"By following the story of my great-grandmother Isabella Ford's life, and adding to it with information from available sources, I have been able to get a better understanding of the circumstances of Lancaster's free blacks. Her story provides a sense of life in mid-nineteenth century Lancaster County and shows how free black families held their own, despite an environment that was often unfriendly and that restricted their opportunities by both law and custom."
"Lancaster had been a town a scant fifteen years when it had the honor of hosting the Treaty of Lancaster. From June 22 to July 4, 1744, representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy, (Six Nations) and the colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia gathered in Lancaster's Centre Square courthouse in a meeting that was to have both immediate and long-range impact on colonists and natives."
Appendix 1 : Founding members of the High German Church ; Appendix 2 : Members of the High German Church who were arrested for distrubing the peace during the riot on January 17, 1835. Charges were brought by Carl Schaeffer and George Milligsach, elders of the High German Church ; Appendix 3 : Pastors and members of the vestry of Zion Lutheran Church during its peak years in the late nineteenth century.
Something in that Declaration -- The Republican revolution: Pennsylvania picks Lincoln -- Mobilizing for war -- We will die in defense of our right to liberty: the Civil War on Pennsylvania's border -- Combating the threat without and within -- Pennsylvania and the second American Revolution -- A day long to be remembered.
Summary
This book takes you to and beyond the battlefield at Gettysburg, to cities and towns throughout the state where Pennsylvanians fought over the meaning of the Union even as they fought for it. By the time the Civil War began in 1861, white and black Pennsylvanians along the state's southern border-in towns like Sadsbury, Coatesville, and Christiana-had been fighting with slave owners and catchers for a decade. And, more than a year after Lee's Army of Northern Virginia left southcentral Pennsylvania, the town of Chambersburg survived another, even more devastating Confederate invasion. For much longer than four years, Pennsylvanians waged war at home and abroad, to save the Union and to rethink its founding principles. Keystone State in Crisis tells that story. [from the publisher]
A good, honest, hard working man : William Christian Paulsen and his family - German immigrants who settled in Lancaster in the mid- to late-nineteenth century
"William Paulsen's story, although unique in its details, is generally typical of the stories of many other middle-class German immigrants in Lancaster. Together, these stories comprise an important part of Lancaster's history that may not be very well known because immigrants in the middle class, although in the great majority, did not leave as many traces in the historical records as did more affluent, well-known immigrants. As a result, the stories of middle-class immigrants are more difficult to piece together. However, in the case of William Paulsen and his family, we are fortunate to have extensive family sources of information to draw on, as well as a substantial number of historical records."
"A relationship between [Thaddeus] Stevens and...[Robert Boston] is an important counter narrative. Most traditional accounts of the local Underground Railroad activity emphasize the actions of white stationmasters such as William Wright in Columbia or Daniel Gibbons in Bird-in-Hand. African-American involvement while not ignored is generally presented as being of secondary importance. Each demonstrable piece of evidence of Black involvement in effort to combat slavery strengthens arguments for a tradition of Black agency and necessitates a reassessment of the lives and experiences of African Americans in the Antebellum Era."
