Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by Ellen Craft

First published: 1860

Type of work: Slave narrative

Time of work: 1830’s-1851

Locale: North American Atlantic coast, from Georgia to Nova Scotia; England

Principal Personages:

• William Craft, a carpenter and fugitive slave
• Ellen Craft, William’s wife, who is also a fugitive slave
• Robert Collins, the Crafts’ owner, referred to in the narrative simply as “the master”
• Mr. Cray, a friend of Collins whom the Crafts deceive in their flight
• Barkley Ivens, a Quaker host of the Crafts in Philadelphia
• Mrs. Barkley Ivens, Ivens’s kindly wife
• Dr. Samuel May, an abolitionist who helps the Crafts escape to England
• Dr. John Estlin, an Englishman who assists the Crafts in their escape

Form and Content

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is autobiographical but concerns only a small portion of two lives. The memoir is narrated in the first-person voice of William Craft, but its authorship is attributed both to William and to his wife, Ellen Craft. The narrative details the life they spent as slaves on a plantation near Macon, Georgia, and at their escape to the North in December of 1848.

The Crafts’ master, Charles Collins, recognized the Crafts as intelligent and capable workers. William was a carpenter, and Ellen was a lady’s maid. Their situation was not as dire as that of many African American slaves, but they had already experienced the breakup of slave families, including their own. As a couple married for two years, they were determined to avoid separation and carefully planned their escape to freedom. Ellen, who was light-skinned, would masquerade as a male slave owner; William would be her slave. Their story reveals the extraordinary dangers they faced and the courage and sagacity with which they managed their situation, but it is more than a harrowing story. They made it also a fierce political document against the theory and practice of slavery.

In accomplishing their escape, Ellen’s is by far the more difficult task. Because it was very unusual for a woman to travel with a male slave, she has to assume the appearance and behavior of a white male for the couple’s ruse to succeed. The Crafts realize that Ellen will be required to register her assumed name in hotels and at the custom house in Charleston, South Carolina, where they expect to board a ship. They therefore bind her right arm in a sling and depend on her asking officials to sign for her. They steal off at night to wait for a morning train out of Macon. Almost immediately, danger strikes. On the platform, William sees a cabinet maker for whom he has often worked looking over the passengers. The man has been sent to look for the escapees, but William shrinks from sight, and the man does not recognize Ellen in her man’s garb. Immediately thereafter, Mr. Collins, a friend of their master, takes a seat in the carriage. This man knows both of the Crafts, but William is riding in the “negro car,” and Mr. Collins begins a conversation with Ellen. Fearing that her voice could give her away, she feigns deafness and finally answers one of his questions with one word only.

William as narrator describes numerous perils along their route—by train to Savannah, then by omnibus to Charleston, where they learn that no ship is scheduled to leave for Philadelphia, as they had expected, so they board a steamer for Wilmington, North Carolina, then a train to Richmond, Virginia, then another train and a steamer to Washington, D.C. There, they board another train to Baltimore, the last Southern city, where the search for escaped slaves has grown intensive. Finally, they arrive in Philadelphia—not their ultimate goal, but a city in which they find a Quaker home of safety. Their later journeys to Boston and finally to England are described only briefly.

Critical Context

The Crafts’ narrative is supplemented in R. J. M. Blackett’s 1999 edition by the editor’s substantial essay revealing other aspects of the Craft family’s remarkable lives. William’s narrative only touches on the couple’s travel to Boston and not at all on the beginning of their tour of New England cities and towns, sponsored by one of the most important of all escaped slaves, William Wells Brown, and by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Before January was out, only a month after their escape, audiences were hearing them relate orally their harrowing thousand miles and the powerful antislavery message that would be published eleven years later in England. Thus, before the book existed, its substance was known by the people who crowded into halls in Boston and Worcester and in small Massachusetts towns such as Northborough and Abington. The Crafts contributed to the antislavery cause not only in 1860 but at the outset of the federal legislation commanding that fugitive slaves be rounded up and returned to their masters. The Crafts themselves were forced to flee to Canada and then to England, where Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom was published only months before the outbreak of the American Civil War.

William would soon work along the West African coast to discourage African leaders from cooperating with slave traders. In 1869, the Crafts returned to the United States, even to the state from which they escaped, Georgia, where William farmed and Ellen and their daughter opened two schools for freed slaves. In their remaining years, the Crafts struggled on, despite debt and fierce post-Reconstruction opposition from southern whites, spending their lives demonstrating that free African Americans could manage their own lives and assist their brothers and sisters to overcome the consequences of slavery.

Bibliography

Barrett, Lindon. “Hand-Writing: Legibility and the White Body in Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom.” American Literature 69 (June, 1997): 315-336. Studies the way in which Ellen Craft succeeded by using her nearly white skin and her supposed literacy, promoted by her ruse of an injury that kept her from writing, to feign the identity of a white traveler.

Blackett, R. J. M. Beating Against the Barriers: The Lives of Six Nineteenth-Century African-Americans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Views the Crafts in the context of the subjugation of African Americans generally.

Blackett, R. J. M. “The Odyssey of William and Ellen Craft.” In Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Summarizes the Crafts’ lives generally and establishes their rank as abolitionists, educators, and benefactors of blacks in both Africa and the United States.

Ellis, Robert P. Northborough in the Civil War: Citizen Soldiering and Sacrifice. Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2007. Chapter 2 contains accounts of a speech by William Craft from two Massachusetts townspeople who heard it on January 16, 1849. These accounts provide a very early record of the Crafts’ escape and demonstrate the couple’s keen resourcefulness and its appreciation by their audiences.

Heglar, Charles J. Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and William and Ellen Craft. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Chapter 4 of this book shows how the energies of the Crafts’ marriage promoted their escape from bondage.

Sterling, Dorothy. Black Foremothers. New York: Feminist Press, 1988. Ellen Craft is presented as a woman inspired by the freedom she had gained to serve abolitionism and later promote the education of former slaves.