Passenger on the Pearl

by Winifred Conkling

  The discussion turned back to the family’s common concern about ransoming Louisa and Josiah.

  Emily could see that her mother’s story touched Stowe profoundly. In their meeting, Milly explained to Stowe that her two youngest children, Louisa and Josiah—“the last two drops of blood in [my] heart”—were to be sold away from her. She begged Stowe for her support in raising the money needed for their ransom.

  Stowe pledged to help free Josiah and Louisa, promising Milly that she would help raise the money needed to free them and if it fell short, she would make up the difference. Milly thanked God—and Stowe—now that she was one step closer to having her family free.

  True to her word, Stowe quickly raised the $1,200 needed to free Louisa and Josiah, but Valdenar, the agent for his sister-in-law, their owner, refused to honor their agreement. First, he increased his asking price by $300. When Stowe agreed to pay the higher price, he refused to sell them again, this time arguing that Josiah was still needed to work the fields. Stowe, unwilling to disappoint Milly, grudgingly agreed to accept the delay and continued the negotiations until the two youngest Edmonson children were safely at home with their mother.

  The Importance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

  After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, editor Gamaliel Bailey asked Harriet Beecher Stowe to write a serialized novel to be published in the abolitionist newspaper National Era in 1851. Stowe agreed and wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in protest of the law and in sympathy with grieving slave mothers.

  The novel appeared as a series of 40 weekly installments, or about one chapter each week. The first part of the series, titled “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the Man That Was a Thing,” appeared on June 2, 1851, filling most of the first page of the paper. (When it was released in book form, the title was changed to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.) Stowe was paid $300 for 43 chapters, but she made her fortune in the later sale of the book that collected all the installments in a single volume.

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin became one of the most important books of the 19th century. It galvanized public sentiment against slavery, helping to ignite the Civil War. It became the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book behind only the Holy Bible in the number of copies sold that century. It remains influential today, with 150 editions in print worldwide.

  Aspects of Uncle Tom’s Cabin have been widely debated since its publication. Literary critics have condemned the work as sentimental and melodramatic. While many readers saw the character of Uncle Tom as strong, principled, and courageous, ultimately dying to protect other runaway slaves, others criticized him for using submissive behavior to get along with white society rather than standing up to his owner. In the decades after the book’s release, the Uncle Tom character appeared in a number of other works that portrayed him as weak and subservient. The term “Uncle Tom” eventually became a negative label for a black person willing to use servility to win the approval of white people. Uncle Tom’s Cabin nonetheless is credited with igniting a reform movement and mobilizing support for the abolitionist movement throughout the country.

  In response to southern critics who asked Stowe to prove that the events in her novel were based in truth, in 1853 Stowe published a second book, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book included “the original facts and documents upon which the story is founded, together with corroborative statements verifying the truth of the work.” The book included a detailed account of the Edmonsons’ story, based on the meeting she had in Brooklyn with Milly, Emily, and Mary.

  Mary and Emily, Emmeline and Cassy

  The story of Mary and Emily Edmonson’s attempted escape on the Pearl helped inspire Harriet Beecher Stowe when she was writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In fact, Stowe based her characters Emmeline and Cassy in part on the stories of Mary and Emily Edmonson.

  In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chapter 45, “Concluding Remarks,” Stowe wrote:

  The public and shameless sale of beautiful mulatto and quadroon girls has acquired notoriety from the incidents following the capture of the Pearl. … There were two girls named Edmundson [sic] in the same company. When about to be sent to the market, the older sister went to the shambles, to plead with the wretch who owned them, for the love of God, to spare his victims.

  He bantered with her, telling what fine dresses and fine furniture they would have [if they became sex slaves for wealthy men in New Orleans].

  “Yes,” she said, “that may do very well in this life, but what will become of [us] in the next?”

  They too were sent to New Orleans, but were afterwards redeemed, at an enormous ransom, and brought back. Is it not plain, from this, that the histories of Emmeline and Cassy may have many counterparts?

  Meeting Milly Edmonson

  Harriet Beecher Stowe was impressed with Milly Edmonson from the first time they met. In A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe wrote:

  Milly Edmonson is an aged woman, now upwards of seventy. She has received the slave’s inheritance of entire ignorance. She cannot read a letter of a book, nor write her own name; but the writer must say that she was never so impressed with any presentation of the Christian religion as that which was made to her in the language and appearance of this woman during the few interviews that she had with her.…

  Milly is above the middle height, of a large, full figure. She dresses with the greatest attention to neatness. A plain Methodist cap shades her face and the plain white Methodist handkerchief is folded across the bosom. A well-preserved stuff gown and clean white apron with a white pocket-handkerchief pinned to her side, completes the inventory of the costume in which the writer usually saw her. She is a mulatto and must once have been a very handsome one. Her eyes and smile are still uncommonly beautiful but there are deep-wrought lines of patient sorrow and weary endurance on her face, which tell that this lovely and noble-hearted woman has been all her life a slave.

  During their interview, Milly’s story and her demeanor touched Stowe deeply. In Milly, Stowe had found a woman as humble and Christ-like as Uncle Tom, the protagonist in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She was impressed with Milly’s character and her common sense. Stowe wrote to her husband, Calvin Stowe, that until she met Milly she had not met a “living example in which Christianity had reached its fullest development under the crushing wrongs of slavery.” She continued: “I never knew before what I could feel till, with her sorrowful, patient eyes upon me, she told me her history and begged my aid.”

  This is the only known photograph of Amelia (“Milly”) Edmonson.

  EIGHTEEN

  Emily, Alone

  HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S friendship with the Edmonsons continued after Louisa and Josiah were freed. In the fall of 1852, Stowe made arrangements for Emily and Mary to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the few schools in the country that accepted students without discrimination based on race or sex. In addition to the core subjects of mathematics, English, geography, and music, Stowe insisted that the girls learn basic housekeeping and sewing, which she argued would prove useful when they became teachers.

  From the time they arrived on campus, Emily became concerned about Mary’s health. Mary complained of “spinal difficulty,” so at Stowe’s recommendation, Emily applied hot and cold wet bandages to Mary’s aching back as part of a water cure that was popular at the time. Mary remained thin and weak, plagued by a chronic cough, fever, and night sweats. The girls lived in the home of Henry Cowles, a minister and member of the Oberlin board of trustees, who provided Mary with healthy meals and plenty of rest. Nothing helped.

  After several months, the sisters decided they wanted to go home to be with their family in Washington. Both of them longed to see their parents, and Emily worried that Mary’s health was not improving and she might not survive to see her family again if they waited too long. Stowe discouraged them, arguing that travel to Washington in Mary’s weakened state could make her worse. She may also have been worried that if their visit home was made public, the girls might be
threatened by people who objected to their involvement in Stowe’s latest book, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which documented the abuses of slavery. A full chapter of the controversial book discussed the Edmonsons. In any case, they did not make the trip.

  By March of 1853, Mary’s health had worsened further. Her symptoms were classic, but the news was still devastating when the doctor made a diagnosis: tuberculosis. By the end of April, the doctors warned that she would not live much longer. Emily hated to see her sister suffer, but she did not feel ready to let go. Emily had depended on Mary her entire life in slavery and in freedom as older sister, best friend, and spiritual guide. Emily’s love for her sister defined who she was, and it shaped who she thought she would be in the future. Mary had been by her side through every experience in her life. What would she do without her?

  Paul Edmonson came to Oberlin to be with his dying daughter; Milly couldn’t make the trip. When he arrived on campus, Paul joined the 24-hour vigil at Mary’s bedside. Helpless and heartbroken, Emily and her father dabbed sweat from Mary’s forehead and wiped bloody spit from the corners of her mouth. They told her they loved her and listened to her struggle for each raspy breath in reply. They knew it wouldn’t be long—no one could hang on to life like that for more than a few hours. Emily believed that someday she would see her sister again in Heaven, but still, it was impossibly hard to let go.

  With her father and sister at her side, 20-year-old Mary Jane Edmonson died of tuberculosis on May 18, 1853. She was buried in Oberlin’s Westwood Cemetery.

  FROM STUDENT TO TEACHER

  After the funeral, 18-year-old Emily wanted to return to Washington with her father rather than remain in Oberlin without Mary. Five years after attempting to escape on the Pearl, Emily was going home to the District of Columbia, but this time as a free and literate woman ready to build a life of her own.

  Still, Emily felt incomplete without Mary. In the weeks after her return, she struggled to redefine herself as a young woman alone, rather than half of the duo known as the Edmonson sisters, Emily and Mary. On June 3, 1853, she wrote about her sister in a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Cowles, whose family she had lived with while at Oberlin:

  Though I am in Washington with all my dear friends, my heart still lingers around Oberlin, for I have left there beneath the green turf, one that I loved as I did myself, but we are far separated now, for she is in Glory and I am now in a land of chains and slavery. . . .

  It took time to move beyond the sadness, but Emily wanted to follow through on the plans she and Mary had made to become teachers. Once again, Stowe provided Emily with the connections she needed to follow her dreams. Stowe recommended Emily to Myrtilla (Myrtle) Miner, the zealous headmistress at the Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington, D.C., a school dedicated to teaching black girls to become teachers themselves.

  From their first meeting, Emily was struck by Miner’s commitment. For a time Emily wondered whether she should instead return to Syracuse to stay with Jermain Loguen and his family, where she could work with the abolitionists. Stowe convinced her to become Miner’s assistant, replacing a young Quaker woman who had spent a year at the school. Emily was to begin teaching primary school, with the understanding that she would move on to more advanced classes over time. A teacher! Emily would return to school, but this time as a teacher rather than a student. What would Mary think if she could see her now?

  As they got to know each other, Emily listened to Miner tell stories about the founding of the school and its difficult beginnings. When Miner announced that she wanted to open a school for black girls in the nation’s capital, many abolitionists and would-be supporters questioned her plan, telling her that they considered it futile and foolish. Even Frederick Douglass, an avowed proponent of education, discouraged her, considering the school an impractical and ludicrous idea because the community would never tolerate a school for black girls. Only Rev. Beecher of New York, the same man who had helped to raise Emily’s ransom, thought that founding a school was an excellent idea; he promised to send money to buy furniture.

  Miner told Emily that she begged money from friends for the school. “Give me anything you have,” she said. “Paper, books, weights, measures. I will make each one an object lesson for my girls.” Ultimately, Miner returned to the District of Columbia with $100 and a teaching assistant. On December 3, 1851, the school opened with six students in a small apartment rented for $7 per month. Six months later, there were 41 students, and the classroom was equipped with carpet, desks, textbooks, and a small, select library donated by publishers and friends. More than half of the students regularly paid the $1.50 monthly tuition.

  Myrtilla Miner (1815 –1864) founded the Normal School for Colored Girls in order to train black students to become teachers.

  Emily could see that Miner and her school had come a long way in a short time. The school recently had raised $4,300 to buy land and expand the facilities, and one of Emily’s first tasks was to help Miner settle into the new campus, an abandoned three-acre farm in the District, which included a two-story main house and three small cabins, surrounded by shade trees, fruit trees, raspberry bushes, rhubarb plants, strawberry patches, and asparagus plants.

  When Emily and Miner moved to the new location, there were no fences around the property or locks on the doors. In a letter to a friend, Miner wrote: “Emily and I live here alone, unprotected, except by God.” Some in the community objected to the education of black girls. At times, troublemakers gathered near the school to insult the girls as they walked home after school. According to her 1851 memoir, Miner responded by yelling out the window: “Mob my school! You dare not! If you tear it down over my head, I shall get another house. There is no law to prevent my teaching these people and I shall teach them, even unto death!”

  Vandals regularly stoned the house, trying to frighten Miner and Emily into leaving. Once, their house was set on fire; someone walking past woke them and helped extinguish the flames. At one point, the threats against the school had become severe enough that Miner had to seek help. She rushed into town and met with a night watchman. About 15 minutes later, four very burly men armed with clubs appeared on the school grounds and the troublemakers disappeared.

  In order to defend herself and her school, Miner bought a revolver, and she and Emily learned how to shoot. When the troublemakers tried to harass them at the window of the school-house with the weapon in plain view, she said she would shoot the first man who came to the door. “I have been seen practicing shooting with a pistol,” Miner wrote in a letter to a friend, noting that, since that time “we have been left in most profound peace.”

  The Normal School became Miner Teachers College in 1929 and the program is now part of the University of the District of Columbia. The college building, built in 1914, houses the School of Education at Howard University.

  To further improve security, Miner invited Emily’s parents to move into one of the cottages on the grounds, where Paul could cultivate a garden and Milly could work as a seamstress. When the Edmonsons moved onto the campus, bringing the family dog, their presence made Emily and the others at school feel safer, especially at night.

  The school became an established and accepted part of the community. In the years that followed, Emily realized her dream of being a teacher—and because of her efforts, the next generation of Edmonson children did not have to struggle as much as she had to receive an education. Emily Brent, Emily Edmonson’s niece, attended the Miner school and was a member of one of the first classes to graduate. After finishing her studies, Emily Brent moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she began her career as a teacher, the second generation of Edmonsons to become educators.

  Who Was Myrtilla Miner?

  Myrtilla Miner, founder of the Normal School for Colored Girls, in Washington, D.C., had an interest in education her entire life. When Miner was a young girl, her father explained that he considered education beyond the basics to be superfluous, so he encouraged his daughter to dro
p out of school after a few years. She respected her father, but Miner couldn’t bring herself to quit; she was curious and eager to learn.

  Miner picked hops to earn money to buy books. She began to teach at age 15, and then wrote to the principal of the Young Ladies Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York, asking for admission with the understanding that she would pay her tuition and room and board from her future earnings as a teacher. The principal accepted her terms.

  Unfortunately, Miner’s physical strength was not as great as her intellectual strength. As a first-year student, she suffered from severe spinal problems requiring back surgery. Her injuries kept her confined to bed, but she kept up with her studies, eventually attending class while lying on the floor at the back of the room.

  After graduation, she accepted a teaching position in the Rochester, New York, public schools. She then moved to Providence, Rhode Island, followed by Whitesville, Mississippi, where she taught a plantation owner’s daughter to read and write. In the South, she encountered slavery for the first time. The realities of holding men and women in bondage horrified her.

  Miner thought that enslaved people should be educated. She asked the plantation owner—her employer—if she could teach the slaves on his plantation. He explained that it was a crime to teach a slave, suggesting she go north to teach the slaves if it was so important to her. That’s just what she did.

  One of the best descriptions of Miner on record comes from a letter Frederick Douglass wrote on May 4, 1883, to a trustee of the Miner school when asked to reflect about the life and mission of the school’s founder. He wrote:

  It is now more than thirty years (but such have been the changes wrought that it seems a century) since Miss Miner called upon me at my printing-office at work, busily mailing my paper, the “North Star.” . . . A slender, wiry, pale (not over-healthy), but singularly animated figure was before me, and startled me with the announcement that she was then on her way to the city of Washington to establish a school for the education of colored girls. I stopped mailing my paper at once, and gave attention to what was said. I was amazed, and looked to see if the lady was in earnest and meant what she said.