Craft, William and Ellen Craft

Source:

 African American National Biography

Craft, William and Ellen Craft

(1824–28 Jan. 1900) and (1826–1891),

escaped slaves, abolitionists, teachers, entrepreneurs, and autobiographers, were born into slavery in antebellum central Georgia. William recalled little of his father and mother, who, along with a brother and a sister, were sold away “at separate times, to different persons” by his first master, a merchant named Craft (Craft, 8). Ellen was the daughter of Maria, a mixed-race slave, and James Smith, a white planter from Clinton, Georgia. Like her mother, Ellen was raised as a house servant until she was given, at age eleven, as a wedding present to her white half-sister Eliza, the wife of Robert Collins, a wealthy businessman and railroad builder in Macon, Georgia. While Ellen was serving as a lady's maid and seamstress in the Collins mansion, William was brought to Macon by a bank officer named Ira Taylor.

William was much in demand for his carpentry skills, as his first master had apprenticed him to learn this trade. Like other male slaves in urban areas who possessed specialized knowledge, he was “hired out,” in this case to work for a white carpenter in town. He waited tables to earn his board and handed over a monthly percentage of his pay to Taylor while pocketing the rest. An accomplished seamstress, Ellen may have saved money from handiwork produced at night after her required duties were done. By the late 1840s both had attained physical mobility, economic self-sufficiency—and for William, a rudimentary reading ability—assets that proved crucial to their success in their escape from slavery.

William and Ellen met around 1846 and quickly fell in love. They agonized, however, over their inability to live together and to procure a Christian marriage. They were equally troubled by the dismal prospects for any children they might have. So long as Ellen remained enslaved, the Crafts’ children would suffer the brutalities of slavery—unrelenting and unrequited toil, crowded and unsanitary living conditions, whippings, perhaps rape by the master, and the auction block. By 1848 the couple had decided to escape to the North.

They strategically planned to make their escape during the Christmas holidays, when it was customary for slaveholders to relax surveillance of their “property,” releasing their slaves from work for several days. The vigilance of the “paterollers”—who patrolled the countryside and monitored the activities of bound and free blacks traveling between plantations—also eased during the holidays. Fear of recapture, separation, punishment, and sale, however, must have weighed heavily on the couple, who were well aware of whites’ anxieties about unchaperoned blacks. The Crafts’ justifiable fears would have been heightened by the tense atmosphere of suspicion that resulted from such slave uprisings as those led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822.

William and Ellen Craft. In order to escape slavery, the Crafts posed as a prosperous southern gentleman and his manservant. (William Loren Katz Collection.)

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The Crafts thus decided to increase their prospects for success by using camouflage, a timeworn yet often effective diversion for runaways. Ellen took advantage of her light-skinned complexion by posing as a chronically ill, albeit prosperous, southern gentleman named William Johnson. She cut her hair, put on a suit and spectacles, layered bandages around her face to conceal her beardless chin, hung her arm lifelessly in a sling to avoid having to write, and topped the whole costume with an elegant, status-announcing beaver hat. William was darker in skin color and facial features, so they devised for him to accompany his “master” as a slave valet. Under the ruse of seeking treatment for “Johnson's” various ailments, the couple conspired to travel to Philadelphia, where slavery was outlawed. After William obtained a pass from his master on the pretext of accompanying Ellen to visit her dying mother, they were ready.

On 20 December 1848, as southern protocol demanded, they boarded separate compartments on the same Macon-to-Savannah railroad that Ellen's current owner had built. On Christmas Day, after a few near exposures and close calls, they arrived in Philadelphia. The Crafts arrived in Boston several weeks later, in January 1849. Unlike other escaped slaves who fled at night following the North Star, lived off berries, and held close to riverbeds and ditches, William and Ellen Craft had traveled openly up the eastern seaboard, tempting fate with overnight stays at hotels swarming with southern planters.

For two years the Crafts were the darlings of northern abolitionists. They settled in Boston, the center of the American antislavery movement, where they lived in the dynamic African American enclave on Beacon Hill. The Crafts became sought-after participants at abolition meetings throughout New England, although in keeping with social convention, Ellen rarely spoke. They were familiar figures at the African Meeting House at Eight Smith Court (known around Boston as “the Black Faneuil Hall”), and at the integrated Charles Street AME Church. William was elected vice president of the League of Freedom, a group organized to protect fugitive slaves. In their private life, the Crafts established a model Victorian household. Possessed of an endearing shyness and delicacy, Ellen remained home but also earned a little “by the needle.” White union members blocked William from plying his carpentry trade, but he sustained a modest used furniture business. This must have further romanticized him to Boston abolitionists, who well remembered the black abolitionist David Walker's used clothing business located decades earlier on Brattle Street in Cambridge.

The Crafts were surrounded by a pantheon of notables, including Lewis Hayden, the businessman, former slave, and Underground Railroad conductor who temporarily boarded the couple in his home; William Wells Brown, the fugitive slave and novelist, who coached the pair for public appearances; the historian William Cooper Nell; the lawyer and integration and antislavery activist Robert Morris; and the influential white reformers William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child, who covered the couple extensively in their widely circulating newspapers the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. At the peak of the Crafts’ celebrity, Robert Hayden opened his home to celebrate at last the couple's Christian marriage.

Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law by Congress in September 1850 revealed the illusory quality of the Crafts’ peaceful lives. In the North, fugitive and free blacks alike had always been imperiled by bounty hunters who abducted them back to the prison-house of slavery with impunity. With the Fugitive Slave Law, however, the federal government itself mandated extradition of escaped slaves to their owners, and punished those who harbored runaways with imprisonment and stiff fines. The biracial Vigilance Committee posted handbills on 24 April 1851 warning Boston's black citizens to “Keep a Sharp Look Out” for human “HOUNDS” engaged in “KIDNAPPING, CATCHING AND KEEPING SLAVES.” The Crafts’ owners issued a warrant for their arrest and sent two men, John Hughes and Willis Knight, to confiscate the now-famous couple. Thus began a cat-and-mouse chase during which William and Ellen lived separately and were moved frequently from one safe house to another. Bostonians largely resisted Hughes and Knight, hurling trash and epithets, and even jailing them, and Hughes and Knight eventually quit in fear and exasperation and returned to Georgia. The damage to the Crafts’ sense of security was irreparable, however, and in November 1851 they sailed to Liverpool, England, by way of a packet from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The couple bought a home in 1857 on Cambridge Road in Hammersmith, a suburb west of London, and traveled throughout England and Scotland, lecturing against slavery. The Crafts were active in benevolent groups such as the London Emancipation Society and the British and Foreign Freedman's Aid Society, and they hobnobbed with transatlantic reformers such as Harriet Martineau and Sarah Parker Remond. British abolitionists raised money to enroll them in the experimental Ockham School, which combined manual training with a liberal arts education. At the London World's Fair in 1851, the Crafts staged a silent antislavery protest in the American exhibit and scandalized their former countrymen by walking arm-in-arm with white abolitionists. When a rumor began circulating that Ellen wanted to return to the South, she responded with an open letter in the antislavery press, asserting, “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 [Dec. 1852], 22). The culmination of the Crafts’ overseas fame was the publication in 1860 of Running 1,000 Miles for Freedom, their recollection of bondage, escape, and pursuit by slave catchers in the North. In 1865 some of the proceeds from the book financed bringing Ellen's mother from post–Civil War Georgia to England.

While the Crafts were thankful to their “antislavery friends” for spiriting them to safety in England and for supporting them while they found their bearings, they were determined to be self-reliant. William tried several business schemes and twice sailed to Benin for prolonged visits in unsuccessful moves to end slavery there, to open an African mission school, and to establish trade links with Britain. After the Civil War ended, homesickness and their concern for the newly freed slaves inspired another move. The Crafts returned to the United States with their two youngest children, Ellen and Alfred, and their oldest son, Charles, then a teenager. Their two middle children, William Jr. and Brougham, briefly remained in England for their educations.

After a triumphant reunion with Boston friends in 1869, the Crafts returned to Georgia after nineteen years in exile. After a school they had opened in South Carolina was burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, William, in 1871, began raising money from Bostonians for the Woodville Cooperative Farm School, an Ockham-style school and plantation in Ways Station, Georgia, outside Savannah. Five years later after the Crafts were accused by white neighbors of misspending funds and keeping sloppy records, they lost contributors. William sued for libel in Boston, but lost the case. The school closed in 1878. Ellen, who spent her last years with her daughter in Charleston, South Carolina, died in 1891. She was buried on the grounds of the Woodville Cooperative Farm School. After his wife's death, William struggled to make his mortgage payments amid lowering crop prices and escalating Jim Crow policies. In 1899 the banks repossessed his land and he died a year later in Charleston.

The Crafts’ story has been imaginatively used by a number of authors, including their contemporaries William Wells Brown (in Clotel, 1853) and Lydia Maria Child (in The Freedman's Book, 1865), and Harriet Beecher Stowe, borrowed heavily from the Crafts’ saga for plot and characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). During the Harlem Renaissance, the poet and playwright Georgia Douglas Johnson revisited the Crafts’ story in her work. The Crafts’ descendants, continuing the couple's commitment to racial advancement, became influential leaders and professionals. Many of the Boston places frequented by the Crafts have been designated national historic sites on the African American Heritage Trail. In London a plaque commemorates the site where these tireless “campaigners against slavery” once lived, on a street now called “Craft Court.”

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