F.S.A. Ellen and William Craft - 1850

Ellen Craft (1826–1891) and William Craft (September 25, 1824 – January 29, 1900) were slaves from Macon, Georgia who escaped to the North in December 1848 by traveling openly by train and steamboat, arriving in Philadelphia on Christmas Day.  As the light-skinned quadroon daughter of a mulatto slave and her white master, Ellen used her appearance to pass as a white man, dressed in male clothing, she passed as a white male planter and he as her personal servant.  Their daring escape was widely publicized, making them among the most famous of fugitive slaves.  Abolitionists featured them in public lectures to gain support in the struggle to end the institution, during their escape.

As prominent fugitives, they were threatened by slave catchers in Boston after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, so the Crafts emigrated to England. They lived there for nearly two decades and reared five children. The Crafts lectured publicly about their escape. In 1860 they published a written account, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. One of the most compelling of the many slave narratives published before the American Civil War, their book reached wide audiences in Great Britain and the United States. After their return to the US in 1868, the Crafts opened an agricultural school for freedmen's children in Georgia.  They worked at the school and its farm until 1890. 

Historians have noted other slave 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.  The Crafts unique in that they escaped as a couple. .

Ellen Craft dressed as a man.

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Early life

Ellen Craft was born in 1826 in Clinton, Georgia, to Maria, a mixed-race slave, and her wealthy planter master, Major James Smith.  At least three-quarters European by ancestry, Ellen was very fair-skinned and resembled her white half-siblings, who were her master's legitimate children.  Smith's wife gave the 11-year-old slave 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.

After Eliza Smith married Dr. Robert Collins, she took Ellen with her to live in the city of Macon where they made their home.   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 master 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. 


Marriage and family

At the age of 20, Ellen married fellow slave, William Craft, in whom her master Collins held a half interest. Craft saved money from being hired out in town as a carpenter.   Not wanting to rear a family in slavery, during the Christmas season of 1848 the couple planned an escape. 
 
Eventually they had five children together, who were mostly born and reared during their nearly two decades of living in England.  The Crafts went there after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, as they were in danger as a prominent fugitive slave couple of being captured in Boston by bounty hunters.  When the Crafts returned to the United States after the American Civil War, three of their children came with them.
 

Ellen Craft dressed as a man to escape from slavery. 


The escape

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 and pretended illness to limit conversation. William was to act as her slave and personal servant. During that time period, domestic slaves frequently accompanied their masters during travel, so the Crafts did not expect to be questioned. Their escape is known as the most ingenious plot in fugitive slave history, even more ingenious than "Henry Box Brown."

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 jacket and trousers. William used his earnings as a cabinet-maker to buy clothes for Ellen to appear as a white slave holder.  They carefully selected clothes that white male slave holders would wear.  Ellen's wardrobe included a top hat, cravat, jacket, tartan, and a tassel, all of which signified slave holder status. William fixed her hair to add to her manly appearance.  Ellen also practiced to get gestures and behavior right.   She wore her right arm in a sling to hide the fact that she did not know how to write.  They traveled to nearby Macon for a train to Savannah.   Although the Crafts had several close calls along the way and neither could read nor write, 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.



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, 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."

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.   Audiences were intensely curious about the young woman who had been so bold in escape. 

One month after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act went into effect, Collins sent two bounty hunters to Boston to retrieve the Crafts. Willis 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 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) 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 owners in the South, and authorized the use of military force if necessary to take them.

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


Flight and life in Great Britain

Bounty hunters and slave catchers sought fees for finding fugitive slaves. 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." 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. 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 Harriet Martineau. She 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

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.   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.   After the end of the Civil War and emancipation of slaves, Ellen located her mother Maria in Georgia; she paid for her passage to England, so they were reunited. 

Return to the United States

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.

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 died in January 1900.