| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac. By Josephine F. Pacheco. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xii, 307 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8078-2918-8.)

The nature of the subject matter dictates that we can learn much about organized attempts to escape from slavery from spectacular failures. Josephine F. Pacheco's well-researched, detailed account of seventy-six runaways and the handful of conspirators who very nearly got them to freedom in 1848 constitutes one of the most remarkable. An important addition to the growing literature on fugitive slaves and the persons who aided them, this volume together with recent biographies of Harriet Tubman helps paint the contours of slave rescue operations in the East that reached into Maryland and the District of Columbia. By skillfully weaving the story of the ill-fated Pearl into the history and politics of slavery in the nation's capital, Pacheco also provides a revealing vantage point into the larger political debates that swirled in the late 1840s.

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