In Touch With Ellen And William Craft
By Betty Miller Buttram
FWIS Contributing Writer
Ellen and William Craft were fugitive slaves who devised a plan to get out of Georgia by posing as a young white man traveling with his enslaved manservant on a train and a steamboat to the north. Once they reached their destination, famous abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and William Wells Brown encouraged them to speak at public lectures to circles of abolitionists about their courageous but dangerous journey and about slavery in the south.
In the early and middle 1800s, Clinton, Georgia was a center of commerce and the cotton trade. It was one of the populous cities in Georgia. Ellen Craft was born in 1826 in Clinton, Georgia, to Maria, a mixed-race enslaved woman and her wealthy planter owner, Major James Smith. Ellen was three-quarters European by ancestry, very fair skinned and resembled her white half-siblings, who were her enslaver’s legitimate children. Smith’s wife gave the 11-year-old Ellen as a wedding gift to her daughter Eliza Cromwell Smith who married Dr. Robert Collins, also an enslaver. After the wedding, the Collins moved to Macon, Georgia taking their wedding gift, Ellen, to live with them. Ellen grew up as a house servant to Eliza. This position in the household afforded her privileged access to information about the area. No one taught Ellen to read and write.
During the Civil War, Macon served as the official arsenal of the Confederacy by manufacturing firearms. Cotton was the mainstay of Macon’s early economy.
William was born in Macon in 1824 and his first enslaver sold him to settle gambling debts. Before he was sold to this man, William witnessed his 14-year-old sister and his parents being separated by sales to different owners. Dr. Robert Collins became William’s new enslaver. Collins apprenticed him as a carpenter and allowed him to work for fees but took a great portion of his earnings.
William met Ellen when he was 16 years old at the time his first enslaver sold him. Ellen was about 14 years old at that time. When she was 20, she and William married. They did not want to have a family born into slavery so during the Christmas season of 1848, they planned their escape.
Ellen could pass as white, but William complexion would not allow him to do that. The couple’s escape plan to go north traveling by train and steamboat.
Ellen dyed her hair and bought appropriate clothes to pass as a young white man traveling in jacket and trousers. William used his earnings as a cabinetmaker to buy clothes for Ellen to appear as a free white man. He cut her hair to add to her manly appearance. Ellen practiced the gestures and behavior of a man. She wore her right arm in a sling to hide the fact that she could not write. William traveled as her slave manservant. They somehow made their way out of Macon to Savannah. They traveled by train from Savannah and then boarded a steamship for passage to Philadelphia. They accomplished their mission and arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Christmas Day in 1848.
Soon after their arrival in Philadelphia, abolitionists encouraged them to talk about their escape in public lectures in the abolitionist circles in New England. They moved to a well-established free Black community on the northside of Beacon Hill in Boston where they were married in a Christian ceremony.
During the next two years, the Crafts made appearances recounting their escape. Ellen learned to read and write. In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law and two months after that law was enacted, Collins sent the bounty hunters after the Crafts. Aided by their supporters, they escaped to England.
The Crafts spent 19 years in England where they had five children. In 1868, they returned to the United States with three of their children. They moved near Savannah where with the aid of their supporters, purchased 1,800 acres of land and founded the Woodville Co-operative Farm School in 1873 to educate and employ formerly enslaved people. The school closed in 1876 because of financial issues and post-Reconstruction violence. By that time in 1876, white Democrats regained control of state governments in the South. In 1890, the Crafts moved to Charleston, South Carolina to live with their daughter, Ellen, who had married a doctor. Ellen Craft died in 1891 and William died in 1900.
Ellen was given as a gift to her half-sister, and William watched his parents and sister as they were sold to different enslavers. They did not want that to happen to their children and so they came up with a plan that they pulled off well. They had moments when they thought that their escape plan would be discovered by other travelers, but their deception did not fail them.