The “Battle of Christiana” became a national event. “Civil War—The First Blow Struck,” proclaimed a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, newspaper. The New York Tribune pronounced the verdict of many Yankees: “But for slavery such things would not be; but for the Fugitive Slave Law they would not be in the free States.” The conservative press took a different view of this “act of insurrection” that “never would have taken place but for the instigations which have been applied to the ignorant and deluded blacks by the fanatics of the ‘higher law’ creed.” Southerners announced that “unless the Christiana
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