Some call it the event that set off the Civil War. For playwright Harry W. Kendall, the 1851 Christiana Riot has become his own spiritual journey. The first time Kendall wrote about Christiana's "flight of freedom," he focused on history's biggest players: former slave-turned-farmer Willie Parker and Maryland slave owner Edward Gorsuch, who battled each other to the finish in southern Lancaster County. Now Kendall has rewritten his history of the Christiana Riot under the name "Cry Christiana Morning" for Theater of the Seventh Sister. But this time, the story comes from a decidedly different angle one that might have stumped other writers. "The assignment I got was to really focus on bringing out Eliza and the female aspect of the resistance to slavery," Kendall said. Eliza was Parker's wife, who also made her own journey from plantation slavery to Christiana to eventual freedom in Ontario after the riot that set in motion a movement that changed the nation. It was Sept. 11, 1851. A year earlier, the stage for the riot was set with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a federal offense not to assist slave owners in recapturing their runaways. Parker, also a runaway slave, had been hiding several runaways on his farm near present-day Lower Valley Road when their owner, Gorsuch, his son, Dickinson, and five other men, including a federal marshal, came looking for them. Gorsuch asked at a Christiana tavern and was directed to Parker's farm. Local farmers, white sympathizers and blacks joined arms in a standoff at the farm. After a violent eruption, Gorsuch lay dead, his son and another man wounded. U.S.
