Authors: Betty DeRamus
However, Ellen and William faced their most serious roadblock when they tried to catch
the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore train at the President Street depot. Ten
years earlier, a twenty-one-year-old Baltimore shipyard slave later known as Frederick
Douglass had escaped aboard a Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore railcar, using
fake seaman’s papers to pass as a freeman. Train officials had become more vigilant
since then, requiring black people wishing to travel on the trains to bring a white
Baltimore resident with them to sign a bond.
This was the trap that had been waiting for the Crafts all along. As soon as the Crafts
approached the ticket master, the man informed “Mr. Johnson” that he would have to
prove his own identity and also post a bond to take a slave to the North. That was
the moment when Ellen reached deep inside herself and tapped something she might not
even have known she owned. Speaking in the scorn-wrapped voice of a Southern planter,
she declared, “You have no right to detain us here.” Fellow passengers from the steamer
vouched for Mr. Johnson as well. William then begged the ticket master to let his
master go, saying he might die if he didn’t receive treatment in Philadelphia soon.
When Ellen spoke again in the voice of a young white man raised on mint juleps and
money, the ticket master finally yielded, waving her on.
In the Jim Crow section of the train to Philadelphia, William began creating his own
Underground Railroad: he asked a free black man for information about Northern slave
havens. This was a common first step for fugitives fleeing the Deep South; they sought
help not from any established network of people who assisted fugitives, but from the
first black person they saw. The free black man gave him the name of a boardinghouse
run by abolitionists.
Finally, the Crafts reached Philadelphia, where they could stand on free soil, breathe
free air and walk around with a free spirit. At the edge of collapse, Ellen finally
broke down and let her tears flow. It was Christmas, and they were in Philadelphia
greeting black abolitionist leaders Robert Purvis and William Still, the latter chairman
of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. When Ellen wore her costume for them, they
were stunned at how it changed her. However, Ellen stayed mostly in bed for a few
days, recovering from her ordeal. The pair spent three weeks with an antislavery Quaker
family, members of a religious group who called themselves Friends of Truth and spoke
to each other the way they believed Jesus spoke to his biblical friends. Quakers believed
in a personal God who spoke directly to their souls and constantly revealed his truths.
Ellen distrusted them and all white people, but the family won her over with warm
bowls of soup and kindness. William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave, author and antislavery
speaker, also called on them, urging them to join him in speaking out against slavery.
Despite the sheen of adventure that surrounds Underground Railroad sagas, only a small
band of citizens actually aided slaves, and not all of them welcomed blacks into their
homes or even churches except in segregated “negro seats,” as the
American Anti-Slavery Almanac
for 1840 pointed out. Yet many of those who sheltered slaves in Philadelphia and
elsewhere truly cared about people of color. In Philadelphia, such friends urged the
Crafts to push on to Boston, which was farther north and, perhaps, safer for a couple
whose daring escape might spark an intense manhunt. After moving to Boston, the Crafts
boarded with Lewis and Harriet Hayden at 66 Phillips Street, a brick brownstone with
pine floors, marble fireplaces, an owner who had been a fugitive slave and a top floor
that sheltered as many as thirteen runaways at a time. Hayden, a fugitive from Kentucky,
had arrived in Boston in 1849, still smarting over the fact that, as he pointed out
in his account of his life, his master had swapped him for a pair of horses. Hayden
kept two kegs of gunpowder under his front stoop and had threatened to blow up the
house rather than let any fugitives be taken from it.
While Ellen sewed and learned upholstery, William Craft, who couldn’t find work as
a cabinetmaker, opened a secondhand furniture store. Craft’s advertisement in the
July 27, 1849, edition of the
Liberator
read:
“William Craft. Dealer in New and Second Hand Furniture, No. 62 Federal Street Boston….
All kinds of furniture cleaned and repaired with despatch [
sic
] in the most satisfactory manner. The patronage of his friends and the public is
respectfully solicited.”
The couple remained in Boston for two years and joined the congregation of the Reverend
Theodore Parker. The Unitarian minister and social reformer claimed that when writing
his sermons he kept a rifle on one side of his desk and a Bible on the other. It didn’t
take long for the Crafts to need both physical protection and prayers. As they became
full-fledged celebrities on the antislavery circuit, they also became tempting targets
for the slavery supporters on their trail.
Everywhere they went, they met people who recognized the power of their story as an
antislavery tool, a saga of adventure and romance that could touch people’s souls.
Unlike most fugitives, though, the Crafts used their real names and described real
events, real places and real people, anxious to make their stories believable. Runaway
slave, writer and antislavery activist William Wells Brown wrote about them in the
Liberator
in January 1849. Other stories soon appeared in the
New York Herald,
the
Newark Daily Mercury,
the
National Slavery Standard
and elsewhere. William and Ellen Craft became America’s most notorious fugitive slave
couple. However, as was the custom in nineteenth-century America, it was William who
did the talking at public meetings while Ellen merely stood onstage, her whiteness
forcing whites to identify with her plight. William spoke to swelling crowds at the
African Meeting House just off Joy Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill in the heart of
the black community. It was the first still-standing black church established in America.
He also spoke in the Hopedale community in Mendon, Massachusetts, a Christian enclave
set on six hundred acres of land. When they toured with William Wells Brown, Brown
sometimes charged admission.
Then suddenly, with one stroke of his pen, U.S. president Millard Fillmore changed
life for Ellen and William Craft and for thousands of other black and white Americans.
On September 18, 1850, he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, passed by Congress as part
of the Compromise of 1850.
Like cholera or some other virulent disease, the new federal law would infect thousands
of people. It had been gaining strength for months. Henry Clay proposed it in the
Senate in January 1850 as part of a compromise package. Under it, California would
come into the Union free and citizens of the territory acquired from Mexico could
choose whether or not they wanted slavery. To appease the antislavery forces, the
slave trade was prohibited in the District of Columbia and California joined the Union
as a free state. To satisfy Southern slaveholders weary of having their runaways sheltered
by Northern communities, a stricter Fugitive Slave Act made it easier to recover runaway
slaves.
The new law was not just tough. It was a slab of stone. It set up a federal system
of judges, commissioners and marshals to recapture escaped slaves, even in free states.
Anyone claiming to own a runaway slave could take the slave into custody after establishing
ownership before a federal commissioner. Any bystander, white or black, could be fined
one thousand dollars or jailed for six months for refusing to help a marshal capture
a fugitive slave.
“Did those framers of the constitution intend that northern freemen should leave their
shops, their plows, their merchandise, to give chase to fugitive slaves?” newspaper
editor and runaway slave Henry Bibb sneered in the January 1, 1851, issue of
Voice of the Fugitive.
Apparently, that was just what framers of the new law expected. Also, special commissioners
received ten dollars for each fugitive returned to slavery and only five dollars for
those turned loose. Slaves weren’t entitled to jury trials or judicial hearings; in
fact, they had no chance to defend themselves. That meant free blacks as well as fugitives
like the Crafts could be kidnapped and thrown into slavery. So eager were some slave
catchers to arrest supposed fugitives that two men seized a fourteen-year-old white
girl in Chester County, Pennsylvania, mistaking her for a mulatto. After traveling
twelve miles, they put her out of their carriage. Patrick Sneed, a black Niagara Falls
waiter, also was briefly arrested on the “pretended charge” of a murder committed
in Savannah, Georgia.
The law was supposed to ease tensions between the North and South by discouraging
slaves from leaving their masters. Supporters also hoped the law would stop Southern
secessionists from threatening to leave the Union. However, the law accomplished just
the opposite of what its supporters had hoped—more slaves than ever began running
to Canada.
“Almost every day we have men arriving here from the land of slavery,” Henry Bibb
commented in the May 7, 1851, edition of his Canadian newspaper. Within a week, forty
blacks left Boston. In Columbia, Pennsylvania, 487 of its 943 African Americans packed
up and left. Sandy Lake, Pennsylvania, a northern Pennsylvania community once dubbed
Liberia because it had accepted so many Southern runaways, lost so many people it
disappeared from the map.
Or as an antislavery tract issued in 1853 pointed out, “Families were broken up—churches
disorganized—joy turned into mourning and laughter into tears.” In New Orleans, the
situation became so laced with paranoia that a June 24, 1853, edition of the
Liberator
claimed a band of twenty-five hundred heavily armed slaves planned to attack the
city. The story was quickly retracted.
Runaways walked through woods, hid in hollow logs and coffins, crawled into unused
pig pens and corn cribs and curled up under sacks of grain on ships; they crossed
rivers in ships, tubs, gates or even logs; they rubbed their bodies with red pepper,
raw onion and the dust from graves to baffle the hound dogs on their trail; and they
ate raw meat to avoid setting cooking fires that would attract slave hunters. Some
ran to swamps and bayous to live with Indians or as solitary outcasts.
Meanwhile, the Crafts and other members of Boston’s antislavery movement began speaking
with gruffer, angrier voices.
On October 4, 1850, Boston blacks adopted a resolution to resist until death any attempt
to snatch away their freedom. Ten days later, Josiah Quincy, former mayor of Boston,
and 340 other white abolitionists, called a meeting to support this resolution. Abolitionist
leader Frederick Douglass told the assembly, “We must be prepared should this law
be put into operation to see the streets of Boston running with blood.”
His words were soon tested.
In mid-October, two slave hunters working for Ellen Craft’s owner, Robert Collins,
showed up in Boston. John Knight, who once worked with William in a cabinetmaker’s
shop, was one of the men. The
Federal Union
newspaper of Milledgeville, Georgia, described Knight as “a tall, lank, lean looking
fellow, five feet ten or eleven inches high, dark hair, about twenty-eight years old.”
He sent William a letter, asking him to come see him at the United States Hotel and
show him around Boston. Knight tossed in an extra cup of sugar: he offered to take
a letter from Ellen back to her mother, Maria.
However, the Crafts learned that Knight was traveling with Willis Hughes, a jailer
from Macon. There was nothing even remotely sweet about him. The November 5, 1850,
edition of the
Federal Union
called him “a short, rowdyish-looking fellow, five feet two, thirty or forty years
of age, sandy hair, red whiskers, black short teeth, chews and smokes.” A third professional
slave catcher named Alfred Beal from Norfolk was also said to be in the area. He was,
according to the newspaper, “a very stout, thick set, coarse looking man, about five
feet nine inches high, sandy hair, red whiskers, upper front teeth broken off, about
forty-five years of age, known to be on a general hunt.”
Knight asked for a warrant for the Crafts’ arrest after the couple failed to show
up at Knight’s hotel. On October 25, he finally found a judge to issue one. William
barricaded himself inside a store owned by Lewis Hayden and guarded by blacks and
abolitionists. He sat at his bench with a plane and saw and a heavily loaded “horse
pistol,” prepared to shoot anyone who tried to carry him away. Ellen first stayed
with her friend Mrs. Hilliard and then with Ellis Gray Loring, a wealthy Boston lawyer,
and finally with Mr. Parker. William hid in Lewis Hayden’s home, the house barricaded
with double locks and Hayden down in the basement with two kegs of gunpowder, ready
to blow up the house if the marshal broke through the guard upstairs. A mob gathered
in the streets as Judge Levi Woodbury considered Knight’s request for warrants. Judge
Woodbury issued the warrants, but they were never served.
Meanwhile, Hughes and Knight found out how it felt to be pursued. They were sworn
at, arrested for carrying concealed weapons, jailed for driving too fast and threatened
with violence. They also went to jail on a charge of libeling the Crafts. An unknown
but wealthy supporter bailed them out each time. In a November 26 letter to the
Federal Union,
Knight said both men had been arrested for calling Craft a slave: and that at one
time a crowd had rushed their carriage, “hissed…called us bloodhounds and some of
them seized upon the horses and attempted to open the doors. Mr. Hughes who was in
the carriage laughed at them and made sport of them.”