Books with title Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

This compelling narrative offers a firsthand account of a couple's remarkable flight from slavery in the antebellum South. William and Ellen Craft devised a daring plan in which the light-skinned wife disguised herself as a man and the husband posed as her servant. This brief memoir recounts their journey northward in 1848, when they made their way to Philadelphia and later settled in Boston, where they were active in abolitionist circles.Originally published in 1860, the Crafts' account of their escape was an immediate success. Their story offers fascinating insights into issues of race, gender, and class in nineteenth-century America.

This compelling narrative offers a firsthand account of a couple's remarkable flight from slavery in the antebellum South. William and Ellen Craft devised a daring plan in which the light-skinned wife disguised herself as a man and the husband posed as her servant. This brief memoir recounts their journey northward in 1848, when they made their way to Philadelphia and later settled in Boston, where they were active in abolitionist circles.Originally published in 1860, the Crafts' account of their escape was an immediate success. Their story offers fascinating insights into issues of race, gender, and class in nineteenth-century America.

In 1848 William and Ellen Craft made one of the most daring and remarkable escapes in the history of slavery in America. With fair-skinned Ellen in the guise of a white male planter and William posing as her servant, the Crafts traveled by rail and ship―in plain sight and relative luxury―from bondage in Macon, Georgia, to freedom first in Philadelphia, then Boston, and ultimately England.This edition of their thrilling story is newly typeset from the original 1860 text. Eleven annotated supplementary readings, drawn from a variety of contemporary sources, help to place the Crafts’ story within the complex cultural currents of transatlantic abolitionism.

William and Ellen Craft were slaves from Macon who gained celebrity after a daring public escape in December 1848. The light-skinned Ellen Craft posed as a white woman traveling with her valet. The bold ruse worked and the couple were able to elude slave hunters and eventually cross the Mason-Dixon line. After many trials and tribulations, including pretending to be a married interracial couple, they eventually settled outside Savannah, Georgia where they were able to purchase land. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is a fast-paced, suspenseful account of their incredible journey.

Husband and wife William and Ellen Craft's break from slavery in 1848 was perhaps the most extraordinary in American history. Numerous newspaper reports in the United States and abroad told of how the two -- fair-skinned Ellen disguised as a white slave master and William posing as her servant -- negotiated heart-pounding brushes with discovery while fleeing Macon, Georgia, for Philadelphia and eventually Boston. No account, though, conveyed the ingenuity, daring, good fortune, and love that characterized their flight for freedom better than the couple's own version, published in 1860, a remarkable authorial accomplishment only twelve years beyond illiteracy. Now their stirring first-person narrative and Richard Blackett's excellent interpretive pieces are brought together in one volume to tell the complete story of the Crafts.

In 1848 William and Ellen Craft made one of the most daring and remarkable escapes in the history of slavery in America. With fair-skinned Ellen in the guise of a white male planter and William posing as her servant, the Crafts traveled by rail and ship--in plain sight and relative luxury--from bondage in Macon, Georgia, to freedom first in Philadelphia, then Boston, and ultimately England.This edition of their thrilling story is newly typeset from the original 1860 text. Eleven annotated supplementary readings, drawn from a variety of contemporary sources, help to place the Crafts’ story within the complex cultural currents of transatlantic abolitionism.

Ellen Craft (c. 1826-c. 1897) was a slave in Macon, Georgia. Her mother was a slave and her father was her mother's owner. She married William Craft (c1826-1900) in 1846. In 1848, Ellen daringly decided to use her light skin to pass as white in order to travel by train and boat to the North, with William posing as her slave. In order to carry out this plan, Ellen also had to pass as male since a single white woman would not have been travelling alone with a male slave at this time. Although they encountered several close calls along the way, the plan worked. Eight days after they began in Georgia, William and Ellen arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas day, 1848. In 1850, William and Ellen went to England for fear that the Fugitive Slave Bill would end their freedom. Their narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), is one of the most compelling of the many fugitive slave narratives. The Crafts continued to make appearances abroad, and made a life there, including having four children. In 1868 they returned to the U. S. and eventually bought land in Georgia and opened an industrial school for young African Americans.

"Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom" is a written account by Ellen Craft and William Craft first published in 1860. Their book reached wide audiences in Great Britain and the United States and it represents one of the most compelling of the many slave narratives published before the American Civil War. Ellen (1826–1891) and William Craft (1824 - 1900) 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.

"Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom" chronicles the daring escape of William and Ellen Craft which is often known as the most ingenious plot in fugitive slave history. While Ellen posed as a white male planter William, her husband, posed as her personal servant. The couple cleverly travelled by train and steamboat, escaped nail-biting detection and arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas Day.Excerpt:"It is a common practice in the slave States for ladies, when angry with their maids, to send them to the calybuce sugar-house, or to some other place established for the purpose of punishing slaves, and have them severely flogged; and I am sorry it is a fact, that the villains to whom those defenceless creatures are sent, not only flog them as they are ordered, but frequently compel them to submit to the greatest indignity."William Craft (1824–1900) and Ellen Craft (1826–1891) were slaves from Macon, Georgia in the United States who escaped to the North in December 1848. Their daring escape was widely publicized, making them among the most famous of fugitive slaves in America. But due to the controversial Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 they had to immigrate to Britain for safety where they continued to garner support for the abolishment of slavery.