Ellen and William Craft

Ellen Craft was born in 1826 in Clinton, Georgia, to Maria, a mixed-race enslaved woman, and her wealthy planter enslaver, Major James Smith. At least three-quarters European by ancestry, Ellen was very fair-skinned and resembled her white half-siblings, who were her enslaver's legitimate children. Smith's wife gave the 11-year-old Ellen as a wedding gift to her daughter Eliza Cromwell Smith to get the girl out of the household and remove the evidence of her husband's infidelity.[2]

After Eliza Smith married Dr. Robert Collins, she took Ellen with her to live in the city of Macon where they made their home.[2][3] Ellen grew up as a house servant to Eliza, which gave her privileged access to information about the area.

William was born in Macon, where he met his future wife at the age of 16 when his first enslaver sold him to settle gambling debts. Before he was sold, William witnessed his 14-year-old sister and each of his parents being separated by sales to different owners. William's new master apprenticed him as a carpenter and allowed him to work for fees, taking most of his earnings.[4]

At the age of 20, Ellen married William Craft, in whom her enslaver Collins held a half interest. Craft saved money from being hired out in town as a carpenter.[2] Not wanting to have a family in slavery, during the Christmas season of 1848 the couple planned an escape.[5]

Eventually they had five children together, who were born and raised during their nearly two decades living in England. The Crafts went there after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, because they were in danger of being captured in Boston by bounty hunters. Their children were Charles Estlin Phillips (1852–1938), William Ivens (1855–1926), Brougham H. (1857–1920), Ellen A. Craft (1863–1917), and Alfred G. (1871–1939), all born in England. When the Crafts returned to the United States after the American Civil War, three of their children came with them.[5]

Ellen Craft dressed as a man to escape from slavery.

Ellen planned to take advantage of her appearance to pass as white while the pair traveled by train and boat to the North; she dressed as a man since at the time it was not customary for a white woman to travel alone, let alone with an enslaved person.[6] She also faked illness to limit conversation, as she was prevented from learning to read and write on pain of death because she was enslaved. William was to act as personal servant. During that time , enslaved people frequently accompanied their enslavers during travel, so the Crafts did not expect to be questioned. To their surprise, they were detained, but only temporarily. An officer had demanded proof that William was indeed Ellen's property.[7] They were finally let on the train due to sympathy from passengers and the conductor.[8] Their escape is known as the most ingenious plot in fugitive slave history, even more ingenious than "Henry Box Brown".[9]

During their escape, they traveled on first-class trains, stayed in the best hotels, and Ellen dined one evening with a steamboat captain. Ellen cut her hair and bought appropriate clothes to pass as a young man, traveling in a jacket and trousers. William used his earnings as a cabinet-maker to buy clothes for Ellen to appear as a white enslaver. William fixed her hair to add to her manly appearance. Ellen also practiced the correct gestures and behavior.[9] She wore her right arm in a sling to hide the fact that she could not write (because of the white supremacist and racist practices of the U.S.). They traveled to nearby Macon for a train to Savannah. Although the Crafts had several close calls along the way, they were successful in evading detection. On December 21, they boarded a steamship for Philadelphia, in the free state of Pennsylvania, where they arrived early on the morning of Christmas Day.[10]

Their innovation was in escaping as a pair, though it was Ellen's bravery and genius which meant their escape was successful. Historians have noted other enslaved women who posed as men to escape, such as Clarissa Davis of Virginia, who dressed as a man and took a New England-bound ship to freedom; Mary Millburn, who also sailed as a male passenger; and Maria Weems from the District of Columbia. As a young woman of fifteen, she dressed as a man and escaped.[11]

Soon after the Crafts' arrival in the North, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and William Wells Brown encouraged them to recount their escape in public lectures to abolitionist circles of New England. They moved to the well-established free black community on the north side of Beacon Hill in Boston,[5] where they were married in a Christian ceremony. Ellen Craft posed in her escape clothes for a photograph (the basis for the engraving included with this article). It was widely distributed by abolitionists as part of their campaign against slavery. Like her actions, her image as a man challenged viewers' assumptions about the "fixity of gender, race, normalcy, and class."[2]

During the next two years, the Crafts made numerous public appearances to recount their escape and speak against slavery. Because society generally disapproved at the time of women speaking to public audiences of mixed gender, Ellen typically stood on the stage while William told their story. An article of April 27, 1849, in the abolitionist paper The Liberator, however, reported her speaking to an audience of 800–900 people in Newburyport, Massachusetts.[12] Audiences were intensely curious about the young woman who had been so bold in the escape. In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which increased penalties for aiding fugitive slaves and required residents and law enforcement of free states to cooperate in capturing and returning formerly enslaved people to their owners. The act provided for a reward to officers and simplified the process by which people might be certified as slaves, requiring little documentation from slave catchers. Commissioners appointed to hear such cases were paid more for ruling that a person was a slave than not.

A month after the new law was effective, Collins sent two bounty hunters to Boston to capture the Crafts. Willis H. Hughes and John Knight eagerly traveled north from Macon intending to capture William and Ellen Craft; upon arriving to Boston they were met with resistance by both white and black Bostonians. Abolitionists in Boston had formed the biracial Boston Vigilance Committee to resist the new Slave Bill; its members protected the Crafts by moving them around various "safe houses" (such as the Tappan-Philbrick house in the nearby town of Brookline[13]) until they could leave the country. The two bounty hunters finally gave up and returned to the south. Collins even appealed to the President of the United States, Millard Fillmore, asking him to intervene so he could regain his 'property'. The President agreed that the Crafts should be returned to their enslavers in the South, and authorized the use of military force if necessary to take them.[14]

The Crafts and many other fugitives were no longer safe in the North. That year the couple moved to Liverpool, England, a major port.[15]

Bounty hunters and slave catchers sought fees for finding fugitives. William Craft described the new law as "an enactment too infamous to have been thought of or tolerated by any people in the world except the unprincipled and tyrannical Yankees".[16] Aided by their supporters, the Crafts decided to escape to England. They traveled from Portland, Maine overland to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they boarded the Cambria, bound for Liverpool. Abolitionist, Lydia Neal Dennett, arranged their passage on that first steamship that ever sailed from Portland, Maine to England.[17] As William later recounted in their memoir, "It was not until we stepped ashore at Liverpool that we were free from every slavish fear". They were aided in England by a group of prominent abolitionists, including Wilson Armistead, with whom they were residing in Leeds when the census was taken in 1851 and who recorded his guests as “fugitive slaves”,[18] and Harriet Martineau who arranged for their intensive schooling at the village school in Ockham, Surrey .

Having learned to read and write, in 1852, Ellen Craft published the following, which was widely circulated in the antislavery press in both Great Britain and the US. The anti-abolition press had suggested the Crafts regretted their flight to England. She said:

So I write these few lines merely to say that the statement is entirely unfounded, for I have never had the slightest inclination whatever of returning to bondage; and God forbid that I should ever be so false to liberty as to prefer slavery in its stead. In fact, since my escape from slavery, I have gotten much better in every respect than I could have possibly anticipated. Though, had it been to the contrary, my feelings in regard to this would have been just the same, for I had much rather starve in England, a free woman, than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.

— Anti-Slavery Advocate, December 1852[19]

The Crafts spent 19 years in England, where they had five children together. Ellen participated in reform organizations such as the London Emancipation Committee, the Women's Suffrage Organization, and the British and Foreign Freedmen's Society.[2] They earned speaking fees by public lectures about slavery in the US and their escape. William Craft set up a business again, but they still struggled financially. For most of their time in England, the Craft family lived in Hammersmith.[20] Ellen turned their home into a hub of Black activism: she invited fellow Black abolitionists to stay (including Sarah Parker Remond) and supported other abolitionists like John Sella Martin.[21]

Ellen challenged white racists both in public and in private. For example, during one dinner party, Craft was seated next to the former Governor of Jamaica Edward J. Eyre, who brutally suppressed the Morant Bay slave revolt in 1865. Unaware of his background, she discussed the situation in Jamaica and when it was pointed out to her who she was sitting next to, she betrayed no sense of embarrassment and instead criticized his decision to execute Black politician George William Gordon for his supposed part in the rebellion. “Do you not yourself, sir” stated Ellen, “feel now that poor Gordon was unjustly executed?” According to one eyewitness, her “sophisticated grasp of the power of political improvisation” was acute, and she repeated this again with Charles F. Brown (also known as Artemius Ward), who was notorious in his racist depictions of Black people. Craft, “looking him straight in the eye,” challenged him and stated he should “never again write anything which shall make people believe that you are against the negro.”[22]

After the end of the Civil War, Ellen located her mother Maria in Georgia; she paid for her passage to England, where they were reunited.[2]

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In 1868, after the American Civil War and passage of constitutional amendments granting emancipation, citizenship and rights to freedmen, the Crafts returned with three of their children to the United States. They raised funds from supporters, and in 1870 they bought 1800 acres of land in Georgia near Savannah in Bryan County. There they founded the Woodville Co-operative Farm School in 1873 for the education and employment of freedmen. In 1876, William Craft was charged with misuse of funds, and he lost a libel case in 1878 in which he tried to clear his name. The school closed soon after. Although the Crafts tried to keep the farm running, dropping cotton prices and post-Reconstruction era violence contributed to its failure. Whites discriminated against freedmen while working to re-establish white supremacy in politics and economics. By 1876, white Democrats regained control of the state governments in the South.[5]

In 1890, the Crafts moved to Charleston, South Carolina to live with their daughter Ellen, who was married to Dr. William D. Crum. He was appointed Collector of the Port of Charleston by President Theodore Roosevelt. The elder Ellen Craft died in 1891, and her widower William January 29, 1900.[5]

Their book provides a unique view of race, gender, and class in the 19th century. It offers examples of racial passing, cross-dressing, and middle-class "performance" in a society in which each of these boundaries was thought to be distinct and stable.[19] While originally published with only William's name as author, twentieth-century and more recent scholarship has re-evaluated Ellen's likely contribution, noting the inclusion of material about Sally Miller and other female fugitives. Reprints since the 1990s have listed both the Crafts as authors.[5]

Their escape, and particularly Ellen's disguise, which played on so many layers of appearance and identity, showed the interlocking nature of race, gender, and class. Ellen had to "perform" successfully in all three arenas simultaneously for the couple to travel undetected. Since only William's narrative voice tells their joint story in the book, critics say it is suggestive of how difficult it was for a black woman to find a public voice, although she was bold in action. Brusky says that, in the way that she used wrappings to "muffle" her during the escape to avoid conversation, Ellen in the book is presented through the filter of William's perspective.[19]

Historians and readers cannot evaluate how much Ellen contributed to the recounting of their story, but audiences appreciated seeing the young woman who had been so daring. On one occasion, a newspaper notes, there was "considerable disappointment" when Ellen Craft was absent.[23] Since they appeared over a period of 10 years, as William recounted their escape, they could respond to audiences' reactions to Ellen in person and to hearing of her actions. It is likely their published account reflects her influence.[19]

• Their residence in Hammersmith is commemorated by a historic Blue Plaque on the wall of Craft Court, the office of the Shepherds Bush Housing Association.[20]
• 1996, Ellen Craft was inducted into Georgia Women of Achievement.[5]
• Their life, accomplishments, and history are displayed at the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia.
• They are mentioned in connection with the Lewis and Harriet Hayden House on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.[24]
• In September 2018, at the village of Ockham in Surrey, where they found refuge, a sign commemorating their escape was unveiled at an event attended by their great-great-grandson Christopher Clark and other descendants.[25]

• List of African-American abolitionists
• List of slaves

• Craft, Ellen; Craft, William; Blackett, R. J. M. (1999) [1860], Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ISBN 978-0807123201
• Blackett, R.J.M. (1986). Beating against the barriers: biographical essays in nineteenth-century Afro-American history. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0807112816.
• Brusky, Sarah (October 2000). "The travels of William and Ellen Craft: race and travel literature in the 19th century". Prospects. 25: 177–92. doi:10.1017/S0361233300000636.
• Chaney, Michael A. (2008), "The uses in seeing: mobilizing the portrait in drag in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom", in Chaney, Michael A. (ed.), Fugitive vision: slave image and Black identity in antebellum narrative, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 80–110, ISBN 978-0253349446.
• Murray, Hannah-Rose Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
• Salenius, Sirpa (2017). "Transatlantic interracial sisterhoods: Sarah Remond, Ellen Craft, and Harriet Jacobs in England". Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 38 (1): 166–96. doi:10.5250/fronjwomestud.38.1.0166. JSTOR 10.5250/fronjwomestud.38.1.0166. S2CID 164419591.
• Samuels, Ellen (September 2006). "'A Complication of Complaints': untangling disability, race, and gender in William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom". MELUS. 31 (3): 15–47. doi:10.1093/melus/31.3.15. JSTOR i30029647.
• Sterling, Dorothy (1988). Black foremothers: three lives (2nd ed.). Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press. ISBN 978-0935312898.
• Still, William, The Underground Railroad, 1872, pp. 60–61, 177–89, 558–59
• Wardro, Daneen (2004). "Ellen Craft and the case of Salomé Muller in 'Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom'". Women's Studies. 33 (7): 961–84. doi:10.1080/00497870490503824. S2CID 143536234.

• Works by Ellen Craft at Project Gutenberg
• Works by William Craft at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Ellen Craft at Internet Archive
• Works by or about William Craft at Internet Archive
• William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library:
• Re-enactor Marcia Estabrook presents Ellen Craft's story in-character, PBS- WGBH
• "Ellen and William Craft", The Memory Palace, podcast