"William & Ellen Craft" (1824-1900;1826-1821)

A slave born in Clinton,Georgia the daughter of a mulatto slave named Maria and their owner, Major James P. Smith.She trained as a house slave,becoming a skillful seamstress,only to be a given as a wedding present to her half-sister Eliza,who settled in Macon, Georgia,with the wealthy Robert Collins.Ellen fell in love with

Ellen is on the left.
 

William Craft,an urban slave and skilled carpenter,who leased his services to neighboring households and plantations.The desire to enter a Christian marriage and to raise freeborn children catalyzed Ellen and William's decision to escape to the North during the 1848 Christmas holidays when southerns traditionally slackened their surveillance of the slaves. Ellen's flight demonstrates both her own agency and the manipulation of her image in pre-Civil-War mass culture.Using her near-white complexion to advantage,she planned to disguise herself as an ailing white gentleman planter seeking treatment for various maladies in the North,accompanied by a doting servant who was, a course William.Where William maximized his mobility to purchase men's clothing for the trip,Ellen used her domestic privileges to hide the clothing in the private room she occupied as a maid, and to obtain a pass to travel.She also contributed ideas to perfect the masquerade, such as swathing her chin in bandages to discourage other travelers from speaking to her and wrapping a sling to sign her name at hotel registers or ticket desks. In four days' time,by rail, steamer, and carriage, Ellen and William traveled from the South to to the North, arriving in Philadelphia on Christmas Day 1848. Once they settled in Boston's black community on Beacon Hill,her story was harnessed to bolster abolitionist arguments about the humanity of slaves in general and the femininity of black women in particular.The engraver Stephen Alonzo Schoff circulated images of her in masculine disguise on both sides of the Atlantic,sparking readers' outrage that American slavery had forced a decent woman like Ellen to"un-sex" herself,or become a man, in order to be free. Other reports took a different tack,focusing on Ellen gentleness,deference,beauty,and domesticity to debunk cultural  representations of black women as unloving,ugly,lazy, and callous.It thus followed that, publicly,Ellen spoke little and demurred to male speakers during abolitionist rallies with William Wells Brown. The media's makeover of Ellen from southern slave to northern lady reached its apogee when the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker married her and William in a ceremony at 66 Phillips Street,the Beacon Hill home of the Underground Railroad conductor and former Kentucky slave Lewis Hayden and his wife, Harriet.In 1850, in order to escape the new Fugitive Slave Law,which extended the assistance of the judiciary and law enforcement to slave owners seeking to reclaim their human property,the crafts moved to England. Overseas, Ellen image in the antislavery press maintained prominence.A rumor circulated that she missed slavery and that, violating Victorian conventions of propriety, she had approached a single white gentleman to help her return to Macon. This accuusation represented all women of African  descent as promiscuous,reckless, and disloyal. So, Ellen, again assumed control distributed a response underscoring her happiness in marriage, in a free England, and in motherhood (She and William were expecting first child,Charles).Her family grew to include five children, yet she frequently was the sole parental figure while William traveled widely in the United Kingdom and Dahomey (now Benin.) Having learned to read and write, she tutored,took in boardes,presented antislavery lectuures, participated in British antislavery organizations,and with William, composed their 1860 narrative, Running a Thousand miles for Freedom.Making ends meet proved difficult,and after nineteen years of exhile the Crafy=ts returned to Georgia. Ellen's final years there were also characterized by humanitarianism and agency.The crafts leased Hickory Hill Plantation outside of Savannah,which was burned down by night riders, and then the Woodville farm in the nearby all-black Bryan County. In both instances,they intended to establish an aricultural cooperative and school for former slaves modeled upon principles of industrial education.Debt and financial scandal,bankrupted them.