The true stories of the Christiana Resistance and ‘Uncle Tom’: Discussing struggles for freedom

Although she grew up in Christiana, Pa., Darlene A. Colón was 30 years old before she learned that her third great-grandfather, Ezekiel Thompson, had a role in the 1851 Christiana Resistance.

Thompson, who she said was called “the Old Indian” because of his part-Native and part-African American heritage, was one of the Black men who fought back when Edward Gorsuch, a Maryland plantation owner, led a posse of white men to Christiana to seize four Black men who had fled from slavery. Christiana is about 55 miles west of Philadelphia, in Lancaster County.

Gorsuch had first traveled to Philadelphia to seek warrants for the men under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Deputy Marshal Henry Kline was assigned to help Gorsuch recapture the men.

It was still dark, before sunrise on the morning of Sept. 11, 1851, when Gorsuch, his son Dickinson, and five others: two other relatives, two of his neighbors, and Kline approached William Parker’s house, where two of the wanted men were holed up.

There were seven people in the Parker house, who at first held off the Gorsuch party. At the start of the confrontation, as Parker and Gorsuch argued over surrendering the two men Gorsuch wanted, Parker’s wife, Eliza, blew a tin horn out of an upstairs window that brought 15 to 25 Black farmworkers, including Ezekiel Thompson, from the surrounding countryside to their aid.

According to Parker’s written account, one of the white men fired the first shots, which he aimed at Eliza Parker as she summoned help with the horn. By the time it was over, Edward Gorsuch, 56, lay dead from a single bullet wound; his son was seriously injured. Parker and at least two other Black men escaped to Canada.

About 36 Black men and women, including Eliza and her sister Hannah Pinckney, and five white Lancaster County men, some of them Quakers, were jailed and charged with treason.

The government put one of the white men on trial first: Caster Hanway. He “was neither an abolitionist nor a Quaker,” according to one report. He was just a neighbor who heard the uproar at the Parker house and went there on horseback. He advised Gorsuch and his men to go home before anyone was killed.

Nevertheless, prosecutors charged Hanway with being the mastermind because they could not believe that Black men had been organizing to rescue other Black people from “slave catchers,” Colón said.

The trial took place at Independence Hall with U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, a Lancaster County lawyer and abolitionist, as Hanway’s chief defense lawyer. A jury found Hanway not guilty, and the government dropped all charges against the others. Eliza Parker, her sister Hannah, and their children later joined their husbands in Canada.

The Christiana Resistance occurred 10 years before the Civil War and eight years before abolitionist John Brown led an attack at Harpers Ferry. Both events are seen as precursors that deepened the pro-enslavement and pro-abolitionist divisions in the country that led to the Civil War.

Former Temple University professor Ella Forbes described the confrontation in her book: But We Have No Country: The 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania Resistance.

Colón who is now 70, is president of the Christiana Historical Society and is active in other historical societies as well. Although she has a family connection to the story, Colón said she never learned about the Christiana Resistance as a child.

“I had NO IDEA about any history of slavery or revolt because, to be honest, it wasn’t taught in schools,” Colón wrote in an email to The Inquirer. “All I ever heard about regarding African American history was Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth. Never heard of the Nat Turner rebellion, barely heard about John Brown.”

Colón was one of the panelists at the Slave Dwelling Project Conference, held in Philadelphia from Oct. 3-5. This particular Slave Dwelling conference was the first to focus on slavery in the Northern states, said organizer Joseph McGill.

Colón spoke about Thompson at a conference session called “By All Means Necessary: Freedom’s Battle at Christiana” at the Museum of the American Revolution:

“He was a farmer, and when they took him to Philadelphia to Moyamensing Prison, he was placed in a cell with one of the men Gorsuch had been looking for.” Officials were going from cell to cell, trying to identify the Maryland escapees.

“Ezekiel threw a blanket over him [to keep him from being identified] and then grabbed a stool. He said, ‘The first one who comes in here, I’m going to splinter this stool across your head.’“

The language used to describe the Christiana rebellion also tells a story, said Michael Lawrence-Riddell, a former schoolteacher who founded Self-Evident Education, a digital resource for teaching the humanities and history.

“We call it the Christiana Resistance, but many people have called it the Christiana Riot, or the Christiana Tragedy,” said Lawrence-Riddell, who shared the panel with Colón.

Calling it a “riot” indicated that the Black people of Christiana could not have planned to resist enslavers, one speaker said.

And panelist Candra Flanagan said calling it a “tragedy” was also a white-focused view because it placed the tragedy as being Gorsuch’s death, rather than the tragedy of Black men losing their freedom. Flanagan is director of the Teaching and Learning unit in the Education Department at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

Saladin Allah, director of community engagement at the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center in New York, spoke at the conference about the routes people seeking freedom took to settle in New York and Canada.

He also talked about his third great-grandfather, Josiah Henson, whose life story was used in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Henson, with his wife and four children, fled from a farm in Owensboro, Ky., in 1830 and, 41 days later, made it to Buffalo, N.Y.

The next day, they crossed into Canada, where the Henson family first settled in a small community called “Little Africa.”

After a few years, the family moved further north. Henson helped established a community called the Dawn Settlement, now known as Dresden, Ontario, Allah said.

“He was considered a forerunner of the Underground Railroad since when he fled slavery in 1830 when Harriet Tubman was still a child,” Allah told The Inquirer. Tubman made her first escape from slavery, to Philadelphia, in 1849.

Allah said Henson had a reputation for honesty and integrity that he displayed while he was enslaved.

“He was venerable. He was a very honorable man, a very spiritual man,” Allah said. “He would bring food to other enslaved people on the plantation. He would educate them about agriculture and how to grow plants.”

When Stowe published her novel in 1852, it became a best-seller. Allah said pro-slavery Americans hated the antislavery book and its portrayal of “Uncle Tom” as a decent and good man. The pro-slavery people began to write alternative plays and books to portray Uncle Tom as a servile figure who catered to white people.

“He wasn’t a negative person in the [Stowe] book,” Allah said.

To address criticisms of Cabin, Stowe later published a second book and an Atlantic magazine article describing how she based the novel on a Josiah Henson narrative published in 1849.

Allah said when people cringe about the name “Uncle Tom,” he sees it as a teachable moment.

“It’s a process of educating people about the importance of us being able to control our own narratives. Oftentimes, the story told about us is history. It is his story and not our story,” Allah said.

“I tell people it’s important to be able to uncover the stories of our ancestors because it gives us a greater sense of who we are.”