Edmonson Sisters
By
John C Abercrombie
- 14
The Edmonson sisters played a huge role in the abolitionist movement. The recent subject of a statue unveiled in Alexandria, Virginia.
They were the daughters of Paul and Amelia Edmonson. Paul Edmondson was a free Black man, but because of the legal term partus sequitur ventrem which comes from Latin and means “That which is born follows the womb.” This concept sounds a bit foreign because when it comes to family the common accepted practice is that the genealogy follows the man but when it comes to slavery, it reverses. The status of the child follows the mother. If the mother is a slave, all of her children are born slaves regardless of the status of the father.
This concept was adopted by Virginia in 1662 and quickly adopted by other colonies. Slaves were part of a slaveowners wealth and even children fathered by a slaveowner were considered slaves. If a slave fathered a child of a free woman, which is frequent that child is under the law, free.
The Edmonson sisters were the daughter of Paul and Amelia Edmonson, a free Black man, and an enslaved woman. The daughters were described as respectable young women of light complexion as the story unfolds, they were Mary, age 15 and Emily age 13 and were hired out to work as servants in private homes in Washington DC. All of the income went to the slaveowner, nothing to them.
It is necessary to keep in mind that there was a degree of hypocrisy in the thinking of slaveowners and others of the same ilk. One of Samuel Edmonson’s friends heard Mississippi Senator Henry Foote celebrating the French Revolution and the triumph of freedom. He is quoted below:
…
Senator Foote and all the rest of them [are] rejoicing that liberty and freedom from oppression have come to people thousands of miles away, while right here under the very sound of their voices, is a race of people who they themselves are holding in the very worst sort of human slavery.
While there is often contention between the field slaves and house slaves, they shared one thing in common, they were not free and had no control of their condition. House slaves were subjected to many horrors separate from the backbreaking work in the fields. History also fails to consider that some slaves were skilled artisans. Again, freedom is freedom and they all wanted it!
April 15, 1848, Mary, Emily and four of their brothers along with seventy-one other slaves made their way to a Schooner named the “Pearl”. These slaves belonged to forty-one of the most prominent families in Washington and Georgetown.
What was planned as the escape of seven slaves erupted into the largest escape ever attempted. They were to sail down the Potomac and up the Delaware to New Jersey, a trip of 225 miles to freedom.
The Pearl began its way down the Potomac, but the voyage was delayed overnight by the shift in tides and then squalls kept them from entering Chesapeake Bay. A passing steamer’s captain thought the Pearl looked suspicious and reported it to authorities.
An armed posse of one hundred captured the slaves put them in chains and took them to Alexandria. An angry mob met the in Washington and officials marched the male slaves in manacles across Pennsylvania Ave to the city jail. Mary and Emily walked behind their brothers with their heads held high.
Pro-slavery advocates rioted in the district for three days, attacking anti-slavery establishments and the printing presses of anti-slavery newspapers in an attempt to suppress the abolitionist movement. Rather than chance another escape attempt, most of the masters quickly sold the runaways to slave traders.
At the slave market in New Orleans, Mary and Emily were handled roughly and subjected to obscene, vile, derogatory, and hateful language. When a yellow fever epidemic struck New Orleans the slave traders quickly sent them back to Alexandria to protect their investment.
Joseph Bruin purchased many of the unsuccessful escapes and kept them in a brick house at 1707 Duke Street in Alexandria. The sisters were forced to work in an on-site laundry, washing, ironing, and sewing. They were locked up at night. They were being sent South to be put to work in the sex industry.
Although the Constitution banned the slave trade from Africa in 1808, slave trading remained legal within the United States. Thousands of enslaved African Americans were sold by their owners in the east to the newly developing lands in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. And Bruin was in the thick of it.
Bruin eventually paid for his crimes against humanity. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Joseph Bruin fled Alexandria but was captured and then confined in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington. The Federal government seized his property, including his personal residence.
Paul Edmonson was on a tireless campaign to free his daughters and the slave traders finally agreed to sell the sisters for $2,250. He spoke with members of the Anti-Slavery who advised him to take his plea to the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York. Beecher was also an abolitionist, and he convinced members of his church to raise the funds required to purchase the Edmonson girls and free them. Reverend Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Reverend Beecher’s church members in Brooklyn raised the necessary funds, and Paul Edmonson hurried back to Washington to purchase the girls’ freedom before they were returned to New Orleans.
Mary and Emily Edmonson were emancipated on November 4, 1848, and their families gathered in Washington to celebrate this wondrous event. The Brooklyn church continued to contribute money to send the sisters to school. They enrolled in the interracial New York Central College in Cortland, New York and worked as domestic servants to support themselves.
The Edmonson sisters were activists. While studying at Cortland, the girls also participated in anti-slavery rallies in New York state. In August 1850 both sisters attended the Slave Law Convention in Cazenovia, New York to protest the Fugitive Slave Act, soon to be passed by Congress. Under this act, slave owners had unlimited powers to arrest fugitive slaves in the North and return them to slavery in the South. The convention, led by Frederick Douglass, declared all slaves to be prisoners of war.
This meeting in August 1850 in Grace Wilson’s orchard made history; it brought together Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, fifty or so fugitive slaves, and two thousand others to denounce the impending Fugitive Slave Act. This dreaded law would give slave owners the right to seize runaways in northern states and law enforcement officials were bound to help him do so.
Douglass spoke about the recent arrest of abolitionist William Chaplin and expressed the need to petition for Chaplin’s release. Mary Edmonson, who spoke frequently at abolitionist meetings, agreed with Douglass and in a poignant speech she noted Chaplin’s kindness to her in the past.
With financial support from Reverend Becher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary and Emily were able to enroll in Oberlin College. Oberlin is located in Ohio and has been a center of abolitionist activism and admitted both Black and White students. Unfortunately, Mary died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty. Harriet Beecher Stowe included part of the Edmonson sisters’ history, the Pearl Incident, and other factual accounts of slavery in her book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). It was published to document the veracity of her depiction of slavery in her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).
The Edmonson sisters are a prime example of the horrors of slavery. Although their father was free, his wife was enslaved, meaning that their children were born enslaved and subject to being sold off. There was no stability in Black families as a result of this, no matter how sophisticated the slave. This is a major, although not the only hazard of slavery. Think about it.
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The Edmonson Sisters
Ep 181 Escape from Slavery The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Edmonson
Mary and Emily Edmonson were two of the youngest passengers who attempted to escape slavery on the ill-fated Pearl voyage in 1848. Join Elizabeth as she and a descendant of the Edmonson family discuss the role of these young women in not only the escape but also the abolition movement and Reconstruction. (Host: Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge)
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Passenger on the Pearl: The True Story of Emily Edmonson’s Flight from Slavery
The page-turning, heart-wrenching true story of one young woman willing to risk her safety and even her life for a chance at freedom in the largest slave escape attempt in American history.
In 1848, thirteen-year-old Emily Edmonson, five of her siblings, and seventy other enslaved people boarded the Pearl under cover of night in Washington, D.C., hoping to sail north to freedom. Within a day, the schooner was captured, and the Edmondson’s were sent to New Orleans to be sold into even crueler conditions. Through Emily Edmonson’s journey from enslaved person to teacher at a school for African American young women, Conkling illuminates the daily lives of enslaved people, the often-changing laws affecting them, and the high cost of a failed escape.
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Slave Descendants Remember Escape on the Pearl.
On April 15, 1848, some 70 slaves made their way down the dark streets of Washington, D.C. They were headed to the Potomac River to board as ship that would hopefully take them to freedom. Would they be successful? Would they make it out alive? Watch my report to find out.
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Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America
May 1986: Seven-year-old Francis Bok was selling his mother’s eggs and peanuts near his village in southern Sudan when Arab raiders on horseback burst into the quiet marketplace, murdering men and gathering the women and young children into a group. Strapped to horses and donkeys, Francis and others were taken north into lives of slavery under wealthy Muslim farmers.
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Edmonson Sisters
In 1848, Mary and Emily Edmonson joined others in an attempt to escape slavery. Their courageous efforts would gain national attention and help turn public opinion in the fight against slavery.
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Escape from Slavery: The Boyhood of Frederick Douglass in His Own Words
Illus. in black-and-white. Opening note by Coretta Scott King. For the first time, the most important account ever written of a childhood in slavery is accessible to young readers. From his days as a young boy on a plantation to his first months as a freeman in Massachusetts, here are Douglass’s own firsthand experiences vividly recounted–expertly excerpted and powerfully illustrated.
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The Edmonson Sisters
– They escaped with seventy-one other slaves that belonged to “41 of the most prominent families in Washington and Georgetown and were valued at $100,000
– Pro-slavery advocates rioted in the District for three days, attacking anti-slavery establishments and the printing presses of anti-slavery newspapers in an attempt to suppress the abolitionist movement
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Escape from Slavery: A Family’s Fight for Freedom (The American Adventure Series
In nineteenth-century Cincinnati, fourteen-year-old Tim Allerton finds his anti-slavery views tested when he and his younger sister Pam save the life of a slave baby whose mother has recently been murdered.
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EDMONSON SISTERS – ESCAPE ON THE PEARL (2022)
The Edmonson sisters were the daughters of Paul and Amelia Edmonson, a free Black man and an enslaved woman. Mary and Emily Edmonson were enslaved African Americans who became prominent in the United States abolitionist movement after gaining their freedom. They were among 77 slaves who tried to escape from Washington, D.C. to New Jersey on the schooner named The Pearl.
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Resistance to Slavery: From Escape to Everyday Rebellion: American Slavery and the Fight for Freedom
In addition to slave uprisings and escapes on the Underground Railroad, enslaved people also resisted their mistreatment through small acts in their everyday lives. Discover the many forms of resistance to slavery.
Read Woke Books are created in partnership with Cicely Lewis, the Read Woke librarian. Inspired by a belief that knowledge is power, Read Woke Books seek to amplify the voices of people of the global majority (people who are of African, Arab, Asian, and Latin American descent and identify as not white), provide information about groups that have been disenfranchised, share perspectives of people who have been underrepresented or oppressed, challenge social norms and disrupt the status quo, and encourage listeners to take action in their community.
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The Pearl Incident
In this episode we conclude our series for Black History Month with The Pearl Incident- the largest attempted escape from slavery in US History.
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We see the complexity of the slave system; a free Black man’s children are born in slavery if his wife is a slave. Her owner may refuse to free her even if the husband has the funds to do so. The children are therefore the property of the mother’s slave owner, not their biological father. Families are split for the flimsiest of reasons and serve to enrich the owner of the mother. The system stinks!