On the evening of April 15, 1848, seventy-seven slaves attempted one of history's most audacious escapes—and put in motion a furiously fought battle over slavery in America that would consume Congress, the streets of the capital, and the White House itself. Setting sail from Washington, D.C., on a schooner named the Pearl , the fugitives began a daring 225-mile journey to freedom in the North. Mary Kay Ricks's unforgettable chronicle brings to life the Underground Railroad's largest escape attempt, the seemingly immutable politics of slavery, and the individuals who struggled to end it. All the while, Ricks focuses her narrative on the intimate story of two young sisters who were onboard the Pearl , and sets their struggle for liberation against the powerful historical forces that would nearly tear the country apart.
After a terrifyingly calm night, the wind came up as the sun rose the next morning, and the small schooner shot off down the Potomac River. Hours later, stunned owners—including a former first lady, a shipping magnate, a former congressman, a federal marshal, and a Baptist minister—raised the alarm. Authorities quickly formed a posse that chased the fugitives down the river. But with a head start and a robust wind that filled their sails, the Pearl raced ahead—unaware that a violent squall was moving into their path and would halt their bid for freedom.
Escape on the Pearl reveals the incredible odyssey of those who were onboard, including the remarkable lives of fugitives Mary and Emily Edmonson, the two sisters at the heart of the story, who would trade servitude in elite Washington homes for slave pens in three states. Through the efforts of the sisters' father and the northern "conductor" who had helped organize the escape, an abolitionist outcry arose in the North, calling for the two girls to be rescued. Ultimately, Mary and Emily would go on to stand shoulder to shoulder with such abolitionist luminaries as Frederick Douglass and attend Oberlin College under the sponsorship of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
A story of courage and determination, Escape on the Pearl revives one of the most poignant chapters of U.S. history. The Edmonsons, the other fugitives of the Pearl, and those who helped them can now take their rightful place as American heroes.
Amazon.com Review
When 77 slaves attempted a daring escape down the Potomac River in a schooner called the Pearl in 1848, the nation's capital--especially the dozens of prominent citizens whose domestic slaves had disappeared--was shaken by the news. In returning to this audacious but largely forgotten episode in Escape on the Pearl , Mary Kay Ricks follows the stories of many of the slaves who made the perilous attempt and in the telling gives a short history of the last decades of American slavery and the country it divided. But most fascinating is her portrait of Washington, D.C., in the years before the Civil War, where North and South came together on territory where slavery was still legal, and where, for the African American residents of the city, the relative freedoms of the North and the terrors of transport to the brutal plantation slavery of the Deep South felt equally close.
Escape on the Pearl is Mary Kay Ricks's first book, after years of research on abolitionism and local D.C. history. For our Grownup School feature she has recommended the 11 books to read on the Underground Railroad, and she also answered a few of our questions about her book:
Questions for Mary Kay Ricks
Amazon.com: How did you first come across the story of the escape on the Pearl?
Mary Kay Ricks: While researching 19th-century Washington history for a different project, I kept stumbling on references to an escape attempt on a schooner named the Pearl that set off pro-slavery riots in the streets of Washington. The incident went on to spark fierce debate on slavery in Congress--a discussion it always worked hard to avoid. I was a co-founder of Washington, D.C.'s High School Friends of SNCC during the civil rights struggle of the 1960's, so I thought I was well-versed in the struggle for freedom. Yet I had never heard the story of the Pearl , nor had most people I knew. I began researching the escape, and eventually accrued much material, even letters--never analyzed in connection with the story--that described much of the planning of the escape. I had to write this book.
Amazon.com: It was an explosive story at the time. What did the news represent for American society when it broke in 1848?
Ricks: The capture of a schooner attempting to take nearly 80 enslaved Americans to freedom on a schooner represented a breakdown of order and an organized resistance to slavery in the nation's capital that served as a harbinger of the growing conflict that would lead to the Civil War. At the same time, discussions in Congress were becoming increasingly fractious over whether slavery could be extended to the vast swath of new territory that had just come under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government at the conclusion of the Mexican War. Southern politicians clamored to extend slavery into those lands and Northern politicians began to come together for the first time, for a variety of different reasons, to demand that it remain free soil. It was this struggle over whether those new lands would be free, slave, or a mix of each that led directly to the Civil War.
Amazon.com: One striking thing to me about the society you describe was that there wasn't a clean line between slavery and freedom. Families--even married couples--were divided between slave and free, some slaves were working for wages to buy their freedom, and free blacks, especially after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, were always in danger of being reclaimed into slavery. What did freedom mean for African Americans before the Civil War, and what did they do to achieve it?
Ricks: Freedom, verified by legal papers that free people were required to carry on their persons, meant that you couldn't readily be taken away and sold to a slave trader, that you had some say in where you lived and worked, and that you could possibly work hard enough to raise money to free loved ones who were still enslaved. Purchasing freedom was a project fraught with obstacles. To give an example of just how costly slaves could be, Paul Edmonson, the free father of six children who joined the Pearl escape, owned a 40-acre farm in Maryland that was valued less than any of those children was as a slave. (All 14 Edmonson children were enslaved because their mother was a slave--that was the universal law in slave jurisdictions.) Enslaved African-Americans attempting to purchasing freedom were always at an extreme disadvantage because the arrangement relied on the good faith of an owner. Slave testimonies are filled with accounts of slaves who had paid all but the last few installments on their freedom when the owner changed the terms of the contract or ignored it completely and sold the nearly free person to a trader. And the death of owner could change everything as heirs worked to undo any promises of emancipation. That happened to 11 members of the Bell family who took their chances on the Pearl.
Fear of sale or removal to the Lower South was very real. In a little known American exodus, nearly one million slaves from the Upper South were part of a forced migration to new lands, which often separated them from loved ones who were owned by different people. Slaves often knew the warning signs that their owner was looking to sell, and some were able to find contacts for passage on the Underground Railroad. But it was simply unfeasible for large numbers of slaves, even those in the Upper South, to reach freedom. Money and other resources were extremely limited and escape usually meant splitting up families, the one thing that the enslaved attempted to avoid at all cost. Escape was also terribly risky and could land a fugitive, if captured, in a worse situation in the Deep South. That is what made the Pearl escape all the more extraordinary. And for those who did successfully reach the North, there was no guarantee that they would remain free. When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, more than 20,000 fugitives from slavery who had lived in the Northern states for years packed their bags and moved to Canada. Freedom meant leaving your homes and the country you were born in.
Amazon.com: Last year, James Swanson's Manhunt painted a vivid picture of Washington, D.C., at the end of the Civil War as a small town that is hard to recognize from our perspective. Your book could be seen as a prequel to that book in a way, both in its story of how we got to the Civil War and its same close attention to the geography of the capital city. What was the Washington you describe like in the 1840s?
Ricks: Before the Civil War, Washington was a city where the majority of politicians lived in boarding houses and hotels. Neighborhoods had popped up like isolated gopher holes where a few gleaming white-marble buildings rose out of the mud surrounded by small wooden and brick houses on streets rife with loose geese, pigs, and even cows. The Capitol, the U.S. Patent Office (today's newly refurbished Portrait Gallery and Museum of American Art), the Executive Mansion, and the Post Office (now a hip downtown hotel) were then and are now spectacularly beautiful buildings. But much of the city, in contrast, looked bleak. Only Pennsylvania Avenue was paved. In 1848, long after New York, Boston, Baltimore, and even Newark had gas lighting, Congress had only just approved the formation of the Washington Gas Light Company. But theatre was popular and so were bowling, billiards, and gambling. Although many described Washington as a backwater with little sophistication, the newspaper advertisements show a surprising range of goods and foods from imported food delicacies, wines, and sherry to piano fortes. Pharmacies were well-stocked with supplies of Swedish leeches. But enormous changes would come with the Civil War. The population in the District of Columbia, about 51,000 in 1850, nearly trebled to over 130,000 by 1870. Many whites who had come to Washington for war jobs decamped the overburdened and rundown city after the war. But the 40,000 African Americans who had fled the Confederacy stayed.
Amazon.com: You share a last name with two of the fugitive slaves on the Pearl (and with some of their descendants)? Was that just a happy coincidence, or have you found a connection between their families and yours? What connections has writing about this story made for you?
Ricks: Two fugitives of the Pearl shared my last name but were not owned by people named Ricks. In fact, not one of the fugitives on board the Pearl shared a surname with an owner. My husband's family arrived in Virginia sometime in the mid-17th century as Quakers and became slave owners. They later became Baptists, probably when the Society of Friends forbade slave-owning. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin includes a copy of a runaway slave advertisement placed by one of my husband's ancestors. It is more likely that the fugitives on the Pearl , both of whom were transported to New Orleans with the Edmonsons, were descended from slaves who been owned at some time by a different branch of the English Ricks family who had come into Maryland many years before.
Interestingly, my family and I now feel very connected to an African-American couple from Maryland named Vernon and Janet Ricks, who are members of Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Georgetown, a congregation which was formed in 1816 as the first black church in the District of Columbia and figures prominently in my book. Vernon Ricks, who may well be related to the two men who took a chance for freedom in 1848, and his wife are very active in their church, the NAACP, and many civic organizations. I worked with Vernon and Janet, Mt. Zion, the National Park Service, and a consortium of Georgetown organizations when I wrote and directed an historical recreation of an 1858 escape on the Underground Railroad to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the tobacco port that is now a part of the District of Columbia. Vernon took on the role of Alfred Pope, a member of Mt. Zion and one of the few Pearl fugitives who had not been sold south after capture, and Janet played his wife. Later, my family was invited to a special Sunday at Mt. Zion to honor the Ricks family that had been part of that congregation for several generations. When the Ricks family members in the church were asked to rise, my husband and I, his parents, and our two children rose as well.
“Exciting. . . . Fascinating. . . . Succeeds as both a historical account and an enjoyable read.” (Chicago Sun-Times)
“An exciting and important story...A must read for all who seek to understand the history of freedom in America.” (James Oliver Horton, co-author of Slavery and the Making of America *)
“The thrilling story of the largest mass escape of fugitive slaves in American history.” (Fergus Borderwich, author of Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America )
“Compelling . . . gripping . . . connects the reader to the desperation and courage of freedom-seekers.” (Ann Hagedorn, author of Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad )*
About the Author
A former attorney at the Department of Labor, Mary Kay Ricks has written about Washington history in numerous publications including the Washington Post. She is the founder of Tour DC (www.tourdc.com), which features in-depth walking tours in the nation's capital, and lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.
On the overcast evening of April 15, 1848, at around 9:00 p.m., a soft clump of dirt struck the window of a servant's small room above the kitchen in the home of Alexander Ray, a prominent businessman in Washington and Georgetown. The family's spacious and well appointed house stood in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, west of the President's House, tucked between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Potomac River, and just a few blocks from where a twenty- two- foot revolving dome cradled the Naval Observatory's telescope. Ray was a prosperous merchant who had the means and the connections to hire the very best of servants, and it was well known in their circle that a family by the name of Edmonson was uncommonly bright and talented help for the better class of people.
That evening, the noise at the upstairs window alerted thirteen-year-old Emily Edmonson, a still slightly plump girl with a warm brown complexion somewhere between her father's deeper color and her mother's much lighter skin tone. Emily's appealing features were set in a slightly rounded, gentle face that already showed the promise of the lovely young woman she was becoming. Lifting the window, she saw her older brother Samuel, about five feet, six inches tall and fair- skinned like his mother, standing at the side door of the house and looking up at her window. He had come from an elegant home some eighteen blocks to the east on Judiciary Square, not far from the Capitol. Samuel lived and worked as a butler in the home of Joseph Bradley, one of Washington's most successful and prominent lawyers.
Emily, neatly and modestly dressed as always, quickly picked up a small bag and quietly slipped through the house and out the door into the sleepy neighborhood. She and her brother began walking east near a factory at Seventeenth Street that produced ice cream, which could be delivered to a customer's door for $2.50 a quart, a hugely expensive treat at a time when an acre of nearby Mary land farmland cost about $15 and skilled workers earned around $1.25 a day. They walked steadily and quietly toward the other side of the Executive Mansion, which, as the Stranger's Guide in the most recent City Directory of Washington explained, was now commonly called the White House.
Emily and Samuel carefully made their way through the unlit and largely unpaved streets. The Washington Gas Light Company was in its formative stages with a bill of incorporation waiting to be reported in the House of Representatives from the Congressional Committee on the District of Columbia. Unlike New York, Boston, St. Louis, Louisville, Baltimore, or Newark, the city lacked any or ganized system of modern streetlights, and public lighting was limited to the whale oil that burned in a few dozen twelve-foot-tall iron street lamps along Pennsylvania Avenue designed by Charles Bulfinch, the architect of the Capitol's low, copper-sheathed wooden dome. A year earlier, Congress had seen to its own needs by installing a self-contained gas lighting system that functioned only when Congress was in session. One of the city newspapers reported that the tall lighting apparatus had resulted in an alarmingly high death rate for swarms of birds drawn to its unusual light.
The darkness served brother and sister well as they made their way to another of the city's still few private homes near Thirteenth and G Streets, where their sister Mary worked, not far from where the recently deceased former president, John Quincy Adams, had lived. Though certainly not a radical abolitionist, Adams had endeared himself to enemies of slavery when he argued the appeal before the Supreme Court that freed the Africans who had revolted onboard the ship called La Amistad and when, as a member of Congress, he successfully campaigned against a congressional gag rule that had for eight years automatically tabled any slavery-related petition.
Mary was watching for her brother and sister. When Emily cautiously called up to her from the back of the house, Mary quickly opened the window above them and, to prevent alerting anyone, tossed out her shoes. At five feet, six inches tall, the slim, fifteen-year-old Mary stood four inches taller than Emily and carried herself with a more grave countenance over her lovely features. She was a sister to look up to in more ways than height: Mary had a particularly spiritual and winsome personality that immediately won over all she met.
Picking up her small bundle of belongings, Mary joined Emily and Samuel outside the house and quickly slipped on her shoes. The siblings stopped briefly to pick up food from a nearby bakery, where the late night shift was preparing breakfast foods, and, in a trade where many blacks worked, found a trusted friend who was willing to discreetly supply them with rolls. With a half-hour walk ahead of them and time running short, the three Edmonsons set off at a brisk pace, but not so fast so that they drew untoward attention. This was not a night to answer awkward questions about where they might be going when they were so close to the 10:00 curfew bell that rang for all blacks, free or enslaved.
The three Edmonsons were slaves, and they were moving carefully toward the Potomac River, where a schooner from the North was waiting to take them on a journey to freedom. They were leaving behind an unusually close, highly spiritual, and even modestly prosperous family. Their parents, Paul and Amelia, lived on a forty-acre farm about fifteen miles north of the city in Norbeck, Maryland, a small rural crossroads in Montgomery County. Thirteen years earlier, shortly before Christmas 1835, Paul Edmonson, a free man of color, purchased his first twenty acres of farmland for $250. In 1847 he doubled the size of his farm with the purchase of an additional contiguous twenty acres of land for $280...
On the evening of April 15, 1848, seventy-seven slaves attempted one of history's most audacious escapes—and put in motion a furiously fought battle over slavery in America that would consume Congress, the streets of the capital, and the White House itself. Setting sail from Washington, D.C., on a schooner named the Pearl , the fugitives began a daring 225-mile journey to freedom in the North. Mary Kay Ricks's unforgettable chronicle brings to life the Underground Railroad's largest escape attempt, the seemingly immutable politics of slavery, and the individuals who struggled to end it. All the while, Ricks focuses her narrative on the intimate story of two young sisters who were onboard the Pearl , and sets their struggle for liberation against the powerful historical forces that would nearly tear the country apart.
After a terrifyingly calm night, the wind came up as the sun rose the next morning, and the small schooner shot off down the Potomac River. Hours later, stunned owners—including a former first lady, a shipping magnate, a former congressman, a federal marshal, and a Baptist minister—raised the alarm. Authorities quickly formed a posse that chased the fugitives down the river. But with a head start and a robust wind that filled their sails, the Pearl raced ahead—unaware that a violent squall was moving into their path and would halt their bid for freedom.
Escape on the Pearl reveals the incredible odyssey of those who were onboard, including the remarkable lives of fugitives Mary and Emily Edmonson, the two sisters at the heart of the story, who would trade servitude in elite Washington homes for slave pens in three states. Through the efforts of the sisters' father and the northern "conductor" who had helped organize the escape, an abolitionist outcry arose in the North, calling for the two girls to be rescued. Ultimately, Mary and Emily would go on to stand shoulder to shoulder with such abolitionist luminaries as Frederick Douglass and attend Oberlin College under the sponsorship of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
A story of courage and determination, Escape on the Pearl revives one of the most poignant chapters of U.S. history. The Edmonsons, the other fugitives of the Pearl, and those who helped them can now take their rightful place as American heroes.
Amazon.com Review
When 77 slaves attempted a daring escape down the Potomac River in a schooner called the Pearl in 1848, the nation's capital--especially the dozens of prominent citizens whose domestic slaves had disappeared--was shaken by the news. In returning to this audacious but largely forgotten episode in Escape on the Pearl , Mary Kay Ricks follows the stories of many of the slaves who made the perilous attempt and in the telling gives a short history of the last decades of American slavery and the country it divided. But most fascinating is her portrait of Washington, D.C., in the years before the Civil War, where North and South came together on territory where slavery was still legal, and where, for the African American residents of the city, the relative freedoms of the North and the terrors of transport to the brutal plantation slavery of the Deep South felt equally close.
Escape on the Pearl is Mary Kay Ricks's first book, after years of research on abolitionism and local D.C. history. For our Grownup School feature she has recommended the 11 books to read on the Underground Railroad, and she also answered a few of our questions about her book:
Questions for Mary Kay Ricks
Amazon.com: How did you first come across the story of the escape on the Pearl?
Mary Kay Ricks: While researching 19th-century Washington history for a different project, I kept stumbling on references to an escape attempt on a schooner named the Pearl that set off pro-slavery riots in the streets of Washington. The incident went on to spark fierce debate on slavery in Congress--a discussion it always worked hard to avoid. I was a co-founder of Washington, D.C.'s High School Friends of SNCC during the civil rights struggle of the 1960's, so I thought I was well-versed in the struggle for freedom. Yet I had never heard the story of the Pearl , nor had most people I knew. I began researching the escape, and eventually accrued much material, even letters--never analyzed in connection with the story--that described much of the planning of the escape. I had to write this book.
Amazon.com: It was an explosive story at the time. What did the news represent for American society when it broke in 1848?
Ricks: The capture of a schooner attempting to take nearly 80 enslaved Americans to freedom on a schooner represented a breakdown of order and an organized resistance to slavery in the nation's capital that served as a harbinger of the growing conflict that would lead to the Civil War. At the same time, discussions in Congress were becoming increasingly fractious over whether slavery could be extended to the vast swath of new territory that had just come under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government at the conclusion of the Mexican War. Southern politicians clamored to extend slavery into those lands and Northern politicians began to come together for the first time, for a variety of different reasons, to demand that it remain free soil. It was this struggle over whether those new lands would be free, slave, or a mix of each that led directly to the Civil War.
Amazon.com: One striking thing to me about the society you describe was that there wasn't a clean line between slavery and freedom. Families--even married couples--were divided between slave and free, some slaves were working for wages to buy their freedom, and free blacks, especially after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, were always in danger of being reclaimed into slavery. What did freedom mean for African Americans before the Civil War, and what did they do to achieve it?
Ricks: Freedom, verified by legal papers that free people were required to carry on their persons, meant that you couldn't readily be taken away and sold to a slave trader, that you had some say in where you lived and worked, and that you could possibly work hard enough to raise money to free loved ones who were still enslaved. Purchasing freedom was a project fraught with obstacles. To give an example of just how costly slaves could be, Paul Edmonson, the free father of six children who joined the Pearl escape, owned a 40-acre farm in Maryland that was valued less than any of those children was as a slave. (All 14 Edmonson children were enslaved because their mother was a slave--that was the universal law in slave jurisdictions.) Enslaved African-Americans attempting to purchasing freedom were always at an extreme disadvantage because the arrangement relied on the good faith of an owner. Slave testimonies are filled with accounts of slaves who had paid all but the last few installments on their freedom when the owner changed the terms of the contract or ignored it completely and sold the nearly free person to a trader. And the death of owner could change everything as heirs worked to undo any promises of emancipation. That happened to 11 members of the Bell family who took their chances on the Pearl.
Fear of sale or removal to the Lower South was very real. In a little known American exodus, nearly one million slaves from the Upper South were part of a forced migration to new lands, which often separated them from loved ones who were owned by different people. Slaves often knew the warning signs that their owner was looking to sell, and some were able to find contacts for passage on the Underground Railroad. But it was simply unfeasible for large numbers of slaves, even those in the Upper South, to reach freedom. Money and other resources were extremely limited and escape usually meant splitting up families, the one thing that the enslaved attempted to avoid at all cost. Escape was also terribly risky and could land a fugitive, if captured, in a worse situation in the Deep South. That is what made the Pearl escape all the more extraordinary. And for those who did successfully reach the North, there was no guarantee that they would remain free. When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, more than 20,000 fugitives from slavery who had lived in the Northern states for years packed their bags and moved to Canada. Freedom meant leaving your homes and the country you were born in.
Amazon.com: Last year, James Swanson's Manhunt painted a vivid picture of Washington, D.C., at the end of the Civil War as a small town that is hard to recognize from our perspective. Your book could be seen as a prequel to that book in a way, both in its story of how we got to the Civil War and its same close attention to the geography of the capital city. What was the Washington you describe like in the 1840s?
Ricks: Before the Civil War, Washington was a city where the majority of politicians lived in boarding houses and hotels. Neighborhoods had popped up like isolated gopher holes where a few gleaming white-marble buildings rose out of the mud surrounded by small wooden and brick houses on streets rife with loose geese, pigs, and even cows. The Capitol, the U.S. Patent Office (today's newly refurbished Portrait Gallery and Museum of American Art), the Executive Mansion, and the Post Office (now a hip downtown hotel) were then and are now spectacularly beautiful buildings. But much of the city, in contrast, looked bleak. Only Pennsylvania Avenue was paved. In 1848, long after New York, Boston, Baltimore, and even Newark had gas lighting, Congress had only just approved the formation of the Washington Gas Light Company. But theatre was popular and so were bowling, billiards, and gambling. Although many described Washington as a backwater with little sophistication, the newspaper advertisements show a surprising range of goods and foods from imported food delicacies, wines, and sherry to piano fortes. Pharmacies were well-stocked with supplies of Swedish leeches. But enormous changes would come with the Civil War. The population in the District of Columbia, about 51,000 in 1850, nearly trebled to over 130,000 by 1870. Many whites who had come to Washington for war jobs decamped the overburdened and rundown city after the war. But the 40,000 African Americans who had fled the Confederacy stayed.
Amazon.com: You share a last name with two of the fugitive slaves on the Pearl (and with some of their descendants)? Was that just a happy coincidence, or have you found a connection between their families and yours? What connections has writing about this story made for you?
Ricks: Two fugitives of the Pearl shared my last name but were not owned by people named Ricks. In fact, not one of the fugitives on board the Pearl shared a surname with an owner. My husband's family arrived in Virginia sometime in the mid-17th century as Quakers and became slave owners. They later became Baptists, probably when the Society of Friends forbade slave-owning. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin includes a copy of a runaway slave advertisement placed by one of my husband's ancestors. It is more likely that the fugitives on the Pearl , both of whom were transported to New Orleans with the Edmonsons, were descended from slaves who been owned at some time by a different branch of the English Ricks family who had come into Maryland many years before.
Interestingly, my family and I now feel very connected to an African-American couple from Maryland named Vernon and Janet Ricks, who are members of Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Georgetown, a congregation which was formed in 1816 as the first black church in the District of Columbia and figures prominently in my book. Vernon Ricks, who may well be related to the two men who took a chance for freedom in 1848, and his wife are very active in their church, the NAACP, and many civic organizations. I worked with Vernon and Janet, Mt. Zion, the National Park Service, and a consortium of Georgetown organizations when I wrote and directed an historical recreation of an 1858 escape on the Underground Railroad to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the tobacco port that is now a part of the District of Columbia. Vernon took on the role of Alfred Pope, a member of Mt. Zion and one of the few Pearl fugitives who had not been sold south after capture, and Janet played his wife. Later, my family was invited to a special Sunday at Mt. Zion to honor the Ricks family that had been part of that congregation for several generations. When the Ricks family members in the church were asked to rise, my husband and I, his parents, and our two children rose as well.
From Publishers Weekly
When the Pearl slipped out of the U.S. capital one spring night in 1848 carrying 77 fugitives from slavery, "the largest known attempted escape on the Underground Railroad" had begun. But the ship was overtaken and the slaves sent to New Orleans to be sold, only to be spared by a fluke and returned to D.C., where Henry Ward Beecher took an interest in their plight and Harriet Beecher Stowe recounted their story in her Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. The "lost" story of their role in the abolition of the slave trade in Washington is one worth telling, but Ricks isn't up to the job. Though a knowledgeable walking tour guide, she's defeated by the story's many threads: the background on slavery, abolition, the Underground Railroad and Washington D.C., the Pearl story (which is really two stories—one about its crew, one about its passengers) and the story of the remarkable Edmonson family, two sisters and four brothers hired out by their owner who joined the heroic escape. When focusing on the Edmonsons, Ricks shines fresh light on the peculiarities of slavery in the capital city. But too often she lapses into digression and repetition in this occasionally stimulating account.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
An 1848 attempted escape of 70 fugitive slaves aboard the schooner Pearl set the stage for a highly publicized campaign to challenge slavery in the nation's capital. Among the fugitives were six members of the Edmondson family, who were hired out as slaves to Washington's most prominent families. The sisters, Mary and Emily, would become famous in abolitionist circles. The Edmondsons' access to the powerful families and the prominence of the sisters heightened the growing debate about slavery, particularly the 10-year lobbying effort to end slavery in Washington, D.C. By focusing on the Edmondsons, Ricks brings a human scale to what was a cause celebre at the time. Drawing on private letters, newspaper reports, and court records, Ricks provides a vivid and detailed account of the heroic escape attempt and the ensuing courtroom drama within the broader context of resistance to slavery. This is a compelling account of a famous campaign and court case that has since languished in the historical past. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Exciting. . . . Fascinating. . . . Succeeds as both a historical account and an enjoyable read.” (Chicago Sun-Times)
“An exciting and important story...A must read for all who seek to understand the history of freedom in America.” (James Oliver Horton, co-author of Slavery and the Making of America *)
“The thrilling story of the largest mass escape of fugitive slaves in American history.” (Fergus Borderwich, author of Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America )
“Compelling . . . gripping . . . connects the reader to the desperation and courage of freedom-seekers.” (Ann Hagedorn, author of Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad )*
About the Author
A former attorney at the Department of Labor, Mary Kay Ricks has written about Washington history in numerous publications including the Washington Post. She is the founder of Tour DC (www.tourdc.com), which features in-depth walking tours in the nation's capital, and lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Two Young Girls
Join an Audacious Escape
On the overcast evening of April 15, 1848, at around 9:00 p.m., a soft clump of dirt struck the window of a servant's small room above the kitchen in the home of Alexander Ray, a prominent businessman in Washington and Georgetown. The family's spacious and well appointed house stood in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, west of the President's House, tucked between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Potomac River, and just a few blocks from where a twenty- two- foot revolving dome cradled the Naval Observatory's telescope. Ray was a prosperous merchant who had the means and the connections to hire the very best of servants, and it was well known in their circle that a family by the name of Edmonson was uncommonly bright and talented help for the better class of people.
That evening, the noise at the upstairs window alerted thirteen-year-old Emily Edmonson, a still slightly plump girl with a warm brown complexion somewhere between her father's deeper color and her mother's much lighter skin tone. Emily's appealing features were set in a slightly rounded, gentle face that already showed the promise of the lovely young woman she was becoming. Lifting the window, she saw her older brother Samuel, about five feet, six inches tall and fair- skinned like his mother, standing at the side door of the house and looking up at her window. He had come from an elegant home some eighteen blocks to the east on Judiciary Square, not far from the Capitol. Samuel lived and worked as a butler in the home of Joseph Bradley, one of Washington's most successful and prominent lawyers.
Emily, neatly and modestly dressed as always, quickly picked up a small bag and quietly slipped through the house and out the door into the sleepy neighborhood. She and her brother began walking east near a factory at Seventeenth Street that produced ice cream, which could be delivered to a customer's door for $2.50 a quart, a hugely expensive treat at a time when an acre of nearby Mary land farmland cost about $15 and skilled workers earned around $1.25 a day. They walked steadily and quietly toward the other side of the Executive Mansion, which, as the Stranger's Guide in the most recent City Directory of Washington explained, was now commonly called the White House.
Emily and Samuel carefully made their way through the unlit and largely unpaved streets. The Washington Gas Light Company was in its formative stages with a bill of incorporation waiting to be reported in the House of Representatives from the Congressional Committee on the District of Columbia. Unlike New York, Boston, St. Louis, Louisville, Baltimore, or Newark, the city lacked any or ganized system of modern streetlights, and public lighting was limited to the whale oil that burned in a few dozen twelve-foot-tall iron street lamps along Pennsylvania Avenue designed by Charles Bulfinch, the architect of the Capitol's low, copper-sheathed wooden dome. A year earlier, Congress had seen to its own needs by installing a self-contained gas lighting system that functioned only when Congress was in session. One of the city newspapers reported that the tall lighting apparatus had resulted in an alarmingly high death rate for swarms of birds drawn to its unusual light.
The darkness served brother and sister well as they made their way to another of the city's still few private homes near Thirteenth and G Streets, where their sister Mary worked, not far from where the recently deceased former president, John Quincy Adams, had lived. Though certainly not a radical abolitionist, Adams had endeared himself to enemies of slavery when he argued the appeal before the Supreme Court that freed the Africans who had revolted onboard the ship called La Amistad and when, as a member of Congress, he successfully campaigned against a congressional gag rule that had for eight years automatically tabled any slavery-related petition.
Mary was watching for her brother and sister. When Emily cautiously called up to her from the back of the house, Mary quickly opened the window above them and, to prevent alerting anyone, tossed out her shoes. At five feet, six inches tall, the slim, fifteen-year-old Mary stood four inches taller than Emily and carried herself with a more grave countenance over her lovely features. She was a sister to look up to in more ways than height: Mary had a particularly spiritual and winsome personality that immediately won over all she met.
Picking up her small bundle of belongings, Mary joined Emily and Samuel outside the house and quickly slipped on her shoes. The siblings stopped briefly to pick up food from a nearby bakery, where the late night shift was preparing breakfast foods, and, in a trade where many blacks worked, found a trusted friend who was willing to discreetly supply them with rolls. With a half-hour walk ahead of them and time running short, the three Edmonsons set off at a brisk pace, but not so fast so that they drew untoward attention. This was not a night to answer awkward questions about where they might be going when they were so close to the 10:00 curfew bell that rang for all blacks, free or enslaved.
The three Edmonsons were slaves, and they were moving carefully toward the Potomac River, where a schooner from the North was waiting to take them on a journey to freedom. They were leaving behind an unusually close, highly spiritual, and even modestly prosperous family. Their parents, Paul and Amelia, lived on a forty-acre farm about fifteen miles north of the city in Norbeck, Maryland, a small rural crossroads in Montgomery County. Thirteen years earlier, shortly before Christmas 1835, Paul Edmonson, a free man of color, purchased his first twenty acres of farmland for $250. In 1847 he doubled the size of his farm with the purchase of an additional contiguous twenty acres of land for $280...