Guest Spotlight: William Parker's War on Slave Catchers

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You can find Amityvilleville at radiotopia.fm or wherever you get your podcasts. PRX From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries. I'm Joe Richman. Today we're bringing you a story from our friends at History This Week, a podcast from the History Channel.

A decade before the Civil War, the United States already felt divided, and the North wasn't as safe as it seemed. Enslaved people used to be able to escape into free states to secure their freedom, but in eighteen fifty one a new federal law meant that even there, people who had escaped slavery could be captured and sent back. kidnapped by gangs of slave catchers backed by the US government.

But the story you'll hear today isn't just told through laws or headlines, it's told by someone who lived it. A man named William Parker, who escaped slavery and built a life in Pennsylvania, later wrote about what it meant to be hunted and what it took to resist. His words take us inside a moment when that resistance was tested and everything changed. Today the story of William Parker's war on slave catchers.

Just a note before we start, this episode contains depictions of racist language and violence from the era of American slavery. These elements are presented in their historical context. History this week. April third, eighteen fifty one. I'm Sally Helm. As he moves around the city of Boston, Thomas Sims is on high alert.

He arrived here just a few weeks ago. He escaped from slavery down in Georgia. He'd been laboring as a bricklayer, forced to hand over all his wages to rice planter and enslaver James Potter. But Sims stowed away on a ship and made it here, to the north. Massachusetts doesn't have slavery anymore, but that doesn't mean that Thomas Sims is safe. Late last summer, in an attempt to keep the country from falling into civil war, Congress passed a very controversial law, the Fugitive Slave Act.

It was already legal for southern enslavers to send bounty hunters up north to try to kidnap the people who had fled to freedom. But many northern states had enacted personal liberty laws. to protect these freedom seekers. Now, the new federal fugitive slave law tries to make these state laws irrelevant. The new law makes it much easier for a black person to be sent south on just a slaveholder's word.

with the help of US Marshals. And the law also requires individual northerners to cooperate. It's creating a new sense of danger all across the North. And today, April 3rd, Thomas Sims is the latest person to be caught. James Potter has gotten wind that Sims is in Boston and had a warrant drawn up for his arrest. And now, two Boston police officers see him on the street. They approach him and try to pull him into a carriage.

He's got a knife and he resists, but he's overpowered. As he's thrown into the carriage, he yells out, I'm in the hands of the kidnappers. Scenes like this have been playing out all across the North. But also all across the North, people are resisting. From New York to Philadelphia to Cleveland, people have long been organized in clandestine groups to trade information and protect black men and women from slave catchers.

Here in Boston, just a few weeks ago, people aligned with a group called the Boston Vigilance Committee. formed the courthouse and rescued a fugitive slave named Shadrach Minken. In fact, the Boston authorities are so worried that someone will rescue Thomas Simms that after they lock him up in the courthouse, they wrap the entire building in chains. After more than a week of court proceedings and abolitionist protests, Sims is marched back to the docks, flanked by hundreds of guards.

Back in Savannah, he's whipped in the public square. It's nearly fatal. This kind of incident is having the exact opposite effect that the legislators had intended. The Fugitive Slave Act was part of a compromise that was supposed to keep the country from falling into civil war, but it seems to be making all of the tensions worse. And a few months later, those tensions will flare again in a major way.

At the center of it all will be a black man who is running one of those clandestine support groups, this time in Pennsylvania. He's known as the Lion of Lancaster. His name is William Parker. Today, William Parker takes on the Slave Hunters. How does Parker find freedom and form an armed resistance against those who want to take it away? And when things explode, how does America react?

I was born opposite to Queen Anne in Anne Arundel County in the state of Maryland on a plantation called Rodown. My master was Major William Brock. Those are the words of William Parker. He published an account of his life in the Atlantic magazine in 1866. The plantation in Maryland where he grew up was actually not too far from the plantation where famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass grew up. They knew each other.

And William Parker, like all enslaved people, grew up facing terrible violence and fear. No punishment was so much dreaded by the refractory slave as selling. Slave auctions were a form of death. That's Kelly Carter Jackson, Chair of the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College.

They were noted as being called the weeping time. People weren't even allowed to say goodbye. You know, you might be in the field and someone's telling you, hey, they're they're selling your wife right now, or your daughter's in in the wagon, she's headed south. 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.

That was their biggest fear. It wasn't if they got food or if they had shoes or if they got whipped. Their biggest fear was separation. Families. doctor Iris Leigh Barnes, director of the Hosanna School Museum, said that at a young age, ten years old, William Parker and his friend hear that one of these horrifying auctions is upon them. Everyone's whispering and they know something's about to happen. Somebody's about to be sold. So they run and hide up in the trees so no one can find them.

Parker and his friend go into the woods and climb up a pine tree. And that day, Parker makes a promise to his friend and to himself that someday they will escape. There's a certain sense of agency that he employs by saying, even at 10, this is not what I want from myself. Years go by as he waits for his moment. How old I was then, I do not know, but from what the neighbors told me, I must have been about seventeen. One morning, Parker simply decides he won't go out to the fields to work.

His master confronts him, but Parker won't relent. He then picked up a stick used for an ox guad, and said, If I did not go to work, he will whip me as sure as there was a God in Heaven. Then he struck at me. But I caught the stick. And we grappled and handled each other roughly for a time. When he called for assistance, he was badly hurt. I let go of my hold, bade him goodbye, and ran for the woods.

I was now on the high road to liberty. I felt as light as a feather and seemed to be helped onward by an irresistible force. William Parker knows his first stop. Baltimore. He is traveling with his friend Charles, who has also escaped. We reached Baltimore on the following evening between seven and eight o'clock. When we neared the city, the patrols were out, and the difficulty was to pass them unseen or unsuspected. Patrols, slave catchers.

This is the late 1830s, well before the enhanced fugitive slave law is passed. But the laws already on the books are plenty dangerous. There are free black people working in Baltimore, but Maryland is not a free state. William and Charles need a disguise. I learned of a brickyard at the entrance to the city, and thither we went at once, took brick dust and threw it upon our clothes, hats, and boots, and then walked on. By this ruse we reached quiet quarters without arrest or suspicion.

But of course, somebody confronts them. They're heading north from Baltimore when three white men stop them on the road. Late at night. So where you coming from? Why you out this late? See here, said he. You are the fellows that this advertisement calls for, at the same time taking the paper out of his pocket and reading it to us. Oftentimes the descriptions were very vague or they could describe a hundred people.

This wanted poster may have described Parker, or maybe not, but either way, he has to avoid capture. He's holding a stick to defend himself when one of the white men moves to draw a gun. He then reach for. When I stepped back and struck him a heavy blow on the arm, it fell as if it was broken. I think it was. It does require a great bit of courage to be able to stand up for yourself in a way that says, you will not take my life, you will not steal me, you will not apprehend me.

So when you get to someone like, well, did you have to break his arm? To me, that just feels like the most trivial thing because it's like he is trying to survive.

Parker does survive. He and Charles eventually part ways, and in the summer of 1839, William Parker reaches Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This is Quaker country, and the Quakers are by and large opposed to slavery. So it's a pro abolitionist region in a free state. Parker gets a job working for a white abolitionist, and he sees his old acquaintance, Frederick Douglass, again. Douglas is becoming immersed in the anti-slavery movement. I had formerly known Mr. Douglas as a slave in Maryland.

I was therefore not prepared for the progress he then showed, neither for his free spoken and manly language against slavery. For the first time in his life, Parker is experiencing freedom. I felt like a bird on a pleasant May morning. Instead of the darkness of slavery, my eyes were almost blinded by the light of freedom.

I struggled to come up with an anecdote or a metaphor that kind of would compare to that kind of liberation, but it's also a feeling in which you were like, the other shoe could drop at any moment. Even in a free state like Pennsylvania, slave catching bounty hunters are on the prowl.

They're armed to the teeth, you're outnumbered, no questions are being asked or answered. Who knows who's hiring them? Who knows who's paying them? Who knows how much they're paying them? And they're being incentivized to break into your home. They did not hesitate to break open doors and to enter without ceremony the houses of colored men.

And when refused admission, or when a manly and determined spirit was shown, they would present pistols and strike and knock down men and women indiscriminately. They're saying no, you're making a mistake. They don't care. Families are left to wonder what happened to their loved ones. Sometimes it's a long time before they find out what happened.

And there's not really a policing force that's going to sort of stop that or, you know, put that at bay. And so these black communities really have to become their own policing forces. Freedom seekers from the South and free black people in the North are living together in places like Lancaster, putting down roots, working jobs, having families. But they know that they are not safe. They need to band together to protect themselves. And that's exactly what William Parker decides to do.

A number of us had formed an organization for mutual protection against slaveholders and kidnappers, and had resolved to prevent any of our brethren being taken back into slavery. At the risk of our own lives, he starts the Lancaster Black Self-Protection Society. The whole goal is to protect you from the violence of slavery, from the snare of the slave catcher. The Lancaster Black Self Protection Society. It's made up of men and women, white and black.

Their rationale was simple. Slavery starts with violence. Slavery is sustained with violence. Slavery will only be overthrown with violence. The group wants to make sure that no one in Lancaster will be kidnapped and brought back to slavery. In the first big incident that Parker writes about, they hear that a man in the community has been arrested and is gonna be sent south. Leaving his wife and children behind. So they decide to show up at the courthouse and try to free him. It's a fight.

Bricks, stones, and sticks fell in showers. We fought across the road and back again, and I thought our brains would be knocked out. When the whites, who were too numerous for us, commenced making arrests, they got me fast several times, but I succeeded in getting away. My friends now said that I got myself into a bad difficulty and that my arrest would follow. In this, they were mistaken.

The man that they've been trying to protect is eventually saved. And William Parker is not arrested because the authorities don't know who he is. He's just known as the Lion of Lancaster. Yeah, he's Batman. But they're keeping the secret, right? They're keeping the secret. All through the eighteen forties, the Lion of Lancaster is busy. He's protecting his community by whatever means necessary.

One night, Parker is at a friend's home when three slave cutters barge in, trying to arrest him or seemingly any black person they could find. After bandying a few words, he drew his pistol upon me. Before he could bring the weapon to bear, I seized a pair of heavy tongs, and struck him a violent blow across the face and neck, which knocked him down. He lay for a few minutes, senseless, but afterwards rose and walked out of the house without a word.

Sometime later, Parker and six men are in hot pursuit of a group of kidnappers. They find out which tavern they're staying in and knock on the front door. The landlord demanded to know if we were white or colored. I told him colored. He then told us to be gone, or he would blow out our brains. They decide to knock on the door again. I pretended that we wanted something to drink. He put his head out the window and threatened again to shoot us.

Parker is not deterred. He breaks down the door. As soon as the door flew open, a kidnapper shot at us, and the ball lodged in my ankle, bringing me to the ground. But I soon rose and my comrade, then firing on them, they took to their heels. The next day, my ankle was very painful. With a knife, I extracted the ball, but kept the wound a secret. As long before we learned that for our own security, it was best not to let such things be generally known.

The Lion of Lancaster makes it through the 1840s without being found out. He also meets his wife, Eliza. She too escaped slavery in Maryland, and she becomes a key member of the Self-Protection Society.

And not long after they marry, they get word about a new crackdown from a new law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It's signed by President Millard Fillmore, and it's part of this whole group of laws that is known as the Compromise of 1850. Congress can see that the country is breaking apart, and this compromise is their attempt to fix that. And Southerners are angry that escaped freedom-seeking slaves can find refuge in the north, hence this law.

It makes it so that a group of federal commissioners can really easily send anyone accused of being a fugitive slave back to the South. You don't get to go before a jury. Sworn statements from two men are all the evidence that's needed. And there's also a financial incentive.

The person deciding the case gets double the money if they decide to send someone back to slavery rather than declaring them free. And if any free northerners refuse to help with slave-catching operations, they will be arrested. States like Pennsylvania had felt relatively safe. But this law changes that.

Under the pretext of enforcing the fugitive slave law, the slaveholders did not hesitate to violate all other laws made for the good government and protection of society, and converted the old state of Pennsylvania. So long the hope of fleeing bondmen, wearied and heartbroken, into a common hunting ground for their human prey. Southern slaveholders are ready to use this new law to their advantage.

Take Edward Gorsage. He has been trying to recapture four men who escaped from his plantation in Maryland. He's been trying to track them down himself, but now he has the power of the federal government behind him. And then Gorsuch learns that the four men are staying in the town of Christiana, Pennsylvania. They're sheltering in the home of someone named William.

Edward Gorsuch, Maryland plantation owner and enslaver, goes to Philadelphia to get a warrant and enlist a U.S. Marshal so that he can track down these four men. He knows where he's going, who he's looking for, and and they put together a little posse and they think, oh, this is going to be no big deal. When I get there, I'll just talk them out of it. They'll come along peacefully, no big deal.

Borsich sets off along with his son, a U.S. Marshal named Henry Klein, and a few other neighbors and relatives.

Meanwhile, the Lion of Lancaster has gotten word that they're coming. September 11, 1851. Gorsuch and his posse arrive in Christiana. They show up that morning, knock on the door. We're here. We have a warrant for the capture of these people. And Parker's like, sorry, doesn't mean anything to me. I then told him to take another step and I'll break his neck. He again said, I am the United States Marshal. I told him I didn't care for him or the United States.

William throws them off and says, I don't care about that. I have no country. This is what we believe and this is what we do. If you do this, this is what's going to happen. Two of the four men that Gorsuch is looking for are inside the house. So is Parker's wife, Eliza, plus her sister and her sister's husband, along with other members of the Self-Protection Society. I told them all not to be afraid nor give up to any slaveholder, but to fight until death.

Gorsuch and Klein barge into the house, and Parker addresses them from the top of his staircase. The men they seek are on the second floor. Mr. Gorsuch then said, You have my property, to which I replied, Go in the room down there and see if there's anything there belonging to you. There are beds in a bureau, chairs, and other things. Then go out to the barn. There you'll find a cow and some hogs. See if any of them are yours.

At some point in the ensuing argument, Parker throws a fishing gig down the stairs. It's a kind of pitchfork. And Gorsuch and Klein run out of the house. Parker then barricades the door and everybody takes positions at windows around the house, including his wife. And she's like, you know, babe, you want me to sound the alarm? I will sound the alarm. Like I think we should sound the alarm. The alarm.

The society members have a pre-established signal for danger. It's a horn, maybe a ram's horn. Eliza Parker takes her position at the window and blows. When the horn sounded from the garret window, one of the ruffians asked the others what it meant, and Klein said to me, What do you mean by blowing that horn? I did not answer. They're like what's going on? What's going on? They start shooting at the window, laying out all their bullets into the window.

My wife then went down on her knees and, drawing her head and body below the range of the window, the horn resting on the seal blew blast after blast while the shots poured thick and fast around her. The only thing that saves Eliza is that it's a stone house and she is hiding beneath the window. Yeah. Then, Korsich and his posse turned their attention back to William Parker. While I was leaning out the window, Klein fired a pistol at me.

But the shot went too high. The ball broke the glass just above my head. Parker fires back. and grazes Gorsuch's shoulder. Then of course the marshal says we're gonna get a hundred men here. Thinking that's really gonna scare them, but he's making it up. They're like, not a hundred people and miles from here, we know that. I said, see here, when you go to Lancaster, don't bring a hundred men, bring five hundred. It'll take all the men in Lancaster to change our purpose or take us alive.

It's now around 7 a.m., and more and more people are showing up. Some to support the marshal, and some responding to Eliza's signal. They describe the mist rising up out of the valley, so you've got people emerging from the crowd, surrounding the house and surrounding the gorse. The first men to engage Korsuch and his party are Quakers, white men who live side by side with the formerly enslaved people in the region. Elijah Lewis and Kastner Hanway.

And Castor Hanway was like, Why are you here? Elijah Lewis is, we don't take kindly to kidnappers here. Klein then shows his warrant. Uh Kastner Hanway reads it and then turns, you know, basically says, I'm not here to help you. Remember, according to the new fugitive slave law, US citizens are legally required to help capture escaped slaves when asked. But these two Quakers refused.

Marshall tries to deputize them and they're like, Look, you know what? You should not be messing with these people. You're gonna get hurt. Edward Gorsuch is still emphatic. He's still like, no, I'm entitled. The law says, the state says, these are my property. I then walked up to where he stood, his arms resting on the gate, trembling as if afflicted by palsy, and laid my hand on his shoulder, saying, I have seen pistols before today.

Gorsuch's son, standing nearby, decides to taunt Parker with a slur. And Parker says he'll knock the man's teeth down his throat. At this he fired upon me, and I ran up to him and knocked the pistol out of his hand, when he let the other one fall and ran in the field. William Parker's brother in law shoots at Gorsuch's son as he runs. Then Samuel Thompson, one of the men that Gorsuch had enslaved, joins the confrontation. Old man, you better go home to Maryland, said Samuel.

You had better give up and come home with me, said the old man. Thompson smacks Gorsuch with the butt of his gun, and brought him to his knees. Gorsuch rose, a signal to his men. And then it it all pops off. At this time, all the white men opened fire, and we rushed upon them. When they turned, threw down their guns, and ran away. Edward Gorsuch is being beaten up by his insane property. These four men, they pounce on him, they overtake him. I saw as many as three at a time fighting with him.

Sometimes he was on his knees, then his back, and again his feet would be where his head should be. It doesn't take long. It's maybe 15-20 minutes before everything stops. The riot, so-called, was now entirely ended. The elder Gorsuch was dead, and his son and nephew were both wounded, and I have reason to believe others were. How many? It would be difficult to say.

Nobody from Parker's side is killed. And at first, Parker doesn't want to leave Lancaster. He thinks maybe he'll just hide, evade capture, like he's always done. It is his friends and neighbors who say, no, dude, you need to get out of here. We need to get you out. The great trial now was to leave my wife and family, uncertain as to the result of the journey. I felt I would rather die than be separated from them.

It had to be done, however, and we went forth with heavy hearts, outcasts for the sake of liberty. This is national news because a slaveholder has died and it is really one of the first times that's public where it's like, oh, this business of the fugitive slave law, it could get you killed. President Fillmore calls out the Marines.

They terrorized the entire area, along with hired slave catchers and dozens of police. They are literally going from door to door arresting people. Anybody that they think that was involved by rumor or by truth. It's like we have to shut this thing down. We wanna scare the bejesus out of them so that they do not think to do this again. Meanwhile, William Parker is headed north.

he meets Frederick Douglass in Rochester. Douglas is gonna help him secure passage across the border to Canada. And William Parker says to Douglas, Hey, Freddie, I want to give you a gift for helping us out. And he gives to him the pistol that fell from Edward Gorsuch's hand. And he says, let this be a token for the battle of Christiana. Twelve days after the Christiana resistance, William Parker makes it across Lake Ontario to Toronto. Eliza and their family will join him soon after.

Back in the US, news of the Christiana resistance, or riot, depending on who you ask, is rippling throughout the country. It's being viewed right away as a bold stand against the Fugitive Slave Act. you know, there's condemnation in some circles that oh no, people died, that's not good.

But the majority of the abolitionist community is like, this is the bold kind of stance that we need. The Fugitive Slave Act was supposed to be a tool to placate Southern slaveholders. Instead, it's become a rallying cry for abolitionists. And now a trial is set to begin. Forty-one men in Christiana, three white, thirty-eight black, have been charged with treason.

President Fillmore wants them convicted and potentially executed to set an example. Don't get in the way of the fugitive slave law again. The first person to stand trial is one of the Quakers who refused to help the US Marshal at the scene, Kastner Hanway. Prosecutors try to say that he was one of the masterminds of this resistance.

And there's no way these inferior beings could have come up with such an ingenious plan. It had to be this white man. The Federal Marshal Henry Klein is a key witness. But the black defendants that he supposedly saw at the scene intentionally wear matching red, white, and blue scarves to court, and Klein can't tell them apart. One author calls it a racist myopia.

In the end, the jury deliberates for just fifteen minutes, and Castner Hanway is found not guilty. The rest of the men are never tried. Southern propaganda said that black people were inherently docile and intellectually incapable, and Parker's stand showed the entire country that wasn't true.

The group was capable, brave, highly organized, and willing to use lethal force to defend their freedom. And the Fugitive Slave Act ends up pushing the nation closer to civil war. It makes it so that northerners can't sit on the sidelines. They have to confront the question of slavery as neighbors are being taken from their homes. Some historians would later argue that the Christiana Revolt was in some ways the first battle of the Civil War.

There's another impact that happens more on the individual level. Back in Maryland, Edward Gorsuch and his family were close with another family just down the road, the Boots. Their son Edwin went on to become one of America's most famous actors. Their other son was a less famous actor, but he'd find notoriety through other means. John Wilkes Booth was very close to the Gorsuch family and when he realizes that

Be no accountability for Edward Gorsarch's death when he realizes that they they won essentially. They escaped, they were never captured. He cannot accept that. He lives with of how can he like get back at this That he feels. Edward Gorsuch's death radicalizes Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. At just 13 years old, he becomes obsessed.

When the war does begin, Thomas Simms, who was arrested in Boston, escapes to the north again, for good this time. And William Parker and his family settle in Canada in a town called Buxton. During the war, he helps ferry escaped slaves across the Great Lakes region via the Underground Railroad. While in Canada, he starts working for Frederick Douglass's newspaper, The North Star. And after the war ends, he writes his autobiographical manuscript.

His editor, James R. Gilmore, notes that Parker required no editing. I have now to bring my narrative to a close. And in so doing, I would return thanks to the Almighty God for the many mercies and favors He has bestowed upon me, and especially for delivering me out of the hands of slaveholders. and placing me in a land of liberty where I can worship God under my own vine and fig tree, with none to molest or make me afraid.

Thanks to the team at Back Pocket Studios and the History Channel for sharing William Parker's story with us. You can hear more stories like this one from History This Week, wherever you get your podcasts, and at HistoryThisweek Podcast.com. Radio Diaries is a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of the best podcasts around. I'm Joe Richman. Thanks for listening.