Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication)
Barbara McCaskill
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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About Barbara McCaskill
Reviews for Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication)
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