Freedom by Violent Means: Part II
The killing of a white slavecatcher by a group of armed black people prompted a vicious response from the federal government
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This is the second part of a two-part series. Read Part I here.
The morning fog still clung to the trees as Edward Gorsuch bled out in William Parker’s front yard. The slaveowner was dead. The slavecatching posse that had failed to retrieve Gorsuch’s runaways was gone, after beatings and bullets forced their hasty retreat. This was not a dark coda to a doomed encounter, though; it was the beginning of a new chapter in the government’s quest to put enslaved people and their white allies under heel. The shootout at Parker’s home, which would long be referred to as the Christiana Riot, was not just about one slaveowner’s death. It symbolized an attack on the state, and it demanded a vicious riposte.
William Parker hadn’t fired the gun that killed Gorsuch, but his life in Christiana was over. He quickly fled the area, as did Gorsuch’s former slaves and the other people who had been holed up in Parker’s house. Knowing that he’d be pursued doggedly by police, Parker even separated from his wife and children so he could slip away faster. Over the next two days he and two allies traveled 500 miles to Rochester, New York, where another one-time fugitive slave, Frederick Douglass, awaited their arrival.1 Impressed by Parker’s “cool determination,” Douglass fed and sheltered the group, then placed them on a steamship to Toronto. “To me, they were heroic defenders of the just rights of man against manstealers and murderers,” Douglass later wrote.2
After the primary suspects in Gorsuch’s killing escaped Christiana, police began seeking out others to punish instead. The day after the shootout, local officials deputized and armed about 40 white railroad workers to detain suspects–one of the men vowed to shoot “the first black thing” he saw. They were soon joined by about 45 marines and a contingent of Philadelphia policemen, signifying the immediate state and federal interest in the killing. Dozens of black people were arrested; one teenage boy was hog-tied and carried off by police.
But as much as the Christiana Riot had uncorked an always-simmering hatred of black people among some locals, the government’s ire quickly turned to the white people who had been involved. Castner Hanway, a white miller and William Parker’s neighbor, had been one of the first to arrive on the scene to help the Parkers after they rang their alarm horn. When the deputy marshal had asked for assistance apprehending the fugitive slaves, Hanway refused and warned the slavecatchers that they should leave the scene. It was perhaps too outlandish–or too dangerous–for white officials to believe that a group of black Americans could arm and violently defend themselves without a white leader. So instead of Parker, the 30-year-old Hanway was quickly cast as the mastermind behind the violence.3
During a quickly assembled federal hearing, a grand jury indicted 38 men, mostly black, on charges of treason for their alleged involvement in the riot.4 It was an extreme charge that carried a political weight beyond murder. But President Millard Fillmore and his White House had been signalling that they would not condone any challenges to the Fugitive Slave Act. “If men get together and declare a law of Congress shall not be executed in any case, and assemble in numbers and force to prevent the execution of such law...It is treason, treason, TREASON,” Secretary of State Daniel Webster said in a May 1851 address.5
With the indictments in tow, federal prosecutors hatched a plan to try Castner Hanway first in order to make him a public example of what happens to people (even white people) who aid fugitive slaves. The case, which was to be tried in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, became a national sensation. Southerners (and some Northern Democrats) viewed a guilty verdict as the rightful outcome to stop abolitionist rhetoric and activity from spiraling further out of control. Antislavery advocates, meanwhile, saw the charges as a clear case of government overreach. Each day onlookers lined up hours in advance for the Hanway trial. The crowd was filled with women as well as black people; courtroom bailiffs initially tried to segregate the audience by gender but eventually gave up. Hanway himself, tall and finely dressed, cut a mysterious figure; he never testified during the trial and left no writing or interviews with his thoughts on the ordeal.
Prosecutors presented various members of the Gorsuch posse who all testified that Hanway had “inspired” the black people during the standoff by his mere white presence. They tried to cast the Parker clan’s effective defense of the fugitive slaves as a coordinated scheme to overthrow the U.S. government. They drew a tenuous link between Hanway and this elaborate conspiracy. But no one on the witness stand even knew what words Hanway might have exchanged with Parker and the others during the standoff. Later in the trial, a key black witness who prosecutors hoped would corroborate their account flipped at the last minute and said he wasn’t even present during the shooting.6
Robert C. Grier, one of two judges presiding over the case, noted that the actions of the Christiana rioters, violent as they may have been, were understandable in an environment where black kidnappings were a regular occurrence. He cautioned the jury that if they found Hanway guilty, it would set a “dangerous precedent” by making more Americans susceptible to charges of treason.7
The jury took only fifteen minutes to deliberate. Hanway was found not guilty. Federal prosecutors soon dropped the charges on all the other accused rioters, sensing they had little chance of a different outcome. State and local officials in Pennsylvania declined to file any charges of their own. Despite the shocking killing of a white man, no one would ever face a criminal conviction for the events of the Christiana Riot.
In the North, antislavery advocates celebrated the verdict as a victory for civil rights and a righteous rebuke of the immorality of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the South, however, the decision was seen as a betrayal all its own. Maryland, Gorsuch’s home state, was particularly irate. Talk of secession from the Union grew louder. “Henceforth, words will give place to acts,” warned Maryland Governor Enoch Louis Lowe, who would later back the Confederacy in the Civil War. Rather than bringing the nation closer together through compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act only divided the country further as it highlighted the stark differences in how Americans felt about slavery.
Hanway and the other white men who had been indicted were celebrated as heroes by white progressives. They were feted by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and mythologized as heroes in local remembrances of the riot in Christiana. The black people who had actually thwarted the slavecatchers became footnotes in a historic moment of their own creation. But they had escaped the tendrils of bondage and continued the search for true freedom.8
William Parker had a difficult time when he got off the steamship Toronto; money and work were tough to come by, and he feared might be extradited back to the United States. Eventually, though, he was reunited with his wife and children, and the family relocated to a small town called Buxton in Ontario. A minister loaned him some money for a down payment on a 50-acre lot. The Parkers built a new home there–not a fortress like the one in Christiana, but a refuge. “The white settlers in the vicinity were much opposed to colored people,” Parker reflected later. “But the spread of intelligence and religion in the community has wrought a great change in them. Prejudice is fast being uprooted; indeed, they do not appear like the same people that they were. In a short time I hope the foul spirit will depart entirely.”9
Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (Oxford University Press, 1994).
Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Park Publishing Company, 1892).
Bloody Dawn.
Ibid.
Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the STruggle for America’s Soul From the Revolution to the Civil War (Penguin Press, 2018).
Bloody Dawn.
Anthony Rice, “A Legacy Transformed: The Christiana Riot in Historical Memory” (PhD diss., Lehigh University, 2012).
Bloody Dawn.
William Parker, “The Freedman’s Story,” The Atlantic, Feb. 1866.
Thanks for another informative piece. I do not think I received Part 1. Can you provide a link to it? Thank you.