Pearl Incident - Aftermath

Aftermath

Supporters of slavery were outraged about the attempted escape, and an angry mob formed. For three days, crowds were riled in the Washington Riot, and numerous police were called in to protect one of their targets. They fixed on Gamaliel Bailey, the publisher of the anti-slavery newspaper The New Era. As they suspected him because of his record of abolitionist publishing, a mob of slave owners almost destroyed the newspaper building, but were held off by the police. (The abolitionist Frederick Douglass later took over the paper and renamed it The New National Era.)

Once the mob dissipated, the slave owners debated how to punish their slaves. They sold all seventy-seven slaves to slave traders from Georgia and Louisiana, who would take them to the Deep South and the New Orleans slave market. There they would likely be sold to work on the large sugar and cotton plantations, which held two-thirds of the slaves in the South by the time of the Civil War. Friends and families scrambled to try to locate their loved ones and buy them from the traders before they were taken south. The case of the two young and attractive Edmonson sisters particularly attracted national attention.