Failed Escape Sheds New Light on D.C. Slavery
After incarceration in the Washington, D.C., jail and slave pens in three different states, the teenage sisters Mary (left) and Emily Edmonson likely had this rare daguerreotype taken in New York City in 1852. They were in the city to meet with Harriet Beecher Stowe in the home of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who had helped raise the money to free them. Collection of Mary Kay Ricks hide caption
After incarceration in the Washington, D.C., jail and slave pens in three different states, the teenage sisters Mary (left) and Emily Edmonson likely had this rare daguerreotype taken in New York City in 1852. They were in the city to meet with Harriet Beecher Stowe in the home of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who had helped raise the money to free them.
Collection of Mary Kay RicksBook Excerpt
Attending an 1850 anti-slavery convention in Cazenovia, N.Y., are Emily Edmonson (from left); Theodosia Gilbert (the finance of William Chaplin, who had helped organize the Pearl escape); Gerrit Smith, the wealthy abolitionist who likely financed the Pearl escape; Frederick Douglass, the leading anti-slavery orator of his day and chairman of the Fugitive Slave Law Convention; and Mary Edmonson. Daguerreotype by Ezra Greenleaf Weld; Courtesy of Madison County (New York) Historical Society hide caption
Attending an 1850 anti-slavery convention in Cazenovia, N.Y., are Emily Edmonson (from left); Theodosia Gilbert (the finance of William Chaplin, who had helped organize the Pearl escape); Gerrit Smith, the wealthy abolitionist who likely financed the Pearl escape; Frederick Douglass, the leading anti-slavery orator of his day and chairman of the Fugitive Slave Law Convention; and Mary Edmonson.
Daguerreotype by Ezra Greenleaf Weld; Courtesy of Madison County (New York) Historical SocietyWashington, D.C., has always figured itself as the place of debate and discourse. But just before the Civil War, the nation's capital was itself part of the debate over slavery.
A plan to smuggle many of the city's slaves down the Potomac River to freedom almost worked. Afterward, divisions deepened between the influential slave-owners and abolitionists. The city was swept up in controversy that would soon change the course of history.
Mary Kay Ricks chronicles the attempted escape and the aftermath in her new book Escape on the Pearl.
In 1848, helped by a local cell of the Underground Railroad, nearly 80 fugitive slaves — many of whom worked in the best homes and hotels in Washington — made their way in twos and threes from Georgetown and some from Alexandria, Va., across the National Mall to a small, secluded wharf. There they boarded a schooner named the Pearl.
Ricks says the escape plan was a political maneuver by the frustrated abolitionists "to take nearly 80 people and get them out of Washington and arrive in the North and say, 'We have escaped from the nation's capital.' They wanted to shine a light more broadly on it."
The plan failed. Bad weather stalled the Pearl and a steamboat sent after the escapees found them easily. But the incident "accomplished a fiercer debate in Congress," Ricks says.
"They all knew slavery was legal (in Washington), but here was an incident that was drawing national attention and international attention. Most of the captured fugitives were sold to slave traders. That was the tradition.
"One of the slave traders put nearly 50 fugitives in a railway car in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol ... and their family and loved ones came to say goodbye to them. It went to the newspapers throughout the North. This actually created a move to end at least the slave trade in Washington," Ricks says.
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