Ellen and William Craft

Ellen and William Craft were slaves, and although they were husband and wife, they lived over a hundred miles apart. Ellen was light skinned enough to be able to pass for white. They escaped from Georgia in 1848, by having Ellen disguise herself as a white man, with William as her slave. Ellen pretended to have an injured hand, to cover the fact that she could not read or write, and therefore could not sign a hotel register.

They were able to reach Philadelphia, where they stayed for a few weeks before moving on to Boston. Ellen Craft found employment as a seamstress and William as a cabinet-maker. They made new friends among the free blacks and white abolitionists, and within a month began speaking at anti-slavery meetings. It was a newspaper article about one of those meetings, reprinted in a Georgia newspaper, that informed their former owners of their location.

In September, 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which made it a federal crime to aid a fugitive slave. The abolitionists in Boston responded by holding a meeting at the African Meeting House, on October 4. They voted to organize a group called the League of Freedom to resist the new law, and elected Lewis Hayden president and William Craft vice-president. Ten days later, a meeting at Faneuil Hall resulted in the formation of a Committee of Safety and Vigilance, organized "to secure the colored inhabitants of Boston from any invasion of their rights." Theodore Parker was the chairman of this committee; its members included Ellis Gray Loring, Richard Henry Dana, Wendell Phillips, Robert Morris, Lewis Hayden, and William C. Nell.

One month after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the owners of the Crafts sent agents to Boston to get them. They were the first of Boston's fugitives to be sought under this new law. The Liberator reported that "two prowling villains" were in the city, looking for the Crafts. One of these men found William at this shop and tried unsuccessfully to capture him. The Vigilance Committee made it clear that slavehunters were not welcome. William I. Bowditch, a member of the Committee, took Ellen Craft to Ellis Gary Loring's home in Brookline; she later went to the home of Theodore Parker. William Craft stayed with Lewis Hayden on Beacon Hill. Joined by other armed men, and supplied with two kegs of gunpowder, Hayden was prepared to blow up his house rather than surrender the fugitive.

Members of the Vigilance Committee had the slavehunters arrested for slander, but they were soon released on bail. Committee members, led by Theodore Parker, then confronted the slavehunters at their hotel, and told them that they would not be safe if they remained in Boston. The slavehunters refused the Committee's offer of safe passage to their train, although they had already been harassed on the streets of Boston; later that day, however, they left the city. Convinced that the Crafts were still not safe in Boston, the Vigilance Committee sent them first to Marblehead, then to Portland, Maine, and finally to England, where they stayed until after the Civil War.

Before they left Boston, they asked Rev. Theodore Parker to marry them. Although they had been married in accordance with slave tradition, they had neither a religious ceremony nor a legal marriage certificate. Parker performed the ceremony on November 7, at the home of Lewis Hayden, and then presented the couple with two gifts--a Bible to save their souls, and a Bowie knife to protect their freedom. Parker later wrote that he thought the phrase "with this sword I thee wed" suited the circumstances of that ceremony.

In England, the Crafts travelled with William Wells Brown, a well-known abolitionist, speaking at anti-slavery meetings. After the war they returned to Georgia, where they bought a plantation and established a cooperative farm school where poor families could live, work, and send their children to school.


Taken from: The African Meeting House in Boston: A Sourcebook, by William S. Parsons & Margaret A. Drew
©The Museum of Afro American History.