Mary Kay Ricks, Escape on the Pearl

Escape on the Pearl

Mary Kay Ricks

Morrow, Feb 2007, $25.95

ISBN: 0060786590

In 1848, some residents of Washington, D.C., owned slaves, though many others opposed the "curious institution." In April, conductors on the Underground Railroad tried a bold freedom run using the Pearl to take seventy-seven runaway "fugitives" to freedom in the north. However, a terrible storm on the Chesapeake doomed the mission. The sheriff arrested the freedom fighters and took the recaptured slaves back to their owner who sent them to New Orleans for sale. Another twist returns the slaves to D.C. where Preacher and staunch abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher made efforts to get them freed and his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe used their plight as part of her reference notes published as the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, two years after the classic was released.

This is a complex at times and convoluted look back at a major incident of its time that has somewhat lost its significance over the subsequent century and a half. The book gets inside the heads of the slaves, slave sellers, slave owners, the Stowes and the Underground Railroad conductors. However, most fascinating, besides the link to Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic, is the way the citizens in the metropolitan DC area looked at slavery. Historical readers need to set aside some time because, though difficult to follow because of how complex the events leading to, the event itself, and the subsequent aftereffect and outcome are, this is a discerning and insightful look at the abomination of slavery.

Harriet Klausner