A daring escape

Some heroes are unjustly forgotten, which might have been the fate of William and Ellen Craft if not for Ilyon Woo’s riveting book Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom (Simon & Schuster 2023). Woo revives the story of the Crafts’ courageous escape from slavery, a journey that began in Macon, Ga., and eventually took them far beyond America’s shores.

In 1848, husband and wife William and Ellen Craft concocted an audacious plan to gain their freedom. Ellen with her very fair skin—both her father and grandfather were white slave owners—was the key to the couple’s escape. She chopped off her hair and donned fine men’s clothing and green tinted spectacles, disguising herself as a young, yet sickly, Southern gentleman. William posed as her loyal slave, and the two bought passage on rail and ship to the North. The journey had close calls, but with unwitting help from white Southerners who expressed sympathy for the poor “young man,” the couple pulled off their improbable escape.

In 1860, William and Ellen penned their own tale in a brief book, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. This account provides the core of Woo’s ­narrative, but Woo fills in gaps and adds description from other sources, heightening the narrative tension and illuminating American society in the years preceding the Civil War.

The journey to the North only accounts for about half of this compelling book. The Crafts settle in Boston, but the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 puts them in jeopardy. Northerners like Daniel Webster had a misplaced sense of duty, valuing the Constitution above virtue, allowing them to compromise to preserve the Union. The most gripping part of the story occurs when slave catchers arrive to drag the Crafts back to Macon. Eventually, the Crafts become lecturers in both America and Britain, working alongside the famous abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

Woo finds Ellen more interesting than William. She uses Ellen to analyze antebellum America through contemporary lenses of race, sex, and identity. Some of these angles offer insight. Ellen is essentially a white woman, whom Southerners and some Northerners view as black. Ellen herself never seems to think she is white—though perhaps William does, dubbing her “the white slave”—and Ellen is the one who struggles to trust white people. Her story hints at the arbitrariness of historical lines between “white” and “black.”

Woo’s feminist angle, however, seems more tenuous. She recasts Ellen’s masquerade as a transgressive reinvention of scripted roles. She also reassigns credit for the initial idea. The Crafts claimed William conceived the plan, but Woo believes Ellen was its author, even though William saved up the $150 needed for their journey and William possessed a showman’s confident personality.

The book’s equity language also tends to distract and confuse what’s an otherwise enjoyable and informative story. There are no “slaves,” just “enslaved people.” There are no ­“slaveholders” or “slave masters,” just “­enslavers.” There are no “runaways” or “fugitives,” just “the self-emancipated.” The goal behind this increasingly common academic cant might be noble, but the euphemistic dancing around our common terminology creates a gap between words and reality that actually serves to disguise the horror of slavery.

William and Ellen Craft, along with leading abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, didn’t flinch from using “slavery,” “slave,” and “fugitive” to describe their own experience because those words communicated the powerful injustice they had suffered. It’s a shame contemporary writers use this newspeak instead of embracing the perspective of their subjects.

Woo’s book does, however, preserve a fundamental perspective of the abolition movement. Throughout the story, the Crafts express faith in God’s providence, and many who helped them did so out of Christian conviction.