Whereas, on April 16, 1848, 77 slaves attempted to flee the District of Columbia and Alexandria, Virginia, on the Pearl, a schooner waiting for them in the Potomac River; Whereas, on April 14, 1848, three White men brought the ship to the District of Columbia, and Daniel Drayton, the captain and owner of the Pearl, chartered the schooner for $100 and arranged for the slaves’ travel; Whereas the escape was initiated by free Blacks Paul Jennings, who had been a slave of President James Madison, and Paul Edmonson; Whereas William Chaplin, a White abolitionist, assisted in connecting the slaves with Drayton; Whereas abolitionist Gerrit Smith of New York financed the escape; Whereas 77 slaves, including men, women, and children, sailed on the Pearl down the Potomac River and then into Chesapeake Bay in pursuit of freedom; Whereas, on April 17, 1848, numerous slaveholders in the District of Columbia, realizing their slaves had disappeared, sent a posse of 35 men to seek the Pearl; Whereas the posse met the Pearl near Point Lookout, Maryland, and took the slaves and the ship back to the District of Columbia; Whereas slavery supporters formed a mob and lashed out at both the White abolitionists involved in the escape as well as free Blacks in the District of Columbia in the Washington Riot of 1848; Whereas the owners of the escaped slaves sold the escapees to slave traders who took them to New Orleans, Louisiana; Whereas two of the escapees were purchased and freed in an effort led by Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church of Brooklyn, New York; Whereas Drayton and two of the other ship workers were arrested for helping in the escape and were represented in court by Congressman Horace Mann; Whereas two of the men, including Drayton, after serving four years in prison, were released after being granted a pardon from President Millard Fillmore, based on a recommendation from Senator Charles Sumner