Ellen and William Craft - Flight and Life in Great Britain

Flight and Life in Great Britain

In 1850, the US Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a federal crime to aid an escaped slave and requiring law enforcement even in free states to aid efforts to recapture fugitives. Bounty hunters and slave catchers sought fees for finding fugitive slaves. William Craft described the new law as "an enactment too infamous to have been thought of or tolerated by any people in the world except the unprincipled and tyrannical Yankees". A month after the new law was effective, Collins sent two bounty hunters to Boston to retrieve the Crafts. Abolitionists in Boston had formed the biracial Vigilance Committee to resist the new Slave Bill; its members protected the Crafts by moving them around various "safe houses" (such as the Tappan-Philbrick house in the nearby town of Brookline) until they could leave the country. Collins appealed to the President of the United States, Millard Fillmore, asking him to intervene so he could regain his property. The President agreed that the Crafts should be returned to their owners in the South, and authorized the use of military force if necessary to take them.

Aided by their supporters, the Crafts decided to escape to England, where slavery had been abolished in 1833. They traveled from Portland, Maine overland to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they boarded the Cambria, bound for Liverpool. As William later recounted in their memoir, "It was not until we stepped ashore at Liverpool that we were free from every slavish fear". They were aided in England by a group of prominent abolitionists, including Harriet Martineau, who arranged for their intensive schooling at the Ockham School in Surrey. Having learned to read and write, in 1852 Ellen Craft published the following, which was widely circulated in the antislavery press in both Great Britain and the US:

So I write these few lines merely to say that the statement is entirely unfounded, for I have never had the slightest inclination whatever of returning to bondage; and God forbid that I should ever be so false to liberty as to prefer slavery in its stead. In fact, since my escape from slavery, I have gotten much better in every respect than I could have possibly anticipated. Though, had it been to the contrary, my feelings in regard to this would have been just the same, for I had much rather starve in England, a free woman, than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.

— Anti-Slavery Advocate, December 1852

The Crafts spent 19 years in England, where they had five children together. Ellen participated in reform organizations such as the London Emancipation Committee, the Women's Suffrage Organization, and the British and Foreign Freedmen's Society. They earned speaking fees by public lectures about slavery in the US and their escape. William Craft set up a business again, but they still struggled financially. For most of their time in England, the Craft family lived in Hammersmith. After the end of the Civil War, Ellen relocated her mother Maria in Georgia and paid for her passage to England, so they were reunited.