As W.E.B DuBois once said of the no-win situation faced by African-Americans, "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." William Parker and the other resisters at Christiana operated on the assumption that they, as free men had the natural right to be free. They were not born slaves, nor did they love slavery. They were an example of collective black agency as exercised by free men in defense of their freedom.

Edward Gorsuch was the embodiment of a myopic white slaveholder who saw himself as the patriarch of his farm. By refusing to view slavery as a deprivation of the right to basic manhood, and by hiring Henry Kline, a man who William Parker called, "a professional kidnapper of the basest stamp". Edward Gorsuch helped to meld the defiant mind-set he encountered on the day of his death.

President Millard Fillmore called the resisters a, "lawless and violent mob." He promised to defend future efforts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. William Parker and his fellow resisters did not feel themselves to be bound by the Fugitive Slave Law. The African-Americans who participated in the resistance were proud of their role in fighting the tyranny which the law represented. The nature of the white reaction to the events of September 1851 serve to verify violent resistance as possibly the only rational reaction open to William Parker and his fellow resisters on that day.

The role of the proud African-American resisters at Christiana has not been lost on history. For several decades the hero of the resistance was said to be the white bystander, Castner Hanway. The same presumption of white superiority that haunted early racial dynamics, haunted the resisters as it was the assumption of white counsel for the actions of the resisters which created false heroes. Recent scholarship has shown the heroic role of William Parker in its true light. Redemptive violence, as practiced by the African-American resistance movement, has become viewed as a necessary means of self-protection in a nation which did not protect William Parker's natural rights as a man. Parker believed the law placed him outside the scope of government protection. If the nation's laws would not protect his rights, he would protect them by his own hand.

As Frederick Douglass stated in September 1851 when criticizing the sedition charge against the resistance at Christiana, "This is to cap the climax of American absurdity, to say nothing of American infamy. Our government has virtually made every colored man in the land an outlaw; one who may be hunted by any villain who may think proper to do so, and if the hunted man, finding himself stripped of all legal protection, shall lift his arm in his own defense, why forsooth, he is arrested, arraigned, and tried for high treason, and if found guilty, he must suffer death. The basis of allegiance is protection. We owe allegiance to the government that protects us, but to the government that destroys us, we owe no allegiance. The only law which the alleged slave has a right to know anything about, is the law of nature…and his manhood is his justification for shooting down any creature who shall attempt to reduce him to the condition of a brute."