xercised by the
discussions of abolitionists and by their close social contact with the
Negroes. The clash came on the seventeenth of May when Pennsylvania Hall,
the center of abolition agitation, was burned. Fighting between the blacks
and whites ensued the following night when the Colored Orphan Asylum was
attacked and a Negro church burned. Order was finally restored for the
good of all concerned, but that a majority of the people sympathized with
the rioters was evidenced by the fact that the committee charged with
investigating the disturbance reported that the mob was composed of
strangers who could not be recognized.[21] It is well to note here that
this riot occurred the year the Negroes in Pennsylvania were
disfranchised.

Following the example of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh had a riot in 1839
resulting in the maltreatment of a number of Negroes and the demolishing
of some of their houses. When the Negroes of Philadelphia paraded the city
in 1842, celebrating the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, there
ensued a battle led by the whites who undertook to break up the
procession. Along with the beating and killing of the usual number went
also the destruction of the New African Hall and the Negro Presbyterian
church. The grand jury charged with the inquiry into the causes reported
that the procession was to be blamed. For several years thereafter the
city remained quiet until 1849 when there occurred a raid on the blacks by
the _Killers of Moyamensing_, using firearms with which many were
wounded. This disturbance was finally quelled by aid of the militia.[22]

These clashes sometimes reached farther north than the free States
bordering on the slave commonwealths. Mobs broke up abolition meetings in
the city of New York in 1834 when there were sent to Congress numerous
petitions for the abolition of slavery. This mob even assailed such
eminent citizens as Arthur and Lewis Tappan, mainly on account of their
friendly attitude toward the Negroes.[23] On October 21, 1834, the same
feeling developed in Utica, where was to be held an anti-slavery meeting
according to previous notice. The six hundred delegates who assembled
there were warned to disband. A mob then organized itself and drove the
delegates from the town. That same month the people of Palmyra, New York,
held a meeting at which they adopted resolutions to the effect that owners
of houses or tenements in that town occupied by blacks of the character
comp