Escape from Slavery

Before the Civil War, Washington was a slave-holding city, but many of its citizens, especially free blacks and abolitionists, assisted freedom seekers at Underground Railroad stops. The largest attempted slave escape began on the evening of April 15, 1848, when 77 men and women boarded the Pearl, waiting half a mile downriver. Captain Daniel Drayton had agreed to sail them down the Potomac and then north to freedom, but bad weather forced the vessel to anchor just short of the Chesapeake Bay. After a tip reached slave owners, the Pearl was apprehended and brought back, and its passengers were marched in chains to jail near Judiciary Square as mobs jeered. Drayton later wrote that it seemed as if the time for the lynching had come. Enraged whites then rioted for three days, attacking the offices of the National Era, an abolitionist newspaper. The enslaved passengers were all sold South, but Emily Edmonson and her sister Mary were later freed when their father raised money to buy them, and they went on to work for abolition. Emily eventually returned to the Washington area, where her descendants still live. Also nearby were the home and church of Anthony Bowen, a free black minister and Patent Office clerk who, according to oral tradition, met escaping slaves and helped them on their way north; in 1853 he founded the nation’s first YMCA for African Americans in his home on E Street between Ninth and Tenth, and in 1856 he also founded St. Paul AME Church.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States