Negroes and the Gun Page 8

  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.63

  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.64

  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. 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.”65

  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.)

  This instruction was pivotal in the acquittal of Hanway. And that acquittal was sufficient to discourage further treason prosecutions. Without appreciating the full implications over coming generations, Grier distilled the essential question that would frame assessments of legitimate and illegitimate violence within the black tradition of arms.

  After Hanway’s acquittal, it seemed better to abandon the treason prosecutions and to charge the remaining black defendants with riot and murder. But federal prosecutors worried that remanding them for trial on these state offenses would result in lenient treatment by the county court. And that is precisely what happened. Ultimately, no one who aided William Parker was convicted of a crime. And the implication that the resistance was moral and righteous resonated widely.

  The Christiana Resistance became a focus of black attention around the country. Contributions to the legal fight and statements of support came from black communities in San Francisco, Chicago, Columbus, and New York, and from fugitives living in Canada and England.66 In churches and lodge halls, blacks passed resolutions of support. A group in Seneca County, New York, resolved “that the recent shooting of the kidnapper in Pennsylvania kindles the hope that the day may yet dawn when the colored man, both North and South, will offer a proper and manly resistance to their mean and murderous oppressors.” Evidencing some concern that this stance would offend white abolitionist allies, the resolution acknowledged that “while there may exist a difference of opinion among the friends of liberty in relation to the mode of resistance, yet all must firmly believe that unflinching resistance, at whatever cost, is what is imperatively called for to confound and conquer these tyrants and win the sympathy of the world.”67

  The black newspaper the Impartial Citizen compared Christiana to recent acts of European resistance that had been applauded by white America:

  Had a band of Austrian mercenaries attacked Kossuth in Turkey with the avowed purpose of delivering him into the hands of their government, and had his companions met them with the same sort of resistance which was offered at Christiana, the act would have been trumpeted to every wind as an instance of noble and self-sacrificing heroism for which no wreath of glory was too bright, no words of panegyric too warm. But the black men of Christiana, whose feelings prompted them to a similar act in the service of their friends—what of them? They must be tried for treason against a government based upon the principle that all men are created equal and endowed by nature with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.68

  The National Antislavery Standard was more graphic, stating, “It need surprise nobody that in the game of slave hunting it should sometimes happen that the hunted become the mark for bullets, [and] the law
of self-preservation, and not the Fugitive Slave Law, be obeyed and triumph.” The Standard showed the same sympathy for the dead slaver Gorsuch that he and his class showed for their quarry. “That Gorsuch should have been shot down like a dog seems to us the most natural thing in the world.” This result, said the Standard, should be duplicated at every opportunity. “The example . . . set at Christiana we have no doubt will be followed and perhaps improved upon hereafter, for colored flesh and blood . . . is very like that of a lighter shade, and shrinks from stripes and chains, and will be prompt to try a measure which even in its worst result is better than slavery.”69

  Black abolitionist Charles Remond, originally an acolyte of the pacifist Garrisonians, cast the violence at Christiana grandly as the opening of a new American Revolution. “It is ours to point to Attucks, of bygone days; and we could, if we would, to Freeman, and Parker, and Jackson of Christiana celebrity; for if Washington and Attucks opened the revolution of the past, Parker, and Jackson, and Freeman, open the revolution of the present, when they shot down Gorsuch and his son at Christiana.”70

  With the aid of various sympathizers, Parker’s band of fugitives, hounded by an escalating reward for their capture, fled on foot, on horseback, by stagecoach, and by steam train to Rochester, New York. Parker’s account says only that he was sheltered there at the home of a friend. This friend we know for certain to be Frederick Douglass, who years later described Parker in heroic terms and acknowledged his own role in Parker’s escape.

  I could not look upon them as murderers. To me, they were heroic defenders of the just rights of man against man stealers and murderers. So I fed them, and sheltered them in my house. Had they been pursued then and there, my home would’ve been stained with blood, for these men who had already tasted blood were well armed and prepared to sell their lives at any expense to the lives and limbs of their probable assailants. What they had already done in Christiana, and the determination which showed very plainly especially in Parker, left no doubt on my mind that their courage was genuine and their deeds would equal their words.

  It is fitting that Parker’s last act on US soil was to embrace Frederick Douglass. The two of them had come of age as slaves in Maryland. One of the first abolitionist meetings Parker attended featured Douglass, then a rising star of the Garrisonians. They both had fought slavery in their own ways, Parker mainly with physical strength and courage, Douglass with an increasingly polished and cutting intellect.

  Douglass probably handed Parker a wad of money and gave some instructions about his contact across the water. And we know for sure what Parker handed to Douglass, who wrote about it this way:

  The work of getting these into Canada was a delicate one. . . . The hours they spent at my house were therefore hours of anxiety as well as activity. . . . There was danger that between my house and the landing or at the landing itself we might meet with trouble. As patiently as I could, I waited for the shades of night to come on, and then put the men in my “Democrat carriage” and started for the landing on the Genesee. . . . We reached the boat . . . without remark or molestation. I remained on board till the order to haul the gangplank was given; I shook hands with my friends, and received from Parker the revolver that fell from the hand of Gorsuch when he died, presented now as a token of gratitude and a memento of the battle for liberty at Christiana.71

  For the rest of his life, Douglass counted the revolver, pried from the dead hand of the slaver Gorsuch, as one of his prized possessions.

  “Rise Now and Fly to Arms!” That was Henry Highland Garnet’s exhortation to young black men when Abraham Lincoln finally opened the Union Army to Negro soldiers. Garnet devoted his life to the freedom struggle, and for a time during the mid-nineteenth century, was a better bet than Frederick Douglass to become titular leader of the race. A militant Presbyterian minister, Garnet had implored Negroes to fight slavery to the death. And when the opportunity came, he urged young black men to fight for the Union, despite the slights of unequal pay and a long delay before they were deemed worthy to serve.1

  As a war hawk, Garnet advocated the ultimate form of political violence. But he also had a keen appreciation for the utility of private violence. A gun likely saved his life as a young man when he was beset by mobbers. It was 1835, and Garnet was student at the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire. Noyes was established the previous year by New England abolitionists on the principle of admitting “colored youth of good character” on equal terms with whites. But Canaan was not universally welcoming.2

  A group of local men, agitated by talk of amalgamation, and spurred on by visiting Southern slave owners, vowed to stamp out the hazard in their midst. They did, however, go through the form of democracy, holding two town meetings and voting to remove the Noyes Academy from Canaan. They took the removal mandate literally, and in August 1835, hitched up “ninety yoke of oxen” and pulled the school building off its foundation, into a swamp half a mile away. They warned the Negroes to be gone within the month or die. Some thought the one-month deadline too lenient, and a contingent of them descended late that night on the house where the black boys were boarding. Garnet’s housemate Alexander Crummell describes the scene.

  Under Garnet as our leader, the boys in our boardinghouse were moulding bullets, expecting an attack upon our dwelling. About eleven o’clock at night the tramp of horses was heard approaching, and as one rapid rider passed the house and fired at it, Garnet quickly replied by a discharge from a double barreled shotgun which blazed away through the window. . . . That musket shot by Garnet doubtless saved our lives. Notice, however, was sent to us to quit the State within a fortnight.3

  Garnet was a fugitive from Southern justice. Born into slavery in Kent County, Maryland, in 1815, he escaped north with his family around age nine. Passing into free territory, they sheltered in Wilmington, Delaware, with a Quaker abolitionist named Thomas Garrett. It is likely that the family, in the fashion of many escaped slaves, adopted the name Garnet (sometimes Garnett) as a loose tribute to Thomas Garrett, who aided their escape.4

  Garnet was a dark black man with deep-set eyes and a strong jaw. Racists of the day said he was a “pure negro” and thus doubly suspect on all the prevailing stereotypes. But Garnet wore the label proudly, tracing his lineage to the warrior class of the Mandingo tribe. And his militancy reflected that temperament. He calculated that once black soldiers were armed and trained, America would be unable to deny their freedom, at least “not without a good fight.”5

  Roughly two hundred thousand Negroes served in the Union Army. Many said that Negroes did not have the temperament for soldiering. But after black men fought and died bravely at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, and Fort Wagner in South Carolina, the assessment changed dramatically. After the battle of Port Hudson, the New York Times said, “they were comparatively raw troops and were yet subjected to the most awful ordeal. . . . They charged upon fortifications through the crash of belching batteries. The man, white or black, who will not flinch from that will flinch from nothing. It is no longer possible to doubt the bravery and steadiness of the colored race.” A reporter on the ground wrote, “it is useless to talk anymore about Negro courage. The men fought like tigers.” Charles Dana, reporting to Secretary of War Stanton, affirmed the assessment, writing, “The sentiment in regard to the employment of Negro troops has been revolutionized by the bravery of the blacks in the recent battle of Milliken’s Bend. Prominent officers, who used to in private sneer at the idea, are now heartily in favor of it.”6

  Commentators looking back argue that some black soldiers were so intent on proving themselves that they exhibited courage bordering on recklessness. This was evident not just in the fighting but also in their reactions to battlefield wounds. One black soldier with his leg blown off below the knee dismissed efforts to take him to the rear for attention. Instead, he perched against a log “sat with his leg a swaying and bleeding” and continued fire on the enemy. Two days later, he was dead. Another resilient
soul from the 30th US Colored Infantry was shot in the head, leg, shoulder, and wrist in four separate battles. He declared confidently to his commander, “I don’t reckon I’se gwine to get killed in dis wah.” And he didn’t.7

  Fig. 3.1. Depiction of black Union troops in combat. (“A Negro Regiment in Action,” wood engraving by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly magazine, New York, March 14, 1863.)

  Negro soldiers would distinguish themselves in uniform. But the Civil War started and progressed without expectation of black military service or commitment to emancipation. Early in the war, General George McClellan, projecting the stance of his commander and the calculations of strategists both north and south, promised Unionist slaveholders in Virginia that he would not confiscate their human property. As answer to the hopes of Negroes that the war meant greater opportunity for escape or resistance, McClellan committed “with an iron hand, [to] crush any attempt at insurrection.”

  Not all Union officers agreed with McClellan. General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, commander of the Union stronghold at Fortress Munroe in Hampton, Virginia, treated fleeing slaves as contraband of war rather than returning them to their masters. Butler’s aggressiveness on this point extended to recruiting blacks as spies and scouts.

  The man reputed to be the first black armed for service in the war, a fugitive slave named George Scott, was deployed under General Butler. Although Scott was a new and novel addition to the Union force, he was thoroughly familiar with firearms. He had been on the run and hiding in the South for more than a year, carrying a pistol and a bowie knife taken in a fight with his master on the eve of his escape.8

  Knowledge of the local terrain made Scott a valuable scout in hostile territory. More than a year before President Abraham Lincoln decided to deploy black troops, Scott was assigned to accompany a Union force into the Battle of Big Bethel in York County, Virginia. In violation of policy and defying the bias of many white soldiers, General Butler commanded the squad, “George Scott is to have a revolver.”