“Who will stand best with posterity--the father who prostitutes his powers as a judge to procure the conviction of peaceable citizens as traitors for refusing to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves, or the son who ministered to the wants of those citizens while incarcerated in a loathsome prison? Need we answer the question?” The Maryland witnesses do not appear to have had as cheery a Thanksgiving as the prisoners. Dickinson Gorsuch’s diary had this entry: “THURSDAY, NOV. 27. Thanksgiving Day. This has been a great holiday here; there was no court today. We went to Mr. Ashmead’s office and stayed awhile. John Bacon went home after the clothes I wore when I was shot.” During their imprisonment the colored people and their families were largely supported by outside friends and sympathizers; and many an item such as this, recorded in the cash book of B. L. Wood (father of Mrs. David W. Jackson), is set down to the credit of sympathetic friends: 10th mo. 8, 1851. Dr. 1 pair of pants and 1 shirt given to Elijah Clark in Moyamensing; also sent his wife qr. middlings. In another respect the official complaints of Maryland’s Governor and Attorney General against Pennsylvania justice call for correction at even this late day. Both aver that “the murder” of Kennedy, a slave owner, at Carlisle, killed in resistance of the fugitive slave law, went utterly unpunished: The facts are that in that offense the rioters and rescuers were led by John Clellans and he and thirty-six others were indicted. Besides Clellans twelve of the accused were convicted of riot and of riotously rescuing fugitive slaves from the lawful custody of their owners. Judge Hepburn sentenced them to solitary confinement at labor in the Eastern Penitentiary for three years. Charles Gibbons represented them on an appeal to the Supreme Court; and Deputy Attorney General (District Attorney) Bonham for the Commonwealth, argued before that tribunal that Pennsylvania followed the law of England, which upon conviction for riot authorized fine, imprisonment and the pillory, and therefore sentence to the penitentiary was lawful. Justice Burnside delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court, declared “it was an aggravated case of riot”; but that as Pennsylvania had adopted the English common law, the imprisonment must be in the county jail, and the final judgment of the court was that as the prisoners had been confined in the Eastern Penitentiary about three-fourths of a year, “we deem this as severe a punishment as if they had been confined in the county jail, where they legitimately should have been sent, for two years.” (Clellans _vs._ Com. 8 Barr. 223.) Meantime the friends of Hanway, Lewis and others, incensed at the continued prosecutions in Lancaster county, assumed the aggressive.