Authors: Fergus Bordewich
The county's underground was diverse, complex, and superbly organized. In addition to as many as fifty permanent stations, divided more or less equally among the homes of blacks and whites, some of whom had been hiding runaway slaves since the turn of the century, it could draw on the support of a constellation of black churches and their traveling minis
ters, plus several outstanding local public figures, including at least two state senators, a former president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the county's fierce abolitionist congressman, Thaddeus Stevens. After the Civil War, Stevens would become the architect of the most radical plan of congressional reconstruction of the South, as well as the father of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which would guarantee former slaves equal protection under the law, and the right to vote. Beginning in the 1840s, he personally paid a spy to infiltrate the “manstealing” counter-underground of slave catchers, and passed on what he learned to fugitives. (Recent archaeological excavations strongly suggest that he also concealed fugitives in a dry cistern next to his own home in the heart of Lancaster city.)
Slave hunters also had to contend with a secret black militia led by William Parker, which mobilized on short notice to fend off slave hunters, and recovered kidnap victims, by force if necessary. Parker, twenty-nine years old in 1851, was born a slave in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and had escaped to Pennsylvania in 1842 by following the railway tracks from Baltimore to York. He had spent the intervening years working on farms in Lancaster County. In 1843, he underwent a transformative experience at an abolitionist rally where he listened raptly to an oration by Frederick Douglass, whom he had known years earlier in Maryland as the simple slave Frederick Bailey. “I was therefore not prepared for the progress he then showed,” Parker later wrote. “I listened with the intense satisfaction that only a refugee could feel.” Parker became a fighter in the tradition of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, although unlike them he operated in a free state and was supported by an interracial underground that recognized both his personal courage and his strategic skill. He acknowledged no federal law. When a Quaker neighbor urged him and the other fugitives to quietly head for Canada, he replied that if the laws protected black men as they did whites, he too would be a pacifist. “If a fight occurs, I want the whites to keep away,” he told her. “They have a country and may obey the laws. But we have no country.”
Parker's fortresslike, two-story fieldstone house two miles outside Christiana was the cockpit of black resistance in eastern Lancaster County, and lay close to the homes of several of the oldest underground stations in the region. Secluded on the slope of a forest-rimmed hill, yet situated so that anyone inside could keep watch over a broad expanse of
countryside below, the house was well-situated for defense. At least two of Gorsuch's slaves plus Parker, his equally warlike wife Eliza, and several other armed men were holed up on the second floor of the house when the Marylanders and Marshal Kline appeared in the narrow lane outside before dawn on the morning of September 11.
Kline deployed four of his men to cover the back of the house. Then, with Edward Gorsuch, he entered the house. Kline announced that he was a U.S. marshal and that he had come to arrest Ford and Hammond. A voice shouted down that there were no such men there. Kline next heard the sound of guns being loaded. He ordered everyone in the house to come downstairs. When no one did, Kline and Gorsuch attempted to go up the narrow stairs, but someone thrust a blunt-pronged pitchfork at them. An axe was next thrown down, but hit no one. Parker's men then made a sudden rush down the stairs, and crowded the surprised whites out of the house.
The two groups, both armed and implacable, now faced each other in the yard. Looking up toward the several blacks who were visible in the second-floor windows, Kline read the arrest warrants aloud three times. He told Parker that he had fifteen minutes to turn over Ford and Hammond.
Parker replied that he cared nothing for him or for the United States government.
“I've heard a negro talk as big as you, and then have taken him, and I'll take you,” Kline retorted.
“You can burn us, but you can't take us,” replied Parker. “Before I give up, you will see my ashes scattered on the earth.”
“I want my property, and I shall have it,” Gorsuch shouted.
A bizarre dialogue next took place, reflecting the dense religiosity of the age, when slaves, their masters, and abolitionists all looked to the literal words of the Bible to sanction their actions.
“Does not the Bible say, âServants, obey your masters?'” Gorsuch challenged, as if the fatal drama that was unfolding concerned merely a fine point of theology.
The same Bible, Parker retorted, also said, “Give unto your servants that which is just and equal.” He added, “Where do you see it in Scripture that a man should traffic in his brother's blood?”
“Do you call a nigger my brother?” Gorsuch demanded.
“Yes,” replied Parker.
The tension mounted on both sides as dawn began to break. Although Gorsuch didn't know it, several of the men in the garret were panicking and urging surrender. Eliza, who, William wrote, had endured a slavery “far more bitter” than his own, grabbed a corn cutter and declared that she would cut off the head of anyone who attempted to give up.
The Parkers kept a horn that was to be used in times of emergency. Eliza now asked William if it was time to call for help. He told her to go ahead. Standing at one of the garret windows, she raised the horn and blew a squalling note that friends anywhere within hearing would instantly understand. One or more of the whites began firing at her, and she fell to her knees, unhurt, and, crouching beneath the sill, she continued to blow blast after blast into the brightening air.
Men and women dropped what they were doing and began to run toward the sound. They came from every direction, some on horseback, others on foot, armed with guns, clubs, barrel staves, and razor-edged corn cutters, until there were several dozen blacks gathered at the house. Some began to pace menacingly up and down the lane. Others pointed guns at Kline's increasingly nervous posse.
At this moment, two white men on horseback arrived on the scene, Elijah Lewis, a Quaker shopkeeper, and a mild-mannered miller named Castner Hanway, both of them well-known locally as sympathetic to blacks. Neither was active in the underground, but they were apparently part of the larger support network of individuals who, although they would not personally risk harboring fugitives, protected those who did, and helped to insulate the most radical activists against exposure. Kline peremptorily ordered the two whites to assist in arresting the fugitives. Both refused. Kline angrily warned them that by refusing they were committing a federal crime under the new Fugitive Slave Law. They, in turn, warned the marshal that unless he left the scene immediately there was certain to be bloodshed. As the two Lancaster men backed away, Hanway raised his arm, apparently to urge Parker's men back, although members of the posse later claimed (betraying the slave hunters' assumption that blacks could not act on their own) that he was signaling them to attack.
The standoff lasted almost an hour. The air fairly quivered with two and a half centuries of rage distilled into the figures that faced each other, no more than ten paces apart. Pride would not let Gorsuch walk away
from a mob of blacks. Contempt seemed to seep from his very pores like sweat. Parker's men were ex-slaves who were filled with lifetimes of abuse from the men who once owned them, men like Gorsuch. They also knew that any one of them might be the next target of a slave-hunting posse.
By this point, there may have been as many as fifty blacks versus the posse's nine men, some of whom were still guarding the back of the house to prevent the fugitives' escape. Gorsuch was exhausted, furious, and hungry, an unfortunate combination. “I have come a long way this morning, and I want my breakfast,” he declared. “I'll have my property, or I'll breakfast in hell.”
“Old man, you had better go home to Maryland,” someone told Gorsuch.
“Father, will you take all this from a nigger?” Gorsuch's son Dickinson exclaimed.
Parker threatened to knock Dickinson's teeth down his throat.
At this, young Gorsuch ran forward and fired his revolver at Parker but failed to hit him. Parker's brother-in-law fired back point-blank with a double-barreled shotgun. Dickinson fell, staggered to his feet, and went down again.
The tension broke like a dam, and Parker's men flooded forward with a shout. The yard in front of the house dissolved into chaos. All the white men in the lane then fired. At least two blacks were hit. Shots flew in every direction. Someone struck Edward Gorsuch with a rifle and clubbed him to the ground. As long as he could, he clung to his pistolsâ“he was the bravest of his party,” Parker grudgingly recalledâfighting three men at the same time, until he finally went down for good under a hail of blows from clubs and corn cutters. Others caught Joshua Gorsuch and clubbed him until the blood ran out of his ears. Pearce, too, was caught and beaten senseless. Kline and the constables, the only members of the posse who escaped unharmed, leaped the fence and ran for their lives. Apart from the two men hit by the whites' first volley, no blacks were seriously injured. It was said afterward by veterans of the fight that “the Lord shook the balls out of their clothes.”
Most of the whites didn't stop running until they reached Chester County. Several survived further injury only because they were escorted to safety by Castner Hanway and Elijah Lewis. Dickinson Gorsuch, although initially left behind in a pool of blood, eventually recovered.
Edward Gorsuch was the only fatality; his death sent waves of shock radiating through Washington, and across the South.
William Parker had no illusions about what fate lay in store for him if he remained in Lancaster County. He was determined not to be taken alive. While most of his men scattered among the homes of white and black supporters in the surrounding area, he and two of his closest friends, Abraham Johnson and Alexander Pinckney, quickly disappeared into the maze of underground lines that extended eastward into Chester County. Before the day was out, they had raced through Parksburg, Downington, and Kennett to the home of Isaac Mendenhall, one of the busiest underground stations in the region, which lay tucked in a narrow fold of hills just north of the Delaware state line. Dinah Mendenhall, normally a woman of steely resolve, later admitted that she was terrified as long as Parker's party was there, knowing that they were wanted for murder. “I had scarce strength to get into the house,” she recalled. “But I held to my faith in an Overruling Providence. These were the times which tried men's souls, and women's too.” The Mendenhalls passed the party on to portly Dr. Bartholemew Fussell, who carried them to the home of his niece, Graceanna Lewis. The next day, they were driven in a closed carriage, “throwing some old carpet over them, just as they would cover a butter-tub,” to Phoenixville, and from there to Norristown, where they were hidden beneath a pile of shavings in a carpenter's shop. Judging the usual underground route via Philadelphia and New York City to be too dangerous, in order to deflect pursuers Dr. Jacob Paxson arranged for five wagons to be hired for that evening. He sent four of them off in different directions as decoys. After they had departed, Parker and his men were disguised, given ten dollars, hidden in the fifth wagon, and driven north by a black teamster.
From here on, the three fugitives would be on their own until they reached Rochester, New York. There, if they were not caught first, they had been directed to contact Parker's old friend Frederick Douglass, who had moved there from Boston in 1847, to establish his newspaper the
North Star.
Speed was critical. For all Parker knew, the sheriff in every town they passed through might be on the lookout for them. Traveling in rented wagons, they passed through the thinly populated mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, through Friendsville, Tannersville, and Homersville, and finally crossing the Delaware River into New York
at Big Eddy. From there they “took the cars” to Jefferson, where at 4
A.M.
on September 20 they changed trains, arriving in Rochester five hours later, exhausted and dust-drenched. They had traveled five hundred miles in less than five days. During this last leg of the journey, a newsboy had passed through the car hawking New York City papers that carried the first reports about the events at Christiana. Parker was shaken, if not surprised, to learn that a reward of one thousand dollars had been placed on his head.
After leaving the train station, they walked the streets until they found a black man who could direct them to Douglass's home. The orator, and now journalist, greeted them enthusiastically. These were the kind of black men of whom he had dreamed: fearless and self-confident, “heroic defenders of the just rights of man against manstealers and murderers.” But there were also no more dangerous men in the United States to have in one's home than these. There was no time to lose. When the three had eaten and rested, Douglass sent one of his collaborators, a white woman named Julia Griffiths, to the nearest landing, three miles away on the Genesee River, to learn when the next steamer was leaving for Canada. She returned a few hours later to breathlessly report that a Toronto-bound steamer was leaving that very night at 8
P.M.
There was barely time to catch it. Douglass hurried the three men into what he facetiously called his “Democrat carriage” and raced for the landing, arriving just fifteen minutes before the boat's departure. He escorted them on board, and remained with them in a state of tortured anxiety, knowing that if they were arrested now, he too would be charged with abetting murder and treason. His entire career would be ruined. He might well find himself condemned to prison, and quite possibly to death. When they at last heard the order to lift the gangplank, Douglass felt a gust of relief. He shook each man's hand and prepared to disembark. Parker stopped him and handed him Edward Gorsuch's revolver, as a memento. The gun was a symbol, both men knew, that the war against slavery had taken a new and deadly turn, and that more, perhaps much more, violence lay ahead. It was one of the great moments in the history of the Underground Railroad.