Today is the 155th Anniversary of the Christiana Riot.

The first shots of the American Civil War were fired on this date in 1851 between Pennsylvania abolitionists and Maryland slaveholders seeking their runaway slaves in Christiana, Pennsylvania.

From the Tarlton Law Library of the University of Texas at Austin:

While the carpenters were building the tenant house and the millwrights were putting up the saw mill, in November, 1849, the negroes were cutting and tapping the corn, haul- ing in the unshucked ears with ox-carts to the barn floor where, by aid of lanterns, the whole household, mechanics and slaves engaged nightly in husking bee merriment. Mean- time news of Bill Foster's search for Abe Johnson were rife; likewise suspicious that the colored "boys" had helped him to raid the cornhouse and shared his spoils. One day they exhibited unwanted unrest and clustered into whispering groups; one expressed to the white workmen special anxiety to know "if the Boss is going to husk corn tonight," and another declared his purpose to set a rabbit trap, for it was "going to be a very dark night."

It was. There was no corn husking; and Knight, the car- penter, was aroused early by the call of Dickinson Gorsuch from down stairs that "the boys are all gone." They escaped through a skylight in the back building and made their way down a ladder and up the York turnpike. When the Gor- suches next saw any of them it was in the flash and fire of the Christiana Riot, in the early dawn of September 11, 1851, at Parker's cabin...

For more information:

The Christiana Riot table of contents