Security· Civil Aid and Humanitarian Operations
Christiana Riot response
A Marine deployment into one of the most explosive flashpoints of the slavery crisis.
At Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Maryland slaveholder attempting to recover escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was killed when a group of free and fugitive Black men, with local support, resisted by force. The episode, treated in the South as an outrage and in the North as a stand against an odious law, became a national confrontation, and the federal government moved to arrest those involved. Marines from the Philadelphia Navy Yard were sent to assist the authorities in apprehending the men accused in the affair. Their role was strictly in support of civil power, backing the federal officers rather than acting on their own. No casualties resulted. The Christiana affair was an early sign of how deeply the slavery question had begun to divide the country, and of how federal force could be drawn into it.
Record no. 370