Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. This item is unavailable.Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

In 1848 William and Ellen Craft made one of the most daring and remarkable escapes in the history of slavery in America. With fair-skinned Ellen in the guise of a white male planter and William posing as her servant, the Crafts traveled by rail and ship—in plain sight and relative luxury—from bondage in Macon, Georgia, to freedom first in Philadelphia, then Boston, and ultimately England. This edition of their thrilling story is newly typeset from the original 1860 text. Eleven annotated supplementary readings, drawn from a variety of contemporary sources, help to place the Crafts’ story within the complex cultural currents of transatlantic abolitionism.

WILLIAM CRAFT (1821–1900), with his spouse Ellen Craft (1826–1891), returned to the United States after the Civil War. For the rest of their lives, often at great personal risk, the Crafts worked to improve conditions for African Americans in the South.

ELLEN CRAFT (1826–1891), with her spouse William Craft (1821–1900), returned to the United States after the Civil War. For the rest of their lives, often at great personal risk, the Crafts worked to improve conditions for African Americans in the South.

BARBARA McCASKILL is a professor of English at the University of Georgia, coorganizer of the Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters Project, and associate academic director of the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts. She is the coeditor of Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919 and author of Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (Georgia). McCaskill edited and wrote an introduction to the 1860 memoir Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (also Georgia).