Captain Daniel Drayton and the Pearl
1848
In April 1848 the citizens of Washington, DC, were celebrating a revolutionary wave moving across Europe. Democratic ideals seemingly appealed to the citizenry of France, Germany, Italy, and Austria. Americans gathered in Lafayette Park for bonfires, torch-lit processions, and passionate speeches proclaiming the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
On the fringes of this crowd stood a group of slaves and abolitionists who found the entire scene hypocritical. They wondered exactly how enslaved people in the nation’s capital and elsewhere were free to pursue their life, liberty, and happiness. If abolitionist Captain Daniel Drayton could have spoken freely, he would have shouted to the crowd, “Nobody in this country will admit for a moment that there can be any such thing as property in a white man. The institution of slavery could not last for a day, if the slaves were all white.” Instead Captain Drayton settled for knowing that the distractions of the night’s celebration made the time ripe for a large-scale escape. Soon the revelers would be less some of their enslaved “citizens.”
Two nights earlier, on April 13, 1848, the Pearl sailed into Washington, DC’s Seventh Street wharf. Captain Daniel Drayton had charted the sailing vessel from Captain Sayres. Drayton would be in charge of smuggling the fugitive slaves aboard, while Sayres would man the fifty-four-ton bay-craft schooner.
When New York abolitionist William Chaplin hired Drayton, he’d implied that there would only be “a family or two” that needed safe passage. In reality this was to be the largest escape on the East Coast’s Underground Railroad yet. Word of the strategic escape had spread to neighboring Georgetown and Alexandria.
The Pearl was docked under the Potomac River’s high bank. As evening approached on Saturday, April 15, a light rain began to fall, but not enough to dampen the enthusiastic crowd celebrating in Lafayette Park. The fugitive slaves eased away from the crowd unnoticed. They crept past the few sparse buildings and open fields on the edge of Washington, DC, to arrive by the 11:00 p.m. deadline. The Pearl’s hull overflowed with fugitives. Captain Daniel Drayton counted more than seventy-six men, women, and children.
Before midnight the fastenings on the Pearl were cast off, and the group of hopefuls set sail under the cover of a thin blanket of fog. The path to freedom would take them 100 miles down the Potomac River, around Point Lookout, and 120 miles up the Chesapeake Bay, through the Delaware Canal to the Delaware River, and on to Frenchtown in New Jersey, a free state.
Soon after they set sail, the wind died down. Nervous tension could be felt among the passengers while they sat in the ominous calm. Captain Sayres dropped anchor so as not to be carried in the wrong direction by the tide coming in from the Atlantic. A sense of dread hung over everyone as they waited for the wind to increase. At daybreak a north breeze finally took them around Alexandria, Virginia. As the winds picked up, so did the spirits of the fugitive slaves huddled together in prayer and song in the ship’s hold.
At dusk the Pearl reached Point Lookout on the mouth of the Potomac River. A fierce northerly wind prevented them from rounding the point. Captain Sayres, knowing the limits of his vessel, adamantly refused to take her out onto the open sea. Instead, he anchored the Pearl in Cornfield Harbor, Maryland, a safe refuge below the point. Again a sense of foreboding set in. The captains, crew, and passengers bedded down for the night around 9:00 p.m., having no choice but to wait it out.
While the Pearl was passing Alexandria, Virginia, residents of Alexandria, Washington, and Georgetown were awakening to discover their slaves missing. President James K. Polk, former first lady Dolley Madison, and thirty-nine other slave owners had slaves who had run off. The total value of their missing property was estimated at more than $100,000.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the passengers and crew of the Pearl, they had bigger troubles than the weather: They had been betrayed. A free black drayman named Judson Diggs had evidently transported two passengers to the Pearl, who apparently didn’t have money to pay him. Additionally it was said that Diggs’s advances toward one of the escapees had been rebuffed. Angered, Diggs turned them all in.
A posse of thirty-five men was rounded up and directed to the river. Less than twelve hours later, the posse had boarded the steamboat Salem and begun their pursuit.
At 2:00 a.m., with only 80 miles to go out of its 220-mile voyage, the Pearl was overtaken. The shocked passengers and crew were unarmed. The more violent men in the posse wished for an immediate lynching, but cooler heads prevailed. The steamer with the dejected prisoners headed back to the District of Columbia and anchored overnight at Fort Washington so as to arrive the following day. The slave catchers wanted to make an example of the shackled men, women, and children, parading them through the city in daylight.
Outraged slaveholders who thought their house servants and hotel and city workers were generally well treated determined to send them to the Deep South to be field hands. Most were sold to the slave-trading firm of Bruin & Hill out of Alexandria. After a stint in a slave pen, they would be sold down south to New Orleans.
The escape attempt of the Pearl made national headlines. The “Washington Riot” in the capital erupted when an angry mob insisted that an abolitionist newspaper press be destroyed in retaliation. Antislavery activists claimed the slave owners were hypocritical in light of the celebration of freedom that had occurred just two nights earlier.
Paul Jennings, a slave who had incited many to flee, had never boarded the ship, explaining that his sense of service and loyalty to a Washington senator kept him from going. He escaped prosecution, but feeling responsible for the fates of the fugitives he encouraged to escape, he consequently raised funds to purchase freedom for some of their family members. Most of the slaves, however, did not fare so well.
Captain Daniel Drayton was accused of being associated with the abolitionist William L. Chaplin, but he insisted he had worked alone. Drayton kept silent, as Chaplin allegedly had promised to take care of Drayton’s wife and six children if he were ever arrested.
Captain Drayton and Captain Sayres stood trial for stealing property and assisting fugitives to escape. They were convicted of the latter on appeal and were remanded to prison until they could pay their heavy fines, which would have taken them a lifetime to raise. Four years later President Fillmore granted them an unconditional pardon. Captain Daniel Drayton never regretted his involvement.