Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery »

William Craft (1821-1900) and Ellen Craft (1826-1891) returned to the United States after the Civil War. For the rest of their lives, often at great personal risk, they worked to improve conditions for African Americans in the South. Barbara McCaskill is an associate professor of English at the University of Georgia and a founding editor of the journal Womanist Theory and Research.

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.