The anti-slavery movement in Pennsylvania never went to the rhapsodical extremes we find in Massachusetts. It was from beginning to end sane and reasonable and yet vigorous and unremittent. Nevertheless, we find the same enthusiasm for the rights of the Negro in the abstract combined with racial antipathy, social and political discriminations, and even on more than one occasion mob violence in the actual treatment of the Negro population of the State.[307] Pennsylvania's interest in slavery, because of her position just to the north of slaveholding States, was never allowed to lag even after she had set all her slaves free. Her Negro population was constantly being replenished from the South and largely by fugitive slaves. This brought about much friction with Maryland, owing to the unwillingness of Pennsylvanians to surrender the runaways. In spite of Federal law the spirit of freedom made it unsafe for owners to hunt for their escaped slaves in Pennsylvania, as the famous Christiana riot of 1851 shows, and brought the State to the verge of nullification,[308] to such extremes were a peaceful and yet liberty-loving people ready to go in their championship of the abstract rights of the oppressed slave. But while this was true, there is abundant evidence to show that by the masses of the people the Negro was thoroughly disliked, persecuted and relegated to an inferior social status by no means in harmony with the doctrine of the inalienable and unalterable rights of man. Negroes were set upon in the streets, beaten, cut and even stoned to death in sheer wanton cruelty. In 1831 the refusal of New Haven, Connecticut, to establish a Negro college was enthusiastically endorsed in resolutions passed at a public meeting in Philadelphia, and in 1834, 1835, 1838, 1842 and 1849 this city was distracted by riots directed against the Negroes. The houses of the Negroes were sacked, their inmates beaten and mobs of whites and blacks fought through the streets with clubs and stones.[309] "A careful study of each of these riots," says Turner, "makes inevitable the deduction that the deep underlying cause which made every one of them possible, and which prepared them long before they burst forth, was a fierce, and at least among the lower classes, an almost universal, hatred of the negro himself."