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Date: | Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:27:21 -0500 |
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Dear colleagues:
An article in today's Washington Post, available in full at http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/11/
AR2007111101589.html, announces that a new office complex in
Alexandria will honor Emily and Mary Edmonson, "two Maryland
teenagers who were held in a pen on that site in 1848 after they and
75 others attempted to escape slavery in a daring flight aboard a
schooner called the Pearl. The girls, ages 13 and 15, fled captivity
to avoid being sold to brothel owners in New Orleans. The schooner
was soon caught, but the girls were ultimately purchased out of
slavery. They traveled North to tell their stories to abolitionists,
including Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe wrote 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' a
blockbuster serialized novel that was adapted into a play,
electrifying audiences worldwide and helping cause a shift in
attitudes toward slavery in the United States."
The article points out that this will be the first Alexandria
memorial to slaves, and a public recognition of what will still be
news to many: Alexandria's importance in the antebellum domestic
slave trade.
An interior view of an Alexandria "slave pen"--a holding jail for
slaves being sold--appears at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpb.01471;
a search at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html on the text string
slave Alexandria
will lead you to a number of other photographs of Alexandria's slave-
trading facilities.
--Jurretta Heckscher
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