Pearl incident
The Pearl incident was the largest recorded nonviolent escape attempt by enslaved people in United States history.
Freedom for the two Edmonson sisters was purchased that year with funds raised by Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York.
The escape inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe in writing her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), in which people in slavery dreaded being "sold South", and increased support for abolitionism in the North.
Three white men were initially charged on numerous counts with aiding the escape and transporting the captives; the captains Daniel Drayton and Edward Sayres were tried and convicted in 1848.
Like the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia and others in the South, Washington, D.C., was a "slave society" as defined by the historian Ira Berlin in his Many Thousands Gone: A History of Two Centuries of American Slavery.
Numerous families in the city actively enslaved people, generally forcing them to act as domestic servants and artisans.
[2] They sought to plan an event that would capture the attention of Congress and the country to promote an end to slavery in the District of Columbia.
White supporters included the abolitionists William L. Chaplin and Gerrit Smith of New York, who helped find the captain Daniel Drayton and pay for a ship.
[1] For two days prior to the slaves' escape, many city residents had been celebrating the news from France of the expulsion of King Louis Philippe and the founding of the French Second Republic, with its assertion of universal human rights and liberty.
Jennings confessed his role in organizing the escape in a letter to his mentor, the northern senator Daniel Webster, an abolitionist.
[1] The captain found to pilot the ship, Daniel Drayton, was from Philadelphia and supported abolition,[1] but admitted that he was offered money to transport the slaves.
Dodge, of Georgetown, a wealthy old gentleman, originally from New England, missed three or four slaves from his family, and a small steamboat, of which he was the proprietor, was readily obtained.
[12]The party on The Salem found The Pearl on Monday morning near Point Lookout in Maryland, upon which they immediately took the slaves and ship back to Washington.
There they would likely be sold to work on the large sugar and cotton plantations, which held two-thirds of the slaves in the South by the time of the Civil War.
After a few days, I saw a procession of captured slaves, who had sought their liberty in a Potomac schooner, chained two-and-two, conducted toward the slave-pen; and there I noticed my bootblack trudging along in my boots.
Drayton, Sayres, and English were initially indicted; the educator Horace Mann, who had helped the slaves from the La Amistad mutiny in 1839, was hired as their main lawyer.
[12][14] In response to the escape attempt and the riot, Congress ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia, although it did not abolish slavery.
[18] [19] The failed attempt provoked reactions from abolitionists and pro-slavery activists across the country and contributed to the divisive rhetoric that ultimately led to the American Civil War.
It also inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe in her writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin, an immediately popular anti-slavery novel published in 1852.
