‘Wearing green spectacles, a top hat and men’s trousers, Ellen’s disguise was complete.’ Photo: Ellen & William Craft
A great escape: Rebecca Hardy on a daring bid for freedom, and Friends met on the way
‘This daring ploy involved gender, class and race disguise.’
A year ago this month, two black abolitionists were honoured with one of the few blue plaques for people of colour in London. The site of Twenty-Six, Cambridge Grove, a redbrick mid-Victorian house in Hammersmith, was where the freedom fighters Ellen and William Craft settled and raised their family, using it as a base for their abolition and social justice work.
The couple were tireless anti-slavery campaigners, but they are perhaps best known for their daring break-for-freedom across nineteenth-century USA, where the first people who hid them were Pennsylvanian Quakers. So how did they manage their escape?
In 1848, the then-enslaved married couple embarked on one of the most ingenious escape plans ever made. This daring ploy involved gender, class and race disguise, as the couple set off on a heart-in-the-mouth trip through the US. The narrow escapes and fraught close-calls that followed would sit well on any movie screen. According to the Crafts’ 1860 book, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, which chronicles their flight, courage, quick thinking, luck and ‘our Heavenly Father’ sustained them.
The deception began in Macon, Georgia, when the couple, enslaved in different households, decided they had had enough. William was enslaved by a local bank cashier, after being put up for auction at the age of sixteen. Ellen was a lady’s maid, having being ‘given’, at the age of eleven, as a wedding present to her previous enslavers’ daughter. Despite being a skilled cabinet maker and working at a local shop, William was forced to give most of his wages to his enslaver, and the couple had little hope of ever enjoying the freedom that they craved, or the security and autonomy to have children. Both William and Ellen had grown up in enslaved families, and then been separated from their loved ones, including William’s fourteen-year-old sister. In despair at the prospects that lay ahead of them, William came up with a plan.
Ellen’s father was the man who had enslaved her biracial mother (who, it is strongly suspected, was raped by him). Could Ellen’s fair skin allow her to disguise herself as William’s enslaver, so they could travel together out of the state?
It was a dangerous prospect, and Ellen was understandably reluctant. But, filled with the horror of what lay ahead if the couple should have children and have them cruelly snatched away, she eventually agreed to try. With her hair cut short, with bandages around her face, and her right arm in a sling so she could avoid having to sign things (Georgia laws forbade enslaved people from learning to read or write), the couple set off on 21 December.
What followed was a journey of epic proportions. The couple were making for Philadelphia – their closest free state – but it was over 1,000 miles away, requiring several journeys by train and steamboat, not to mention crossing heavily-patrolled state borders. Fortunately, the couple had some precious free time to dedicate to the trip – as ‘favourite slaves’, both had obtained passes for a few days leave over Christmas. But the journey would last days, and they had to move quickly. Wearing green spectacles, a top hat and men’s trousers, Ellen’s disguise was complete. According to the Crafts’ book, they both knelt and prayed before taking their ‘desperate leap for liberty’.
The journey lasted four days and was fraught with complications. At the Macon station where they first departed, William spotted the owner of the cabinetmaker’s shop where he worked, standing on the platform. Shrinking low into his seat on his designated ’negro carriage’, while Ellen bought tickets, he managed to stay hidden as the man peered through the window. With his heart in his mouth, he watched as his employer started searching the other carriages, passing through the one where Ellen now sat, unrecognisable as a prosperous-looking white man in green spectacles and bandages. The train moved away just before he reached William’s carriage.
The Crafts’ retelling of the journey across the USA, on first-class trains and steam boats, staying in a luxury hotel, is full of close encounters like this. On the train from Macon, no sooner had the train pulled out when Ellen realised she was sitting beside a close friend of her enslaver, who had known Ellen for years. All fears that he had come to bring her back evaporated, however, when he civilly said: ‘It is a very fine morning, sir,’ to which Ellen pretended she was deaf – a deception that she had to keep up for several hours.
The Crafts’ hope was that they could be supported by the abolitionist community in Pennsylvania. First, though, they had to board a steamboat from Charleston, South Carolina, then another to Philadelphia, and then pass through the vigilant border patrol at Baltimore. On the steamer, Ellen found herself scolded by a military officer for saying ‘thank you’ to ‘his boy’, while another traveller offered to buy William and take him to the Deep South. Ellen politely declined. After a night in a hotel, where the bandaged invalid was lavished with a fine dinner and one of the most expensive rooms, the couple queued to buy tickets for the steamer to Philadelphia. Here they hit another obstacle, and for a heart-stopping moment they thought the game was up. Despite Ellen’s bandaged arm, the ticket seller refused to sign their names. This could have held them back for days, under strict anti-abolitionist measures, with Ellen under pressure to prove that William was indeed her ‘property’. Fortunately, just at that moment a captain Ellen had befriended said he would happily sign their names for them. But their trials hadn’t ended quite yet.
Baltimore proved another test – and by this point the couple really thought they’d been caught. They were detained, and asked to report to the authorities to verify ownership. ‘We felt as though we had come into deep waters and were about being overwhelmed,’ William wrote in their book, but there was another lucky coincidence. An officer walked in, noticed Ellen’s bandages, and took pity on ‘him’, telling the stubborn clerk to let them pass.
On Christmas Day, they eventually made it to Pennsylvania, where their first source of help was some Quakers. On arriving in the state, the couple immediately made contact with the underground abolitionist community. The Crafts were warned that even in Philadelphia they wouldn’t be safe and were advised instead to get to Boston. There, they were taken in by a Quaker family called the Ivens, who hosted them on their farm. Ellen, however, couldn’t quite throw off her fears, scarcely believing that white people could be so kind. The couple did spend three weeks on the Ivens’ farm, where they learned to spell and write their names, but they soon left, preferring the security of the Bostonian abolitionist community, and wanting to begin their own lives. William found work as a cabinet and furniture maker, and Ellen as a seamstress, but two years later, in 1850, they faced trouble again.
This time it was the Fugitive Slave Act that forced the couple to flee – and their destination now would be England. Under the act, inhabitants of the ‘free states’ were forbidden from sheltering freedom seekers, and, sure enough, it wasn’t long before the Crafts’ former enslavers sent agents to kidnap them. Moving to safe houses, the couple made it to Maine and through to Novia Scotia, where they boarded a ship bound for England.
‘It was not until we stepped ashore at Liverpool that we were free from every slavish fear’, William later wrote in their book. Once in Britain, the Crafts became leading figures in the abolitionist community. Ellen supported the suffrage movement, and began crossing paths with more Quakers. In 1856, the couple were invited to talk at Bath Meeting House, where local Friends took direct action against slavery by inviting escaped enslaved people to speak. They also opened depots to trade in non-slave products. The Crafts also stayed with the Quaker Wilson Armistead in Leeds in 1851, and were in his household at the time of the census that year. They later moved to Hammersmith and likely encountered Quakers there too – they were involved in abolitionist circles, which, as Gil Skidmore from the Quaker Historical Association points out, had quite an overlap with Quaker ones.
According to Hannah-Rose Murray, the historian who proposed the blue plaque for the Crafts last year: ‘Their story inspired audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and, when the Crafts reached Britain, they were relentless in their campaigns against slavery, racism, white supremacy, and the Confederate cause during the US Civil War (1861-1865).’
Today, the Crafts’ plaque is one of the few to honour people of colour, with only 2.1 per cent of the 1,160 blue plaques, commemorating black figures. Just four per cent of plaques reference anyone from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background. English Heritage has said it wants to increase these percentages, although the selection of who is commemorated is driven mainly by suggestions from the public. ‘Black history is part of English history and English Heritage is committed to telling the story of England in full,’ said Anna Eavis, English Heritage’s curatorial director last year, when two other plaques were unveiled for minority ethnic figures: the pioneering neurologist James Samuel Risien Russell, and the civil engineer Ardaseer Cursetjee Wadia. Meanwhile, this year plaques have been unveiled commemorating the Ayahs Home in Hackney and Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian nationalist to win a popular election to the UK parliament. Nominations for BAME figures have also seen a notable rise.
For now, the Crafts join the small percentage of black people honoured with such plaques, including Bob Marley; Elizabeth Welch; Jimi Hendrix; Laurie Cunningham; Learie Constantine and Mary Seacole. John Archer, the first black person to hold a senior public office in London, and Harold Moody, founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, also have blue plaques. ‘Ellen and William Craft’s story is incredibly powerful,’ Anna Eavis said. ‘Their determination to escape from enslavement in the most perilous circumstances, and then to campaign for abolition and win over hearts and minds here in the UK is astonishing… They are an important part of the anti-slavery movement and we are delighted to remember them with this plaque.’
Rebecca is the journalist at the Friend.
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