In 1850 it was alleged that an innocent and free colored hired man named Henry Williams had been seized without right or legal process and sold into perpetual slavery South. William Dorsey had been taken from his wife and three children and lodged in the jail at Lancaster. A gang of three, who tried to take a maid servant from Moses Whitson’s across the line in Chester County, were forcibly resisted by a lot of colored men under the lead of Ben. Whipper. The girl was rescued and her captors terribly, if not fatally, beaten on the Gap hill. A negro known as “Tom-up-in-the-barn,” living near Gap, was said to have been captured one morning on his way to thresh at Caleb Brinton’s, and never got back. The barn of Lindley Coates, in Sadsbury township, was burned in 1850 by miscreants angered at his denunciation of slave catchers and kidnappers. [Illustration: “RETREAT FARM.” HOME OF THE GORSUCHES.] It was also related that an industrious negro fence-maker had been violently carried off from his home on John McGowen’s place in the valley, near Mars Hill, between Christiana and Quarryville. The narrator of this (Forbes’ “True Story”) does not tell whether the man was free or a fugitive slave; and to his outraged neighbors this distinction made little difference. The incident of most note occurring in the immediate neighborhood, the influence of which lasted longest, the feeling about which was most acute, and which figured largely in the “Treason Trials” was what was stigmatized as “the outrage at Chamberlain’s.” Its scene was on the “Buck hill,” in the northwestern part of Sadsbury township, on what is now known as the “Todd place,” west of the back road from Gap to Christiana and in what was a sort of middle ground between the operations of the “Gap gang” and the refuge territory of the fugitives. Here in March 1851 a posse, claimed to be led by a rather notorious member of the “Gap gang,” entered the Chamberlain house, severely beat a colored man named John Williams employed there, who made desperate resistance, terrified the members of the family, and carried off their bleeding victim in a wagon. It seems he was an escaped slave; but his captors exhibited no official warrant of arrest nor made any claim of authority except to declare they were acting for his master. It was believed he died from their ill treatment of him. And there were reprisals! William Parker--of whom this narrative will have more to say--admitted years afterwards that he had helped to beat, fatally he believed, the captors of a colored girl; that he had tried to kill Allen Williams on suspicion that he had betrayed Henry; that he recaptured a kidnapped man on the West Chester road, after shooting at his captors and being himself shot in the ankle; and that he and his associates went to the home of a decoy negro, burned it down and watched to shoot him with smooth-bore rifles “heavily charged” if the flames drove him into the open.