300px|right|thumb|This [[daguerreotype photograph shows Mary Edmonson (standing) and Emily Edmonson (seated), shortly after they were freed in 1848.]]
The Pearl incident was the largest recorded nonviolent escape attempt by enslaved people in United States history. On April 15, 1848, seventy-seven slaves attempted to escape Washington, D.C. by sailing away on a schooner called The Pearl. Their plan was to sail south on the Potomac River, then north up the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River to the free state of New Jersey, a distance of nearly . The attempt was organized by both abolitionist whites and free blacks, who expanded the plan to include many more enslaved people. Paul Jennings, a former slave who had served President James Madison, helped plan the escape.
The escapees, including men, women, and children, found their passage delayed by winds running against the ship. Two days later, they were captured on the Chesapeake Bay near Point Lookout, Maryland, by an armed posse traveling by steamboat. As punishment, the owners sold most of the escapees to traders, who took them to the Deep South. 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.
When the ship and its captives were brought back to Washington, a pro-slavery riot broke out in the city. The mob attempted to attack an abolitionist newspaper and other known anti-slavery activists. Extra police patrolled for three days to try to contain the violence until the unrest ended. The episode provoked a slavery debate in Congress, and may have influenced a provision in the Compromise of 1850 that ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia, although not slavery itself. 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. After serving four years in prison, they were pardoned by President Millard Fillmore in 1852.
Background
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. It supported a major slave market and was a center of the domestic slave trade; with its connection to the Chesapeake Bay by the Potomac River, Washington was an important transit point for captives being shipped or marched overland from the Upper South to markets or owners in the Deep South. Numerous families in the city actively enslaved people, generally forcing them to act as domestic servants and artisans. Some hired out their slaves to work as servants on the waterfront and in other urban jobs.
In 1848, free blacks outnumbered slaves in the District of Columbia by three to one. Abolitionists, both free blacks and whites, were active in the city in trying to end the slave trade and slavery. In addition, since the 1840s, there had been an organized group that supported the Underground Railroad in the district. The abolitionist community demonstrated in its planning for the escape that it could act in a unified way. 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. The black community made the project its own, notifying so many families that soon there were 77 slaves who wanted to be part of the escape. and Senator Foote of Mississippi. The former likened the Tree of Liberty to the great cotton-wood tree of his section, whose seed is blown far and wide, while the latter spoke eloquently of the universal emancipation of man and the approaching recognition in all countries of the great principles of equality and brotherhood." Ultimately Daniel's wife Mary, eight of the Bell's children, and two grandchildren would hazard the perilous journey on the schooner Pearl. Paul Jennings, a former slave of President James Madison, was among the free black organizers of the escape. His only other crew was Chester English, a cook. "In the darkness of the night seventy-seven colored men, women, and children found their way to the schooner." With Drayton and Sayres accepting the risk of transporting them, on Saturday night, April 15, the slaves boarded the ship. Chester English, the cook, was on The Pearl to supply the passengers until they reached freedom.
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.
Riots
Supporters of slavery were outraged by the attempted escape, and an angry mob formed. For three days, crowds were riled in the Washington Riot, and numerous police were called in to protect one of their targets. They fixed on Gamaliel Bailey, the publisher of the anti-slavery newspaper New Era. Suspecting him because of his record of abolitionist publishing, a mob of slave owners almost destroyed the newspaper building but were held off by the police. thumb|This 1848 poster was made by the District of Columbia government to warn alarmed white citizens fearing a slave revolt, not to riot or commit acts of violence. The poster was in response to public concern and rumors of a slave uprising, following the capture of the schooner Pearl
Once the mob dissipated, the slave owners debated how to punish their slaves. They sold all seventy-seven slaves to slave traders from Georgia and Louisiana, who would take them to the Deep South and the New Orleans slave market. 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. Congressman John I. Slingerland, an abolitionist from New York, alerted anti-slavery activists to the actions of the slave owners and slave traders, which helped increase the effort to end the slave trade in the nation's capital. Friends and families scrambled to try to locate their loved ones and buy them from the traders before they were taken south. The case of the two young Edmonson sisters in particular attracted national attention. At least 50 of the recaptured slaves were sold to trader Hope H. Slatter who put them in Bernard M. Campbell's Baltimore slave pen and then shipped south from there.
Illinois Congressman John Wentworth of Illinois told a story about the Pearl incident in his 1882 memoirs: