A Quaker CDV Album with Underground RR Connections

A couple weeks ago, I was excited to read an interesting article by Nancy Plumley in the Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society highlighting letters exchanged between siblings of the Rakestraw family in Bart Township, Lancaster County.  The letters give insights into daily life on a farm in 1865, as well as the social network of Quakers in Southern Lancaster County that included some of the most ardent abolitionists and participants in the Underground Railroad.

From Bart Township Map, Bridgens' Atlas, 1864, showing location of farm of William L. Rakestraw

The family of interest is that of William L. Rakestraw (1813-1869) and Sarah S. (Sugar) Rakestraw (1814-1906).  Their farm stands just south of where Mt. Pleasant Rd. crosses over the Enola Low Grade Line in Bart Township (two farms away from Middle Octorara Presbyterian Church, where Capt. Samuel Boone was buried after his death at the Battle of Perryville).  William's activities with the Underground Railroad earned him a couple mentions in Robert C. Smedley's 1883 History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania, and Sarah's family was involved as well.  They had four children, including John Sugar Rakestraw, the recipient of the letters in Plumley's article.

I also found the article interesting as many of the names mentioned in article are those in a cartes-de-visite album listed on Ebay that I acquired back in 2007.  Based on the labeling of "aunts" and "uncles" and conversations with Nancy Plumley, the album likely belonged to William and Sarah's youngest daughter, Abbie (1854-1929).  It contains 20 photos--15 identified--mostly of John S. Rakestraw's aunts and uncles and presumably family friends.  Tax stamps on the back of many of the photos allow us to date most of the photos to the mid-1860s. 



Here are some highlights of the individuals depicted, with information from Nancy Plumley, Ancestry.com, and Smedley's book:

Joshua Gilbert.  Gilbert (1801-1876) was a pump maker with a farm east of Quarryville.  In the 1830s, hee employed fugitive slave William Wallace, before William Wallace went to work for Gilbert's neighbor and brother-in-law, Henry Bushong.  At Bushong's farm, Wallace lived in a tenement house with his family.  That house was the site of later confrontations with slave catchers and a subsequent jailing that got the Fulton Opera House its underground railroad designation.   

Thomas and Susan (Barnaby) Rakestraw.  Thomas Rakestraw (1811-1886) and Susan Barnaby (1806-1874) married in 1835 at the Bart Friends Meeting in Lancaster County and moved to Ohio soon afterwards.  Their second child, William L. Rakestraw, graduated from or was a law student at Mt. Union College, and served as a captain in the 19th Ohio Infantry.  He died in camp of diphtheria in 1861  One wonders about the conversations within Quaker families about the war, and how they balanced their abolitionism and pacifism.  Even in the 79th Pennsylvania, we have several examples of soldiers from Quaker families enlisting.   See, for example, a previous post on another network of Quaker families in Drumore Township near Liberty Square with two soldiers in Company E, 79th PA. 

A Sunday Drive to Southern Lancaster County

The Brown family at Devil's Den, Gettysburg, c. 1930.
My grandmother, Ethel (Brown) Bielmyer, stands second from the left.

On Sunday, I had the fortunate occasion to take a drive with my ninety-one year-old grandmother to southern Lancaster County and visit some of the sites I wrote about few weeks back.  Our mini-tour included William T. Clark's farm, the Chestnut Level Presbyterian Church where he was buried, the Drumore Friends Meeting with its cemetery in Liberty Square (where most of the people in the Shoemaker album are buried), and the Octoraro Creek in Little Britain Township where the fictional events of Ellwood Griest's John and Mary were set.

In exchange, my grandmother recounted stories of her grandparents (Browns from Little Britain Township and Oxford, Chester County) and visiting family there in the 1920s.  Here are a few pictures of what we saw:

160th Anniversary of the Christiana Riot

An artist's recreation of the Christiana incident from Still Under Ground Railroad Records, 1886.

On September 11, 1851, wealthy and well-respected Maryland farmer Edward Gorsuch, a small armed posse of his supporters, and a deputy federal marshal arrived in Christiana, a small town in Lancaster County near the Chester County border.  Gorsuch and company were acting on intelligence that three of his slaves who had escaped two years ago were hiding out near Christiana, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave them pretty broad authority to kidnap blacks they claimed were fugitive slaves.

They proceeded to the farm of William Parker, a mulatto man who had been leading efforts of free blacks in the area to defend themselves from kidnappers and white thugs and who was harboring the fugitive slaves Gorsuch sought.  Alerted to Gorsuch's plans, perhaps in advance or perhaps as they unfolded, blacks converged on Parker's farmer to prevent Gorsuch from carrying out those plans.  The confrontation ended violently, with Gorsuch killed and others in his party wounded.

The nation was shocked.  Southerners and seemingly most Northerners were outraged at that a prominent citizen like Gorsuch could be killed, and demanded their killers be brought to justice.  Parker and the other blacks fled, and county and federal authorities responded rather severely, arresting several white men for their alleged involvement in the incident.  Those men were tried and found not-guilty in a well-publicized trial later that year. 

Looking at the immediate reaction in Lancaster, both Democrats and Whig newspapers condemned the killing, but their response is interesting for how far they missed their mark on who was responsible.  They identified white abolitionists as the culprits, presumably because their worldview prevented them from giving any agency--any credit--to blacks.  Plus, the more they talked about blacks' roles, the more they would actually have to think about the horror of being taken from freedom to slavery.

It's also worth thinking about the Christiana Riot from the perspective of the generation that would enlist in the Union army ten years later, especially because Company C, 79th Pennsylvania, was largely recruited in Sadsbury Township, where the incident took place.  Looking back, many scholars see the Christiana Riot as a key event in the sequence of events that put the nation on a collision course with civil war, as it suggested the compromise the produced the Fugitive Slave Act was untenable.  It's hard to tell how the incident   affected the feelings and opinions of boys who would become soldiers ten years later--whether it produced sympathy or antipathy towards Southern slaveholders--but either way it became much easier to envision a future of violence.

Here are some primary and secondary sources related to the Christiana Riot, listed from oldest to newest.  Both the incident and the trial were dramatic events and make for interesting history.

Local Newspaper Reaction
Democrat: Intelligencer (browse issues here)
Whig: Examiner and Herald 9/17/1851, 9/24/1851

Sympthetic to blacks and Quakers:
William Parker, "The Freedman's Story: In Two Parts." The Atlantic Monthly, vol. XVII, Feb. 1866, pp. 152-166; Mar. 1866, pp. 276-295.
Still's underground rail road records by William Still (1886)
A true story of the Christiana riot by David R. Forbes (1898)

Sympathetic to Gorsuch:
A review of the political conflict in America by Alexander Harris (1876).   Harris was a Lancaster lawyer and outspoken critic of the war. 

Other Histories
The Christiana riot and the treason trials of 1851: an historical sketch by William Uhler Hensel (1911)
Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North by Thomas P. Slaughter (1991)

John and Mary: A tale of south-eastern Pennsylvania

It is fairly well known that Lancaster County was a hot spot for underground railroad activity due to

1. its proximity to Philadelphia and Baltimore,
2. a large free black community in places like the Susquehanna River town of Columbia, and
3. farms of sympathetic Quakers in the southern part of the county, from the Susquehanna River near the Maryland Line that also extended into Chester County. 

In spite of some semi-primary sources like R. C. Smedley's 1883 History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania and research efforts like Charles Spotts' 1966 pamphlet The Pilgrim's Pathway: The Underground Railroad in Lancaster County, which named seventeen "stations" in Lancaster County, our knowledge of the fugitive slave activity in Lancaster is fairly limited. 

What might actually be our best glimpse into what was going on in the minds of fugitive slaves and the people who harbored them is an 1873 novel by Ellwood Griest entitled John and Mary: or, The fugitive slaves. A tale of south-eastern Pennsylvania (click on link to view the book).

Maj. Ellwood Griest (1824-1900) was born to a Quaker family just across the Octoraro Creek from Lancaster County in West Nottingham, Chester County.  He learned blacksmithing, moved to Christiana, and became very active in Republican politics and abolitionism.  The Lancaster Intelligencer even accused him during the 1860 election campaign of "figuring somewhat prominently" in the Christiana Riot, although I haven't seen evidence.  Griest also served with the Union army as a Sixth Corps commissary officer (a Quaker compromise?), and stayed in the army until 1866 witnessing early Reconstruction in Florida.  After the war, he ran a newspaper in Lancaster and stayed active in politics.  Lancaster's 1920s skyscraper, the Griest Building, is named after Ellwood Griest's son, Congressman William Walton Griest. 

This remarkable novel is actually a rather interesting read, and combines fiction and fact (some autobiographical) to tell two stories.

Detail of Little Britain Township from 1864 Bridgens' Atlas (source)
The story was set very specifically along the Octoraro Creek in this area.

The first is set in 1830 along the banks of the Octoraro Creek in Little Britain Township, Lancaster County, near the Maryland line.  A Quaker family, the Browns, get involved for the first time in hosting fugitive slaves--John and Mary and their infant, Charley--but the plan for their northward journey is thwarted, resulting in a semi-dramatic nighttime confrontation with the slaveowner's posse.

The Octoraro Creek, a couple miles downstream from the story's events. (source)

The second story is set in late 1865 or 1866, and takes place during early Reconstruction at an army camp near Gainesville, Florida, where one of the Brown children who witnessed the events of 1830 is now a captain.  An act of racial violence linked to the Ku Klux Klan meant to intimidate the black soldiers stationed there leaves a soldier of the 33rd Regiment, United States Colored Troops, dangerously wounded.  Capt. Brown meets the ultimately fatally wounded soldier and the soldier's mother, recognizing them as the fugitives he met as a six year-old boy.

Eastland Friends Meeting, Little Britain Township  (Source + info)
Many characters of the story are connected to and presumably buried here.

1st South Carolina Volunteers, later the 33rd Regiment, United States Colored Troops (USAMHI, Source)
Griest mentioned many free black men from Lancaster and Chester County joined the 33rd USCT.

In spite of attention given to heroism displayed in 1830, the story imparts a rather pessimistic message about Reconstruction.  The fugitive slave baby, whose life was so treasured and precious that so many people in 1830 risked so much to save the baby from slavery, grew to a man whose life was ended rather meaninglessly by random racial violence in the post-war South.  Griest's assessment seems to be that this sort of violence was undermining Southern society.  He might have also been responding to similar sentiments (although not as violent?) in the North--even Lancaster--as the Democratic Party of the late 1860's made a pretty nasty brand of racism into a policy pillar.  Here's an interesting poem from the September 24, 1870, Columbia Spy in which an anonymous (presumably) African-American author expresses deep exhaustion with the grip racism has on society.

If you encounter any interesting passages in John and Mary, or something in the books strikes you, feel free to share in the comments.

See also:

• "Banking on the Octoraro," Lancaster Online October 3, 2008.  Efforts of the Lancaster County Conservancy to preserve land referred to in the story above.
• Other literary and historical scholarship mentioning John and Mary
• Sitting in darkness: New South fiction, education, and the rise of Jim Crow ... By Peter Schmidt
• Abolitionists remember: antislavery autobiographies & the unfinished work of ... By Julie Roy Jeffrey
• Watching slavery: witness texts and travel reports By Joe Lockard

News and Links

Parson's Battery at Perryville Battlefield
By Hal Jespersen at en.wikipedia (Transferred from en.wikipedia) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Over the past couple days, I have come across three pieces of exciting news about places that are now on my to-visit list by the end of the Sesquicentennial:

1.  Civil War Preservation Trust campaigning to save 141 acres of Perryville Battlefield.  Although on the other end of the Union line from where the 79th Pennsylvania fought (and defined itself), this is still great news for the battlefield which I have yet to visit but have heard great things about. 
2. "Fort Monroe edging closer to Park Service status."  It looks like much momentum is building to make Fort Monroe (at the southern tip of the Virginia peninsula) a national park.  Aside from its important place in the national narrative of military strategy and emancipation, Fort Monroe (and the operational area nearby) seems to pop up often in Lancaster's Civil War history related to the Pennsylvania Reserves in the Peninsula Campaign, Patriot Daughters' aid efforts after that campaign, and the untold history of Lancaster's conscripted companies in the 178th and 179th Pennsylvania infantry regiments.
3. "Tubman Underground Railroad center on Shore gets funding."  Aside from geographical proximity between Tubman's area of operations and southern Lancaster County and similar stories of escaped slaves and sympathetic Quakers, this is also relevant as I keep running into stories of Pennsylvania soldiers on Hilton Head Island, where Tubman later served as a nurse and spy.  (Irony note: literally as I typed the last sentence, I was listening to this satire of how we tend to approach African-American history through the heroics of white men and women with Jon Oliver commenting, regarding the movie The Help, "White people are amazing. We really are.")        

Also, here are two articles and a video for your reading and viewing pleasure:

1. "Perryville: Then & Now" by Kurt Holman
2. "Theology, Presbyterian History, and the Civil War" by Mark A. Noll  (one of my favorite historians).  To make a connection to this blog, our excellent diarist, William T. Clark, of Co. B, 79th Pennsylvania, was a devout Presbyterian and member of Chestnut Level Presbyterian Church in southern Lancaster County.  His diary notes the exchange of at least forty letters exchanged with his pastor while campaigning 79th Pennsylvania. 
3. "The Civil War, the Churches, and the Terrible Swift Sword" by Dr. James Moorhead