In April 1848 the schooner Pearl slipped down the Potomac from Washington carrying seventy-seven enslaved men, women and children in the largest recorded escape attempt in American history. Its captain, Daniel Drayton, tells how he came to the venture, how the ship was captured in Chesapeake Bay, and of his trials and more than four years in the Washington jail.
A plain, powerful first-person record of abolition and its cost, essential for anyone studying slavery in the capital. Download the free EPUB.