“This Question of Slavery”:
Perspectives From Primary Sources
TEACHER INSTITUTE
July 16 – 20, 2001
Source Material on the Pearl
For Activity One:
Storytelling Using Primary Source Documents
Researched and Compiled for The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
by
Susan Hoffman Fishman
Education Consultant
Teacher Institute Sponsored by:
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
77 Forest Street
Hartford, Connecticut 06105
860-522-9258
This project is supported by The Connecticut Collaborations for Teaching the Arts and Humanities, a partnership of the Connecticut Humanities Council and The Eisenhower Program of the Connecticut Department of Higher Education
Source Material on the Pearl
For Activity One
Of
Teacher Institute:
Storytelling Using Primary Source Documents
Primary Source Documents
Personal Memoir of Daniel Drayton, For Four Years and Four Months A Prisoner: For Charity’s Sake in Washington Jail Including a Narrative of the Voyage and Capture of the Schooner Pearlby Daniel Drayton. Boston: Bela Marsh; New York: American and Foreign Anti-slavery Society, 1854.
Memoir of the ‘Captain’ who agreed to take the fugitive slaves to freedom.
Available in The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Library. On-line text available through the digital library of Cornell University, Making of America, .
Reprinted in this document by permission of The Making of America Digital Collection, Cornell University Library.
Excerpts from numerous issues of The North Star, an African-American Newspaper that was published from December 3, 1847 – April 17, 1851, edited by Frederick Douglass and M. R. Delaney. The newspaper was established “to see in this slave-holding, slave-trading, and negro-hating land, a printing-press and paper, permanently established, under complete control and direction of the immediate victims of slavery and oppression…” Relevant excerpts run from April 28, 1848, just after the Pearl incident occurred, to June 12, 1849.
Reprinted in this document by permission of Accessible.com
A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying The Truth of the Work, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1853. Part II, Chapter VI describes, in Stowe’s own words, the Pearl incident and, in great detail, the Edmondson family.
Available in The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Library. On-line text available through the University of Virginia’s website, Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: /.
Secondary Source Documents
The Fugitives of the Pearl by John H. Paynter, excerpted and reprinted from The Journal of Negro History Vol. 1, No. 3, July 1916. Summary of the incident 68 years after it occurred.
On-line text available from Howard University ArchivesNet,
Reprinted in this document by permission of The Association for the Study of African American Life & History, Inc.
The Flight of the Pearlby Thomas Fleming. Contemporary article in American Legacy, a joint venture of RJR Communications, Inc. and The American Heritage Group, a Division of Forbes, Inc.Summer 2000 issue.
Reprinted in this document by permission of Forbes.
“The Pearl Affair,” chapter in District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History by David L. Lewis. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,1976. This history of Washington, D. C. is one volume in a series entitled, States and The Nation. Using Drayton’s memoir and Paynter’s Fugitives of the Pearl as source material, Lewis reconstructs the Pearl Affair.
Reprinted in this document by permission of W.W. Norton & Co.
Escape on the Pearl by Mary Kay Ricks. Article that appeared in the Washington Post on Wednesday, August 12, 1998, 150 years after the Pearl incident and one week after descendants of the Edmondsons attended a family reunion in commemoration of the incident.
Reprinted in this document by permission of the author.
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