Pacheco, Josephine F.

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Pacheco, Josephine F.

PERSONAL:

Education: Earned B.A., M.A., Ph.D.

CAREER:

Writer, educator. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, distinguished professor of history emerita and former director of the Center for the Study of Constitutional Rights.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) The Legacy of George Mason, George Mason University Press (Fairfax, VA), 1983.

(With Philip S. Foner) Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner: Champions of Antebellum Black Education, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1984.

(Editor) Antifederalism: The Legacy of George Mason, George Mason University Press (Fairfax, VA), 1992.

To Secure the Blessings of Liberty, George Mason University Press (Fairfax, VA), 1992.

(Editor, with Jack R. Censer and T. Daniel Shumate) An International Perspective on Human Rights: The Legacy of George Mason, George Mason University Press (Fairfax, VA), 1992.

The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Josephine F. Pacheco is a distinguished professor of history emerita from George Mason University. She is also the former director of the Center for the Study of Constitutional Rights.

In her 1988 title The Legacy of George Mason, Pacheco gathers essays on one of America's founding fathers. In her introduction to the book, Pacheco explained Mason's enduring contribution: "In 1776, when George Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the state's first constitution, he established a precedent that has influenced the course of national and international affairs for more than two hundred years: A constitution had to be written down so that everyone would know what powers a government had or did not have; as a further safeguard, that document had to state the rights of the people that government could never invade or limit." Pacheco has also edited Antifederalism: The Legacy of George Mason and, with Jack R. Censer and T. Daniel Shumate, edited An International Perspective on Human Rights: The Legacy of George Mason.

In Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner: Champions of Antebellum Black Education, Pacheco and coauthor Philip S. Foner tell the stories of three white women teachers who dared to teach black students in pre-Civil War America. Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, and Myrtilla Miner established schools for black children in Connecticut, Virginia, and Washington, DC, despite persecution from many in their communities.

In 2005, Pacheco published The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac. In this book, she recounts the story of seventy-six slaves who, in 1848, tried to escape from Washington, DC, aboard a ship named the Pearl. They hoped to sail north along the Atlantic coast to freedom in Pennsylvania. Because of a storm in the Atlantic, the ship was forced to stop at the mouth of the Potomac River. Their pursuers overtook the ship and the slaves were caught and returned to Washington. Daniel Drayton and Edward Sayres, the two white men who had arranged for the ship, were arrested and jailed. The slaves were sold to slave traders who resold them in the Deep South. Pacheco recounts not only the story of their aborted escape but the ramifications of the attempt. Because of the wide publicity surrounding the escape, the U.S. Congress debated whether the District of Columbia, as the seat of the national government, should ban slavery. While slavery was not banned, the abolitionist cause nonetheless benefited from the public debate of the issue. Writing in the book's introduction, Pacheco notes: "The attempted escape is revealing about Americans both black and white, slave and free, powerful and powerless; it was significant in the story of American slavery and antislavery." "The nature of the subject matter dictates that we can learn much about organized attempts to escape from slavery from spectacular failures," according to Keith P. Griffler, writing in the Journal of American History. "Josephine F. Pacheco's well-researched, detailed account of seventy-six runaways and the handful of conspirators who very nearly got them to freedom in 1848 constitutes one of the most remarkable." "Pacheco," the critic for Black Issues in Higher Education wrote, "provides fresh insight into the lives of enslaved Blacks in the District of Columbia, putting a human face on the victims of the interstate slave trade whose lives have been overshadowed by larger historical events." Hutch Johnson, writing in History: Review of New Books, called the book "an intriguing story" and believed that "The Pearl should be added to every reading list for undergraduate courses and graduate seminars surveying this period." "Pacheco's main argument," Carol Wilson wrote in the Journal of Southern History, "… is persuasive—that while the Pearl did not bring about the end of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, it did bring the issue squarely to the attention of members of Congress and provided abolitionists with a springboard for initiating the debate." Reviewing the book for H-Net Reviews, Mary Beth Corrigan concluded that Pacheco "provides a solid account of an almost mythic event among local historians that establishes its importance within the antislavery movement. [The Pearl], therefore, constitutes a significant contribution to the growing literature on antebellum Washington."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December, 1984, Kenneth E. St. Clair, review of The Legacy of George Mason, pp. 1389-1390; February, 1985, V.P. Franklin, review of Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner: Champions of Antebellum Black Education, p. 222; June, 2006, Steven Deyle, review of The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac.

American Journal of Legal History, October, 1985, Henry J. Bourguignon, review of The Legacy of George Mason, pp. 362-363.

Black Issues in Higher Education, February 10, 2005, review of The Pearl, p. 39.

Booklist, May 1, 1991, review of The Legacy of George Mason, p. 1697.

Civil War History, March, 2007, Thomas C. Buchanan, review of The Pearl, pp. 69-71.

Educational Studies, February, 1984, review of Three Who Dared, pp. 365-390.

History: Review of New Books, fall, 2005, Hutch Johnson, review of The Pearl, p. 9.

History Today, May, 2005, review of The Pearl, p. 75.

Journal of American History, December, 1993, Robert W. Hoffert, review of Antifederalism: The Legacy of George Mason, p. 1073; December, 1994, Jack N. Rakove, review of To Secure the Blessings of Liberty, p. 1294; March, 2006, Keith P. Griffler, review of The Pearl.

Journal of Southern History, May, 1995, Warren M. Billings, review of To Secure the Blessings of Liberty, p. 368; May, 2006, Carol Wilson, review of The Pearl, p. 470.

Journal of the Early Republic, spring, 1993, David W. Robson, review of Antifederalism, p. 83; winter, 2005, Stanley Harrold, review of The Pearl, pp. 687-689.

Mason Gazette, July 12, 2006, Colleen Kearney Rich, "Mason Faculty Nominated for Literary Awards."

Perspectives on Political Science, spring, 1995, review of To Secure the Blessings of Liberty, p. 110.

Reference & Research Book News, February, 1993, review of Antifederalism, p. 23; December, 1993, review of To Secure the Blessings of Liberty, p. 34.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1994, review of To Secure the Blessings of Liberty, p. 44.