Amelia was allowed to live with her husband, but continued to work for her master. Įdmonson purchased land in the Norbeck area of Montgomery County, where he farmed and established his family. By 1860, 49.7 percent of black people in Maryland were free. By 1810, more than 10 percent of black people in the Upper South were free, with most of them in Maryland and Delaware. Most descended from enslaved people freed in the first two decades after the American Revolution, when enslavers were encouraged to manumission by the principles of the war and activist Quaker and Methodist preachers. Maryland was a state with a high percentage of free black people. Their father, Paul Edmonson, was set free by his owner's will. Since the 17th century, law common to all slave states decreed that the children of an enslaved mother inherited their mother's legal status, by the principle of partus sequitur ventrem.

Mary and Emily were two of 13 or 14 children who survived to adulthood, all of whom were born into slavery. The Edmonson sisters were the daughters of Paul and Amelia Edmonson, a free black man and an enslaved woman in Montgomery County, Maryland. They campaigned with Beecher throughout the North for the end of slavery in the United States. After gaining freedom, the Edmonsons were supported to go to school they also worked.

On April 15, 1848, they were among the 77 slaves who tried to escape from Washington, DC on the schooner The Pearl to sail up the Chesapeake Bay to freedom in New Jersey.Īlthough that effort failed, they were freed from slavery by funds raised by the Congregational Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, whose pastor was Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent abolitionist. Mary Edmonson (1832–1853) and Emily Edmonson (1835 – September 15, 1895), 'two respectable young women of light complexion', were African Americans who became celebrities in the United States abolitionist movement after gaining their freedom from slavery.

Within the Ward by Emily Larkin