The Pearl : A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac (review)

The struggle over slavery that preceded the American Civil War was marked by numerous scenes of conflict. In 1831, Southampton County, Virginia, witnessed a rebellion led by slave preacher Nat Turner; while in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, a proslavery mob killed abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy. In numerous cities across the North, biracial mobs forcefully resisted the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, while in Kansas Territory, antislavery and proslavery bands fought a guerrilla war beginning in 1856. But no location was more important than Washington, DC. As the nation's capital, Washington hosted a debate between opposing sectional political forces. As a slaveholding city on the South's northern periphery, it was vulnerable to slave escape and northern abolitionist interference. Perhaps most important, slaveholding and slave-trading Washington symbolized the power of slaveholders over the entire United States.

In The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac, Josephine F. Pacheco provides a comprehensive account of an event that more than any other demonstrates the interplay of these three characteristics of Washington. The escape attempt of April 1848, involving seventy-six men, women, and children aboard the schooner Pearl, was the largest unsuccessful such undertaking in American history, surpassed only by the successful escape of 135 slaves aboard the brig Creole in November 1841. Although other crises soon eclipsed the Pearl in the public imagination, it was a riveting event that preoccupied Washington for weeks. Despite the failure, it frightened local slaveholders and southern politicians while encouraging slavery's opponents.

As Pacheco points out, anticipation among slaves in Washington and its vicinity that they or their loved ones would be sold to traders and sent into the Deep South led to the escape attempt. Daniel Bell, a free black resident of Washington who feared for his enslaved wife and children, worked with northern white abolitionist William L. Chaplin to plan the escape. Chaplin, who reported on Congress for the Albany Patriot, chartered the Pearl to transport slaves to the North and freedom. Shortly after its arrival from Philadelphia, the ship's crew of three white men, led by Daniel Drayton, took the escapees on board and sailed down the Potomac. Before dawn, however, a posse embarked on a steamboat from Georgetown, overtook the Pearl, capturing all aboard, and brought them back to Washington where they were paraded through the streets on their way to jail.

Three days of rioting by angry white mobs and nearly a week of acrimonious debate between antislavery and proslavery members of Congress followed. At the center of the rioting was the office of the city's antislavery newspaper, the National Era, and the nearby home of its editor, Gamaliel Bailey. Rioters also threatened antislavery Congressman Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, who also became a focal point of debate in Congress. Meanwhile, angry masters sold the would-be escapees to traders, and prosecution of the would-be rescuers began. Drayton, convicted of transporting slaves and jailed indefinitely, never implicated Chaplin or other abolitionists involved in the escape attempt. Most of the slaves disappeared into the Deep South, while abolitionists and black families organized to purchase the freedom of a few. Most notable among those freed were Emily and Mary Edmundson, who attracted the attention of famous New York City evangelist Henry Ward Beecher and his soon-to-be more famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Within the last quarter century there has been a fair amount written by historians on the Pearl escape attempt. Richard C. Rohrs and I have written articles centered, respectively, on the congressional debates and the riots, Catharine M. Hanchett has written on the Edmondson sisters, and most recent is my Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C. 1828–1865 (2003). Like Pacheco's book, Subversives devotes a chapter to the unfolding of the escape attempt, placing it in the context of continued cooperation between northern abolitionists and local African Americans in Washington. The book emphasizes Chaplin's role...