From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family

12. Traces of Yarrow

12 Traces of Yarrow The end of Yarrow’s bloodline in America did not end his connections to later events in Maryland, Georgetown, and black history. These are worth noting before turning to the rest of his in-laws, the Turners. Yarrow was long remembered in Georgetown, but other connections to his life emerged after his death. Aquilla and Peale’s Granddaughter The first and perhaps strangest example of these connections was that Charles Willson Peale’s granddaughter ended up in Pleasant Valley. Her name was Priscilla Robinson, and she was the daughter of Angelica Peale Robinson. Priscilla married Dr. Henry Boteler of Pleasant Valley in 1814. He had grown up on the Magnolia Plantation a few miles south of Yarrowsburg . After their marriage, the couple settled across the Potomac River in Shepherdstown, Virginia (West Virginia now), founded by Samuel Beall’s business partner Joseph Chapline. Priscilla had four children before dying in 1820 after only five years of marriage. Whether Aquilla had moved to Pleasant Valley before Priscilla died is unknown. Peale painted Yarrow in January 1819, but the brief entries about him in Peale’s diary make no mention of his having a son, much less of the son living in the same farming community as Peale’s granddaughter. Francis Dodge, the Pearl, the Edmonsons, and the Turners Then there is the later owner of Yarrow’s house who stopped a major slave escape that involved descendants of the slaves of James Edmonston. 150 | traces of yarrow Someone had continued to pay the property taxes on Yarrow’s house in Georgetown for years after his death. Tax records show the property belonged to Yarrow’s heirs. Since the payments stopped around the time of Aquilla’s death, he might have been making them. Five years later, in 1837, the city auctioned the property to pay the tax bill. A speculator bought it, then turned around and sold it to Francis Dodge a short time later.1 Dodge was a wealthy merchant in Georgetown . His reason for buying Yarrow’s lot is not known. Dodge had a large house and family in a different part of the town, so he probably purchased Yarrow’s modest property for investment purposes, leasing it out to others. On Saturday night, April 15, 1848, some seventy slaves in Washington slipped quietly through the streets to board a small schooner called the Pearl. Their hope was to sail to freedom in the north. Most were urban slaves, tired of slavery and concerned that they might be sold to slave traders who would ship them off to plantations in the Deep South. Among the escapees were six adult children of Paul Edmonson. Although Edmonson was a free man, some of his children were still slaves. The Edmonsons were surely descendants of slaves of James Edmonston, whose widow had married Samuel Turner almost one hundred years earlier. Now, in 1848, not only was one of the slave descendants, Paul Edmonson, free, but he even owned a forty-acre farm. It was near Olney where the white Edmonston family had once owned so much of the land. Paul’s ancestors undoubtedly acquired the name Edmonson from being slaves of the Edmonstons.2 Mary Turner and the Edmonsons on the Pearl were descended from slaves of the same man.3 The Pearl’s departure went undetected for several hours, giving the vessel a head start on pursuers. However, it was a sailing ship. The night was relatively calm, and the ship’s progress down the Potomac was slow. Eventually, the slaves’ owners in Washington realized what had happened, and a posse assembled on the banks of the Potomac. Daniel Drayton was the abolitionist behind the escape attempt. His memoirs described what happened next: A Mr. Dodge, of Georgetown, a wealthy old gentleman, originally from New England, missed three or four slaves from his family, and a small traces of yarrow | 151 steamboat [the Salem], of which he was the proprietor, was readily obtained. Thirty-five men, including a son or two of old Dodge, and several of those whose slaves were missing, volunteered to man her; and they set out about Sunday noon, armed to the teeth with guns, pistols, bowie-knives, &c., and well provided with brandy and other liquors.4 The Salem chugged down the Potomac after the Pearl and found her around 2 a.m. the next morning, lying at anchor at the mouth...