ONLY CONVICTS AND LUNATICS 05-City-Under-the-Hill-by-Steven-J.-Diner-8-1
April 1848 was an exhilarating time. A revolution had erupted in Europe. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had just completed a pamphlet titled The Communist Manifesto. Activists were arranging the first women’s rights convention. which would be held three months later in upstate New York. And in Washington, the principles of freedom again were clashing with the reality of slavery, moving the nation toward civil war. 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 trying to end the slave trade and slavery.
Setting sail from Washington, D.C., the Pearl and its fugitives, old and young, male and female, mothers with children — had worked in homes, boardinghouses and hotels, began a daring 225-mile journey to freedom in the North—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.
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Back in Washington, Georgetown and Alexandria that morning — as church bells heralded services and fire bells rang an alarm at the slave escape — authorities assembled a posse that headed for the usual country roads. Runaways were hardly uncommon; newspaper ads featuring an icon of a black man with a pole over his shoulder were routine. However, the scope of this escape was beyond anyone’s imagination. On Tuesday, the Pearl was towed back to Washington. When it passed the wharves at Alexandria, the slaves were displayed in chains to angry whites. More crowds awaited them in Washington. all were marched across Pennsylvania Avenue to the city jail.
The incident prompted angry debate in Congress and it helped end the slave trade in the District of Columbia. It is no coincidence that the next day, April 16, would be celebrated from then on as Emancipation Day. The Pearl incident was the largest recorded escape attempt by slaves in history. The attempt failed, but it inspired the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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