The Christiana Resistance: When a Town Fought Back Against the Fugitive Slave Act

On September 11, 1851, a violent clash between a Maryland enslaver and a group of freedom seekers—supported by local Black residents and abolitionists—ended with one slaveholder dead, dozens of people charged with treason and a country further polarized over human bondage.

The confrontation, now known as the Christiana Resistance (or Christiana Riot), happened in the rural village of Christiana, Pennsylvania, and revealed the nation’s raw tensions over slavery and a community's resolve to fiercely defend liberty.

Nearly a year before the Christiana Resistance, Congress had passed the Compromise of 1850, a collection of bills designed to appease both the North and the South. But the legislative package was not without controversy. Particularly inflammatory was the new Fugitive Slave Acts, a federal law requiring residents of free states to help capture individuals who had escaped enslavement. The act also denied alleged fugitives the right to a jury trial, a policy that was perilous to both the enslaved people who had fled north for freedom and free people of color who had already settled there.

For Christiana—which was part of the Underground Railroad and near the Maryland border dividing free states from slave states along the Mason-Dixon Line—the law threatened the community’s very way of life.

Christiana not only stood out because of its location but also because of the residents who called it home. In addition to free people of color and formerly enslaved individuals, white abolitionists, including Quakers, lived there and in the surrounding Lancaster County. Together, they helped so-called fugitives from slavery find their way to freedom in the north.

This population mix, according to Hilary Green, a professor of Africana studies at Davidson College, meant “the conditions were right” for a rebellion. “You already had an activist-minded community,” she says, “and with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, even those who were passive became activated.”

Whether a Black person had been free for years or born into freedom, the law instilled fear. “It did not matter how long you were in the community, your freedom was threatened,” Green says.

So Christiana residents, including abolitionist William Parker, started to organize. Parker, who settled in the village after escaping enslavement in Maryland, led a group to defend Black residents. His home became a refuge until enslaver Edward Gorsuch decided to recapture his escaped “property”—the men who’d fled captivity at his estate in Baltimore County, Maryland. Accompanied by several family members and a federal marshal, Gorsuch arrived at the resistance leader’s Christiana farm before dawn on September 11, 1851. 

Parker, however, was not caught unawares.  

“They were ready,” says Iris Leigh Barnes, a historian who specializes in Maryland, African American and Civil War history. “They were not complacent.”

When Gorsuch and his posse swarmed Parker’s home and demanded surrender, Parker, his wife Eliza, their family members and others who had fled slavery refused to comply. 

Eliza Parker was especially instrumental during the confrontation. She blew a horn typically used to call in field workers in this rural community. In this moment, though, it alerted the community to prepare for armed resistance. The Parkers’ neighbors, both Black and white, assembled in just minutes.

Accounts differ about what happened next. Barnes says that both Parker and Gorsuch quoted scripture to justify their stances on slavery. When local Quaker Castner Hanway tried to intervene, the marshal ordered him to help capture the formerly enslaved individuals. Hanway refused and advised Gorsuch’s group to leave for their own safety.

The confrontation turned deadly when Gorsuch mounted the steps to Parker’s home, prompting the members of the resistance to open fire, wounding the enslaver. According to Parker’s 1866 account in The Atlantic, the women then finished Gorsuch off. As Parker writes, "[Gorsuch’s] slave struck him the first and second blows; then three or four sprang upon him, and, when he became helpless, left him to pursue others. The women put an end to him.” Afterward, both the federal marshal and the remaining members of Gorsuch’s group withdrew.

In the days following the clash, many participants fled. With the help of abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, Parker ultimately reached Canada.

After Gorsuch’s death, the federal authorities arrested and charged as many as 100 people with treason, a gravely serious charge intended to show that the government did not consider the incident a local disturbance, but a direct challenge to federal authority. The government claimed that the defendants had initiated war against the United States by resisting the Fugitive Slave Act.

Still, the heavy-handed charges did not lead to convictions. 

The first person brought to trial was Hanway, the white Quaker who refused to help the slave catchers. The prosecution argued that the Black men could not have conspired to resist without being led by a white man like Hanway. Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania congressman who later became a key figure during Reconstruction, served as his defense attorney. The jury of northerners, who considered the new Fugitive Slave Act a major overreach, acquitted Hanway in minutes. This led the prosecutors to drop the outstanding charges against everyone else. 

“If you couldn’t convict the white man, you’re not likely to convict the others” for simply defending their homes, Barnes says.

Eliza Parker and others who had been arrested were released and they made their way to Canada, where they reunited with William Parker. 

The acquittals reflected the legal defense funds that community members raised for those charged. Their support and the collective action of Christiana residents showed that federal enforcement of controversial laws had limited authority in communities that opposed them.

And the fact that many participants managed to leave the county demonstrated the strength of the Underground Railroad network. Getting from Pennsylvania to Canada required sophisticated coordination, Green says.

The Christiana Resistance made national headlines. While Northerners celebrated it as an act of self-defense, the event outraged Southerners, who viewed it as lawless rebellion and characterized Gorsuch as a martyr.

Reports of the resistance particularly angered a young John Wilkes Booth, who knew the Gorsuch family personally, Barnes says. Historians have speculated that the incident contributed to Booth’s subsequent pro-slavery radicalization and eventual assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Beyond Booth, the Christiana Resistance intensified regional tensions over slavery, with Southern leaders feeling that their rights would be undermined in the Union.

“These are the kinds of moments that lead to the breakdown that becomes the Civil War,” Green says.

Northern abolitionists, meanwhile, took heart in the resistance’s outcome. It suggested that communities could challenge the enforcement of unjust laws. For Black Pennsylvanians, the ordeal reminded them that their freedom was not assured.

“If you are a Black person, there is no distinction made whether you’re freeborn or a self-liberated individual,” Green says. “Your freedom and your ability just to live were threatened.”