“One hundred dollars” is what Daniel Bell, a free African American blacksmith living and working at the Navy Yard in the District of Columbia, was told he needed for his family in 1848. Eleven members of his family — including his wife, children, and grandchildren — could escape from slavery for $100 (today’s equivalent of a half year’s pay). Legally they were already free, but lawyers had them tied up in court. Proving their freedom would be expensive, time consuming, and uncertain at best. A ship could be chartered, The Pearl, to take his family to freedom.

Paul Jennings

It had been done before and they could get the same captain do it again. Working with two other African Americans living in Washington, D.C. —   Samuel Edmonson (who wanted to help his enslaved sisters, Emily and Mary), and Paul Jennings (in the process of “paying down the balance of the debt owed for his freedom,” formerly enslaved to President and Mrs. Madison) —  Bell would make it happen; he would get the $100. Captain Daniel Drayton took the chance because he needed the money. He chartered The Pearl and brought it to the 7th street wharf in D.C. during the great public demonstrations celebrating the establishment of the new French Republic, the exile of King Louis-Philippe and the hope for universal liberty. Washington, D.C. was aglow with excitement.

The cargo schooner could hold more than the enslaved members of the Bell and Edmonson families. Others learned of the daring plan and asked to join. Drayton accepted all those who could get on board by midnight. Casting off in the dark, they sailed down the Potomac, escaping to their freedom. The largest slave escape in the history of the United States was in progress.

Forty-one slave owners in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia awoke the next day to discover 77 people missing. Banding together on the steamer Salem, organized by the then Justice of the Peace, law enforcement officers and others, a posse of 35 armed white men headed out in hot pursuit of The Pearl. Winds pouring down the Chesapeake had forced The Pearl to anchor, waiting for a weather change, and the ship and its passengers were apprehended. The pursuit of family freedom was stymied, but many of the families on The Pearl survived and, when freedom came, they thrived.

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law Convention, Cazenovia, New York. The Edmonson sisters are standing wearing bonnets and shawls in the row behind the seated speakers. Frederick Douglass is seated, with Gerritt Smith standing behind him, and with Abby Kelley Foster the likely person seated on Douglass’s left. Source: WikiCommons

Above, Frederick Douglass is pictured with Mary and Emily Edmonson at the Cazenovia Fugitive Slave Law Convention in New York. The New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. Underground Railroad cell(s) were very involved in the planning, organization, and implementation of the escape.

People of faith and the church of that time served as the life blood for communications and the driving force behind the movement to abolish slavery locally and nationally. The escape on the Pearl Schooner reignited the abolitionist movement. Thus, it led to a series of events and congressional and presidential  actions that later laid the foundation for the emancipation of slavery in Washington D.C., the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Civil War.

This article was originally published on The Pearl Coalition website.

Learn More

Read more about the escape on the Pearl at the Washington Post.

Listen to a musical tribute to Emily and Mary Edmonson, composed by Joe DeFilippo and performed by the R. J. Phillips Band, a group of Baltimore musicians: “Troubled Waters.”

Find related resources below.

The post April 15, 1848: The Escape on the Pearl Schooner appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Henry Highland Garnet, c. 1881. Source: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, public domain.

Abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet was born into slavery in Maryland on Dec. 23, 1815. He and his parents escaped from bondage via the Underground Railroad and settled in New York City.

Garnet was a student at Noyes Academy in New Hampshire until it was destroyed by white supremacist terrorists in 1835.

He became a minister in 1843, and spoke to the delegates of the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York, where he called for a militant slave revolt against the plantation owners of the South. Many abolitionists at the time thought the call for self-emancipation was too radical. But it was ultimately the enslaved rebelling — running away, refusing to work on the plantations, taking up arms, and joining the Union Army — that won the Civil War.

Garnet also opposed the U.S.-Mexico War because it’s real aim was to re-impose slavery on Mexico, which had abolished it decades earlier.  In 1865, he gave a speech to the U.S. House of Representatives urging them to adopt the 13th Amendment. 

He met with Cuban liberation leaders to form an international coalition to spread emancipation across the globe. At a mass meeting in New York City, Garnet urged people to link the Black freedom struggle with the liberation movements in Latin America. They gathered 500,000 signatures to advance the cause of freedom and delivered the petition to President Grant to recognize the independent Republic of Cuba.

Find resources below for teaching this history, including a lesson called “‘If There Is No Struggle…’: Teaching a People’s History of the Abolition Movement.”

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Elizabeth “Betsy” Brown Stephens, a Cherokee woman who walked the Trail of Tears. Image Source: Lmaotru.

See the film segment of We Shall Remain and use the Cherokee/Seminole Removal Role Play to introduce students to the history outside of the textbook about the organized efforts to resist relocation and the horror of the internment and subsequent death marches. 

The post May 23, 1838: The Trail of Tears Began appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Left out of most representations of the Oregon Trail are the Native peoples whose land was being invaded. Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

The post May 22, 1843: “Great Emigration” of the Oregon Trail appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History tells U.S. history from the point of view of — and in the words of — America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.

As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles — the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality — were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through President Clinton’s first term, A People’s History of the United States features insightful analysis of the most important events in U.S. history.

Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those. . . whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.” Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s award-winning classic continues to revolutionize the way U.S. history is taught and remembered.

The book has appeared in popular media, like The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Good Will Hunting, Lady Bird, and the History Channel documentary The People Speak. [Publisher’s description.]

More than two million copies sold.

The 35th anniversary edition, published in November of 2015, includes a new introduction by Anthony Arnove. He begins,

Howard Zinn fundamentally changed the way millions of people think about history with A People’s History of the United States. He would be the first to say, however, that he didn’t do so alone. The book grew out of his awareness of the importance of social movements throughout U.S. history, some of which he played an active role in during the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, namely the Civil Rights Movement, mass mobilizations to end the Vietnam War, as well as other antiwar movements, and the many movements for higher wages and workers’ rights and the rights of women, Latinos, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, and others.

ISBN: 9780062397348 | HarperCollins

Teacher Quotes

As a teacher, the Zinn Education Project website is invaluable because it provides activities that directly relate to A People’s History. Last week we did The People vs. Columbus, et al. which places all the parties involved in the arrival of Columbus on trial for the murder of the Tainos. The activity was so interactive that teachers from other classrooms had to ask us to quiet down. Students were able to better understand the motives and consequences behind the arrival.

Even though A People’s History can be a bit difficult for some students, the activities on the Zinn Education Project website makes the content accessible regardless of their reading level.

—Julian Hipkins III

HIgh School Administrator, Washington, District of Columbia

My first lesson as a student teacher was using an excerpt from A People’s History of the United States to teach about Columbus. I was working at Booker T. Washington Middle School in NYC. A student raised her hand and said, “Howard Zinn is my uncle!” I was honored, my hero’s niece! For Christmas, I got a signed copy!

—Francesca Miller

Teacher, New York, New York

More than thirty years ago, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Howard Zinn on a cross-country flight to check out graduate programs. Despite my being somewhat star-struck, he was one of those easy to “fall into conversation with” seatmates — kind, engaging, and interested in why I was traveling.

When I revealed that I was considering becoming a social studies teacher, he said “You must do that. The world needs teachers like the one you will be.” The voice of the universe had spoken and I have been a classroom teacher for the past thirty years, using parts of A People’s History of the United States and his inspirational approach to understanding the American experience.

—Annie Barnes

High School Humanities Teacher, Los Angeles, California

I grew up very trusting (too trusting) of the mainstream media and the accounts of our nations history from my textbooks. For years I was under the impression that the United States of America was the greatest nation in the world with no flaws — the epitome of democratic perfection. I would sing the national anthem proudly at baseball games and digest all the stories of our founding fathers that led me to idolization.

Then I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and everything changed. I became more curious about who was writing the history and their motivations. I developed a lens by which to critically judge the events and accounts I read in newspapers and history books. I was more thoughtful about a mainstream version of our history informed how another might see the world differently than me.

His book was the catalyst — opening me to a deeper understanding of myself, my biases and how they manifested subconsciously into sexism, racism, classism, and other forms of intolerance. After doing more work, reading books like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, I found my way with conviction into activism. Each day I do this work I feel increasingly more empowered to be an aware and mindful ally to the Movement for Black Lives and other movements who struggle to dismantle systems of violence and oppression.

—Brendan Orsinger

Organizer with the James Reeb Voting Rights Project, District of Columbia

I read A People’s History of the United States in the summer before my junior year of high school — fifteen years ago now. It was an interesting time. This would have been 2005-2006, so the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were well underway, and I was beginning to pay attention to what those around me were saying about war.

As I sat in Boston Common reading my paperback copy of A People’s History, I must have had dozens of people come up to me to tell me how much it had changed their lives. Some were former students, some were fans, some were college students reading Zinn for the first time. Howard Zinn gave me a gift — a radical awakening. His work has that kind of power. You don’t forget injustice easily, and he unearths the injustices the other textbooks would rather forget.

I had the distinct honor of meeting Zinn when he gave the opening remarks at an adaptation of Grace Paley’s work. For all that Zinn was — activist, educator, historian, pacifist, mensch — he reminded me of why our people fight for justice. I love the long, anti-capitalist, anti-white supremacist tradition he carried forward as a Jew. We are obligated by our religion to fight for all who are oppressed, and every time I read Zinn, I am graced with that reminder, and that memory.

I believe in the power of radical change through progressive education and fully support the work of the Zinn Education Project.

—Becky Eidelman

Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Graduate Student, Boston, Massachusetts

I am an 8th grade Humanities teacher at Melrose Leadership Academy in Oakland.

I just finished chapter 4 of A People’s History of the United States on tyranny with my 8th graders, and I have never seen so many of my students engaged in discussion! One of my normally non-avid readers came up to me at the end of the class and said, “Ms. V, this is such an interesting book!”

I am so proud to be using Howard Zinn’s work! Thank you!

—Marisa Villegas

Middle School Humanities Teacher, Oakland, California

Because of this book, I understood early in my college career the importance of the true, unfiltered words of the actual actors in a historical event. As a result, I was drawn further into the study of history and, eventually, into my career as a history teacher. What A People’s History brought to my attention is that American history is much more interesting than that. Our history is an exciting, sometimes appalling, struggle for power and that makes us just like every other country that has ever existed.

A long list of “good guys” with no one to struggle with is neither a true story nor a good story. It doesn’t resonate because it leads the student to believe that we are all waiting for the next exceptional leader, instead of becoming a force for change in our own communities. A People’s History helped me recognize this as a student of history and inspires my attempt to bring true stories to young people, weary of the inaccessible lists that history teaching has become.

—Reynolds Bodenhamer

HIgh School Social Studies Teacher, Gulfport, Mississippi

In my first year of teaching 15 years ago, I was browsing local bookstores for resources that could supplement the textbook that I resented. I became a history teacher to help students make history a living part of their lives and the textbook seemed to have the opposite effect. I grabbed A People’s History of the United States and have yet to put it down.

The way in which Howard Zinn makes history compelling for students is undeniable and a resource that I have decided I — and my students — cannot be without. Many students who find themselves in alternative programs will often say that teachers never made school interesting. Zinn’s work gave me the resource I needed to capture the internal sense of justice so many urban students have. As an educator, I am filled with excitement that although I opened the window with the help of Howard Zinn, they have made the effort to examine what is outside.

—Dawn Fontaine

High School Social Studies Teacher, Springfield, Massachusetts

I have been a Howard Zinn fan since I picked up a copy of A People’s History when it first came out. I have cited it in more newspaper opinion columns than I can remember. I also quoted from it many times in my lectures at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, where I was on the faculty for 36 years. I recommended the book to my students. I still recommend the book to my union brothers and sisters — I’m the webmaster-editor for the Kentucky State AFL-CIO, a member of the state executive board and a retiree-member of AFT Local 1360. More than a few have bought copies of it.

—Berry Craig

Professor Emeritus of History, West Kentucky Community and Technical College, Louisville, Kentucky

Read more quotes from teachers about the impact of Howard Zinn and A People’s History of the United States on their work.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress
Chapter 2. Drawing the Color Line
Chapter 3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition
Chapter 4. Tyranny Is Tyranny
Chapter 5. A Kind of Revolution
Chapter 6. The Intimately Oppressed
Chapter 7. As Long as Grass Grows or Water Runs
Chapter 8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God
Chapter 9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom
Chapter 10. The Other Civil War
Chapter 11. Robber Barons and Rebels
Chapter 12. The Empire and the People
Chapter 13. The Socialist Challenge
Chapter 14. War Is the Health of the State
Chapter 15. Self-help in Hard Times
Chapter 16. A Peoples War?
Chapter 17. Or Does It Explode?
Chapter 18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam
Chapter 19. Surprises
Chapter 20. The Seventies: Under Control?
Chapter 21. Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus
Chapter 22. The Unreported Resistance
Chapter 23. The Coming Revolt of the Guards
Chapter 24. The Clinton Presidency
Chapter 25. The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism”

The post A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Here is the original language of the Act signed by Jefferson:

An Act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States, in cases of insurrections

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.

APPROVED, March 3, 1807.

In the 19th century, it was called upon when the United States wanted to suppress American Indian sovereignty. The law was also the legal basis for the Civil War, as it gave Abraham Lincoln powers to send federal troops into Southern states.

With a few exceptions, the law has historically been used to make a federal military response to labor disputes or anti-racism protests.

Andrew Jackson used the law to put down Nat Turner’s Rebellion and to put down a revolt by C&O Canal laborers in Maryland.

Ulysses S. Grant used the law at least three times during Reconstruction to respond to violent racist rioting by the Klan and other white supremacists. Grover Cleveland cited it to respond to the Pullman Strike in 1894 and Woodrow Wilson used the power to send troops to the 1914 Colorado Coalfield War.

Eisenhower and Kennedy called on the Act to enforce desegregation and defend against white aggression. Johnson used the act to quell uprisings in April 1968, in Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. George H. W. Bush used the Act to send troops to Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King protests.

The post March 3, 1807: Thomas Jefferson Signs Insurrection Act Into Law appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

In 1832, Garrison, with others, helped organize a meeting of abolitionists. Garrison, an abolitionist from Massachusetts, co-founded and was an editor for The Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper that was created in 1831.

On Jan. 6, 1832 the New England Anti-Slavery Society was founded at the African Meeting House in Boston.

Remember Your Weekly Pledge, collection box for Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Circa 1850. Courtesy of Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Below are lessons and other classroom resources on the Abolition Movement.

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On Jan. 1, 1804, Haiti became a free republic after a revolution that began in 1791, declaring independence for all people from colonial rule and enslavement.

Frederick Douglass, who served as U.S. minister to Haiti (1889-91) until he resigned in protest, gave a lecture on the history of Haiti and the U.S. treatment of Haiti that is as relevant and informative today as it was when he gave it on Jan. 2, 1893. He begins,

My subject is Haiti, the Black Republic; the only self-made Black Republic in the world. I am to speak to you of her character, her history, her importance and her struggle from slavery to freedom and to statehood. I am to speak to you of her progress in the line of civilization; of her relation with the United States; of her past and present; of her probable destiny; and of the bearing of her example as a free and independent Republic, upon what may be the destiny of the African race in our own country and elsewhere.

He continues on the unique role of Haiti,

Until she [Haiti] spoke no Christian nation had abolished negro slavery. Until she spoke no christian nation had given to the world an organized effort to abolish slavery. Until she spoke the slave ship, followed by hungry sharks, greedy to devour the dead and dying slaves flung overboard to feed them, plouged in peace the South Atlantic painting the sea with the Negro’s blood. Until she spoke, the slave trade was sanctioned by all the Christian nations of the world, and our land of liberty and light included. Men made fortunes by this infernal traffic, and were esteemed as good Christians, and the standing types and representations of the Saviour of the World. Until Haiti spoke, the church was silent, and the pulpit was dumb. Slavetraders lived and slave-traders died. Funeral sermons were preached over them, and of them it was said that they died in the triumphs of the christian faith and went to heaven among the just.

Read Douglass’s lecture in full, Lecture on Haiti, The Haitian Pavilion, Dedication Ceremonies Delivered at the World’s Fair, in Jackson Park, Chicago, Jan. 2d, 1893.

Learn more from The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius S. Scott and the resources listed below.

The post Jan. 1, 1804: Haitian Independence appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Adam Crosswhite. Source: Archives of Michigan

On Jan. 27, 1847, several hundred citizens of Marshall, Michigan, helped Adam and Sarah Crosswhite escape from being kidnapped.

The Crosswhites had escaped from slavery in Kentucky and were living in Marshall with their four children when slave catchers came to kidnap them.

The townspeople detained the slave catchers while the Crosswhites fled to Canada. Learn more about their story from the Seeking Michigan archives. Also, the National Archives has papers related to their case, including a deposition given by the Crosswhites in Canada, as described in a National Archives Researcher News (Fall, 2016) article.

This is considered to be one of the cases that led to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

In the related resources below is a lesson on the people’s history of the Abolition Movement.

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Writ of Attachment in the Trial of “The Antelope”

On June 29, 1820 (19 years before the famous Amistad case), 281 Africans aboard The Antelope were brought to Savannah by the U.S. Treasury. The average age of the captives was about 14, and more than 40% were between the ages of 5 and 10 years old.

Rather than being given their immediate freedom as they stated they should be (and should have been), the Africans were imprisoned for seven years while a legal and political battle ensued.

Lawyers and public officials prospered from the case. For example, while imprisoned, the U.S. marshal in Savannah forced the strongest of them to labor (with no pay and under brutal conditions) on his plantation, while at the same time he billed the federal government for the care of the captives.

Of the Africans: 120 died and 2 are unaccounted for. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that 39 be sold into slavery (by the U.S. gov’t.) to raise funds to pay Spain and Portugal and 120 be sent to Liberia to found New Georgia. An overview at the National Archives explains,

Writing for the [Supreme Court] majority, Chief Justice John Marshall concluded that however “abhorrent” the trade may have been, it had “claimed all the sanction which could be derived from long usage and general acquiescence.”

For this reason, the United States was obliged to recognize the rights of other nations to participate in the slave trade. However, because a number of the Africans in question were captured from aboard an American vessel, the United States would retain possession of a portion of their total. Those Africans that were placed in U.S. custody were returned to Africa the following year. The Africans that remained were sold to American slave owners and their proceeds delivered to the Spanish and Portuguese claimants as restitution for their losses.

The full (and painful) decision can be read online, The Antelope, 23 U.S. 66 (1825).

Here is more detailed description from a review of Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope by Jonathan M. Bryant.

In 1820, a suspicious vessel was spotted lingering off the coast of northern Florida, the Spanish slave ship Antelope. Since the United States had outlawed its own participation in the international slave trade more than a decade before, the ship’s almost 300 African captives were considered illegal cargo under American laws.

But with slavery still a critical part of the American economy, it would eventually fall to the Supreme Court to determine whether or not they were slaves at all, and if so, what should be done with them.

Bryant describes the captives’ harrowing voyage through waters rife with pirates and governed by an array of international treaties. By the time the Antelope arrived in Savannah, Georgia, the puzzle of how to determine the captives’ fates was inextricably knotted. Set against the backdrop of a city in the grip of both the financial panic of 1819 and the lingering effects of an outbreak of yellow fever, Dark Places of the Earth vividly recounts the eight-year legal conflict that followed, during which time the Antelope‘s human cargo were mercilessly put to work on the plantations of Georgia, even as their freedom remained in limbo.

When at long last the Supreme Court heard the case, Francis Scott Key, the legendary Georgetown lawyer and author of “The Star Spangled Banner,” represented the Antelope captives in an epic courtroom battle that identified the moral and legal implications of slavery for a generation.

Four of the six justices who heard the case, including Chief Justice John Marshall, owned [enslaved people]. Despite this, Key insisted that “by the law of nature all men are free,” and that the captives should by natural law be given their freedom. This argument was rejected. The court failed Key, the captives, and decades of American history, siding with the rights of property over liberty and setting the course of American jurisprudence on these issues for the next thirty-five years. The institution of slavery was given new legal cover, and another brick was laid on the road to the Civil War.

Let us know if you have taught about this case. Find related teaching resources below on resistance to slavery and reparations.

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