William Craft

(1824 - 1900)

William Craft was born into slavery in Georgia. He was apprenticed to a carpenter in Macon, while his future wife, Ellen, the child of an enslaved woman and a white slaveholder, was sent at the age of eleven to serve as a maid for her half sister. About two years after the Crafts married, they began their escape with Ellen disguised as an invalid white man; as they approached Charleston by ship, a fellow passenger scolded Ellen for her courtesy toward her “slave,” William. The couple arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas Day 1848, and published a book about their journey, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, in 1860.