William and Ellen Craft
In January 1849, fugitive slave couple William and Ellen Craft arrived in Boston after traveling over 1000 miles from captivity in Macon, Georgia. Their harrowing escape -- in which the fair skinned Ellen disguised herself as a White gentleman and the dark-skinned William played the part of her doting slave - illustrates both the power of the Underground Railroad in Boston's antebellum Black community and the power of militant abolitionism in the face of federal pro-slavery legislation.
In his 1860 narrative Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom, William Craft stated: "It is true, our condition as slaves was not by any means the worst; but the thought that we couldn't call the bones and sinews that God gave us our own . . . haunted us for years." Although both William and Ellen were enslaved in the notorious rice paddy region of Macon, GA, neither of them were forced to endure the strenuous life of rice cultivation that afflicted so many of their brethren. William was let out to a White cabinet-maker, a practice that was common in Macon during the ante-bellum era, and an occupation that provided William with a trade few slaves were fortunate to get. Slaves who had learned a trade not only sold well at auction, they also had some autonomy, limited though it was, over their own work. Ellen worked as a "ladies' slave," a position that gave her favoritism within the White household where she worked. Upon marriage in 1846, William and Ellen Craft began to search for a way to escape to the north. Although they had heard stories of those who had come before them, slaves who had stolen away at night or disappeared while being let out in the local market place, they feared being separated and sold further down south if captured. Finally, in 1848, they decided upon a plan to disguise Ellen as an infirm White man, and William, as a faithful slave, accompanying his "master" to Philadelphia for medical treatment. On December 21, after obtaining passes from their respective masters to travel to the next town for the Christmas holiday, William and Ellen used the money that William had been saving from his apprenticeship to board a train to Savannah. After traveling by train and steamboat through the coasts of South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington D.C., and Maryland, the Crafts arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas Day, 1848.....
For the rest of the story, visit Boston National African-American Historic Site.Blogging Black History Month
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