CHAPTER 1
TROUBLE BEFORE PEACE: INTRODUCTION
William Parker’s 1866 narrative, “The Freedman’s Story,” in which he chronicles his life and the 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania Resistance is one of the best sources for understanding the worldview and ideology of Africans committed to their own liberation. Evidently, he is the only African participant to leave a written personal record of the uprising so we know more about him than the other rebels. From his account, however, we get an understanding of the Christiana Resisters’ convictions concerning the use of redemptive violence.
Although it was published one year after the end of the Civil War, Parker’s memoir reads like an anti-slavery tract because he engaged in the typical philosophical analyses about the dehumanizing nature of enslavement and enslavers. “Well may the good John Wesley 1 speak of slavery as the sum of all villainies; for no resort is too despicable, no subterfuge too vile, for its supporters. Is a slave intractable, the most wicked punishment is not too severe; is he timid, obedient, attached to his birthplace and kindred, no lie is so base that it may not be used to entrap him into a change of place or of owners.” 2 W.E.B. Du Bois also wrote of the no-win situation facing enslaved Africans. “If they fought for freedom, they were beasts; if they did not fight, they were born slaves. If they cowered on the plantations, they loved slavery; if they ran away, they were lazy loafers. If they sang, they were silly; if they scowled, they were impudent.” 3 This attitude, held by so many white Americans, found its way into public policy, most significantly, for the Christiana Resisters, in the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Such a position denied the humanity of the enslaved by disavowing their right to a natural human response to oppression.
Parker understood this dichotomy and acted on it. According to him, every human being has a natural desire to be free. “The mandates of Slavery are like leaden sounds, sinking with dead weight into the very soul, only to deaden and destroy. The impulse of freedom lends wings to the feet, buoys up the spirit within, and the fugitive catches glorious glimpses of light through rifts and seams in the accumulated ignorance of his years of oppression.” 4 The Christiana Resisters simply operated on the assumption that they, too, had this human desire.
Like all authors of anti-slavery tracts, Parker highlighted the dehumanizing disruption of families and the abuse that was an integral part of the institution of enslavement. “Without a word of warning, and for no fault of their own, parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, were separated to meet no more on earth. A slave sale of this sort is always as solemn as a funeral, and partakes of its nature in one important particular,—the meeting no more in the flesh.” 5 He recorded several episodes, including some involving himself, of the physical abuse of enslaved men, women and children.
Parker condemned those who wished to maintain the institution of enslavement and he lambasted the hypocrisy inherent in the system. “The apologist for slavery at the North, and the owner of his fellow-man at the South, have steadily denied that the separation of families, except for punishment, was perpetrated by Southern masters; but my experience of slavery was, that separation by sale was a part of the system. Not only was it resorted to by severe masters, but, as in my own case, by those generally regarded as mild. No punishment was so much dreaded by the refractory slave as selling.” 6 Interestingly, four generations after the Christiana Resistance, Edward Gorsuch’s great granddaughter was attempting to promote the belief that slaveowners did not sell the Africans they enslaved. She branded as a lie the assertion “that the southern people were unkind to the Negroes and they would take children away from the parents and sell them or if they had more’n they wanted they would take them down South and put them on what they called the block and auction them off or even if they needed money they would do it.” 7
William Parker’s memoir completely challenges such a view because it was the sale of Africans on the plantation where he was enslaved which put the notion of escape in his mind at an early age. We see through the poignant eyes of a child what the sundering of black family life was like due to the sales which were a part of the system: “How desolate I was! No home, no protector, no mother, no attachments...we might at any moment be sold to satisfy a debt or replenish a failing purse,—I felt myself to be what I really was, a poor, friendless slave-boy.” 8
Further, a black respondent on the same audio program with Gorsuch’s great granddaughter disputed her assertion by proclaiming that his own father’s mother was sold away. Like William Parker’s anguished references to the sales of enslaved Africans he witnessed as a boy, the interviewee says his father was “just a young boy” when it happened and that he “didn’t know where she was sold.” His father was also sold.
Yes’m, they sold him, sold him to Mr. Duke Kelly. People in slave times, they had them up just like they had cows and things to sell—“Well he looks good.” And mother said they used to take a piece of meat and grease his mouth—[in slaveholder’s voice] “Yes, he looks like he had plenty to eat.” They’d grease his mouth so they’d look like they’d been eating and had a plenty. Yeah. [Slaveholder’s voice] “Oh yeah, that ole feller looks like he’s big and strong. Look at him there.” Big, dark feller you know. Yes. He said, “He looks like he’s good, looks like he’s had plenty to eat. I think I’ll take him.” Just put him up there and bid on him. I heard my father’s mother say. This respondent also debunked the notion of the benevolent slaveholder. When asked if Kelly was a good or bad master, he interrupted the questioner with an emphatic “NO! My father’s was a bad master.” His mother’s master, however, was kinder because he was, like so many other slaveholders, her father.
Parker was resentful, even into his middle age, that he did not know the actual date of his birth. He pointed to this as an especially galling aspect of enslavement. “Slaveholders are particular to keep the pedigree and age of favorite horses and dogs, but are quite indifferent about the age of their servants, until they want to purchase. Then they are careful to select young persons, though not one in twenty can tell year, month, or day. Speaking of births,—it is the time of ‘corn-planting,’ ‘corn-husking,’ ‘Christmas,’ ‘New Year,’ ‘Easter,’ ‘the Fourth of July,’ or some similar indefinite date. My own time of birth was no more exact; so that to this day I am uncertain how old I am.”
Gorsuch’s great granddaughter’s comments indirectly buttress Parker’s assertions. Her words reflect the language and sentiments of the unrepentant slaveowner, four generations removed. “The slaves were valuable. My gracious, $300 wasn’t anything in those days for a good man. Because they were trained, the southern people needed them, couldn’t go on without them. They treated them right. Now I will tell you that. Say you had a valuable horse, you wouldn’t treat it badly. They were owned by the masters, not as an animal but as human beings and they were treated right. And southern people didn’t believe in slavery but it was a condition under which they lived, you know...I don’t say that there might have been some case where somebody could have been unkind but it wasn’t the general attitude of the slaveowner at all to be that way.” 9 Nowhere in her statement is the realization that it was criminal to enslave “human beings” and nowhere is there an acknowledgment that in order to enslave human beings there had to be a great deal of physical force to which her ancestor no doubt resorted. Like enslavers, she reduced the enslaved to commodities, to property, “$300 wasn’t anything in those days for a good man.” Her use of “unkind” instead of “cruel” augments her myopic and self-serving position.
She also told a story about a black family servant which allows the listener to place the comments she made on the audio recording into the proper perspective. “We called her Mammy Kelly but her name was Emily. Emily Kelly was her name. My laws, we loved her. If she’d been just a great grandmother, we couldn’t of loved her any more. And, up in my home, we always felt that nothing was complete if Mammy Kelly wasn’t there. We had a Christmas party so Mammy Kelly had to come up, sit in the chair beside the fireplace. Everybody would talk to her, you know, and make over her. She was always respectful and knew her place. Everybody could be nice to her because she was that type.”
A ninety-three-year-old white male descendant of a Dorchester County slaveowner told a similar story on the audio tape. He recounted the story of an African woman who “cooked for my mother sixty-five years, daily, seven days a week. She was a wonderful cook. We were all devoted to her. We just thought of her as a member of the family. So it was a very happy relationship. I think so; in many ways, an ideal one.”
In the typically selfish, self-centered vein which characterized slaveholders, the unreconstructed slaveowners’ descendants cannot see these servants as existing outside their roles in the white families. They are, to the slaveowners’ descendants, not wives, daughters, or mothers but are only there, in their place, to serve them, a place for which all blacks were ideally suited. Did they inherit, if they were truly considered family? Did they benefit in any way from being so horribly exploited?
A younger white male who was interviewed for the same audio production held much the same distorted view as Gorsuch’s great granddaughter and the former slaveowner’s son, testifying to the power of perverted white public opinion. “Why don’t we have a little common sense here? If they were treated unkindly and like animals do you think they would have worked to make profit for the owners? You can’t make a person do anything physically, I’m talking about in the field.”
In response to this completely ahistorical comment, a female respondent says, “They could have been killed and murdered right out. I mean they really didn’t have much choice, either work or be killed.” The young white male says, “Okay, so they’re murdered, but they can’t do anything when they’re dead, can they? Their work wouldn’t have been as good.” He is convinced that Africans have a natural passivity which predisposes them to being enslaved.
The narrator of the audio program says in amazement, “Sort of a strange combination here with that boy with southern attitudes and beliefs combined with Yankee values. The image he has is of the slave as a good worker. He doesn’t have the shiftless, banjo playing image. He assumes that people work and do good work in order to profit. They don’t do it unvoluntarily. He assumes this is the case with everyone.” (Continued, click below).
Notes:
1 John Wesley was the founder of the Methodist Church. Wesley ordained the white American, Francis Asbury, whose assistant, Richard Allen, began the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Parker is displaying his extensive religious knowledge here and living up to the appellation he was known as, “The Preacher.”
2 William Parker, “The Freedman’s Story,” Atlantic Monthly 17 (February 1866), 155.
3 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1962), 125.
4 Parker, 158.
5 Ibid., 154.
6 Ibid., 155.
7 Myles Jackson, producer, Two Man War At Christiana, 1851 (New York: Random House, 1971), audio.
8 Parker, 155.
9 Ibid.
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