In Plain Sight | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

Phoebe Judge: It does seem to me that this was a love story. Barbara McCaskill: Absolutely.
Phoebe Judge: These were two people who were kind of, wildly in love and wanting to live
freely. Barbara McCaskill: Absolutely, they are partners every step of the way, and at the center of
their story is the fact that they fell for each other and had such a long relationship
with each other. Phoebe Judge: Let's go back to the beginning. Who were William and Ellen Craft?
Barbara McCaskill: William and Ellen Craft were both born in slavery in the middle of
the 19th century in Georgia. Phoebe Judge: We know more about Ellen's life than we do about William's.
What we do know about William Craft is that the man who owned his family sold his parents when William was a child.
And then William and his sister were mortgaged. Their owner wanted cash so he could invest in cotton, and when that investment failed,
the bank just took William and his sister and auctioned them off to the highest bidders.
By the time William was 16, he'd lost every member of his family... Barbara McCaskill: ...which was very traumatic.
First the idea, of all of a sudden without any warning, one's owner coming in and saying,
"Today is the day, I'm going to separate you," is traumatic enough, and then not knowing
what would become of his siblings, was also traumatic. Phoebe Judge: This is University of Georgia Professor Barbara McCaskill.
Barbara McCaskill: Ellen again, was born in slavery. We know more about the circumstances of her birth.
She was born in a small town called Clinton, which is right outside of Macon, Georgia.
Ellen's mother was enslaved. We know the name of her mother, Mariah, and her father was the white man who owned her.
Her father was her master, James P. Smith. Phoebe Judge: It didn't matter that Ellen was the master's daughter.
She was still forced to work as a house servant waiting on her father, his wife and her half
siblings. Her presence in the house was a daily reminder to everyone of what James Smith had done.
Barbara McCaskill: It caused a great deal of tension between her master, James Smith
and his wife. And one of the reasons why the wife was so angry and so jealous, was because white visitors
and friends of the master and mistress would come to the household, and they would mistake
Ellen for one of his wife's children. And that was a constant source of embarrassment and shame.
As a result, an opportunity arose in which the mistress finally was able to get rid of
Ellen once and for all. Phoebe Judge: The mistress’s solution was to give Ellen away as a wedding present.
Ellen had a half-sister who was a few years older than she was, Eliza. When Eliza married a very wealthy man in Macon, Dr. Robert Collins, Ellen was sent over along
with all the other wedding gifts. She was 11 years old. Barbara McCaskill: She was basically passed from mistress to mistress.
She would become officially the maidservant of Eliza Smith Collins, and live in the Collins'
very posh home in downtown Macon, Georgia, ostensibly separating Ellen from the closest
person that she had known for all of her life, her mother, Mariah. Ellen never knew whether she would see her mother again.
Phoebe Judge: It's also kind of horrifying to imagine being given as a gift to your own
sister. Barbara McCaskill: Yes, this idea that she could be passed from hand to hand as little
more than a wedding present really stung her pride, and emphasized to her the reality that
every enslaved person had to face, and typically very early in their lives. And that was that in the eyes of the slave holding society, they were not
human beings. They were property, they were objects. The former slave Harriet Jacobs describes African Americans in enslavement as merely
laboring machines in the eyes of their masters and mistresses. Phoebe Judge: It was as her sister's property in her new house in Macon that Ellen met William
Craft for the first time. He was trained as a carpenter and carpentry was in demand.
Robert Collins often rented William to other slave owners in a practice called hiring out.
Being hired out meant that William was given a special travel pass. He could move from town to town with more freedom and less surveillance, and he could
make a little bit of money for himself. Ellen and William fell in love, and although they wanted very badly to be married by a
Minister, that wasn't allowed. The alternative for enslaved people was a ritual called, jumping the broom.
Barbara McCaskill: Basically, what the couple would do, would jump over a broomstick several
times as a way of sealing the deal on their relationship. And there would often be an opportunity provided by the master and mistress, free time from
labor, in other words, for the couple to have a reception. So, William and Ellen Craft jumped the broom, but this rankled them.
This frustrated them. They wanted the solemnity, the sobriety of a Christian ceremony.
So, one of the reasons they decide to escape is so that they can get married again and
do it right. Phoebe Judge: They were going to need a very good plan. It was against the law for them to travel on trains or boats without their master's
consent. It wasn't going to be easy to cross multiple slave holding states without a train or a
boat. And they knew that if they got caught, they'd be separated from each other, maybe forever.
And they'd heard stories of professional slave hunters who made a living chasing escapees
and returning them to their masters to be punished, sometimes tortured to death.
But they also knew they were going to try. They wanted children, and they wanted their children to be safe.
Barbara McCaskill: This was the major terror that compelled them to decide to run away.
They wanted to have the peaceful understanding that any children that they had in their marriage
would truly be free, and they would not wake up one morning or be awoken one night by slave
traders who had come to take their children away from them. Phoebe Judge: It took eight days to work out exactly what would happen.
They agreed they wouldn't try to escape in the middle of the night. William came up with something much more daring.
A plan to escape in broad daylight, elbow to elbow with white slave owners and slave
traders. Barbara McCaskill: Remember that Ellen is half white, and because of her biracial identity,
she looks like a white person. She also walked and talked and sounded like a privileged, affluent white person because
she'd spent her entire life around privileged, affluent white people, beginning with her
playmate, her half white sister Eliza. So, William proposed to Ellen that they use her body as the mechanism of their escape.
And by that I mean, she would cut her hair, she would deepen her voice and make her voice
sound husky, and she would pretend that she was a wealthy, white, Southern plantation
gentleman. A wealthy, white male slave holder, and accompanying her would be William.
He would pretend to be her slave. Phoebe Judge: William began to gather what they needed for Ellen's disguise.
He knew better than to try to buy more than one item at any given store, so he went all
over town at odd times buying bits and pieces of what they needed. Ellen worked on sewing the pants she'd wear.
They were young and in love and about to hide in plain sight. For the last step, William cut off his wife's hair, short and square across the back of
her head. And the next morning they were on their way. I'm Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal.
Barbara McCaskill: She was very nervous about her ability to pass as a man. She would have to learn very quickly how to walk differently, how to use space differently.
She worried about the fact that she didn't have facial hair during an era when most adult
men had beards, mustaches. Not unlike the trend today. How was she going to do that?
They could try to put together some false hair, but she worried that it would look so
fake. So they articulated their disguise of Ellen even further by making the decision that Ellen
would pretend to be very ill, and that would give her the excuse to wrap her face in bandages as if she had bad swelling and a bad toothache.
And also, it would give her the excuse not to talk a lot, not to move her jaws a lot.
They also knew the expectation would be by other whites around her that she could read
and write, and they knew that she might be called upon to write her name when she signed
for tickets for trains and steam ships. So, she put her arm in a sling as if it were broken.
Phoebe Judge: Even with one arm broken and in a sling, she might still be asked to sign
something with her other hand, so she kept those fingers bent like she had severe arthritis,
too painful to hold a pen. They pretended she was almost deaf and couldn't understand what people might ask her.
And to deal with the issue of reading, she wore a pair of green tinted glasses. These were supposed to signal that she couldn't really see.
Barbara McCaskill: So she and William concocted all kinds of problems. They would pretend that he, in other words Ellen, was going specifically to Philadelphia
in order to have expert medical advice. In the middle of the 19th century, Philadelphia was a major center of medical innovation and
research. People would not be perplexed or suspicious if she said she was going to Philadelphia
for medical assistance. Also, fortuitously for William and Ellen, Philadelphia was in a free state.
They knew that as enslaved persons, if they could make it to Philadelphia they would be
relatively free. Phoebe Judge: They wanted to leave close to Christmas hoping everyone would be distracted,
and every place would be crowded. Very early in the morning on December 21, 1848, they set off for the train station.
William stowed her luggage and went to his train car near the engine, while Ellen took
her seat in one of the fanciest cars on the train. She was alone, wearing a suit and tie plus a vest.
She also wore a beaver hat. Barbara McCaskill: What they looked like are basically shorter versions of top hats.
And they gave the gentleman wearing them an air of distinction and were meant to be signals of respectability, and signals of wealth.
Phoebe Judge: I mean, it's so unreal to think of William and Ellen standing there you know,
Ellen posing as a nearly deaf, badly injured, white wealthy man in a beaver hat, and just
looking at each other and just saying, "All right, here we go." Barbara McCaskill: She was terrified and so was William, and Ellen immediately recognized
from the get go, she recognizes in this first leg, a neighbor of her master and mistress
in Macon. She kept her calm outwardly but inside she was quaking because this was the first real
test of her disguise. They exchanged greetings, they don't have a detailed conversation, and that is due in
large part because of the effectiveness of Ellen's strategy. Phoebe Judge: They got off the train in Savannah and boarded an overnight steamboat to Charleston.
As soon as they got on the boat, Ellen panicked and went to her cabin to go to bed.
William tried to play up her sickness making sure others saw him delivering her medicine
and bandages. They were able to spend some time alone together that night, but then William had to leave
her cabin, and there was nowhere for him to go. So, he walked around the boat most of the night.
In the morning in the dining room, Ellen was criticized by a young soldier. He said she was spoiling her slave by using the words please and thank you.
Her disguise was working. When the boat docked in Charleston, they went looking for a hotel.
Barbara McCaskill: They pick out one of the poshest hotels in Charleston. This is the favourite hotel of John C. Calhoun who was one of the most notorious defenders
of slavery of their day. So, they were literally going into the lion's den. If there's ever a place where they might be discovered, it is this hotel, and Ellen is
particularly very nervous about staying in her room alone. Because remember, it is absolutely not appropriate for her manservant to be in her room.
He can lay outside her room. He can put a cot on the floor outside her room and that is indeed what he does.
But they can't confer very frequently in other words. They can't touch bases frequently, they can't warn each other on a frequent level about
people that are giving them suspicious glances. They both have to rely in a very independent way on their own abilities to think on their
feet, on their own wit, while at the same time to the extent that they can, try to protect
each other. Phoebe Judge: They planned to go directly from Charleston to Philadelphia, but when
they got to Charleston they realized that that boat didn't operate in the winter.
They needed to reroute. Not an easy task when you can't read, and when Ellen was doing everything she could
not to talk. She managed to buy a boat ticket from Charleston to Wilmington, North Carolina, and the ticket
clerk asked her to pay a $1 tax on her servant. She paid the dollar and then the clerk told her to sign the registration log.
She held up her arthritic hand. Barbara McCaskill: The clerk is very suspicious and kind of nasty at- something doesn't feel
right, it seems, to that particular gentleman about Ellen. He insists that she sign her name.
Charleston was on particular alert for African Americans trying to run away by boat.
And there was something about Ellen that doesn't ring true to him. What happens is that momentarily, Ellen and William are dumbfounded.
William, of course, doesn't dare to speak. It is the protocol that slaves don't speak unless spoken to.
So, to amplify the tension William can't even defend Ellen. She's on her own, even though he's standing there next to her.
So, she's in a momentary loss for words because her sense of affluence, her sense of wealth,
her old age, her seniority, her infirmity, all of these mean nothing to the gentleman
who is standing between her and William's next step toward freedom. And there are two gentlemen who are in line behind them.
One who had met Ellen on a prior leg of the journey, and another young soldier, and they
both step up to defend the honor of what they perceive to be is another Southern gentleman.
And in fact, one of these men volunteers to sign his name for Ellen if need be. So it's just by good fortune that she and William are able to board the steamship at
Charleston port, they just luck out. Phoebe Judge: They reached Wilmington and took a train to Richmond, where Ellen was
joined in the car by a middle-aged white man and his two young daughters. The man would not stop talking to her, and then his daughters started talking to her.
When Ellen tried to go to sleep, the girls offered to make her a pillow with their shawls,
and still kept trying to have a conversation. Barbara McCaskill: And it's like the equivalent today of being on an airplane and all you
wanna do is sleep, and the person next to you just keeps talking, and talking, and talking,
and talking. Phoebe Judge: Nightmare. Barbara McCaskill: Yes, it was a nightmare, Phoebe Judge: This is like a complete nightmare.
Barbara McCaskill: It was a nightmare. And Ellen slowly realizes, it slowly begins to dawn on Ellen that these two young ladies
are flirting with her. They see her, in spite of her infirmity, they're looking at the signals of wealth that her
clothing give off, and they see a marriage prospect. And it becomes agonizingly clear to Ellen, but she begs off again, calling attention
to how badly she's feeling and how ill she is, and how she really must get this treatment,
and although they are disappointed, they leave the train. Phoebe Judge: The father gave Ellen a recipe for something he said would help her arthritic
joints. But she was so scared of holding the piece of paper upside down that she didn't even
look at it. She thanked him and immediately put it in her pocket. Barbara McCaskill: Why should we be surprised that both she and William had such talent
masquerading, disguising, fooling people. If we think about how, on a daily basis as they were growing up, William and Ellen Craft
learned very quickly to avoid punishment and reprisal to mask their true feelings, to pretend
they were happy when they may have felt sad, to pretend they were delighted when they might
have felt angry. All of that practice served them when they were escaping from the South.
In other words, Ellen and William had a well of talent to dig from as they were pretending
to be people who they were not. Phoebe Judge: And then on Christmas day, four days after they left Georgia, they arrive
safely in Philadelphia. They went directly to an abolitionist safe house where they were greeted as two men.
Barbara McCaskill: They think, the abolitionists think that Ellen is really a black man disguised
as a white man. A light-skinned, white looking black man disguised as a white man.
Ellen excuses herself, she goes into another room, she changes clothes and she comes out
in 19th century feminine attire, wearing a long dress, wearing a scarf on her head, attired
like a woman and she astonishes the abolitionists. So, from that day forward, their story becomes a sensation.
The American anti-slavery and commercial press pick up that story like lightning and tell
it far and wide. And William and Ellen Craft very quickly, become the darlings of the American and British
anti-slavery community. Why? Not only did they effect this daring escape, but they are young, they are good looking—that
always matters in terms of celebrity culture. They're well mannered, they're composed, they're eager to learn.
They're eager to read, eager to write and eager to give themselves fully to the anti-slavery
cause. Phoebe Judge: Philadelphia abolitionists insisted that they would be safer and better supported
if they went to Boston, and so they did. William worked as a carpenter and cabinet maker.
Ellen worked as a seamstress. They were invited to give speeches about their escape and earned money that way too.
Things were good for about two years until 1850, when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave
Act. It required authorities in free states to participate in the capture and return of runaway
slaves. Anyone caught providing food, shelter, or help to fugitives was subject to a $1,000
fine and six months in jail. William and Ellen's master, Robert Collins, got warrants for their arrest and enlisted
the help of the US Marshals. Barbara McCaskill: The minute that William and Ellen Craft step onto the free soil of
Philadelphia, they became criminalized in the eyes of Robert Collins who owned them
and other Southern slaveholders. They were in essence stealing themselves from their owners.
They didn't own themselves, so they could not make the decision to free themselves.
They had literally stolen themselves away, and an owner like Dr. Collins would see them
as eminently retrievable. In other words, your freedom was freedom so long as you didn't get caught.
Phoebe Judge: Boston was a major center of the abolitionist movement. There was a huge network of people eager to protect the Crafts, and the two bounty hunters
who arrived in Boston to try to capture them — their names were Willis Hughes and John
Knight — had no idea what they were walking into. Barbara McCaskill: Bostonians start a harassment campaign.
Every time these two men, Hughes and Knight appear from their hotel on the streets, Bostonians
pelt them with raw vegetables. Their favorite is rotten eggs. The police of the city of Boston harass the bounty hunters by stopping their carriage
frequently, their horse-drawn carriage, and fining them, and sometimes jailing them for driving too fast.
In effect, everyone tries in all kinds of ways, large and small, to make the lives of
these two gentlemen as miserable as possible. They give them phony directions, they call them names, they serve them bad food in restaurants.
They activate a campaign to literally drive these men out of the city of Boston, and provide
as much disinformation as they can about the whereabouts of William and Ellen Craft.
Phoebe Judge: The bounty hunters gave up after five days and just went home. Because of the Fugitive Slave Act, there was nowhere in the whole country the Crafts would
be safe. They were too high profile and their owner was too rich and powerful. He'd already written directly to the president, Millard Fillmore, asking for assistance tracking
them down. Ellen and William needed to leave the country, but first, they still wanted a real wedding
with a minister. In November of 1850, the abolitionist and Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, performed
the ceremony. That same year, Theodore Parker gave a speech at an anti-slavery meeting that included the
phrase, "a democracy of all the people, by all the people, for all the people." Years later, Lincoln adapted that phrase for the Gettysburg Address.
After their second wedding, Ellen and William headed north to Canada and boarded a ship
to Liverpool. Barbara McCaskill: They end up spending 19 years in England, and over those years they
have five children, four sons and a daughter. And they also try from thousands of miles away with an ocean between them, to reassemble
their own families that they had been divided from. They use letters, they find lawyers, they even appeal to union soldiers who are traveling
throughout the south in the war, to help them find their family members. And miraculously, Ellen is reunited on British soil with her mother, Mariah.
Mariah is still living outside of Macon, Georgia they find out, and they are able to purchase
her through the help of abolitionist friends and bring her to England. Phoebe Judge: Eventually William and Ellen, and Ellen's mother and
their children, move back to the United States. They moved back to the South. They bought a plantation outside of Savannah, and in 1873 they founded the Woodville Cooperative
Farm School, where Ellen, alongside three of her children, taught reading and writing to men and women released from slavery.
Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohrer, Nadia Wilson and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers.
Alice Wilder is our intern. Julienne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.
You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where we've got archival portraits of the Crafts, including Ellen in her disguise.
The Crafts wrote a book about their escape. It's called Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom.
That's how we got so many details about how they planned it and pulled it off. We've got a link to the book.
You can read the whole thing online. You can also learn more about Professor Barbara McCaskill's book, Love, Liberation And Escaping
Slavery, William And Ellen Craft In Cultural Memory. That's all at thisiscriminal.com.
If you like our work, please review the show on iTunes. It's an important way to help us grow.
Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around.
I’m Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal. Jingle: Radiotopia, from PRX.

In 1849, abolitionist and attorney Wendell Phillips wrote: “We should look in vain through the most trying times of our revolutionary history for an incident of courage and noble daring to equal that of the escape of William and Ellen Craft; and future historians and poets would tell this story as one of the most thrilling in the nation’s annals, and millions would read it, with admiration of the hero and heroine of the story.” Unfortunately, almost 170 years later, William and Ellen Craft aren’t well known anymore. Today, we have the story of this couple’s incredible escape from slavery, the abolitionist pastor Theodore Parker who married the Crafts, and their founding of the Woodville Co-operative Farm School.

Read the Crafts’ book: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/585

Barbara McCaskill wrote about William and Ellen Craft in Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820347240/love-liberation-and-escaping-slavery/

Music in the episode: “Laser Focus” by Blue Dot Sessions “Pacing” by Blue Dot Sessions “Pens from Spain (Instrumental)” by Loch Lomond “High Valley ID” by Lobo Loco “Back” by David Szesztay “Delphi” by Podington Bear “Night Light” by Blue Dot Sessions

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 59 originally published 1/20/2017 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-59-in-plain-sight-1-20-2017

Brief Summary

William and Ellen Craft escape slavery, disguise, and become abolitionist figures after a daring journey to freedom.

Key points

A Love Story Amidst Slavery. Phoebe Judge and Barbara McCaskill discuss the deep love between William and Ellen Craft, who were born into slavery and fought for their freedom.
The Escape Plan. William and Ellen Craft devise a daring escape plan, disguising Ellen as a wealthy white man.
Facing the Fugitive Slave Act. After their escape, the Crafts face new dangers as the Fugitive Slave Act threatens their freedom.
The Gettysburg Address Inspiration. Lincoln adapted Parker's phrase for his famous address, emphasizing democracy.
Ellen's Miraculous Reunion. Ellen reunites with her mother after years of separation, showcasing resilience.
Founding the Farm School. Ellen and William establish a school to educate freedmen and women in the South.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

They wanted children, and they wanted their children to be safe.

Phoebe Judge highlights the couple's motivation for escaping.

5:12WatchDec 5, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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