anthropology (for example, Mintz 1986; Wolf 1992) began
to recognize that the study of common people within their historical
contexts inevitably led to questions concerning inequality and the use
and maintenance of social power (Scham 2001; Paynter and McGuire
1991; Leone 1988; Orser 1988). In turn, historical archaeologists in-
terested in understanding the complex social and historical processes
embedded, particularly, in European colonialism and its American af-
termaths, recognized that these were contested processes that could not
be materially understood without recognizing the complex nature of,
and reaction to, social domination (for example, Delle 1999; Portugal
1989; Silliman 2004). Imagining the processes of the world dialectically,
archaeologies of resistance emerged, interpreting human agency as part
of a domination/resistance dialectic, in which some exerted power over
others, while those others resisted that power with exertions of their
own (Paynter and McGuire 1991; Orser and Funari 2001).
xii INTRODUCTION

While there has been much debate on the nature of the relationship
between the individual and social context, which is made and which is
making (for example, McGuire and Wurst 2001; Hicks and Beaudry
2006), there can be little denying the fact that the post-Columbian so-
cieties of the New World were formed through the exercise of unequal
social power. Multiple categories of social place emerged through the
negotiations of that power, each of which has combined to create the
hierarchies of inequality that still characterize the societies of the Ameri-
cas. Many of these social categories have been explored by historical
archaeologists, including race (Orser 2004, 2007), class (Delle 1999a;
Mrozowski 2008), gender (Baugher and Spencer-Wood 2010; Kruczek-
Aaron 2002; Scott 1994; Wall 1994, 2000), and ethnicity (Griggs 1999;
Voss and Allen 2008). Each of these categories of being interrelates with
all others to shape social realities—to structure and limit the roles that
individuals can play within a given society at a given historical moment.
All of these categories have, at one time or another, been used to create
and reify systems of inequality. In every case, such systems have been
challenged by those who have suffered the injustices of inequality, and
others who, while privileged within a system, have disapproved of and
struggled against the injustices inherent in their day. Many different
struggles have been and could be explored archaeologically (for example,
Delle 1999a; Kruczek-Aaron 2002; Larkin and McGuire 2009; McGuire
and Wurst 2002; Shackel 2003).
The people of the Americas have struggled against many manifesta-
tions of inequality; of these perhaps none has been more thoroughly
explored by archaeologists than the system of African slavery (Ascher
and Fairbanks 1971; Samford 2007; Singleton 2001; Weik 2012). The
long history of the use of captive labor in the Americas has left innu-
merable archaeological traces, perhaps best known through the excava-
tion of quarter sites associated with plantations in the U.S. South (for
example, Adams and Boling 1989; Ferguson 1992; Joseph 1993; Otto
1994; Singleton 1991) and the Caribbean (Armstrong 1990, 2010; Delle
1998). In recent years, however, the scope of African American archae-
ology has grown beyond the Antebellum southern plantation to focus
on a variety of other topics, including northern slavery (LaRoche and
Blakey 1997; Fitts 1996), bioarchaeology (Knudson and Stoganowski
2009; Rankin-Hill 1997), planned post-emancipation towns (Fennell
2010), consumerism (Mullins 1999), and, of course, resistance to the
slave system (Weik 2012).
The authors in this volume expand upon such recent work in Afri-
can American archaeology by focusing on struggles against slavery and
 JAMES A. DELLE xiii

racism. The studies presented here represent work done in a number of

historical and geographic contexts from 18th century sugar plantations
in the Caribbean to 19th century sites in the U.S. Northeast. In each
case, the authors explore dimensions of the African American experience
through the concept of “struggle.”

The Concept of Struggle

Many historical archaeologists have studied the material dimensions of
opposition to structures of inequality. Most such studies have used the
concept of “resistance” to frame action in opposition to “domination”
(see Miller et al. 1989; Frazer 1999). Influenced by anthropological
studies deriving from political economy (for example, Wolf 1982; Mintz
1986) and the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971), most resistance studies
have considered that acts of resistance occur within dialectical conflicts
between those with power over others and the subaltern groups they
control. While a useful concept to understand the development of con-
flict between groups caught in the webs of inequality, recent work on
the dynamics of power relations have begun to expand the limits that a
binary oppositional definition of domination/resistance might otherwise
allow (Delle 1999a; McGuire and Wurst 2001; Weik 2012).
Regardless, the fact remains that people do contest structures and
institutions of inequality. For the purposes of this volume, the authors
take the concept of “struggle” as a starting point. Several archaeologi-
cal studies have attempted to re-frame historical narratives through the
concept of struggle. For example, McGuire and Wurst (2002) argued
that the use of individualizing theoretical frameworks characteristic of
“post-processual” approaches lacked the conceptual space to fully ad-
dress how collective action has been historically marshaled to challenge
and change structures of inequality. In reflecting on what they considered
to be the false dichotomy of individual agency/historical determinism,
McGuire and Wurst rightly suggest that human interaction is relational,
and the actions of any given human being will be shaped by the multitude
of social relations they experience. To McGuire and Wurst (2002), daily
life exists in a web of relational struggles: a poor, gay, black woman
might struggle against structures of poverty, homophobia, institutional
racism, and misogyny simultaneously or in any combination, dependent
on the shifting social contexts in which she might find herself moving.
Following McGuire and Wurst, the studies presented here consider
struggle as a relational force with multiple and simultaneous expressions.
In usage here, struggle refers to actions, both collective and individual,
xiv INTRODUCTION

that are focused on changing or eliminating social forces that serve to

marginalize or otherwise oppress definable social groups. Such struggle
can be manifested on many scales, expressed in a variety of ways, and in-
volve diverse parties and allies united to bring an end to social structures
and institutions commonly considered to be unjust. To better explore
the nature of struggle, the studies in this volume, inspired by the oratory
of Frederick Douglass, consider both physical and moral expressions of
the struggle against slavery.
To frame the overarching concept of struggle, the studies presented
here consider physical struggles to be acts of material opposition against
the structures of slavery. Such struggles included the multitude of orga-
nized rebellions and uprisings by the enslaved to overthrow the system
that oppressed them, as well as other forms of violent resistance to
slavery.
Individuals and groups often used multiple strategies to oppose their
own enslavement and that of others, thus the concept of struggle implies
both collective and individual efforts to effect social change. As Douglass
so eloquently stated, struggles do sometimes require or manifest physical
confrontation as power gives up nothing freely. The act of taking up
arms—the armed struggle—can be a relatively narrow or focused mani-
festation of struggle, for example when an individual takes up a weapon
and kills a slaveholder or overseer. While such individual actions can
be historically overlooked or dismissed as a foolhardy, futile, or failed
effort, such action can only be so considered when conceptually isolated
from the overarching moment of struggle of which it was a constituent
part. Furthermore, acts of armed resistance need not achieve their im-
mediate ends to be part of a broader and ultimately successful struggle.
For example, John Brown’s Raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry did
not achieve its intended military goal of inciting and arming a general
uprising of Virginia’s enslaved population. Yet acts like Brown’s served
as rallying points for fellow travelers who moved the struggle forward.
Not all struggles are successful, however, as revolutions and violent
uprisings can fail to bring about social change when the moral elements
of a struggle are not well articulated or accepted by a large percentage
of both the oppressed and oppressing population. So long as a major-
ity, or even a plurality, of people accept the structures of oppression
as being morally acceptable or functionally necessary for their society,
structural change releasing the bonds of oppression is difficult if not
impossible to achieve. In Douglass’s words, struggle must have a moral
dimension—that is struggle must reveal the inherent injustices of the
 JAMES A. DELLE xv

operative social relations and work to change the collective mind of the
people about the righteousness of their way of being. In late 18th- and
early 19th-century Europe and North America, such a moral struggle
against slavery was waged on many fronts. Abolitionists, propagandists,
and liberal legislators spoke and wrote tirelessly about the conditions
of slavery. Over the course of several generations, they were ultimately
successful in shifting public opinion to the idea that slavery was ethically
wrong, encouraging like minded individuals to make changes in their
daily thought and practice to reinforce this emerging mindset. Many
abolitionists, both black and white, sought to use the power of the pen
and of moral example to mobilize and shame people into seeking an
end to the slave system.
Systems of oppressive social relations have moral, physical, and geo-
graphic limitations. Moral limitations are often co-defined by existing
systems of law and ethics. In the case of African slavery, the existence
and legal limits of the system of coerced, captive labor were debated
and established both ecclesiastically and legislatively. For example, in
17th century Virginia, the colonial legislature (known as the General
Assembly) made the distinction between Christian (European) and non-
Christian (African) servants, eventually legislating different terms of ser-
vitude for each, a generally ecclesiastical distinction allowing Africans to
be enslaved for life, with the general assumption that such people were
not Christians at the time of their initial captivity (Epperson 2001). By
the turn of the 18th century, the conditions of slavery were largely a leg-
islative issue, as greater percentages of the enslaved were colonial born
and raised as Christians. Colonial legislatures were subsequently busy
throughout the 18th century in defining the boundaries of who could be
enslaved, what limitations on power over these people would be enforced,
and under what conditions they might, individually, be freed from their
captivity. Part of the moral struggle would thus be to convince constitu-
ents, legislators, and executives, that such laws defining people as chattel
were unethical and immoral. Hence emancipation in the British West
Indies was legislated through an Act of Parliament, and the enslaved in
the rebellious Confederate States of America were emancipated through
an executive order of the President of the United States.
Because slavery was defined and enforced by New World legislatures,
and because those colonies and their successor states had limitations
on the geographic territory they could legally and actually control, the
tyranny of slavery had its limits. A critical element of the struggle against
slavery was the creation and maintenance of independent communities
xvi INTRODUCTION

established beyond the limits of tyranny. Many enslaved men and women
chose to self-emancipate themselves by leaving the spaces of their en-
slavement. Throughout the New World, the self-emancipating process
we now call marronage was common. Maroon communities of various
sizes, from a few households to consolidated states, emerged beyond
the limits of slavery, placing a beacon of hope for those still enslaved,
provoking shudders of fear from those who continued to enslave, and
providing the opportunity to live a self-defined life for those who escaped
slavery to live in the maroon communities (Agorsah 1994; Weik 1997,
2012; White 2009, this volume).
Archaeological studies have focused on each of these manifestations
of struggle. The essays in this volume are thus organized into three parts.
The first group of chapters examines the archaeology of armed struggle
and violent resistance to the slave system. Part II examines the moral
dimensions of the struggle against slavery. The third and final group
of chapters, again following the work of Douglass, explores how mar-
ronage pushed beyond the limits of tyranny—here meaning both the
physical and social limits of the slavery system.

The Physical Struggle

Part I of this volumes considers the physical struggle against slavery
through three case studies. In each case a group of African American
or Afro-Caribbean people took up arms against those who would en-
slave them.
The first of these case studies explores an incident known as the
Christiana Riot, which took place on September 11, 1851, near the
sleepy hamlet of Christiana, Pennsylvania. On the morning of that day,
empowered and emboldened by the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law, a
group of Maryland farmers, accompanied by a U.S. Marshal, descended
on the house of William Parker, an African American tenant farmer who
was reputed to be harboring four self-emancipated men, considered to be
fugitive slaves by the Marylanders. After heated words between Parker,
his guests, and the Maryland posse, a gunfight broke out. Reputedly,
Parker’s wife blew a fish horn to signal the surrounding community of
danger. As many as several dozen African American neighbors descended
on the Parkers’ house to come to the aid of the besieged tenants. In the
ensuing melee, Edward Gorsuch, the leader of the posse, was killed;
his son, Dickinson Gorsuch, was seriously wounded. The remaining
members of the posse, including U.S. Marshal Henry Kline, were forced
 JAMES A. DELLE xvii

to retreat. Although Parker and the fugitives immediately fled north, in

the aftermath of the incident several dozen African Americans from the
outlying area, as well as three white neighbors who were on the scene,
were arrested.
This incident, like many brief acts of physical struggle, may have
passed with only brief note, had it not been for the insistence of the
prosecutors to bring the defendants up on charges of treason for failure
to aid in the apprehension of the fugitives and for having taken up arms
against a U.S. Marshal. The subsequent treason trial, in which the only
defendant to be brought to trial was acquitted, with the other cases
dismissed, was a national sensation.
In Chapter 1, James A. Delle explores the meaning of the so-called
Christiana Riot through a community archaeology project, in which he
partnered with the Christiana Historical Society to uncover the founda-
tions of the “Riot House.” Along with both white and black descendants
of the 1851 incident, Delle and his students from Kutztown University
located and excavated the site of the Christiana “Riot.” In this chap-
ter, Delle explores not only the incident itself, but the meaning and
commemoration of this moment of physical struggle against American
slavery.
While the Christiana Riot was an event that transpired over the
course of but a few hours, some physical struggles against slavery lasted
significantly longer. The history of New World slavery is one character-
ized by insurrection. Nearly every colony (or later, nation) that permitted
the holding of slaves experienced one or more uprisings in which the
enslaved population struggled to overthrow the slave system by force.
Holly K. Norton has been exploring one such insurrection. In Chapter 2,
Norton explores the meanings and consequences of the 1733 uprising
on the Danish island of St. Jan, now known as St. John and part of the
U.S. Virgin Islands. In 1733, a group of enslaved workers rose up and
captured the island of St. Jan, holding the island for nearly six months.
It was only through the intervention of French forces from the nearby
island of Martinique that the “rebels” were defeated. Norton explores
why and how the uprising was temporarily successful and examines
the material changes the Danes made to their Caribbean colonies in the
aftermath of this manifestation of the struggle against colonial slavery.
Such acts of resistance were not always island-wide phenomena,
as was the case in St. Jan. A generation before the uprising in St. Jan,
Major Samuel Martin, on Christmas Day, 1701, was killed by en-
slaved laborers attached to his estate on the island of Antigua. Like the
xviii INTRODUCTION

Christiana incident, the murder of Major Martin was a brief event

that had long-standing consequences. In Chapter 3, Samantha Rebovich
Bardoe explores how the death of Martin impacted the planter class on
Antigua and how generations of planters followed the advice of Martin’s
son, who published a treatise on the proper management of a plantation
in the wake of his father’s death.

The Moral Struggle

As the 18th century drew to a close, increasingly vociferous abolitionist
movements in both the United States and Great Britain crusaded for the
end of both the African slave trade and the use of captive laborers in the
U.S. and British New World colonies. Hundreds of books, pamphlets,
and broadsides preached about the evils of the slave system, and, for
many, the struggle against slavery became a moral issue.
By the middle of the 19th century, the slavery question loomed as the
primary political issue in the United States. Although the British (1834)
and French (1848) had legislated emancipation several decades prior to
the American Civil War, it was not until that conflict was resolved that
slavery was abolished in the United States; another generation would
pass before the last bastions of legal African slavery would fall (Cuba
[1886] and Brazil [1888]). During this protracted abolitionist era, apolo-
gists for slavery made many attempts to justify the institution, claiming
that it was part of the civilizing mission of Christianity to enslave African
“heathens,” that southern slaves lived better lives than northern factory
“wage slaves,” and that people of African descent did not have the social
or intellectual capacity to live as free people.
To counter these preposterous claims, those struggling against slav-
ery, particularly the black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and
Lewis and Harriet Hayden, set out to prove through example that
African Americans could participate equally in the civil society of Victo-
rian America. As the sections moved closer to war, radical politicians in
the northern states unsuccessfully pushed local and national legislation
to bring an end to slavery. Many involved in the abolitionist movement,
both black and white, continued to aid those seeking to emancipate
themselves by leaving their places of enslavement and heading north to
Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, New England, and Canada.
Each of the chapters in Part II examines the contributions made to
the struggle against slavery by individuals who would become famous
for their antislavery activities. In Chapter 4, Linda Zigenbein explores
 JAMES A. DELLE xix

the limitations of traditional archaeological resistance models through

the examination of the life of David Ruggles, a leading Black abolitionist
in western Massachusetts. A thoughtful review essay, Zigenbein’s chapter
challenges historical archaeologists to expand beyond the domination/
resistance model and to be more inclusive in our studies of the struggle
against slavery.
Chapter 5, by James A. Delle and Mary Ann Levine, examines ar-
chaeological evidence linking Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton
Smith to the Underground Railroad. Stevens, a radical politician from
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was an indefatigable critic of the southern slave
system. A leader of the Radical Republicans in the House of Representa-
tives during the Civil War and early Reconstruction period, Stevens was
a primary author of the so-called Reconstruction Amendments to the
Constitution. These amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) legislated the
end of slavery in the United States and its territories, guaranteed citizen-
ship and equal protection of the law to the newly emancipated people,
and guaranteed the right to vote for all male citizens, regardless of race
or past enslavement. Lydia Hamilton Smith, Stevens’s African American
housekeeper and confidante, was by reputation a “conductor” on the
Underground Railroad and rose to social and economic prominence as
an independent property owner. This chapter interprets how a modified
cistern on the Stevens and Smith properties may have been part of a safe
house used to aid those seeking freedom through Lancaster.
The final chapter in Part II, by Douglas V. Armstrong, is an archaeo-
logical exploration of the life of Harriet Tubman. Tubman, an iconic
member of the Underground Railroad movement, has served, in her day
and ours, as an inspirational figure. Having aided hundreds of people
fleeing slavery through New York State, Tubman’s story is symbolic of
the moral struggle against slavery. Through an archaeological investiga-
tion of her properties in Upstate New York, Chapter 6 sheds light on
how Tubman sustained herself and those who sought her help both prior
to and following the abolition of slavery in the United States.

The Limits of Tyrants

The third and final part of this volume explores the phenomenon of mar-
ronage—the creation and existence of sovereign communities of those
who escaped their enslavement. The existence of maroon communities
throughout the Caribbean and in both North and South America chal-
lenged the slave system and demonstrated that people of African descent
xx INTRODUCTION

could exist beyond the control of those who would enslave them—living
beyond the physical and social limits of the slaveholders.
In Chapter 7, Daniel Sayers explores the archaeological legacy of
maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp along the border of
Virginia and North Carolina. A refuge for many, the swamp provided
protection for small groups of people to live in relative peace away from
the centers of slave power. Uzi Baram explores a similar landscape in
Chapter 8, which examines marronage in the Manatee River drainage
of west-central Florida.
The final chapter of the volume, by Cheryl White, is an essay explor-
ing how historical archaeologists have traditionally studied the African
American experience. Like many of the chapters in this volume, White’s
contribution seeks to push the discipline away from a bipartite domina-
tion/resistance model and implores us to expand our theoretical frame-
works such that we can better understand the nuances of the African
American experience beyond the “Three R’s” of Retention, Rebellion,
and Resistance.

Conclusion
Although resistance studies have pushed the archaeological literature
on the African Diaspora well beyond a search for “Africanisms” and
other forms of cultural retention from that vast continent, much work
still needs to be done. It is the hope of the contributors to this volume
that our work, taken collectively, will push the discipline even further.
In considering the physical and moral struggles against slavery from
an archaeological perspective, we hope to inspire other archaeologists
to think about struggles beyond reactive resistance to provide more
nuanced understandings of the disaporic experience in the Americas.

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THE LIMITS OF TYRANNY
 PART ONE
THE PHYSICAL STRUGGLE

The struggle against slavery was fought on many fronts, and

in many ways. Among the most dramatic of the struggle’s
many manifestations were episodes of armed resistance,
where the enslaved took up weapons and struck out against
those who would keep them in bondage. Such episodes of
armed struggle could be momentary, quiet, and individually
focused, or could result from careful planning and collective
action. Many slaveholders lived in fear of poisoning and
other clandestine attempts at their lives and so worked to
ban the many forms of African-derived religious practices,
known alternately as obeah, Santeria, or voudon, whose
practitioners were skilled herbalists and knew how to cre-
ate a variety of poisons that might be tasteless and leave no
evident traces. More immediately violent acts of retribution
by the enslaved were not unknown, and likely dozens if not
hundreds of slaveholders and overseers fell to violent blows
and gunshots directed at them from those they would op-
press. From time to time, like-minded people would work
to bring the armed struggle out from beyond individual ret-
ribution to collective action. The history of the New World
is rife with examples of slave rebellions, carefully planned
and orchestrated, some of which succeeded in either tem-
porarily, or in the case of Haiti permanently, throwing off
the shackles of slavery. Indeed, the struggle against slavery
in the United States was ultimately determined by force of
2 PART ONE

arms, and while few would characterize the U.S. Civil War
as a slave rebellion, many people fled their captivity to work
for the Union cause, and indeed, many African American
men took up arms and became soldiers in the fight to end
slavery in the United States. While the actions of a cook
surreptitiously slipping poison into a meal in Martinique in
1760 might seem disconnected to the rallying of thousands
of armed men and women to put hundreds of plantations
to the torch in Jamaica in 1831, both were manifestations
of the physical struggle against slavery.
Frederick Douglass warned that the fight against slav-
ery would have a physical component, and, indeed, every
slaveholding colony and successor state experienced some
manifestation of the physical struggle against slavery. In
many cases, collective actions were discovered before they
unfolded, resulting in public executions and the display of
the tortured and mutilated bodies of those accused of plot-
ting against slavery. Despite the often gruesome reminders of
the lengths to which the slaveholders would go to maintain
the system of captive labor, mutinies and murders, riots and
rebellions, conspiracies and insurrections were common-
place. Just as the enslaved were not passive recipients of
their captivity, neither were the planters the passive recipients
of the physical struggle. Nearly to the end of the system, the
planters fought back, with their executioners, legislatures,
and management plans ever focused on keeping the enslaved
population in check, and at work. Despite their best efforts
at intimidation, suppression, collusion, and amelioration,
the slaveholders could never suppress the physical struggle
against slavery.
The following three chapters explore various expres-
sions of the physical struggle against slavery. In Chapter
One, James A. Delle explores the events and memories of
the Christiana “Riot,” an act of armed struggle by a group of
self-emancipated African Americans who fought back when
their Maryland “owners” tried to retake them into slavery.
Holly Norton explores a momentarily successful rebellion on
the Danish island of St. Jan, and how the consequences of this
insurrection changed the direction of plantation settlement
in the Danish Virgin Islands. In Chapter Three, Samantha
 THE PHYSICAL STRUGGLE 3

Rebovich Bardoe analyzes how an act of murder led a

planter’s son to become one of Antigua’s greatest planta-
tion theorists. In each of these three cases, we see both sides
of the struggle: in Pennsylvania, those that assisted the so-
called fugitive slaves were arrested for treason, in the Dan-
ish Caribbean the island of St. Croix experienced a spatial
organization designed to reduce the chances that another
St. Jan uprising could occur there, and in Antigua, the lives
of the enslaved were manipulated by the designs of a man
whose father was killed in the struggle. In each case, those
striving for freedom stood opposed to those who would en-
slave them. Taken together, these three chapters demonstrate
the geographic and thematic ranges of the physical struggle
against slavery.
 1
“FREEDOM BEGAN HERE”
A Social Archaeology of Armed Struggle
at Christiana, Pennsylvania

James A. Delle

The physical struggle against slavery in the United States took many
violent turns, including a number of organized and armed uprisings.
Many of these insurrections, whether plotted or actually brought to
action, are historically well-known, including the famous Stono, Nat
Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Gabrielle Prosser rebellions. While at first
blush these might seem like isolated and unrelated events, each was
framed in a larger context of the violent struggle against slavery. Placed
into this larger narrative context, events such as these can be interpreted
as being localized manifestations of the broader and ongoing struggle
against slavery. And indeed, a select number of these events have been
memorialized as part of the generally accepted narrative of antebellum
American history. This process of memorialization, the incorporation of
specific events into broadly accepted historical narratives, does serve the
purpose of reminding the historically conscious public that the enslaved
did take up arms against their enslavers, and that armed resistance to
slavery was both temporally and geographically common. However,
the processes of memorialization and creation of historical narratives
must be by their nature selective; there were dozens if not hundreds of
violent attempts to strike out against slavery, but only a handful have
been memorialized and endowed with a common name. Events like Nat
Turner’s Rebellion, the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy, or John Brown’s
Raid are characterized both by the names of their leaders, used adjec-
tively, and the defining noun which frames the nature of the action being
remembered (Raid, Revolt, Rebellion).
6 SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AT CHRISTIANA, PENNSYLVANIA

The memorialization of an event, particularly if defined by violence

against an accepted order, is a contested and highly political process
(Shackel 2001, 2003). Memories of events, and historical interpretations
of those events, can differ based on the frames of reference of the actors
remembering or interpreting those events. As has long been pointed
out, the practice of archaeology is part of this process of selective me-
morialization, as principle investigators, landowners, granting agencies,
publishing houses, journal editors, and universities hold great power
over which archaeological sites will be excavated, and how the results
of those excavations will be used to interpret past events (Delle 2008;
Delle and Levine 2011; Shackel 2003; Shanks and McGuire 1996). The
creation of archaeological knowledge about manifestations of the physi-
cal struggle against slavery can itself be seen to be part of a meta-struggle
to understand the nature of past events (McGuire and Wurst 2002).
The events commonly incorporated into narratives about the struggle
against slavery generally occurred south of the Mason-Dixon Line, in
states associated with the Old Confederacy. However, the paradigm-
shifting work at New York’s African Burial Ground has forced scholars
of the past to come to terms with both the scale and scope of slavery in
the northern states, and the frequency and violence of acts of struggle
against slavery there. It is now well understood that there were signifi-
cant and coordinated attempts to strike out against slavery in the 18th
century north, particularly in New York City and New Jersey. Although
most of the northern states would outlaw slavery by the opening decades
of the 19th century, the struggle against slavery continued there. This was
particularly so in border states like Pennsylvania, where kidnappings of
both self-emancipated immigrants (“fugitive slaves”) and freeborn resi-
dents was shockingly common, particularly after the passage of the 1850
Fugitive Slave Law. The unfortunate victims of these kidnappings, even
if free born, were sold into southern slavery. Not surprisingly, residents
of Pennsylvania communities on or near the border with slaveholding
Maryland were increasingly concerned about kidnappings, and a new
theater in the struggle against slavery was opened.
The village of Christiana, then home to about 150 African American
people and located just 15 miles north of the Maryland border, was such
a community. On a fall day in the year 1851, an event took place here
that may be best understood as a manifestation of the physical struggle
against slavery. Traditionally known as the “Christiana Riot,” armed
resistance against slavery broke out in a most unlikely place, a small ten-
ant house located in a sleepy corner of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
 JAMES A. DELLE 7

Over 150 years later, the events of that day are still remembered by the
descendant community in many ways, including through a community
archaeology project conducted on the site of the incident, the William
Parker House.

The Christiana “Riot”

On the morning of September 11, 1851, a group of Marylanders, led
by the slaveholding farmer Edward Gorsuch, approached a small stone
house, the residence of William Parker, an African American tenant
farmer, near the small hamlet of Christiana, in Sadsbury Township,
Pennsylvania. Accompanied by Deputy U.S. Marshal Henry Kline, the
Marylanders were empowered by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to
apprehend four men, alleged to have once been enslaved on Gorsuch’s
Maryland farm. As they approached the house, the posse, which included
Gorsuch’s son Dickinson, his son-in-law Alexander M. Morrison, his
nephews Joshua Gorsuch1 and Dr. Thomas Pearce, as well as Nicholas
Hutchins, Nathan Nelson, and Cockey Gist, met one of the African
American men who had emancipated himself from servitude on the
Gorsuch farm. The group of whites pursued him to the small stone
house, where they demanded that William Parker release the fugitives
into Kline’s custody (Hensel 1911; Slaughter 1994).
Parker, a well-known and active black abolitionist in the Octoraro
Valley, refused to accede to these demands. After several tense hours, the
standoff between the so-called fugitive slaves and those that had been
empowered by the U.S. Government to deem them so, grew violent.
Gunshots were exchanged, and bloody hand-to-hand combat, including
the use of corn knives and other deadly implements, ensued. When the
dust cleared, Edward Gorsuch lay dead, and his critically wounded son
Dickinson, who had dragged himself away from the fight, lay against a
tree, barely clinging to life (Slaughter 1994).
In the days that followed, although Parker and the active participants
in the incident had fled north, dozens of African Americans in the sur-
rounding county were arrested, as were several white neighbors of the
Parkers. A force of 45 U.S. Marines was dispatched from the Philadel-
phia Navy Yard, accompanied by about 50 policemen from Philadelphia;
some 100 Irish railroad workers were deputized to search the area for
anyone possibly linked to the incident (Rettew 2006). After a brief in-
vestigation and arraignment, three white men—Castner Hanway, Elijah
Lewis, and Joseph Scarlett who had been on the scene when the melee
8 SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AT CHRISTIANA, PENNSYLVANIA

Figure 1.1. The William Parker House ca. 1880. Courtesy Christiana Historical Society.

broke out— and more than three dozen black men, were remanded
to prison in Philadelphia, where they were to be tried in U.S. Circuit
Court for treason. The subsequent treason trial of the first defendant,
Castner Hanway, resulted in an acquittal; U.S. Attorney John Ashmead,
in charge of the prosecution, subsequently moved to drop the federal
charges pending against the remaining defendants.
The incident that led to the treason trial, which has become known as
the Christiana “Riot,” was a sensation in its day. It has been interpreted
as being the first test case of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and was clearly
an act of struggle against the laws permitting the enslavement of people.
Commemorated for decades as one of the key events leading to the
U.S. Civil War, the incident at Christiana faded from historical memory
in the early 20th century. As the 21st century dawned, the descendant
communities of the participants of the Christiana Riot, including the
lineal descendants of both the white and black defendants in the treason
trials and the community of Christiana have sought to reinvigorate the
memory of what they now call the “Christiana Resistance.” As part of
the efforts to re-memorialize the incident at Christiana, I have had the
 JAMES A. DELLE 9

privilege of working with the descendant community to archaeologically

uncover the so-called “Riot House,” the small stone dwelling inhabited
by William Parker and his family in the 1840s and 1850s, and the place
where Parker and his associates actively resisted impressment back into
slavery (figure 1.1).

Archaeology and the Collective Memory

of Physical Struggle
Memorialization is a complex process through which narratives of past
events are passed down through successive generations. As I have argued
elsewhere (Delle 2008), archaeology can play a part in the construc-
tion of collective memory. The processes behind the creation and use
of collective memory have long been examined by historians, cultural
anthropologists, archaeologists, and other critics of the ways that the
past is used in the present. It has, for example, been argued that those
in positions of power use recollections of the past to solidify their con-
trol over subordinates in a variety of social forms, from industrial and
post-industrial nation-states (for example, Linenthal and Englelhart
1996; Zerubavel 1995) to pre-industrial states (for example, Joyce
2003; Meskell 2003; Sinopoli 2003) to non-state or pre-state social
formations (Lillios 1999, 2003; Pauketat and Alt 2003). The literature
on heritage tourism has explored the various ways that historical land-
scapes, monuments, and museums have been used to broadcast specific
historical messages in the effort to create a selective memory that serves
the present (Cameron 1999; Delle and Smith 1997; Handler and Gable
1997; Shackel 2001a). It is also recognized that significant dissonance
can exist between authorized historical ideologies and popular memory
(Hobsbawm 1983; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003). Not only are there
contradicting remembrances of past events, but various segments of a
given society can select themes of particular interest to them and use
these to frame an alternative collective memory.
To contextualize how and why memories of the Christiana Riot are
now being recalled, it is important to distinguish between these various
forms of memorialization. For example, recollections of historical events
can be and are used by those in positions of power and authority to
control the past, and thus, to control the present. This kind of top-down
construction of collective memory has been addressed by a number of
scholars, who generally agree that nation-states can use selective memo-
ries of the past to create national histories which bind citizens together
10 SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AT CHRISTIANA, PENNSYLVANIA

under the banner of nationalism (Kohl 1998; Kohl and Fawcett 1995;
Shackel 2003: 11; Trigger 1984, 1989). This production and reproduc-
tion of public memory can be based on inscriptive memory (Connerton
1989; Rowlands 1993), that is through the creation of monuments and
other visible reminders of past events, or embodied memory (Connerton
1989), that is the performance of ritual behavior. Governments can
participate in the creation of embodied memory through such quotidian
practices as the teaching of school history curricula and the practice of
prescribed patriotic rituals, or through historic pageantry, like commem-
orative parades. What Rowlands and others have referred to as inscribed
or inscriptive memory (Rowlands 1993; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003) is
a much more tangible manifestation of the creation and reproduction
of public memory. Inscriptive public memory is created and reproduced,
in part, through visible memorials like museums, preserved battlefields,
statues, or other historical monuments, that are open to the public for
the consumption of carefully crafted memories.
Alternative social memory comprises the collective recollections of
those who reproduce historical narratives that are not part of authorized
public memories actively reproduced by governments and other power-
ful interests. Social memory can be commemorated in ways similar to
public memory, either through inscriptive or embodied memorialization.
Physical struggles against perceived injustice are often memorialized this
way, particularly when they are not incorporated into public memory.
For example, the 1912 Ludlow Massacre, an event in which Colorado
National Guard troops opened fire on and burned a camp of striking
coal miners, killing several women and children, has never been part of
authorized public memory. Nevertheless, there are annual commemora-
tive ceremonies at the site of the massacre, and the United Mine Workers
of America union has erected a monument on the site; memories of the
Ludlow Massacre are thus reproduced both by inscriptive and embodied
processes of memorialization (Walker 2000, 2003). Such events are com-
memorated by descendant communities whose social memory conflicts
with or contradicts the public memory reproduced by those in power.
Social memory can also be used to create community or social cohe-
sion among members of subordinated or subaltern groups through oral
tradition, alternative press histories, protest songs, web blogs, and even,
from time to time, through the publication of alternative histories on
mainstream presses (Basso 1996; Mullins 2004; Shackel 2004; Van Dyke
and Alcock 2003). Like public memory, the themes of social memory
and the meaning of constituent events can change as the interests of
those reproducing those memories change.
 JAMES A. DELLE 11

Remembering Struggle
Although the historical meaning of the Christiana Riot is multifaceted
and complex, one way to understand the events of September 11, 1851, is
in the context of the broader antebellum struggle to liberate and protect
the freedom of African Americans. As I have argued elsewhere (Delle
2008), the Underground Railroad is a widely memorialized manifesta-
tion of this struggle. Most mainstream accounts of the Underground
Railroad portray this particular element of the struggle against slavery
in relatively peaceful terms. This may be a result of the long-held mis-
conception that the Underground Railroad was largely an enterprise
run by white Northern Quakers, a group famous for their pacifism.
The archaeologist Cheryl LaRoche considers the image of the peaceful
Quaker Friend to be one of the most prevailing, and misleading, elements
of the mythology of the Underground Railroad. LaRoche has argued that
three popular accounts of resistance to the slave regime, Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s fictional Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Levi Coffin’s Reminiscences, and
Lydia Maria Child’s biography of Isaac Hopper were “most responsible
for perpetuating and cementing the myth of the kindly Quaker Friend
in American historical memory” (LaRoche 2004: 12). The long history
of crediting white Quaker abolitionists for running the Underground
Railroad has minimized the leading roles that African Americans played
in the Underground Railroad, not only in providing aid and shelter,
but in expressing agency in the struggle by escaping their own enslave-
ment (Blockson 1977, 1981, 1987; DuBois 1907; Gara 1961; LaRoche
2004:13; Wesley 1969).
William Parker was one such African American expressing
agency against the tyranny of slavery, not only through his own self-
emancipation, but by providing shelter and assistance to other people
escaping from Maryland and Virginia into Pennsylvania. By his own
account, published in 1866, Parker was not afraid to use violence either
to defend himself or others from being shipped back South into slavery.
Parker reported that he broke one man’s arm with a stick upon his first
escaping to Pennsylvania; participated in a violent melee at the Lancaster
Courthouse in order to free William Dorsey who was being sent back
into slavery; attacked a white intruder in his house with fireplace tongs
knocking him senseless; participated in a violent attack on a band of
kidnappers, three of whom, according to Parker, died of their wounds;
burned down the barn of a tavern keeper sympathetic to the Fugitive
Slave Law; engaged in a gun fight at an inn to free a captive being tak-
ing back to Maryland; violently beat Allen Williams, who had turned
12 SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AT CHRISTIANA, PENNSYLVANIA

a fugitive over to the authorities, with the intent to kill him; burned
down the house of another man who was turning fugitives in, with the
intent to shoot him as he escaped the flames; and of course was an active
participant in the Christiana incident (Parker 1866).
Although Parker may have exaggerated the scope of his exploits,
his description of his actions indicates that Parker and his comrades in
southeastern Pennsylvania were not afraid of actively participating in
the physical struggle against slavery, even though they were living in a
free state. The popular image of the passive fugitive seeking help from
white friends clearly discounts the scale of action actually taking place.
Kidnapping both fugitives and free African Americans was apparently
commonplace after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was enacted, and,
indeed, a description of the prevalence of kidnapping in the area around
Christiana was a key part of the defense strategy during the Treason
Trials in 1851. Accounts like Parker’s, and events like the “Riot,” clearly
demonstrate that the physical struggle against slavery in the North
occasioned the use of violence.
Because Parker’s account was published in a leading periodical of its
day—The Atlantic Monthly—his rendition of the prevalence of armed
resistance to slavery has entered the public record. The use of violence
by men like Parker was not universally sanctioned and provoked con-
siderable controversy. Like many controversial events, the meaning and
subsequent memorialization of the Christiana Riot was contested by
parties wising to control how the details of the event were portrayed,
and how the physical struggle against slavery would be remembered.

Contemporary Accounts of the “Riot”

A number of scholars have recognized that the construction and repro-
duction of historical memory is a deeply political and contested enter-
prise (Handler and Gable 1997; Shackel 2001; Trigger 1989; Trouillot
1995). The construction of public memory of any event can begin virtu-
ally immediately and can continue as the meaning of events change to
reflect the ever-shifting social realities of the malleable present. Control-
ling public memory can begin with attempts to establish the rhetoric or
tone in public media outlets, which primarily consisted of newspapers
and other print media in the 19th century (figure 1.2).
Merely days after the Christiana event, various parties vied to control
the narrative of the Christiana Riot. Of particular note are two contem-
porary accounts by participants describing the events of the day. The
 JAMES A. DELLE 13

Figure 1.2. A mid-19th-century depiction of the Christiana “Riot.”

Courtesy Christiana Historical Society.

first account is attributed to Joshua Gorsuch. Dated September 17, 1851,

the Gorsuch account first published in the Baltimore Sun, was reprinted
multiple times in newspapers across the country. In 1866, a second ac-
count of the Christiana Riot was published by William Parker in The
Atlantic Monthly. An analysis of their recollections, and their attempts
to control the public memory of the Christiana Riot, are instructive in
examining how public memory is constructed. These were but two of
the contemporary accounts that shaped both public opinion and public
memory of the Christiana Riot.
Although published within a week of the incident, the Gorsuch ac-
count was not the first published description of the Christiana Riot. The
first attempt to create the authentic narrative of the events at Christiana
was published the day after the incident, in a letter to the editor of the
Lancaster Intelligencer, by a correspondent in nearby Columbia. Suppos-
edly based on an eyewitness account, this published narrative described
the event as a “horrible Negro Riot and Murder.” The correspondent
relates that Edward Gorsuch was fired upon immediately following a
14 SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AT CHRISTIANA, PENNSYLVANIA

first failed attempt to apprehend the occupants of the Parker House.

Within 45 minutes, it was claimed, some 200 African American neigh-
bors, “most of whom were armed with guns,” descended upon the scene;
this account relates that Gorsuch was struck on the back of the head by
a scythe and shot as he was reeling from the blow (Intelligencer Journal
1851). At the end of the action, this account relates that the “negroes
took alarm at their bloody work and dispersed, yelling like demons
incarnate.”
Perhaps recognizing that such newspaper accounts were shaping
public memory of the events of September 11, Joshua Gorsuch wrote
an account of the Christiana incident from the bedside and in the voice
of the wounded Dickinson. The account opened with a justification of
why the Marylanders were in pursuit of the fugitives. According to the
Gorsuch account, three of the four men who were with Parker during
the incident had fled from Edward Gorsuch’s farm, having stolen some
wheat that they proceeded to sell. Although a message had been sent
to them that no harm would come should they return to the Gorsuch
farm, they instead chose to flee into Pennsylvania. Although several years
had passed since the theft of the wheat, during which time the Fugitive
Slave Law had been passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, Joshua
Gorsuch relied on this clear violation of property law to justify the at-
tempt to bring the fugitives back to Maryland. Gorsuch also hinted that
Kline and the Philadelphia law officers were to blame for the bloodshed;
he recounted that the operation was supposed to take place on Wednes-
day, September 10, but Kline failed to appear with the necessary war-
rants and that several constables sent back to Philadelphia for another
warrant never returned, weakening the numbers and authority of the
Maryland party and forfeiting the element of surprise. In Gorsuch’s ac-
count, the hearty, brave, and legally protected southerners would have
to be the agents of order.
Gorsuch reported that after Marshal Kline did finally arrive, the
party decided to attempt their apprehension at dawn on September 11.
Approaching the Parker House, the Maryland party was spotted by one
of the fugitives, who fled into the house to warn Parker and the others.
According to Gorsuch:
Mr. Kline asked for the owner of the house; told them he was an
United States Marshal, and that he came for the purpose of arrest-
ing Mr. Gorsuch’s slaves, Nelson and Josh. He then read to them
the warrants, and while doing this he heard them loading their
guns upstairs. The Marshal and my father started both together
 JAMES A. DELLE 15

to go upstairs, the latter having first called to Nelson, that he saw

him, and told him that if he would come down peaceably and go
home with him, he would treat him as kindly as before he ran
away. Resistance, he said, would do no good, for he came with the
proper officer and authority, and he would not leave the premises
without his property. While they were on the steps and intending
to proceed, one of the Negroes struck at them with a staff shod
with sharp iron. [Edward Gorsuch] then turned and went out of
the door. Just as he got out a gun was fired at his head from one of
the windows, but the aim was too high. The Marshal coming out
just behind him fired his pistol in the window.

According to this account, the law-abiding Marylanders attempted to

peaceably and lawfully apprehend the fugitives but were met with violent
resistance. Interestingly, Gorsuch recollects that while the Marshal was
reading the warrants, the African Americans were loading their guns and
then fired the first shot, Kline returning the fire in self-defense.
Gorsuch also depicts the arrival of the first white neighbors on the
scene, apparently Elijah Lewis and Castner Hanway. According to his
account:
. . . the watch was held, but before the time expired a white man rode up
to the bars in the lane. His presence inspired the blacks; they immediately
raised a shout and became confirmed in their opposition. When the mar-
shal saw the man at the bars, he went to him, and called on him in the
name of the United States, to assist in arresting the fugitives, showing his
warrant, reading his authority, and telling him the inevitable consequence
of refusal. Another white man was also present during this conversation.
The reply was, that he would not assist; and that they had better go home,
for they could make no arrests there, or blood would be spilt.

This version of the story clearly depicts the white neighbors in a nega-
tive light, both inciting the Parker party to strengthen their resistance,
and suggesting that the whites themselves were threatening violence.
Another interesting note in Gorsuch’s account, and perhaps the most
significant, is the description of the death of Edward Gorsuch:
. . . the marshal and two of the young men left. My father was then near
the house, [Dickinson], Pearce, and Joshua Gorsuch, not far from him, still
guarding the house to keep the slaves from escaping. Just as the marshal
and the two young men left, the Quaker on the horse said something to the
Negroes that had assembled near him, when they set up a most hideous yell
and rushed towards the house, the Negroes in the house at the same time
rushing out, and whooping like savages, met the advancing gang around
16 SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AT CHRISTIANA, PENNSYLVANIA

my father. They were four men, all armed with pistols, it is true, opposed
to about one hundred infuriated, blood-thirsty, howling demons. As soon
as these two gangs met in the narrow lane, the attack was made upon the
diminished band by a Negro from behind striking [Edward Gorsuch] on
the head, which caused him to fall forward on his knees, when he was
shot several times and cut over the head with corn-cutters.

Gorsuch continues his tale by relaying how the surviving members of

the party fled after the death of Edward Gorsuch, wounded, and pursued
by the Parker party, who are described as “whooping and yelling with
savage glee” at the death of Gorsuch, and who would have finished off
the critically wounded Dickinson Gorsuch: “the fiends followed and
would have most cruelly murdered him, but an old Negro, who had
been in the affray, threw himself over his body and called upon them
for God’s sake to assist him, for he would soon die anyhow.”
The Gorsuch account of the Christiana event, first published in a
leading southern newspaper, was reprinted in newspapers across the
country, including Lancaster, PA. In the first weeks after the event, this
version became the official narrative, and Gorsuch’s spin emerged as the
first narrative of the event accepted by the public as authentic.
As the Gorsuch version of events was circulated, a parallel narrative
emerged out of Philadelphia. An account attributed to a conductor of the
Pennsylvania Railroad defined the event as a “Fatal Riot on Account of
Fugitive Slave.” This narrative, published on September 17, 1851, in a
variety of newspapers including the Amherst, New Hampshire Farmer’s
Cabinet, painted the African Americans as the aggressors, claiming that
when “the officers came upon the party they were surrounded on all
sides, and a deadly fire poured upon them by the negroes. At the first fire
Mr. Gorsuch, an elderly gentleman, was instantly killed . . .” (Farmer’s
Cabinet 1851). This same narrative was published in Sandusky, Ohio
on September 18; the Sandusky Register described the incident as “a
tremendous riot . . . in consequence of a slave owner and his son attempt-
ing to arrest a fugitive slave. When the owner appeared in the presence
of the slave, the latter shot him dead” (Sandusky Register 1851). Again,
the African Americans are described in this event as the aggressors.
William Parker’s published account, while corroborating many de-
tails about the melee, disputes some of Gorsuch’s key points. Not surpris-
ingly, Parker’s account (published after the Civil War had ended, some
15 years after the Christiana incident took place) questions the morality
of the Fugitive Slave Law, by, for example, referring to Marshal Henry
Kline as “a professional kidnapper of the basest stamp.” He dispar-
ages the Philadelphia constables as “Philadelphia roughs.” According to
 JAMES A. DELLE 17

Parker, the designs of the Gorsuch party had been discovered in Philadel-
phia by a clandestine group, known as the “Special Secret Committee,”
and one of the agents of the committee, a black man named Samuel
Williams, managed to get word to Christiana that Gorsuch was on his
way. Several men, including two of those sought by Gorsuch, sought
refuge in Parker’s house on the night of September 10; at dawn on the
11th, one of these men, on starting out from Parker’s house, came upon
the Marylanders and ran back to warn the others.
Parker recounts that the Marylanders followed the fleeing man and
burst into the house in pursuit of him. At this point in the retelling,
Gorsuch and Marshal Kline engaged Parker by demanding the return
of Gorsuch’s “property,” a concept that Parker relates he then disputed.
Upon his refusal to turn over the men, Kline threatened to burn the house
down. Parker’s wife then sounded an alarm by blowing a horn out of
an upstairs window. According to Parker, the first shots were fired when
two of the Gorsuch party climbed a peach tree and tried to shoot the
woman blowing the horn. Undaunted, she continued to sound the alarm,
despite Parker’s assertion that the Marylanders fired “ten or twelve”
times at her. As the argument continued, Parker relates that as he was
leaning out of an upstairs window Kline fired a pistol shot at him, which
just missed. At this point, Parker reached for a gun; restrained by one
of his colleagues from aiming at Gorsuch, Parker recounts that the gun
fired, grazing Gorsuch’s shoulder, but not seriously injuring him. After
additional parleying between the sides, the African American party and
the Marylanders, both reinforced by this point, confronted each other
in the house yard, a confrontation that led to the mortal wounding of
Edward Gorsuch.
In contrast to the 1851 accounts of the incident, Parker’s story con-
tends that when the heavy firing began, the African American group
was vastly outnumbered, their number being ten, and the white party
numbering between 30 and 40. Parker relates that each side fired several
volleys toward each other, and then engaged in hand to hand combat,
with at least the African American side using their guns to club their
adversaries. Parker recounts that when he and his men rushed the white
party, the Gorsuch men and their allies fled, with the sole exception of
old Gorsuch, who “held on to his pistols until the last, while all the
others threw away their weapons” (Parker 1866). Parker’s account cor-
roborates at least one detail of the previous story, that one of Gorsuch’s
former slaves “struck him the first and second blows; then three or four
sprang upon him, and, when he became helpless, left him to pursue
others” (Parker 1866).
18 SOCIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AT CHRISTIANA, PENNSYLVANIA

When the media narratives of the Christiana incident were first form-
ing in the early 1850s, the issue of slavery, and the Fugitive Slave Law
in particular, were national issues, which many have argued led directly
to the U.S. Civil War. The proslavery press was very quick to use the
Christiana incident as part of a broader narrative portraying blacks as
violent, and antislavery whites as unreasonable radicals. The first at-
tempts to create a public memory of the event portrayed the Gorsuch
party as aggrieved, law-abiding citizens, opposed to “fugitives” who
openly defied the laws of the United States. By the time that the Parker
account was published in the Atlantic Monthly, the Union had prevailed
in the Civil War and slavery had been abolished in the United States
and its possessions. The Atlantic Monthly article sought to cast the
events of September 11, 1851, in a more heroic light and to portray the
Christiana Riot as a crucial event in the broader struggle against slavery
in the United States.

Memorializing the “Riot”

Current events can easily fade into the mists of time unless some agency
is exerted to keep the memories of past events part of the narrative of
the present. The reproduction of public memory is one way in which
specific versions of an event are passed down through the generations
as authentic “history.” Scholars concerned with the question as to how
archaeology contributes to the construction and reproduction of public
memory make the distinction between memorialization based on inscrip-
tive memory (Connerton 1989; Rowlands 1993), which is through the
creation of monuments and other visible reminders of past events, and
embodied memory (Connerton 1989), which is the practice of ritual
behavior.
The Christiana Riot has been memorialized through embodied mem-
ory practice multiple times since the conclusion of the Civil War. In 1888,
the New York Times reported that the citizens of Lancaster County were
“making preparations for the celebration” of a commemorative event
at which they had hoped that Castner Hanway, then “a resident of a
Western State” would be in attendance (New York Times August 15,
1888:2). The 1888 article itself commemorates the event by stating that
Hanway had been one of only two men ever tried for treason in the
United States, the other being the famous duelist and former U.S. Vice
President Aaron Burr. The headline of the notice, which in part reads
“citizens of lancaster county, penn., will celebrate an event
Another random document with
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farther side of the lobby he surmised that the young woman was an
office clerk on an errand for her employer. She was neatly dressed;
there was nothing in her appearance to set her apart from a hundred
office girls who visited the bank daily and stood—just as this young
woman was standing—in the line of bookkeepers and messengers.
“Well,” said the banker, “what about her?”
While looking at the girl the detective drew out a telegram which he
scanned and thrust back into his pocket.
“Her mother runs a boarding house, and her father, Julius Murdock,
is a crook—an old yegg—a little crippled by rheumatism now and out
of the running. But some of the naughty boys passing this way stop
there to rest. The place is—let me see—787 Vevay Street.”
Burgess thoughtfully brushed a speck from his coat-sleeve, then
looked up indifferently.
“So? Hardly a fashionable neighborhood! Is that what is called a
fence?”
“Well, I believe the police did rip up the boarding house a while back,
but there was nothing doing. Murdock’s able to make a front without
visible means of support—may have planted enough stuff to retire
on. He’s a sort of financial agent and scout for other crooks. They’ve
been in town only a few months. The old man must feel pretty safe
or he wouldn’t keep his money in a bank. Nellie, out there, is
Murdock’s daughter, and she’s stenographer for the Brooks Lumber
Company, over near where they live. When I came in she was at the
receiving teller’s window with the lumber company’s deposit. She’s
probably waiting to draw a little money now for her daddy. He’s one
of the few fellows in his line of business who never goes quite broke.
Just for fun, suppose you see what he has on the books. If I’m wrong
I’ll decline that cigar you’re going to offer me from the box in your
third left-hand drawer.” The banker scribbled the name on a piece of
paper and sent a boy with it to the head bookkeeper. “And I’d be
amused to know how much Nellie is drawing for Julius, too, while
you’re about it,” added the detective, who thereupon sat down in one
of the visitors’ chairs inside the railing and became absorbed in a
newspaper.
Burgess strolled across the lobby, stopping to speak to
acquaintances waiting before the several windows—a common
practice of his at the busy hour. Just behind the girl in the red hat
stood a man he knew well; and he shook hands and continued
talking to him, keeping pace with his friend’s progress toward the
window. The girl turned round once and looked at him. He had a very
good view of her face, and she was beyond question a very pretty
girl, with strikingly fine gray eyes and the fresh color of youth. The
banker’s friend had been recounting an amusing story and Burgess
was aware that the girl turned her head slightly to listen; he even
caught a gleam of humor in her eyes. She wore a plain jacket, a year
or two out of fashion, and the red feather in her cloth hat was not so
crisp as it appeared at a distance. She held a check in her hand
ready for presentation; her gloves showed signs of wear. There was
nothing to suggest that she was other than a respectable young
woman, and the banker resented the detective’s implication that she
was the daughter of a crook and lived in a house that harbored
criminals. When she reached the window Burgess, still talking to the
man behind her, heard her ask for ten-dollar bills.
She took the money and thrust it quickly into a leathern reticule that
swung from her arm. The banker read the name of the Brooks
Lumber Company on the passbook she held in her hand.
“Pardon me,” said Burgess as she stepped away from the cage
——“those are badly worn bills. Let me exchange them for you.”
“Oh, thank you; but it doesn’t matter,” she said.
Without parleying he stepped to the exchange window, which was
free at the moment, and spoke to one of the clerks. The girl opened
her reticule and when he turned round she handed him the bills.
While the clerk went for the new currency Burgess spoke of the
weather and remarked upon the menace of worn bills to public
health. They always meant to give women fresh bills, he said; and he
wished she would insist upon having them. He was a master of the
art of being agreeable, and in his view it was nothing against a
woman that she had fine eyes and an engaging smile. Her voice was
pleasant to hear and her cheeks dimpled charmingly when she
smiled.
“All money looks good to me,” she said, thrusting the new bills into
her satchel; “but new money is certainly nicer. It always seems like
more!”
“But you ought to count that,” Burgess protested, not averse to
prolonging the conversation. “There’s always the possibility of a
mistake.”
“Well, if there is I’ll come back. You’d remember——”
“Oh, yes! I’d remember,” replied Burgess with a smile, and then he
added hastily: “In a bank it’s our business to remember faces!”
“Oh!” said the girl, looking down at her reticule.
Her “oh!” had in it the faintest, the obscurest hint of irony. He
wondered whether she resented the idea that he would remember
her merely because it was a bank’s business to remember faces.
Possibly—but no! As she smiled and dimpled he put from him the
thought that she wished to give a flirtatious turn to this slight chance
interview there in the open lobby of his own bank. Reassured by the
smite, supported by the dimples, he said:
“I’m Mr. Burgess; I work here.”
“Yes, of course—you’re the president. My name is Nellie Murdock.”
“You live in Vevay Street?” He dropped his voice. “I can’t talk to you
here, but I’ve been asked to see a young man named Drake at your
house. Please tell him I’ll be there at five-thirty today. You
understand?”
“Yes, thank you. He hasn’t come yet; but he expected to get in at
five.” Her lips quivered; she gave him a quick, searching glance, then
nodded and walked rapidly out.
Burgess spoke to another customer in the line, with his eyes toward
the street, so that he saw the red feather flash past the window and
vanish; then he strolled back to where the detective sat. On the
banker’s desk, face down, lay the memorandum he had sent to the
bookkeeper. He turned this up, glanced at it and handed it to Hill.
“Balance $178.18; Julius Murdock,” Hill read. “How much did Nellie
draw?”
“An even hundred. I stopped to speak to her a moment. Nice girl!”
“Gray eyes, fine teeth, nose slightly snub; laughs easily and shows
dimples. Wears usually a gold chain with a gold heart-shaped locket
—small diamond in center,” said Hill, as though quoting.
“Locket—yes; I did notice the locket,” frowned Burgess.
“And you didn’t overlook the dimples,” remarked the detective—“you
can’t exactly. By-the-way, you didn’t change any money for her
yourself?”
“What do you mean?” asked Burgess with a scowl. “Wait!” he added
as the detective’s meaning dawned upon him.
He went back into the cages. The clerk who had brought the new
bills from the women’s department found the old ones where they
had been tossed aside by the teller. Burgess carried them to Hill
without looking at them. He did not believe what he knew the
detective suspected, that the girl was bold enough to try to palm off
counterfeit money on a bank—on the president of a bank. He was
surprised to find that he was really deeply annoyed by the detective’s
manner of speaking of Nellie Murdock. He threw the bills down on
his desk a little spitefully.
“There you are! That girl took those identical bills out of her satchel
and gave them to me to change for new ones. She had plenty of
time to slip in a bad bill if she wanted to.”
Hill turned round to the light, went over the bills quickly and handed
them back to the banker with a grin.
“Good as wheat! I apologize. And I want you to know that I never
said she wasn’t a pretty girl. And the prettiest ones are often the
smartest. It does happen that way sometimes.”
“You make me tired, Hill. Everybody you see is crooked. With a man
like you there’s no such thing as presumption of innocence. ’Way
down inside of you you probably think I’m a bit off color too.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say just that!” said the detective, laughing and taking
the cigar Burgess offered him from a box he produced from his desk.
“I must be running along. You don’t seem quite as cheerful as usual
this morning. I’ll come back tomorrow and see if I can’t bring in a
new story.”
Burgess disposed of several people who were waiting to see him,
and then took from his drawer the letter he had been reading when
the detective interrupted him. It was from Ralph Gordon, a Chicago
lawyer, who was widely known as an authority on penology. Burgess
had several times contributed to the funds of a society of which
Gordon was president, whose function it was to meet criminals on
their discharge from prison and give them a helping hand upward.
The banker had been somewhat irritated today by Hill’s manner of
speaking of the criminals against whom he was pitted; and doubtless
Hill’s attitude toward the young woman he had pointed out as the
daughter of a crook added to the sympathetic fading with which
Burgess took up his friend’s letter for another reading. The letter ran:
Dear Old Man: You said last fall that you wished I’d put
you in the way of knowing one of the poor fellows I
constantly meet in the work of our society. I’m just now a
good deal interested in a young fellow—Robert Drake by
name—whose plight appeals to me particularly. He is the
black sheep of a fine family I know slightly in New
England. Drink was his undoing, and after an ugly scrape
in college he went down fast—facilis descensus; the
familiar story. The doors at home were closed to him, and
after a year or two he fell in with one of the worst gangs of
yeggs in the country. He was sent up for cracking a safe in
a Southern Illinois post office. The agent of our society at
Leavenworth has had an eye on him; when he was
discharged he came straight to me and I took him into my
house until we could plan something for him. I appealed to
 his family and they’ve sent me money for his use. He
wants to go to the Argentine Republic—thinks he can
make a clean start down there. But there are difficulties.
Unfortunately there’s just now an epidemic of yegging in
the Middle West and all suspects are being gathered in. Of
course Drake isn’t safe, having just done time for a similar
offense. I’ve arranged with Saxby—Big Billy, the football
half-back—you remember him—to ship Drake south on
one of the Southern Cross steamers. Saxby is, as you
know, manager of the company at New Orleans. I wanted
to send Drake down direct—but here’s the rub: there’s a
girl in Indianapolis he wants to marry and take along with
him. He got acquainted with her in the underworld, and
her people, he confesses, are a shady lot. He insists that
she is straight, and it’s for her he wants to take a fresh grip
and begin over again. So tomorrow—that’s January
twenty-third—he will be at her house in your city, 787
Vevay Street; and he means to marry her. It’s better for
him not to look you up; and will you, as the good fellow
you are, go to see him and give him cash for the draft for
five hundred dollars I’m inclosing? Another five hundred—
all this from his father—I’m sending to Saxby to give him in
gold aboard the steamer. Drake believes that in a new
country, with the girl to help him, he can make good.
Hoping this isn’t taking advantage of an old and valued
friendship, I am always, dear old man—
Burgess put the letter in his pocket, signed his mail, entertained in
the directors’ room a committee of the Civic League, subscribed a
thousand dollars to a hospital, said yes or no to a number of
propositions, and then his wife called him on the telephone, with an
intimation that their regular dinner hour was seven. She reminded
him of this almost daily, as Burgess sometimes forgot to tell her
when he was to dine downtown.
“Anybody for dinner tonight?”
“Yes, Web,” she answered in the meek tone she reserved for such
moments as this. “Do I have to tell you again that this is the day
Bishop Gladding is to be here? He said not to try to meet him, as he
didn’t know what train he’d take from Louisville, but he’d show up in
time for dinner. He wrote he was coming a week ago, and you said
not to ask anybody for dinner, as you liked to have him to yourself.
You don’t mean to tell me——”
“No, Gertie; I’ll be there!” and then, remembering that his too-ready
acquiescence might establish a precedent that would rise up and
smite him later, he added: “But these are busy days; if I should be
late don’t wait for me. That’s the rule, you know.”
“I should think, Web, when the bishop is an old friend, and saved
your life that time you and Ralph Gordon were hunting Rocky
Mountain sheep with him, and the bishop nearly died carrying you
back to a doctor—I should think——”
“Oh, I’ll be there,” said Burgess; “but there’s a friend of Gordon’s in
town I’ll have to look up after a little. No; he hasn’t time to come to
the house. You know how it is, Gertie——”
She said she knew how it was. These telephonic colloquies were not
infrequent between the Burgesses, and Mrs. Burgess was not
without her provocation. He resolved to hurry and get through with
Gordon’s man, Drake, the newly freed convict seeking a better life,
that he might not be late to dinner in his own house, which was to be
enlivened by the presence of the young, vigorous missionary bishop,
who was, moreover, a sportsman and in every sense a man’s man.
He put on his ulster, made sure of the five hundred dollars he had
obtained on Gordon’s draft, and at five-thirty went out to his car,
which had waited an hour.

II
A thaw had been in progress during the day and hints of rain were in
the air. The moon tottered drunkenly among flying clouds. The bank
watchman predicted snow before morning as he bade Burgess good
night.
Burgess knew Vevay Street, for he owned a business block at its
intersection with Senate Avenue. Beyond the avenue it deteriorated
rapidly and was filled with tenements and cheap boarding houses.
Several blocks west ran an old canal, lined with factories, elevators,
lumber yards and the like, and on the nearer bank was a network of
railroad switches.
He thought it best not to approach the Murdock house in his motor;
so he left it at the drug-store corner, and, bidding the chauffeur wait
for him, walked down Vevay Street looking for 787. It was a
forbidding thoroughfare and the banker resolved to complain to the
Civic League; it was an outrage that such Stygian blackness should
exist in a civilized city, and he meant to do something about it. When
he found the number it proved to be half of a ramshackle two-story
double house. The other half was vacant and plastered with For
Rent signs. He struck a match and read a dingy card that announced
rooms and boarding. The window shades were pulled halfway down,
showing lights in the front room. Burgess knocked and in a moment
the door was opened guardedly by a stocky, bearded man.
“Mr. Murdock?”
“Well, what do you want?” growled the man, widening the opening a
trifle to allow the hall light behind him to fall on the visitor’s face.
“Don’t be alarmed. A friend of Robert Drake’s in Chicago asked me
to see him. My errand is friendly.”
A woman’s voice called from the rear of the hall:
“It’s all right, dad; let the gentleman in.”
Murdock slipped the bolt in the door and then scrutinized Burgess
carefully with a pair of small, keen eyes. As he bent over the lock the
banker noted his burly frame and the powerful arms below his rolled-
up shirtsleeves.
“Just wait there,” he said, pointing to the front room. He closed the
hall door and Burgess heard his step on the stairs.
An odor of stale cooking offended the banker’s sensitive nostrils. The
furniture was the kind he saw daily in the windows of furniture stores
that sell on the installment plan; on one side was an upright piano,
with its top littered with music. Now that he was in the house, he
wondered whether this Murdock was after all a crook, and whether
the girl with the red feather, with her candid eyes, could possibly be
his daughter. His wrath against Hill rose again as he recalled his
cynical tone—and on the thought the girl appeared from a door at
the farther end of the room.
She bade him “Good evening!” and they shook hands. She had just
come from her day’s work at the lumber company’s office, she
explained. He found no reason for reversing his earlier judgment that
she was a very pretty girl. Now that her head was free of the hat with
the red feather, he saw that her hair, caught up in a becoming
pompadour, was brown, with a golden glint in it. Her gray eyes
seemed larger in the light of the single gas-burner than they had
appeared by daylight at the bank. There was something poetic and
dreamy about them. Her age he placed at about half his own, but
there was the wisdom of the centuries in those gray eyes of hers. He
felt young before her.
“There was a detective in the bank when I was in there this morning.
He knew me,” she said at once.
“Yes; he spoke of you,” said Burgess.
“And he knows—what does he know?”
The girl’s manner was direct; he felt that she was entitled to a frank
response.
“He told me your father had been—we will say suspected in times
past; that he had only lately come here; but, unless he deceived me,
I think he has no interest in him just now. The detective is a friend of
mine. He visits the bank frequently. It was just by chance that he
spoke of you.”
“You didn’t tell him that Mr. Gordon had asked you to come here?”
“No; Drake wasn’t mentioned.”
Nellie nodded; she seemed to be thinking deeply. Her prettiness was
enhanced, he reflected, by the few freckles that clustered about her
nose. And he was ready to defend the nose which the detective,
reciting from his card catalogue, had called snub!
“Did your friend tell you Bob wants to be married before he leaves? I
suppose you don’t know that?”
She blushed, confirming his suspicion that it was she whom Drake
was risking arrest to marry.
“Yes; and if I guess rightly that you’re the girl I’d like to say that he’s
an extremely fortunate young man! You don’t mind my saying that!”
He wondered whether all girls who have dimples blush to attract
attention to them. The point interested Webster G. Burgess. The
thought that Nellie Murdock meant to marry a freshly discharged
convict, no matter how promising he might be, was distasteful to him;
and yet her loyalty and devotion increased his admiration. There was
romance here, and much money had not hardened the heart of
Webster G. Burgess.
“It all seems too good to be true,” she said happily, “that Bob and I
can be married after all and go away into a new world where nobody
knows us and he can start all over again.” And then, coloring prettily:
“We’re all ready to go except getting married—and maybe you can
help us find a minister.”
“Easily! But I’m detaining you. Better have Drake come in; I want to
speak to him, and then we can make all the arrangements in a
minute.”
“I’m afraid he’s been watched; it’s brutal for them to do that when
he’s done his time and means to live straight! I wonder——” She
paused and the indignation that had flashed out in her speech
passed quickly. “It’s asking a great deal, Mr. Burgess, but would you
let us leave the house with you? The quicker we go the better—and
a man of your position wouldn’t be stopped. But if you’d rather not
——”
“I was just going to propose that! Please believe that in every way I
am at your service.”
His spirits were high. It would give edge to the encounter to lend his
own respectability to the flight. The idea of chaperoning Nellie
Murdock and her convict lover through an imaginable police picket
pleased him.
She went out and closed the door. Voices sounded in the hall;
several people were talking earnestly. When the door opened a man
dodged quickly into the room, the girl following.
“This is Robert Drake, Mr. Burgess. Bob, this is the gentleman Mr.
Gordon told you about.”
Burgess experienced a distinct shock of repulsion as the man
shuffled across the room to shake hands. A stubble of dark beard
covered his face, his black hair was crumpled, and a long bang of it
lying across his forehead seemed to point to his small, shifty blue
eyes. His manner was anxious; he appeared decidedly ill at ease.
Webster G. Burgess was fastidious and this fellow’s gray suit was
soiled and crumpled, and he kept fingering his collar and turning it up
round a very dirty neck.
“Thank you, sir—thank you!” he repeated nervously.
A door slammed upstairs and the prospective bridegroom started
perceptibly and glanced round. But Burgess’s philosophy rallied to
his support. This was the fate of things, one of life’s grim ironies—
that a girl like Nellie Murdock, born and reared in the underworld,
should be linking herself to an outlaw. After all, it was not his affair.
Pretty girls in his own world persisted in preposterous marriages.
And Bob grinned cheerfully. Very likely with a shave and a bath and
a new suit of clothes he would be quite presentable. The banker had
begun to speak of the route to be taken to New Orleans when a
variety of things happened so quickly that Burgess’s wits were put to
high tension to keep pace with them.
The door by the piano opened softly. A voice recognizable as that of
Murdock spoke sharply in a low tone:
“Nellie, hit up the piano! Stranger, walk to the window—slow—and
yank the shade! Bob, cut upstairs!”
These orders, given in the tone of one used to command, were
quickly obeyed. It was in the banker’s mind the moment he drew
down the shade that by some singular transition he, Webster G.
Burgess, had committed himself to the fortunes of this dubious
household. If he walked out of the front door it would likely be into
the arms of a policeman; and the fact of a man of his prominence
being intercepted in flight from a house about to be raided would not
look well in the newspapers. Nellie, at the piano, was playing
Schubert’s Serenade—and playing it, he thought, very well. The
situation was not without its humor; and here, at last, was his chance
to see an adventure through. He heard Bob take the stairs in three
catlike jumps. Nellie, at the piano, said over her shoulder, with
Schubert’s melody in her eyes:
“This isn’t funny; but they wouldn’t dare touch you! You’d better camp
right here.”
“Not if I know myself!” said Burgess with decision as he buttoned his
ulster.
She seemed to accept his decision as a matter of course and, still
playing, indicated the door, still ajar, through which the disconcerting
orders had been spoken. Burgess stepped into a room where a table
was partly set for supper.
“This ain’t no place for you, stranger!” said Murdock harshly. “How
you goin’ to get away?”
“I’ll follow Bob. If he makes it I can.”
“Humph! This party’s too big now. You ought to have kept out o’ this.”
There was a knock at the front door and Murdock pointed an
accusing finger at Burgess.
“Either set down and play it out or skip!” He jerked his head toward
the stairs. The music ceased at the knock. “Nellie, what’s the
answer?”
Murdock apparently deferred to Nellie in the crisis; and as the knock
was repeated she said:
“I’ll get Bob and this gentleman out. Don’t try to hold the door—let
’em in.”
Before he knew what was happening, Burgess was at the top of the
stairway, with the girl close at his heels. She opened a door into a
dark room.
“Bob!” she called.
“All right!” whispered Drake huskily.
Near the floor Burgess marked Bob’s position by a match the man
struck noiselessly, shielding it in the curve of his hand at arm’s
length. It was visible for a second only. Nellie darted lightly here and
there in the dark. A drawer closed softly; Burgess heard the swish of
her jacket as she snatched it up and drew it on. The girl undoubtedly
knew what she was about. Then a slim, cold hand clutched his in a
reassuring clasp. Another person had entered the room and the
doorkey clicked.
“Goodby, mother!” Burgess heard the girl whisper.
The atmosphere changed as the steps of the three refugees echoed
hollowly in an empty room. A door closed behind them and there
was a low rumble as a piece of furniture was rolled against it.
Burgess was amazed to find how alert all his senses were. He heard
below the faint booming of voices as Murdock entertained the police.
In the pitch-dark he found himself visualizing the room into which
they had passed and the back stairway down which they crept to the
kitchen of the vacant half of the house. As they paused there to
listen something passed between Drake and Nellie.
“Give it to me—quick! I gotta shake that guy!” Drake whispered
hoarsely.
The girl answered:
“Take it, but keep still and I’ll get you out o’ this.”
Burgess thought he had struck at her; but she made no sign. She
took the lead and opened the kitchen door into a shed; then the air
freshened and he felt rain on his face. They stood still for an instant.
Some one, apparently at the Murdock kitchen door, beat three times
on a tin pan.
“There are three of them!” whispered Nellie. “One’s likely to be at the
back gate. Take the side fence!” She was quickly over; and then
began a rapid leaping of the partition fences of the narrow lots of the
neighborhood. At one point Burgess’s ulster ripped on a nail; at
another place he dropped upon a chicken coop, where a lone hen
squawked her terror and indignation. It had been some time since
Webster G. Burgess had jumped fences, and he was blowing hard
when finally they reached a narrow alley. He hoped the hurdling was
at an end, but a higher barricade confronted them than the low
fences they had already negotiated. Nellie and Bob whispered
together a moment; then Bob took the fence quickly and silently.
Burgess jumped for the top, but failed to catch hold. A second try
was luckier, but his feet thumped the fence furiously as he tried to
mount.
“Cheese it on the drum!” said Nellie, and she gave his legs a push
that flung him over and he tumbled into the void. “Bob mustn’t bolt;
he always goes crazy and wants to shoot the cops,” he heard her
saying, so close that he felt her breath on his cheek. “I had to give
him that hundred——”
A man ran through the alley they had just left. From the direction of
Vevay Street came disturbing sounds as the Murdocks’ neighbors
left their supper tables for livelier entertainment outside.
“If it’s cops they’ll make a mess of it—I was afraid it was Hill,” said
the girl.
It already seemed a good deal of a mess to Burgess. He had got his
bearings and knew they were in the huge yard of the Brooks Lumber
Company. Great piles of lumber deepened the gloom. The scent of
new pine was in the moist air. Nellie was already leading the way
down one of the long alleys between the lumber. A hinge creaked
stridently behind them. The three stopped, huddled close together.
The opaque darkness seemed now to be diminishing slightly as the
moon and a few frightened stars shone out of the clouds. Then the
blackness was complete again.
“They’ve struck the yard!” said Nellie. “That was the Wood Street
gate.”
“If they stop to open gates they’re not much good,” said the banker
largely, in the tone of one who does not pause for gates.
The buttons had been snapped from his ulster at the second fence
and this garment now hung loosely round him, a serious impediment
to flight. He made a mental note to avoid ulsters in future. A nail had
scraped his shin, and when he stopped to rub it he discovered an
ugly rent in his trousers. Nellie kept moving. She seemed to know
the ways of the yard and threaded the black lumber alleys with ease.
They were close together, running rapidly, when she paused
suddenly. Just ahead of them in a cross-alley a lantern flashed. It
was the lumber company’s private watchman. He stopped
uncertainly, swung his lantern into the lane where the trio waited,
and hurried on.
They were halfway across the yard as near as Burgess could judge,
hugging the lumber piles closely and stopping frequently to listen,
when they were arrested by a sound behind. The moon had again
swung free of clouds and its light flooded the yard. The distance of
half a block behind a policeman stood in the alley they had just
traversed. He loomed like a heroic statue in his uniform overcoat and
helmet. His shout rang through the yard.
“Beat it!” cried Nellie.

III
Nellie was off as she gave the word. They struck a well-beaten
cross-alley—a main thoroughfare of the yard—and sprinted off at a
lively gait. It was in Burgess’s mind that it was of prime importance
that Drake should escape—it was to aid the former convict that he
had involved himself in this predicament; and even if the wedding
had to be abandoned and the girl left behind it was better than for
them all to be caught. He was keeping as close as possible to Bob,
but the young man ran with incredible swiftness; and he now dodged
into one of the narrower paths and vanished.
The yard seemed more intricate than ever with its network of paths,
along which the lumber stacks rose fantastically. Looking over his
shoulder, Burgess saw that the single policeman had been
reenforced by another man. It was a real pursuit now—there was no
belittling that fact. A revolver barked and a fusillade followed. Then
the moon was obscured and the yard was black again. Burgess felt
himself jammed in between two tall lumber piles.
“Climb! Get on top quick and lie down!”
Nellie was already mounting; he felt for the strips that are thrust
between planks to keep them from rotting, grasped them and gained
the top. It was a solid pile and it lifted him twenty feet above the
ground. He threw himself flat just as the pursuers rushed by; and
when they were gone he sat up and nursed his knees. He marked
Nellie’s position by her low laugh. He was glad she laughed. He was
glad she was there!
Fifty yards away a light flashed—a policeman had climbed upon a
tall pile of lumber and was whipping about him with a dark lantern.
“It will take them all night to cover this yard that way,” she whispered,
edging close. “They’re crossing the yard the way women do when
they’re trying to drive chickens into a coop. They won’t find Bob
unless they commit burglary.”
“How’s that?” asked Burgess, finding a broken cigar in his waistcoat
pocket and chewing the end.
“Oh, I gave him the key to the office and told him to sit on the safe.
It’s a cinch they won’t look for him there; and we’ve got all night to
get him out.”
Burgess was flattered by the plural. Her good humor was not without
its effect on him. The daughter of the retired yeggman was a new
kind of girl, and one he was glad to add to his collection of feminine
types. He wished she would laugh oftener.
The president of the White River National Bank, perched on a pile of
lumber on a wet January evening with a girl he knew only as his
accomplice in an escapade that it would be very difficult to explain to
a cynical world, reflected that at about this hour his wife, hardly a
mile distant, in one of the handsomest houses in town, was dressing
for dinner to be ready to greet a guest, who was the most valiant
member of the sedate House of Bishops. And Webster G. Burgess
assured himself that he was not a bit frightened; he had been
pursued by detectives and police and shot at—and yet he was less
annoyed than when the White River National lost an account, or an
ignorant new member preempted his favorite seat in the University
Club dining room. He had lost both the sense of fear and the sense
of shame; and he marveled at his transformation and delighted in it.
“How long will it be before that begins to bore them, Nellie?” he
remarked casually, as though he were speaking to a girl he had
known always, in a cozy corner at a tea.
The answer was unexpected and it did not come from Nellie. He
heard the scraping of feet, and immediately a man loomed against
the sky not thirty feet away and began sweeping the neighboring
stacks with an electric lamp; its rays struck Burgess smartly across
the face. He hung and jumped; and as he let go the light flashed
again and an automatic barked.
“Lord! It’s Hill!” he gasped.
As he struck the ground he experienced a curious tingle on the left
side of his head above the ear—it was as though a hot needle had
been drawn across it. The detective yelled and fired another shot to
attract the attention of the other pursuers. Nellie was already down
and ready for flight. She grasped Burgess’s arm and hurried him
over and between unseen obstacles. There seemed to be no method
of locomotion to which he was not urged—climbing, crawling,
running, edging in between seeming Gibraltars of lumber. From a
low pile she leaped to a higher, and on up until they were thirty feet
above the ground; then it seemed to amuse her to jump from pile to
pile until they reached earth again. Running over uneven lumber
piles in the dark, handicapped by an absurd ulster, does not make
for ease, grace or security—and wet lumber has a disagreeable
habit of being slippery.
They trotted across an open space and crept under a shingle shed.
“Good place to rest,” panted Nellie—and he dropped down beside
her on a bundle of shingles. The rain fell monotonously upon the low
roof of their shelter.
“That’s a pretty picture,” said the girl dreamily.
Burgess, breathing like a husky bellows, marveled at her. What had
interested her was the flashing of electric lamps from the tops of the
lumber piles, where the pursuers had formed a semicircle and were
closing in on the spot where the quarry had disappeared. They were
leaping from stack to stack, shooting their lamps ahead.
“The lights dancing round that way are certainly picturesque,”
observed Burgess. “Whistler would have done a charming nocturne
of this. I doubt whether those fellows know what a charm they impart
to the mystical, moist night. The moving pictures ought to have this.
What’s our next move?” he asked, mopping his wet face with his
handkerchief.
“I’ve got to get Bob out of the office and then take a long jump. And
right here’s a good time for you to skedaddle. You can drop into the
alley back of this shed and walk home.”
“Thanks—but nothing like that! I’ve got to see you married and safely
off. I’d never dare look Gordon in the face if I didn’t.”
“I thought you were like that,” she said gently, and his heart bounded
at her praise. She stole away into the shadows, and he stared off at
the dancing lights where the police continued their search.
Far away the banker saw the aura of the city, and he experienced
again a sensation of protest and rebellion. He wondered whether this
was the feeling of the hunted man—the man who is tracked and
driven and shot at! He, Webster G. Burgess, had been the target of a
bullet; and, contrary to every rule of the life in which he had been
reared, he was elated to have been the mark for a detective’s gun.
He knew that he should feel humiliated—that he owed it to himself,
to his wife waiting for him at home, to his friends, to society itself, to
walk out and free himself of the odium that would attach to a man of
his standing who had run with the hare when his place by all the
canons was with the hounds. And then, too, this low-browed criminal
was not the man for a girl like Nellie to marry—he could not free
himself of that feeling.
As he pondered this she stole back to his hiding-place. The ease,
lightness and deftness with which she moved amazed him; he had
not known she was near until he heard Drake’s heavier step beside
her.
“Bob’s here, all right. We must march again,” she said.
She explained her plan and the three started off briskly, reached a
fence—the world seemed to be a tangle of fences!—and dropped
over into a coalyard. Burgess was well muddled again, but Nellie
never hesitated. It had grown colder; heavier clouds had drifted
across the heavens and snow began to fall. They reached the farther
bound of the coalyard safely; and as they were about to climb out a
dog yelped and rushed at them.
“I forgot about that dog! Over, quick! The watchman for this yard is
probably back there playing with the police, or else he’s hiding
himself,” said Nellie.
This proved to be the most formidable fence of the series for
Burgess, and his companions got him over with difficulty just as a
dog snapped at his legs. They landed in a tangle of ice-covered
weeds and lay still a moment. Bob was in bad humor, and kept
muttering and cursing.
“Chuck it, Bob!” said Nellie sharply.
They were soon jumping across the railroad switches and could see
the canal stretching toward the city, marked by a succession of well-
lighted bridges.
“They’ll pinch us here! Nellie, you little fool, if you hadn’t steered me
to that office I’d ’a’ been out o’ this!”
He swore under his breath and Burgess cordially hated him for
swearing at the girl. But, beyond doubt, the pursuers had caught the
scent and were crossing the coalyard. They heard plainly the sounds
of men running and shouting. Bob seized Nellie and there was a
sharp tussle.
“For God’s sake, trust me, Bob! Take this; don’t let him have it!” And
she thrust a revolver into Burgess’s hand. “Better be caught than
that! Mind the bank here and keep close together. Good dog—he’s
eating the cops!” And she laughed her delicious mirthful laugh. A
pistol banged and the dog barked no more.
The three were now on the ice of the canal, spreading out to
distribute their weight. The day had been warm enough to soften the
ice and it cracked ominously as the trio sped along. Half a dozen
bridges were plainly in sight toward the city and Burgess got his
bearings again. Four blocks away was his motor and the big car was
worth making a break for at any hazard. They stopped under the
second bridge and heard the enemy charging over the tracks and
out upon the ice. A patrol wagon clanged on a bridge beyond the
coalyard and a whistle blew.
A sergeant began bawling orders and half a dozen men were sent to
reconnoiter the canal. As they advanced they swept the banks with
their electric lamps and conferred with scouts flung along the banks.
The snow fell steadily.
“We can’t hold this much longer,” said Nellie; and as she spoke there
was a wild shout from the party advancing over the ice. The lamps of
several policemen shot wildly into the sky and there were lusty bawls
for help.
“A bunch of fat cops breaking through the ice!” chuckled the girl,
hurrying on.
They gained a third bridge safely, Nellie frequently admonishing Bob
to stick close to her. It was clear enough to Burgess that Drake
wanted to be rid of him and the girl and take charge of his own
destiny. Burgess had fallen behind and was feeling his way under
the low bridge; Nellie was ahead, and the two men were for the
moment flung together.
“Gi’ me my gun! I ain’t goin’ to be pinched this trip. Gi’ me the gun!”
“Keep quiet; we’re all in the same boat!” panted Burgess, whose one
hundred and seventy pounds, as registered on the club scales that
very day after luncheon, had warned him that he was growing pulpy.