Queer Places:
Woodville Cooperative Farm School & Plantation, Ways Station, now Richmond Hill, Bryan County, Georgia
Ellen
Craft (1826–1891) and William Craft (September 25, 1824 – January 29, 1900)[1]
were slaves from Macon, Georgia, in the United States, who escaped to the
North in December 1848 by traveling openly by train and steamboat, arriving in
Philadelphia on Christmas Day. She passed as a white male planter and he as
her personal servant. Their daring escape was widely publicized, making them
among the most famous of fugitive slaves. Abolitionists featured them in
public lectures to gain support in the struggle to end the institution.
As the light-skinned quadroon daughter of a mulatto slave and her white
master, Ellen Craft used her appearance to pass as a white man, dressed in
male clothing, during their escape.
As prominent fugitives, they were threatened by slave catchers in Boston
after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, so the Crafts emigrated
to England. They lived there for nearly two decades and raised five children.
The Crafts lectured publicly about their escape. In 1860 they published a
written account, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, The Escape of
William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. One of the most compelling of the many slave
narratives published before the American Civil War, their book reached wide
audiences in Great Britain and the United States. After their return to the US
in 1868, the Crafts opened an agricultural school for freedmen's children in
Georgia. They worked at the school and its farm until 1890. Their account was
reprinted in the United States in 1999, with both the Crafts credited as
authors, and it is available online at Project Gutenberg and the University of
Virginia.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_and_William_Craft