African-American Perspective 

The most important issues to African-Americans living in the North in 1851 were continuing racial hostility, violence, and disenfranchisement. The resisters at Christiana would give agency to a growing rhetoric of redemptive violence. If the government of the United States would not protect their natural rights of life, liberty, and property, the African-Americans would protect the rights themselves. African-Americans came to the realization that violent resistance was sometimes necessary. William Parker felt the only way to maintain freedom was by his own right arm.

Frederick Douglass viewed the violence at Christiana as having a special moral and political significance because the event was evidence of black manhood. Violent resistance and African-American manhood was exhibited on a national stage as evidenced through this local event. The significant nature of the resistance coming from the African-American fugitives themselves, made future enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law a futile gesture. Douglass would have applied the same level of redemptive violence had the slave catchers attempted to remove William Parker, Abraham Johnson, and Alexander Pinckney from his Rochester home.

Douglass sarcastically described Gorsuch as a "law abiding citizen" who undertook a "patriotic expedition." Douglass spoke of Gorsuch and his fellow kidnappers as men who forfeited their right to life when then came to the North to deprive fugitives of their freedom. He saw the resisters as righteous and justified in their stand.

Douglass left no doubt as to his belief in the heroism of the resisters. "I could not look upon them as murderers. To me, they were heroic defenders of the just right of man against manstealers and murderers. What they had already done at Christiana, and the cool determination which showed very plainly especially in Parker, left no doubt on my mind that their courage was genuine and that their deeds would equal their words."

A fugitive named Samuel Ringgold Ward expressed an attitude of aggressive resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. His words are a sample of the sort of rhetoric put into practice at Christiana. "We must depend upon ourselves, I think, that in our unprotected state, we are driven to the most desperate circumstances. We must act according to this desperation. Let no man consent to be a slave. Let no man be taken from the North alive. Liberty we enjoy but too little of, even in New England. What little we do enjoy, is too precious to be yielded up without a struggle. It is worth fighting and dying for. Let us die for it, if need be, rather than tamely submit to being taken to the horrible Bastille of Slavery." Ward certainly would have approved of his rhetoric being put into practice at Christiana.

Many African-Americans voiced their commitment to rebellion. Martin Delany announced to the mayor of Pittsburgh that no slave-catcher would take him alive, "if he crosses the threshold of my door, and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet, I hope the grave may refuse my body a resting-place, and righteous Heaven my spirit a home, O, no! He cannot enter that house and we both live." Joshua Smith advised every fugitive to, "show himself a man" and "arm himself with a revolver." Robert Johnson passionately admonished, "we will not go into the depots or elsewhere after the slave-hunter, but when he rushes upon our shield, kill him."

Voices from across the country lauded the stand of the heroes at Christiana. At a meeting held at Zion Baptist Church a resolution was put forward that said, "Resolved, that it is the duty of every man who thinks his house and his person worth defending, to contribute his might to defend these Christiana patriots against the lawless expression of a cruel, besotted, and self-condemned Executive." The image of Gorsuch and the federal government as the villains was a popular and effective image in the African-American community.