The Pearl Incident in 1848 was the single largest recorded escape attempt by enslaved people in United States history. On April 15, 1848, 77 slaves attempted to flee Washington, D.C. by sailing away on a schooner called The Pearl. They planned to sail south along Potomac River and then north up the Chesapeake Bay, cross overland to the Delaware River and then to the free state of New Jersey, a distance of nearly 225 miles.
The mass escape attempt was organized by both black and white abolitionists in Washington, D.C. Free blacks Paul Jennings, the former slave of President James Madison, and Paul Edmonson, whose wife and 14 children were still enslaved, were the initiators of the escape. They enlisted the help of William Chaplin, a Washington, D.C. white abolitionist who in turn contacted Philadelphia abolitionist Daniel Drayton, Captain and owner of The Pearl, and pilot Edward Sayres. Wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith of New York provided financial backing for the escape.
With the help of numerous members of Washington’s free black community, 77 enslaved men, women, and children from across the city and surrounding areas slipped away from their places of work or residence on the evening of April 15 and made their way to The Pearl at a wharf on the Potomac.
The next morning, numerous Washington, D.C. slaveholders, realizing their slaves and The Pearl were missing, sent out an armed posse of 35 men on the steamboat Salem. The posse caught up with The Pearl near Point Lookout, Maryland, boarded the vessel, and took the slaves and the ship back to Washington.
Supporters of slavery were outraged at the attempted escape. An angry mob formed and for the next three days lashed out at suspected white abolitionists and the entire free black community of Washington in what would be known as the first Washington Riot.
The Pearl escape attempt had unexpected consequences. A provision of the Compromise of 1850 enacted by Congress ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia although it did not abolish slavery there. The Pearl incident is also said to have inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe in her writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was published in 1852.
In 1579, an African man now known by the name of Yasuke arrived in Japan. Much about him remains a mystery: it’s unconfirmed which country in Africa he hailed from, and there is no verifiable record of his life after 1582. But Yasuke was a real-life Black samurai who served under Oda Nobunaga, one of the most important feudal lords in Japanese history and a unifier of the country.
