Overview

The spectacular 1848 escape of William and Ellen Craft (1824–1900; 1826–1891) from slavery in Macon, Georgia, is a dramatic story in the annals of American history. Ellen, who could pass for white, disguised herself as a gentleman slaveholder; William accompanied her as his “master’s” devoted slave valet; both traveled openly by train, steamship, and carriage to arrive in free Philadelphia on Christmas Day. In Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery, Barbara McCaskill revisits this dual escape and examines the collaborations and partnerships that characterized the Crafts’ activism for the next thirty years: in Boston, where they were on the run again after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law; in England; and in Reconstruction-era Georgia. McCaskill also provides a close reading of the Crafts’ only book, their memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in 1860. Yet as this study of key moments in the Crafts’ public lives argues, the early print archive—newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, legal documents—fills gaps in their story by providing insight into how they navigated the challenges of freedom as reformers and educators, and it discloses the transatlantic British and American audiences’ changing reactions to them. By discussing such events as the 1878 court case that placed William’s character and reputation on trial, this book also invites readers to reconsider the Crafts’ triumphal story as one that is messy, unresolved, and bittersweet. An important episode in African American literature, history, and culture, this will be essential reading for teachers and students of the slave narrative genre and the transatlantic antislavery movement and for researchers investigating early American print culture.

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Reviews

Barbara McCaskill's new book should be read by everyone interested in the spectacular story of the self-emancipating Crafts--one of antebellum America's most compelling stories of bondage and of memory. McCaskill brilliantly builds on her edition of the Crafts' Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom with new details gleaned from meticulous research. Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery illuminates McCaskill's exemplary archival excavations into the lives of Ellen, William, their community of renowned formerly enslaved authors and activists, the whites who obstructed their life's journeys and those who helped clear their paths, and ultimately, the Crafts' outstanding progeny. --Joycelyn Moody, Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio Barbara McCaskill demonstrates that the Crafts' life and famous story reveal a great deal about how transatlantic literature, culture, and history have been managed and misrepresented over the years. This valuable and revealing history is the go-to study for anyone interested in the Crafts. --John Ernest, author of A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities before the Civil War Barbara McCaskill demonstrates that the Crafts' life and famous story reveal a great deal about how transatlantic literature, culture, and history have been managed and misrepresented over the years. This valuable and revealing history is the go-to study for anyone interested in the Crafts.--John Ernest author of A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities before the Civil War McCaskill s Love, Liberation and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory is a valuable addition to this growing body of African American biography. . . . Using a range of sources McCaskill peels back the layers of sensationalism that surrounded the Crafts public personae to reveal the contradictions and complexities that shaped their quest for freedom and its subsequent representation by antislavery activists, playwrights and twentieth-century scholars.--Erica L. Ball Civil War Book Review McCaskill's Love, Liberation and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory is a valuable addition to this growing body of African American biography. . . . Using a range of sources McCaskill peels back the layers of sensationalism that surrounded the Crafts' public personae to reveal the contradictions and complexities that shaped their quest for freedom and its subsequent representation by antislavery activists, playwrights and twentieth-century scholars.--Erica L. Ball Civil War Book Review Barbara McCaskill's new book should be read by everyone interested in the spectacular story of the self-emancipating Crafts - one of antebellum America's most compelling stories of bondage and of memory. McCaskill brilliantly builds on her editions of the Crafts' Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom with new details gleaned from meticulous research. Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery illuminates McCaskill's exemplary archival excavations into the lives of Ellen, William, their community of renowned formerly enslaved authors and activists, the whites who obstructed their life's journeys and those who helped clear their paths, and ultimately, the Crafts' outstanding progeny.--Joycelyn Moody, Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio

McCaskill s Love, Liberation and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory is a valuable addition to this growing body of African American biography. . . . Using a range of sources McCaskill peels back the layers of sensationalism that surrounded the Crafts public personae to reveal the contradictions and complexities that shaped their quest for freedom and its subsequent representation by antislavery activists, playwrights and twentieth-century scholars.--Erica L. Ball Civil War Book Review

Barbara McCaskill demonstrates that the Crafts' life and famous story reveal a great deal about how transatlantic literature, culture, and history have been managed and misrepresented over the years. This valuable and revealing history is the go-to study for anyone interested in the Crafts.--John Ernest author of A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities before the Civil War In this confluence of moment when the cultural and literary past met McCaskill's present, the result is four tightly packed chapters, richly layered with insights from a diverse array of primary and secondary sources. McCaskill constructs a narrative around the cultural meanings of the Crafts' successes and failures to gauge the agency realized by these two African American fugitives from the U.S. slave regime.--Michael Benjamin The Journal of African American History McCaskill's Love, Liberation and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory is a valuable addition to this growing body of African American biography. . . . Using a range of sources McCaskill peels back the layers of sensationalism that surrounded the Crafts' public personae to reveal the contradictions and complexities that shaped their quest for freedom and its subsequent representation by antislavery activists, playwrights and twentieth-century scholars.--Erica L. Ball Civil War Book Review Barbara McCaskill's new book should be read by everyone interested in the spectacular story of the self-emancipating Crafts - one of antebellum America's most compelling stories of bondage and of memory. McCaskill brilliantly builds on her editions of the Crafts' Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom with new details gleaned from meticulous research. Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery illuminates McCaskill's exemplary archival excavations into the lives of Ellen, William, their community of renowned formerly enslaved authors and activists, the whites who obstructed their life's journeys and those who helped clear their paths, and ultimately, the Crafts' outstanding progeny.--Joycelyn Moody, Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio

Barbara McCaskill's new book should be read by everyone interested in the spectacular story of the self-emancipating Crafts - one of antebellum America's most compelling stories of bondage and of memory. McCaskill brilliantly builds on her editions of the Crafts' Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom with new details gleaned from meticulous research. Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery illuminates McCaskill's exemplary archival excavations into the lives of Ellen, William, their community of renowned formerly enslaved authors and activists, the whites who obstructed their life's journeys and those who helped clear their paths, and ultimately, the Crafts' outstanding progeny. -- Joycelyn Moody, Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio Barbara McCaskill demonstrates that the Crafts' life and famous story reveal a great deal about how transatlantic literature, culture, and history have been managed and misrepresented over the years. This valuable and revealing history is the go-to study for anyone interested in the Crafts. -- John Ernest * author of A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities before the Civil War * McCaskill’s Love, Liberation and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory is a valuable addition to this growing body of African American biography. . . . Using a range of sources McCaskill peels back the layers of sensationalism that surrounded the Crafts’ public personae to reveal the contradictions and complexities that shaped their quest for freedom and its subsequent representation by antislavery activists, playwrights and twentieth-century scholars. -- Erica L. Ball * Civil War Book Review * In this confluence of moment when the cultural and literary past met McCaskill’s present, the result is four tightly packed chapters, richly layered with insights from a diverse array of primary and secondary sources. McCaskill constructs a narrative around the cultural meanings of the Crafts’ successes and failures to gauge the agency realized by these two African American fugitives from the U.S. slave regime. -- Michael Benjamin * The Journal of African American History *

Barbara McCaskill demonstrates that the Crafts' life and famous story reveal a great deal about how transatlantic literature, culture, and history have been managed and misrepresented over the years. This valuable and revealing history is the go-to study for anyone interested in the Crafts. --John Ernest, author of A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities before the Civil War

Author Information

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 1,000 Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (also Georgia).

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