Negroes and the Gun (11 page)

A similar incident occurred in 1851 in Boston, where fugitive Frederick Wilkins was apprehended and taken into custody on the strength of the 1850 law. In a tactic that was repeated in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere, and in overt defiance of any government authority over Wilkins, Negroes burst into the courtroom, stole Wilkins away, and skirted him off to Canada. When two blacks and two whites involved in the rescue were acquitted on state charges, President Millard Fillmore threatened federal prosecution against the “lawless mob.”
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Commentary from fugitive activists captures the sentiment that under the circumstances, blacks had little to lose from political violence. One commentator, exiled in Canada, rebuked President Fillmore, arguing that because blacks were not protected by the law of the United States, they could not be “censured for opposing its execution.” In Pennsylvania, William Parker, soon to be famous for leading the Resistance at Christiana, expressed it this way: “The laws for personal protection are not made for us and we are not bound to obey them. Whites have a country and may obey the laws. But we have no country.” As for the federal protection and assistance granted to slave catchers, Parker retorted, whether the kidnappers were clothed with legal authority or not, “I do not care to inquire, as I never had faith in nor respect for the Fugitive Slave Law.”

Religious scruples were no clear bar on such sentiments. In New York City, a mass church gathering resolved that fugitives from slavery should resist “with the surest and most deadly weapons.”
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The militancy of the group was underscored by the thunderous response to William Powell's question, “Shall the bloodthirsty slaver be permitted by this unrighteous law to come into our domiciles, or workshops, or the places where we labor, and carry off our wives and children, our fathers and mothers, and ourselves, without a struggle—without resisting, even if need be onto death?”

Surviving accounts distill what probably was a diverse range of views among black congregations. One longs for a transcript of the 1850 meeting at the Colored Congregational Church in Portland, Maine, resolving “that recognizing no authority higher than the law of God, . . . We pledge to resist unto death any and every effort to take from the city for the purpose of enslaving him any person to whom we are united by the ties of brotherhood.” One member of the group invoked the theme of the American Revolution, declaring that “not a man is to be taken from Portland. Our motto is liberty or death.”
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In 1851, the black state convention of Ohio officially endorsed physical resistance to slave catchers. The sentiment was captured by activist Sam Ward, who concluded that the 1850 law “throws us back upon the natural and inalienable right of self-defense” and warned, “Let the men who would execute this bill beware.”

The impulse toward resistance trumped the worry of alienating white allies. In Pittsburgh in 1851, black activist Martin Delaney gave a fiery speech in front
of the white political establishment. His declaration dripping with irony, Delaney exhorted,

Honorable Mayor, whatever ideas of liberty I may have, had been received from reading the lives of your revolutionary fathers. I have therein learned that a man has a right to defend his castle with his life, even unto the taking of life. Surely, my house is my castle; in that castle are none but my wife and my children, as free as the angels of heaven, and whose liberty is as sacred as the pillars of God. If any man approaches that house in search of a slave—I care not who he may be, whether constable or sheriff, magistrate or even judge of the Supreme Court—nay, let it be he who sanctioned this Act to become law, surrounded by his cabinet as his bodyguard, with the Declaration of Independence waving above his head as his banner, and the Constitution of his country upon his breast as his shield—if he crosses the threshold of my door, and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet, I hope the grave may refuse my body a resting place and righteous Heaven my spirit a home. No! He cannot enter that house and we both live.
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There is more than enough hyperbole in Delaney's speech. But the content and the venue show how he was moved by desperation to an overt policy of political violence. The statements of Robert Williams, little more than a century later, are tame by comparison.

The harshness of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law pressed dedicated black acolytes of William Lloyd Garrison to a more militant stance. Robert Purvis of Westchester was both a Garrisonian and a Quaker. The 1850 law pushed him to this: “Should any wretch enter my dwelling, any pale-faced specter among them, to execute this law on me or mine, I'll seek his life and I'll shed his blood.”
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Although Frederick Douglass would recoil from John Brown's folly at Harpers Ferry, advising Brown that he was going into “a perfect steel trap,” he condemned the 1850 fugitive slave law with a militancy that reflected his now open estrangement from Garrison.
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Writing in the
Frederick Douglass Paper
in August 1852, Douglass declared that “the only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”
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He pressed the theme in a widely reprinted speech exhorting black solidarity against slavery.

When the insurrection of the southern slaves shall take place, as take place it will unless speedily prevented by voluntary emancipation, the great mass of the colored men of the North, however much to the grief of any of us, will be found by your side, with deep-stored and long-accumulated revenge in their hearts and with death-dealing weapons in their hands.

The colored American, for the sake of relieving his colored brethren, would no more hesitate to shoot an American slaveholder, than would a white American,
for the sake of delivering his white brother, hesitate to shoot an Algerine slaveholder. The state motto of Virginia, “Death to Tyrants,” is as well the black man's, as the white man's motto. . . . If American revolutionists had excuse for shedding but one drop of blood, then have the American slaves excuse for making blood flow even unto the horse bridles.

If your oppressors have rights of property, you, at least, are exempt from all obligations to respect them. For you are prisoners of war, in an enemy's country—of a war, too, that is unrivalled for its injustice, cruelty, and meanness—and therefore by all the rules of war, you have the fullest liberty to plunder, burn, kill as you may have occasion to do to promote your escape.
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Much of the scattered evidence of the emerging tradition of arms during this era reflects the marginal status of slaves, fugitives, and freemen. It appears briefly and unsympathetically in the records and writings of the dominant class. But sometimes we find something richer. A fully textured account of black resistance emerges from in the widely chronicled violence at Christiana, Pennsylvania. Variously dubbed the Christiana Resistance, Riot, Uprising, or Tragedy, depending on who was talking, the event is significant because one of the surviving accounts comes from the central black figure in the conflict.
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The driving force in the Christiana Resistance was a physically imposing escaped slave named William Parker. Parker was a contemporary of Frederick Douglass and knew him as Fred Bailey when they were slaves in Maryland. Parker settled in central Pennsylvania, bordering the slave fields of Maryland, and was an active conductor on the Underground Railroad.

Parker was harboring several Maryland runaways in his home outside Christiana when their master, Edward Gorsuch, accompanied by several relatives and three government marshals, rode in to retrieve his property. Parker's account is filled with bravado that demands cautious evaluation. But independent reports confirm an episode of fierce resistance.

By the time the slavers approached Parker's modest, two-story farmhouse, the community already had experienced several abductions and was primed for conflict. Parker himself had fought with slave catchers hunting in the area. In one incident, Parker and a loosely organized vigilance group intercepted a band of Maryland kidnappers, rescued a neighborhood girl, and left two of the abductors badly wounded. In another, Parker and a band of seven exchanged gunfire with slave catchers who were retreating with their prize back to Maryland. This time, the slavers prevailed and Parker suffered a gunshot wound. Shortly after that, still nursing his injury, Parker went out alone in pursuit of hunters from Maryland who had abducted his
neighbor, Henry Williams. Again he was thwarted and worried aloud, “Whose turn will come next?”

Parker was forewarned when slave hunters advanced on his home in early September 1851. An agent of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society's Vigilance Committee, was stationed on the steps of the magistrate's office where fugitive slave warrants were issued. He transmitted the news that Gorsuch had procured papers authorizing the capture of his Negroes from Christiana.

The man-hunters had their papers and their law. But that meant nothing to the armed blacks who answered the alarm and came running with guns and cutlery. Exactly how many folk came is contested. Some estimates say fifty to eighty. Some surely exaggerated accounts of two hundred seem intended to elevate the danger facing the slave hunters and tacitly excuse the fact that several of them fled the scene.
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The detailed account of the combat is disputed. But most agree that Gorsuch was insistent on recovering his slaves even though some of his party advised retreat. Gorsuch rejected this counsel, declaring that he would “have his slaves or perish” in the attempt.

We do not know exactly what sorts of guns the combatants used, whether they were older single shots or state-of-the-art repeaters. But it is certain that all of the firearms that day were charged with black powder, a propellant that renders thick clouds of white smoke. So even assuming the low estimates about the number of combatants, the pasture and woodlot of Parker's homestead would have been thick with gun smoke.

Soon after the shooting started, the discipline of the slave catchers evaporated. A few fled, or as they later put it, went for help. The others took cover and attempted to nurse their wounded. By the end of it, Gorsuch was obliged his arrogant demand: He was denied his slaves. But he did perish.

With Gorsuch crumpled dead in the mud and two of his party badly wounded, the aftermath was both predictable and surprising. In the midst of frenzied reporting and swirling accusations, Parker, several of his compatriots, and two of Gorsuch's slaves fled north, chased by federal and state lawmen
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Under political pressure from the slave states, indictments for treason were issued against forty-five members of the group who came to Parker's aid. In federal court in Philadelphia, before Circuit Judge Robert Grier, United States prosecutors charged the first defendant, white collaborator Casner Hanway, with “treasonous levying of war, a conspiracy of a public nature, aimed to nullify a law of the United States.”
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The charge basically captures the idea of resistance as political violence that ran through much of the rhetoric of the burgeoning black leadership class. So it is ironic that Judge Grier instructed the jury in a fashion that disputed this characterization and laid the foundation for Hanway's acquittal. Treason, Grier explained,
involved a conspiracy of a public nature, aimed to overthrow the government or hinder the execution of the law. He cast the efforts of the Christiana resisters in far more personal terms. “A number of fugitive slaves may infest a neighborhood, and may be encouraged by the neighbors in combining to resist the capture of any of their number; they may resist with force and arms. . . . Their insurrection is for a private object and connected with no public purpose.”

Fig. 2.6. An artist's rendering of the Resistance at Christiana. (From William Still's
The Underground Railroad
[Philadelphia: Porter & Coats, 1872], p. 351. Courtesy of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.)