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19th Century · Abolition

Ellen Craft

1826 – c. 1891

Self-emancipator and abolitionist who escaped slavery in 1848 disguised as a white male planter, then campaigned against slavery in the United States and Britain.

Engraving of Ellen Craft in the disguise she wore to escape slavery: a man's coat, top hat, and cravat, with her right arm in a sling
Engraving reproduced in Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

In December 1848 Ellen Craft, an enslaved woman light enough to pass as white, cut her hair, bound her right arm in a sling, and travelled a thousand miles from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia as an ailing young planter with her husband, William, posing as her slave. The escape made the Crafts the most famous fugitives in America. When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 sent slave catchers after them, they fled to England, where they spent nearly two decades in the abolitionist movement before returning to Georgia to found a school for freedpeople.

At a Glance

Born
1826, Clinton, Georgia
Died
c. 1891, probably Charleston, South Carolina (accounts differ)
Birth name
Ellen Smith
Known for
The December 1848 escape from Macon to Philadelphia in disguise; Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860); the Woodville Co-operative Farm School
Fields
Abolition · Education · Literature
Era
19th Century

Early Life

Ellen Craft was born in 1826 in Clinton, Georgia. Her mother, Maria, was an enslaved woman of mixed ancestry; her father was Major James Smith, the planter who held them both. “My wife’s first master was her father, and her mother his slave,” William Craft wrote in 1860. Ellen was so light-skinned that visitors mistook her for one of Smith’s white children.

According to the Crafts’ own account, that resemblance so annoyed Smith’s wife that when Ellen was eleven she was given away as a wedding present to the couple’s daughter, Eliza, Ellen’s half-sister. Eliza had married Dr. Robert Collins, and the household moved to Macon in 1837. The gift separated Ellen from her mother. In Macon she worked as a lady’s maid and seamstress and was allowed a small room of her own.

In Macon she met William Craft, an enslaved cabinetmaker. Apprenticed to the trade as a boy, he had been mortgaged to a bank by his first owner and sold at auction, separated from his family, then sent back to the cabinet shop where he worked. The two postponed marriage for years because, as William wrote, the law “compelled all children of slave mothers to follow their condition”: any child they had would be born enslaved. They married around 1846, in a union that Georgia law did not recognize.

Life and Work

The escape plan came together in December 1848, and the Crafts carried it out within eight days. Because slaveholders routinely travelled with their slaves, Ellen would pose as a white man and William as his servant; a white woman travelling alone with an enslaved man would have drawn attention. William bought the clothing piece by piece in different parts of town, and Ellen sewed the trousers herself. Since she could not write, she proposed binding her right hand in a poultice and sling so that clerks would sign hotel registers and the Charleston customs book for her. A second poultice under her chin hid her beardless face, and a pair of green spectacles shaded her eyes. William cut her hair square at the back. She travelled as “William Johnson.”

They left their cottage on Wednesday, 21 December 1848. The route ran by train to Savannah, by steamer to Charleston and on to Wilmington, North Carolina, then by rail to Richmond and Fredericksburg, by steamer to Washington, and by train to Baltimore, which they reached on Christmas Eve. There an officer refused to let “Mr. Johnson” take his slave north without proof of ownership; he relented as the train was about to leave. They reached Philadelphia early on Sunday, 25 December. On arrival, by William’s account, Ellen took his hand and said, “Thank God, William, we are safe!”

Philadelphia abolitionists, among them Robert Purvis, sent them to rest at the farm of Barkley Ivens, a Quaker, then advised them to settle in Boston. William worked there as a cabinetmaker and furniture broker and Ellen as a seamstress. Encouraged by William Lloyd Garrison and William Wells Brown, they described their escape to antislavery audiences across New England, and the story was widely reported.

The Fugitive Slave Act of September 1850 put them in immediate danger. That October, Collins sent two agents from Macon, Willis Hughes and John Knight, to Boston with a federal warrant. Boston’s Vigilance Committee hid Ellen outside the city while William armed himself at home; committee members had the slave catchers repeatedly arrested on charges of conspiracy to kidnap and defamation until they left. Before the Crafts fled, the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker married them again “according to the laws of a free State.” They escaped through Portland, Maine, and St. John, New Brunswick, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and sailed on the Cambria, reaching Liverpool in December 1850.

In England, with help from Harriet Martineau, Lady Noel Byron, and the Bristol abolitionist John Bishop Estlin, the Crafts studied at the Ockham School in Surrey, a rural trade school, where they learned to read and write and taught sewing and carpentry. They settled in Hammersmith, in west London, where they raised a family; five children are recorded, the first, Charles Estlin Phillips Craft, born in 1852. In late 1852, after American newspapers reported that she wished to return to slavery, Ellen published a letter denying it, declaring she would rather starve in England a free woman than be a slave. In 1860 the couple published Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery in London, the fullest account of their flight.

Legacy

After the Civil War the Crafts returned to the United States; English Heritage dates their arrival in Boston to August 1869. In Georgia, in 1873, they founded the Woodville Co-operative Farm School in Bryan County, south of Savannah, modeled on the Ockham School, to teach the children of freedpeople while families farmed the land. An earlier attempt on a leased plantation in South Carolina had been burned out by the Ku Klux Klan after a single season. Woodville struggled from the start. Accusations that William had raised money in the North for his own use led him to sue for libel; he lost, and the school closed in the 1880s for lack of funds.

Ellen Craft died around 1891. The National Park Service records her death in Charleston, South Carolina, where the family later lived with their daughter, Ellen Craft Crum; other accounts place her death in Georgia. By one account she asked to be buried at Woodville. William died in Charleston in January 1900.

The escape has been told and retold for more than 170 years as one of the boldest in American history, notable for the way it turned the categories of race, gender, class, and disability against the system that relied on them. Ellen was inducted into Georgia Women of Achievement, and in 2021 English Heritage placed a blue plaque on the Crafts’ former home at 26 Cambridge Grove, Hammersmith.

For Educators

Ellen and William Craft escaped slavery by exploiting the very assumptions about race, gender, class, and disability that held slavery in place. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 1826 Born in Clinton, Georgia, to Maria, an enslaved woman, and Major James Smith, who held her.
  2. 1837 Given as a wedding present to her half-sister, Eliza Smith Collins, and taken to Macon.
  3. c. 1846 Marries William Craft, an enslaved cabinetmaker, in Macon.
  4. 21 December 1848 Leaves Macon disguised as “William Johnson,” a white planter travelling with his slave.
  5. 25 December 1848 Reaches Philadelphia; the couple soon settles in Boston.
  6. October 1850 Slave catchers sent from Macon under the Fugitive Slave Act are driven out of Boston by the Vigilance Committee.
  7. December 1850 Reaches Liverpool after fleeing through Canada.
  8. 1860 Publishes Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom with William Craft in London.
  9. 1869 Returns to the United States with three of her children.
  10. 1873 Founds the Woodville Co-operative Farm School in Bryan County, Georgia, with William Craft.
  11. c. 1891 Dies, probably in Charleston, South Carolina.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. William Craft and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: William Tweedie, 1860). Documenting the American South. Link
  2. National Park Service, “Ellen Craft.” Link
  3. English Heritage, “Ellen and William Craft” (blue plaque, 26 Cambridge Grove, Hammersmith). Link
  4. “Craft, Ellen (1826–c. 1891),” Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com. Link
  5. “William and Ellen Craft (1824–1900; 1826–1891),” New Georgia Encyclopedia. Link
  6. R. J. M. Blackett, Beating Against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
  7. Barbara McCaskill, Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).

Related on Black-History.com

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Black-History.com Editors. “Ellen Craft.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/people/ellen-craft/.
Editorial Note

By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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