In September, Edward Gorsuch travels with a posse of seven white men plus his eldest son to Christiana, Pennsylvania, where he’s heard that the men are being sheltered by another escaped slave, the abolitionist William Parker. Gorsuch confronts Parker on Parker’s doorstep.

Parker orders Gorsuch away.

Gorsuch answers that he’ll breakfast in hell before he leaves without his property. The white men attempt to force their way into Parker’s house. They have warrants and a sheriff with them. The law, they say, is on their side.

Parker blocks their entry. He says if they take another step, he’ll break their necks.

Meanwhile Parker’s wife, Eliza, has opened a window on the second floor. From it, she sounds several loud blasts on a tin horn. The first shots are fired at her.

Neighbors hear the horn. They come at a run, they are armed, and in the subsequent conflict, Gorsuch is killed and his older son, Dickinson, badly wounded.

Johnny happens to be with Thomas when the news of his father’s death arrives. Johnny’s outraged to learn that a man can’t even go and recover his own slaves in safety.

Cruel retribution comes for the black community in Christiana, but it doesn’t dim Johnny’s fury. Five white and thirty-eight black men are arrested, and still no one is found guilty of the killing. William and Eliza Parker have fled to Canada. Why has no one gone after them? If Johnny were only older, he thinks, he’d see to this himself.

The whole episode clarifies his thinking about slavery, which it turns out is not at all the same as his father’s. He doesn’t say so to Mother, opposition to Father always making her so uncomfortable, but he shares his views freely at school, where they are largely agreed. Slavery, Johnny tells his schoolmates, is the luckiest thing to ever happen to the Negro. He describes Retreat Farm as a peaceful, happy kingdom until robbed of its benevolent king. “I have seen the black man whipped,” he will later concede, “but only when he deserved more than he got.” Over the years, he speaks often of what happened at Christiana. So does the South.

So does Frederick Douglass, who’ll say that Parker’s action, more than anything else, led to the destruction of the Fugitive Slave Act. Others, later, will call the battle at Christiana the beginning of the Civil War.

—

Father wants a larger house for the family on the farm. He hires an architect, James Gifford, to build something in the currently popular Gothic Revival style. In October, work commences with the digging of the cellar, done on Father’s instructions, in such a way so as not to trouble the nearby locust trees.