Slavery’s sojourners: the trans-Atlantic crossing of William and Ellen Craft (1850 – 1869)

The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in the United States made even the free territory of the northern states unsafe for escaped slaves. Slaves could be captured and returned to the South at any time without benefit of trial. By late September of 1850 America was no longer a place where any black person could live safely. William and Ellen Craft were two such slaves, who chose – with the help of Trans-Atlantic abolitionists – freedom in temporary exile. Moving out of Boston, through Canada and across the Atlantic, they arrived in Liverpool late in 1850. They toured Scotland and England at various intervals, appearing publicly with William lecturing both for the Abolitionist cause and for the Uplift of their race. In 1861, William published a book (Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom), Uncle Tom’s Cabin draws on their experience, and they are often mentioned in critical and social commentary of the day. William and Ellen Craft represented the dark-side of the American socio-political identity to a self-consciously newly emancipated Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. But beyond their abstracted relationship to Britain at mid-century they were, first and foremost, black immigrants inculcating themselves into a foreign white society. The Crafts would remain in Britain for nine years during which they established a new paradigm of Black Victorian’s living in Britain. The bulk of Black immigrants in Britain on their arrival were male, working-class, tied to the sea or to domestic servitude, and unschooled. The Crafts consciously transgressed class boundaries by appearing to assimilate into the prescriptive hegemony of the aspiring middle-classes. Their choice of address, schooling, social circle, and business interests indicate both a real and imagined relationship with an identity vastly dissimilar to the bulk of Black British immigrants and belied expectation. Furthermore, and more importantly, they were not true immigrants in that they never intended to remain in Britain and indeed, after nineteen years they did return home to America. In that time, they had five children, purchased a house, obtained scholastic certificates, established businesses, and were members of various public and private organisations. This paper explores this more private and un-worked area of the Craft’s Trans-Atlantic movement. Previously, the interest in William & Ellen’s movement across the Atlantic has been bound up in the narrative of their slavery and their fugitive slave identities. I would like tot shift this focus in my consideration of their sojourn in Britain onto their imagined and achieved black middle-class identities. Who did they imagine themselves to be once they relocated? How did their projected identity differ, and for what purpose where they projecting it? And, in terms of re-invention, what identity opportunities were specific to their geographic and cultural movement?

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