Oh boy, here we go. One of my all-time favorite stories. William and Ellen Craft were both born into slavery in Georgia in the 1820s. They looked like this. You’ll note, just by looking at her, that Ellen was very light skinned. That would be because her parents were an enslaved woman and her master…and Ellen’s mother was also the child of an enslaved woman and her master. You can only imagine what had happened. Slavery is disgusting. Anyway.
William and Ellen met, fell in love, and got married so far as they were allowed (enslaved people were forbidden by law to actually get married in any legally binding fashion; since being sold away from each other forever happened so often, slave marriage vows often included the phrase “til death or separation do you part”–again, slavery is disgusting). As you can imagine, William and Ellen didn’t want to have any children born into the system of slavery. In December of 1848, they decided to escape to the North. And that’s when the Crafts got crafty and came up with a brilliant plan to escape in style.
As we established, Ellen was white passing, and they decided to use this fact to their advantage. William was able to keep a small portion of his earnings from being contracted out as a carpenter, and he saved up that money to buy Ellen some really fancy clothes. Once disguised, Ellen looked like this:
Dashing, right? So Ellen was disguised as a wealthy, white man, someone nobody would think to question, and William would be playing the part of her enslaved manservant. Their story was that they were traveling north because Ellen was in poor health and wanted the expertise of northern doctors. This poor health story was for a few different reasons:
Ellen had been practicing masculine mannerisms and behaviors, but by claiming to be sick, she wouldn’t have to talk much and reveal that she still had a feminine voice.
Ellen had her right arm in a sling, pretending it was badly injured, so she could mark travel documents with an “X” and hide that she didn’t know how to write.
On racially segregated trains, she could keep William in the “white” compartments with her because she would need him to tend to her at all times, what with her “delicate health” and all. Staying together would prevent the two from getting separated accidentally.
It was still a nerve-wracking experience, to be sure, with the threat of discovery at every turn, but William and Ellen Craft managed to escape from slavery by riding first class trains and staying in the nicest hotels along the way. There was even one point where Ellen got to have dinner with the captain of the steamboat they were riding. They arrived in Philadelphia, safe and sound, on Christmas Day, 1848. The Crafts then settled in Boston, fitting in nicely with the free black community in the Beacon Hill neighborhood and making friends with prominent abolitionists. These abolitionist friends, which included the likes of Theodore Parker and Lewis Hayden among many others, encouraged William and Ellen to make their escape story public. They did, and soon the two were celebrities.
Their celebrity status turned out to not be such a good thing less than two years later, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed. Their master back in Georgia had, of course, read all about how the Crafts outwitted all the white people and made a home for themselves in Boston, so he hired two slave catchers to go up to Boston and retrieve his “property.” What the slave catchers didn’t bargain for was that Boston was ready for them.
Up in Boston, the Vigilance Committee consisting of both black and white abolitionists was hard at work coming up with a plan to prevent the Crafts from being captured. William Craft and Theodore Parker even thought of legal loopholes to get William arrested in Massachusetts, if it came to that, because he couldn’t be taken out of Massachusetts jail to be taken South. Loophole 1: since Ellen and William still hadn’t gotten married, a friend could report William for fornication and get him arrested for that. Loophole 2: William could carry various weapons on him, fight back against the slave catchers if they caught him, and get arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. They thought of everything.
When the slave catchers arrived, the Vigilance Committee sprang into action, getting the two slave catchers arrested like six separate times in quick succession, for petty crimes both real and imagined. They had Vigilance Committee member Samuel Gridley Howe doing his Sam thing and making very scary threats. All of this was done to make these slave catchers so sick of Boston that they’d give up and go home to Georgia. All the while, William and Ellen were being shuffled, often separately, between safe houses. Eventually it came to pass that Ellen was staying with Theodore Parker, while William stayed with Lewis Hayden. And that’s when yet another dramatic episode happened.
Lewis Hayden had himself been born into slavery in Kentucky, and he had made his escape up to Boston just a couple years before William and Ellen Craft did. Once William got to his house, Hayden put his own plan into action. One day, the slave catchers, who had already been put through hell by like the entire city of Boston, arrived at Lewis Hayden’s doorstep and demanded that he turn over the fugitive William Craft. Hayden calmly opened the door a little further, not to let them inside, but to reveal the two kegs of gunpowder he had waiting just inside. He told them that he would prefer to blow them all sky high if they took one more step, rather than see himself or William Craft return to slavery. The two slave catchers took the hint and left.
William and Ellen were reunited at Theodore Parker’s house shortly thereafter, and plans were made to smuggle the Crafts up to Canada and then across the Atlantic to England. Before they left, however, there was something Parker wanted to do for them. Since they were heading to safety at last and no longer needed to be able to go to jail for fornication, Parker offered to legally marry them. William and Ellen agreed, and Parker, their minister, did the honors right in his own living room, with a Bible in one hand and–I’m not kidding–a sword in the other. Parker escorted them as far as Maine himself, with a variety of swords and guns on his person so he was basically that trope where a character takes an absurd amount of weapons out of their clothes. When they parted, he gave William and Ellen the Bible and sword he had been holding as he officiated their marriage.
William and Ellen made a home for themselves in England for the next nineteen years. They got to go to school, and they fulfilled their goal of raising their children in freedom. They had five children, as a matter of fact. In 1859, they were paid a visit by their old friend, Theodore Parker, who got to meet their children and see that they still had the Bible he gave them. Parker was on his way to Italy, where he hoped the warm climate would improve his tuberculosis, but he would die in Florence the following spring, at just 49 years of age. After the Civil War, Ellen was miraculously able to figure out where her mother was in Georgia and have her brought over to England to stay with them. They hadn’t seen each other in almost twenty years, so you can only imagine the reunion. In 1868, once slavery was abolished, citizenship was granted to African Americans, and the right to vote was granted to African American men, the Crafts felt like they had work to do. Twenty years after they escaped from it, William and Ellen moved back to Georgia, back to where they began. William and Ellen tried to establish a school for freedmen as well as a farm, but white supremacist violence and laws led to the failure of both after Reconstruction ended.
William and Ellen Craft spent their twilight years living in Charleston, South Carolina with their daughter and son-in-law. Ellen Craft died in 1891, at the age of 65. William Craft died in 1900, at the age of 75.
