Ellen Smith Craft
1826 – 1891

Ellen Smith Craft is a Georgia woman whose life story reads like a Hollywood script of adventure and courage: an unlikely escape from the shackles of slavery followed by the selfless pursuit of justice despite continuing threats to her own safety and well-being.

She was born in 1826, in the town of Clinton, GA just a few miles east of Macon. Her mother was an African American slave named Maria; her father was her mother’s white owner and master, Col. James Smith. Ellen’s skin was very light and she was often taken for a member of her white family. It is easy to imagine what an unhappy relationship she must have had with her mistress, the wife of Col. Smith. At age eleven she was given to her half-sister as a wedding present upon that sibling’s marriage to Dr. Robert Collins of Macon.

Ellen met her own husband-to-be there. William Craft was a slave whose family had been broken up and sold to pay its master’s gambling debts. In Macon he belonged to a banker who apprenticed him out as a carpenter so as to earn money from his labor.

Ellen and William were allowed to marry in 1846, but they could not live together since they belonged to different owners. They endured this separation for a while but soon began to save money and plan an escape.

While their plan seems incredible, it worked. Ellen disguised herself as a white gentleman, placing her arm in a sling to cover her inability to write, and wrapping her head in a bandage to hide her lack of beard. She pretended to be traveling, first-class, to Philadelphia for medical treatment. William went as her slave. After several harrowing encounters, they got to Savannah by train, took a boat to Charleston and then the train again, to Maryland.

Once in free territory, they made contact with an Abolitionist group. Ellen stayed with a Quaker family in Philadelphia who nursed her through a serious illness. But for safety they moved on to Boston, the main center of the Abolitionist movement, where they supported themselves through their trades, cabinet-making for William and sewing for Ellen. Both became active in the abolitionist movement and gained fame on the lecture circuit; stories about them were published in The New York Herald, The Boston Globe, and the Georgia Journal and The Macon Telegraph.

After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which permitted the forcible recapture of ex-slaves from the free states, the Crafts were no longer safe in Boston. Ellen’s former owner, Dr. Collins, sent two slave catchers to hunt her down. An ex-slave group called the League of Freedom protected Ellen and William from that threat, but they decided to flee to England, going overland to Maine to catch a boat from Canada since the Boston ports were being watched.

They lived in England for seventeen years, and their five children were born there. After a lecture tour during which news accounts reported that audiences had been moved to tears by their story, William and Ellen went to an agricultural school in Surrey, broadening their skills, and eventually teaching. But though they were offered the positions of superintendent and matron of the school, they chose to move to London, believing it was important to demonstrate that ex-slaves could be self-sufficient. When visitors from the southern United States spread rumors of her desire to return to the security of her former home in Georgia, Ellen issued what became a famous disclaimer: “I had much rather starve in England, a free woman, than to be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.”

Once the Civil War was over, however, and the slaves emancipated, Ellen and William came back to the South, having raised funds to start a cooperative farm for ex-slaves as a way of freeing them from the contract labor system; they also planned to develop a school for children.

The Ku Klux Klan burned out their first establishment, and white opponents used slander to destroy their second. Their school, at which Ellen was teaching seventy-five children free of charge, was forced to close.

Ellen died in 1891, and a few years later the farm she and her husband had started was auctioned off to pay William’s debts. He died one month later.

Ellen Craft was not content simply to gain her own freedom. Through her belief in the dignity and worth of all human beings she helped to shape a better future for succeeding generations.

Ellen Craft was a Georgia Woman of Achievement.

Georgia Women of Achievement
Fifth Induction Ceremony
Macon, Georgia
March 21, 1996