William and Ellen Craft-The Unbelievable Escape To Freedom

During the middle of the 1800s, Ellen and William Craft, two former slaves, undertook a risky escape to the North. In the beginning of their story, Ellen was employed while also residing with her half-sister Eliza Smith Collins and her husband.

Ellen met William Craft, a former slave, when she was with Eliza. The Crafts made the decision to organize their escape from slavery after falling in love and getting married.

Tubman Museum's director of exhibitions, Jeff Bruce, says, "What they decided to do was to dress Ellen as a young white planter."

Ellen Craft was born in 1826 in Clinton, Georgia, to Maria, a mixed-race enslaved woman, and her wealthy white owner, Major James Smith. Ellen was very fair-skinned and resembled her white half-siblings.

Smith's wife gave the 11-year-old Ellen as a wedding gift to her daughter, Eliza Cromwell Smith, to get the girl out of the household and erase the evidence of her husband's infidelity. Ellen grew up as a house servant to Eliza.

When William's initial owner sold him to pay off gambling debts, he was 16 years old and living in Macon. As a carpenter apprentice, William was given the opportunity to labor for pay by his new master, who kept the majority of his earnings.

Ellen married William Craft when she was 20 years old.  Craft saved money by working as a carpenter for others in the community. The couple plotted an escape over the Christmas season of 1848 because they didn't want to start a family while still in captivity.

The Escape

With Ellen being biracial she devised a means to pass as a white slave owner.

They cut her hair short, they wrapped her head in a handkerchief to hide the fact that she didn’t have facial hair. They put her arm in a sling -- that was to make it impossible for her to sign any documents because neither one of them could read or write.

Four days before Christmas in December 1848, they managed to flee. They traveled by ship and train, arriving in Philadelphia on Christmas Day.

William was to serve as a personal aide. The Crafts did not anticipate being interrogated because slaves routinely accompanied their masters on journeys during that era. They took first-class trains, stayed in the finest lodgings, and Ellen shared a meal with a steamboat captain one evening. When Ellen traveled, she wore a jacket and pants to pass for a young man. She also colored her hair and purchased the right clothes.

William dressed Ellen in clothes so she could pass for a free white man using the money he earned from making cabinets. William gave her a haircut to make her look more masculine.

On December 21, they boarded a steamship for Philadelphia, in the free state of Pennsylvania, where they arrived early on the morning of Christmas Day

Even though the Crafts made it to the North, where slavery was outlawed, they were still subject to persecution since slave catchers were dispatched to find them. Collins sent two bounty hunters to Boston to capture the Crafts.

The Crafts made the decision to flee to England with the help of their supporters. The Crafts spent 19 years in England, where they had five children together.

The Crafts and three of their children returned to the United States in 1868, following the American Civil War and the adoption of constitutional amendments guaranteeing emancipation, citizenship, and rights to freedmen. They obtained money from supporters and purchased 1800 acres of land in Bryan County, Georgia, close to Savannah, in 1870. To educate and employ freedmen, they established the Woodville Co-operative Farm School there in 1873.