The Pearl (1 of 3 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
The Pearl by Josephine F. Pacheco. Copyright 2005 Josephine F. Pacheco.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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THE PEARL
A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac

Josephine F. Pacheco

In memory of Hallie Beazley Fennell and Robert Henry Fennell


INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 1848 watermen Daniel Drayton and Edward Sayres undertook to lead one of the largest slave escape attempts in the United States. The two men planned to use a schooner, the Pearl, to carry seventy-six runaway slaves from Washington, D.C., to freedom in Pennsylvania and points north. They went down the Potomac River and expected to sail up the Chesapeake Bay, but stormy weather frustrated their project. When they anchored to wait for the storm to abate, their pursuers overtook them and returned Drayton, Sayres, and the fugitives to Washington. The two seamen ended up in jail and most of the runaways in the hands of slave dealers, awaiting sale to owners in the Deep South.

In the pages that follow, the events surrounding the thwarted flight will lead to an examination of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, the religious and political climate in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the sentiments and actions of antislavery and proslavery activists. The attempted escape is revealing about Americans both black and white, slave and free, powerful and powerless; it was significant in the story of American slavery and antislavery.

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Slaves ran away wherever slavery existed. Owners knew that losing a slave because of flight was a hazard of slavery. According to a former bondman, “The white folks down south don’t seem to sleep much, nights. They are watching for runaways.” A fugitive from Maryland declared that “no power in this world will arrest the exodus of the slaves from the South.” He called fleeing from bondage “the divinely ordered method for the effectual destruction of American slavery.”(1)

Although they could not prevent flight, slave masters let their human property know that terrible punishment awaited them if they were caught or even if they returned of their own volition. Decisions about the punishment of runaways were left to their owners; the government did not interfere because punishment was a private matter between a master and his property. Governments stepped in if there were indications that someone had enticed a bondman or woman to flee, for that was a very serious offense, as this account will show.(2)

In the years following the American Revolution, northern states either ended slavery or made plans to do so; southern states did not. The men that met in Philadelphia in 1787 to write our Constitution accepted both the reality of human bondage and the accompanying reality of slave flight. Consequently, Article 4, Section 2, paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution provided that a person “held to service or labor in one state,” on fleeing to another, “shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

In 1793, not long after the new government began to function, Congress enacted a law giving legal effect to that constitutional provision. It dealt with both fugitives from justice and fugitives from enslavement. Sections 3 and 4 of the law provided that a slave owner, or “his agent or attorney,” could seize the fugitive, take him before a judge of the federal court or “any magistrate of a county, city or town corporate, wherein such seizure or arrest shall be made,” and provide testimony of ownership. If the evidence satisfied the judge or magistrate, he would issue a “certificate” that gave the owner the right to return the slave to the place from which he had fled. Anybody interfering with such a process was liable for the very large fine of $500. At least one historian has claimed that the law was not enforced, that nonslaveholders encouraged and protected runaways.
(3) Whether or not the law was enforced, it did not and could not stop bondmen and bondwomen from seeking freedom.

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NOTES
http://www.dailylit.com/books/pearl/notes

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