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