Excursus: "Did You Help with The Underground Railroad, Grandpa?"

Shoofly Pie

My childhood home near Gap, PA, was about five miles from Christiana, PA. I remember Christiana for two things. The first thing is that it was the home of my mother's sister and her husband—my aunt and uncle—and we often visited them. I particularly liked visiting them because they had television before we did, so I could get to watch that captivating box. I mostly remember watching cartoons and Lassie.


The second thing I remember about Christiana is that there used to be a milk plant right beside the railroad tracks not far from my aunt and uncle's house. One of our neighbors in Gap drove a milk truck that would pick up cans of milk from farmers (mostly Amish) and deliver the cans to the milk plant. There the cans would be unloaded onto a conveyor that trundled them into the plant, the lids would be knocked loose, the milk dumped out into a holding tank, and the emptied cans and lids would be sent through a hot-water wash. Then you'd pull the truck around to the back of the plant to load the still wet and steaming milk cans back into the truck for return to the farmer on the next run.

Not until I was at least twenty years old did I learn that there was much more to Christiana's history than the television at my aunt and uncle's house and the milk plant nearby. I was living on Manhattan's Lower East Side and was reading even more voraciously than ever when I ran across a stocky paperback entitled American Violence: A Documentary History, edited by Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace. I think I might have been ruminating on H. Rap Brown's comment that "...violence is as American as cherry pie..." and so decided that Hofstadter might help me fill in the blanks a little better.

Imagine my curiosity at seeing in the first section an entry entitled "Christiana Affair, 1851." I probably thought it was a reference to Christiana, Delaware, but the introductory paragraph set me straight: it was indeed referring to Christiana, PA—the very Christiana that was the home of my Aunt Anna and Uncle Sylvester.

The backdrop was this: the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act meant that slaves who had escaped to non-slave states could be captured and returned to the south without so much as a trial. What it also meant in practice that any black person could be kidnapped and sold into slavery regardless of their legal status. Groups of northern citizens allied to challenge the execution of this law by preventing the capture of black persons or by freeing captives already taken. The first encounter of this kind to turn deadly occurred in Christiana, PA, in 1851. And it was indeed my Christiana, not somebody else's.

The facts of the Christiana incident are clear: Timonium (MD) slaveowner Edward Gorsuch heard that some of his escaped slaves had taken refuge just outside of Christiana at the home of a well-known "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, a Free Person of Color named William Parker. In September, 1851, armed with both guns and the requisite federal warrant, Gorsuch and his party tried to storm the house where the escaped slaves were hiding, but were met with armed resistance. Gorsuch was killed, his son and several others in their party were wounded, and the rest retreated to Maryland.

A few days laters the Feds arrested thirty-eight of the resistors and charged them with treason for having openly flouted the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Their trial was, as Hofstadter indicates, the first major legal test of the Fugitive Slave Act. After the first of the accused was acquitted, the charges against the rest were dropped. The South was furious: the trial was seen as clear and direct evidence that the North was not operating in good faith regarding the existing compromises on slavery. Some have subsequently called the Christiana Affair the first battle of the Civil War.

I was stunned. How could I have grown up within a few miles of where this had happened and had heard nothing about it? I hadn't even known that Christiana was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, much less that a gun battle over escaped slaves had taken place there.

Part of the answer surely lies with our Amish Mennonite "two-kingdom theology." According to those lights, the kingdom of this world is the kingdom of Caesar. While the kingdom of Caesar is ordained of God, it remains nevertheless outside the perfection of Christ. Christians are first and foremost citizens of the Kingdom of God, and while they are to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, their first allegiance is to the Kingdom of God. And where the priorities of the two kingdoms conflict, the Kingdom of God takes precedence.

For Amish Mennonites, the ethics of the Kingdom of God are manifested in the Sermon on the Mount. The implications for the rule of Caesar are clear: the Sermon on the Mount flatly rejects the use of the sword, whereas the rule of Caesar is predicated on the use of the sword.

A second part of the answer would be the Amish Mennonite notion that Christians are to be separate from the world. Christians are not to take on what is fashionable in either thought, action or even dress, but are to conduct themselves honestly, plainly, and humbly, according to Scripture as discerned by the community of faith.

This part was rather less difficult for a small group of low-German speaking, war-resisting Amish Mennonite farmers in the midst of the English-speaking world of the emergent United States citizenry, many of whom held that their armed triumph over the forces of the tyrant King George III was a sure sign of divine blessing.

Thus, Amish Mennonites generally kept to themselves without mixing in with the larger population. They might get somewhat involved in local government matters, but they generally refused to get involved in any politics that could be seen as leading to violence and in particular, war-making.

I mentioned earlier that the Amish Mennonites in Lancaster County came in for considerable criticism during the Civil War because of their refusal to fight or even to openly support the Union effort. This refusal to get involved seems to have extended to involvement in the Underground Railroad. While the Amish Mennonites did not own slaves, there is, with one small exception, no record of that any of them was involved with the Underground Railroad either. Unlike their Quaker neighbors, who had a long tradition of civic activism, the Pennsylvania Amish Mennonites believed that the way to be true to their faith was to remain withdrawn from the political machinations of the "world."

That tradition of withdrawal remains a very powerful force in Old Order Amish life today, although less so amongst the more liberal Mennonites. Randy Michael Testa reports in After the Fire: the Destruction of the Lancaster County Amish the difficulties he faced in the late 1980s when he tried to rally the Amish to collective political action against an unwanted housing development on some of their farmland. A central part of the urgency of the issue is the fact that more and more Lancaster County farmland is being removed from production for the purposes of development: the Amish have run out of land to farm in Lancaster County. Testa nevertheless reports one Amishman as telling him "My grandpa used to say that given the choice between trusting twelve men at the voting booth or one man on his knees before God, he'd take the man on his knees every time..."

This tradition of withdrawal was very much a part of my parents' lives. I never asked them whether they knew about the Christiana Affair. I don't know why I didn't. I do know that they would have had a very hard time thinking of killing anyone as heroic, slaveholder or no. They were very much in the thrall of the great Anabaptist story of Dirk Willems, the 16th century Dutch Anabaptist who was re-captured when his pursuer fell through the ice. He would have drowned had not Willems turned around to rescue him, which Willems believed to be his Christian duty. Willems was promptly re-arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately executed. Dirk Willems clearly would not have taken a gun and fired at Edward Gorsuch.

On the other hand, how could my tradition have sanctimoniously and piously stood by and done nothing to help our fellow creatures, the escaped and escaping slaves, who were so desperately in need of assistance? Our choice to remain unstained from worldly affairs now seems unforgiveable to me.

A final note: I mentioned that there was one known exception regarding Amish Mennonite assistance in the Underground Railroad. Paton Yoder records it in Eine Würzel: Tennessee John Stoltzfus:

"But it was [Tennessee John Stoltzfus's] son-in-law John S. Stoltzfus who tested the Amish regulations more than anyone else in the family. It was probably in the 1850s when he began to support abolitionism openly and to participate in the underground railroad conspiracy in aiding slaves to escape. This was breaking the law, the federal Fugitive Slave Law. And it was probably in 1860 that he campaigned for Abraham Lincoln for the presidency. Such political and social activism was not to be permitted by a church which was increasingly opposed to voting and solidly opposed to attendance at and participation in political rallies. According to his descendants it was these activities which led the church to place John S. under the ban [excommunication]...The ban almost complete isolation from wife and family and from the members of his congregation...." (p. 50-51)

So someone in our tradition did break ranks, and it cost him his membership in the community from which he drew his identity. Yoder reports that he died a broken man.



Sources: Richard Hofstadter, Michael Wallace, eds. American Violence: A Documentary History (Vintage Books: 1971)

Randy Michael Testa, After the Fire: the Destruction of the Lancaster County Amish (University Press of New England: 1992).

Paton Yoder, Eine Würzel: Tennessee John Stoltzfus (Sutter House: 1979).