The Pearl: a Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac

Black Issues in Higher Education, Feb 10, 2005

The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac By Josephine F. Pacheco University of North Carolina Press, 2005 320 pp., $29.95 Cloth ISBN: 08078-2918-8

In the spring of 1848, 76 slaves from the nation's capital hid aboard a schooner called the Pearl in an attempt to sail down the Potomac River and up the Chesapeake Bay to freedom in Pennsylvania. When inclement weather forced them to anchor for the night, the fugitive slaves and the ship's crew were captured and returned to Washington. Many of the slaves were sold to the Lower South and two men sailing the Pearl were tried and sentenced to prison.

Recounting this harrowing tale from the preparations for escape through the participants' trial, Dr. Josephine Pacheco provides fresh insight into the lives of enslaved Blacks in the District of Columbia, putting a human face on the victims of the interstate slave trade whose lives have been overshadowed by larger historical events. She contends that although the incident itself and the trials and the Congressional disputes that followed were not directly responsible for bringing an end to the slave trade in the nation's capital, they played a pivotal role in publicizing many of the issues surrounding slavery.

Pacheco is professor emerita of history at George Mason University, author of The Legacy of George Mason and co-author of Three Who Dared.