One couple. One thousand miles. Four days to outrun a nation built on chains.
December 21, 1848, Macon, Georgia. In a cramped attic above a cabinet shop, Ellen Craft, twenty-four, light-skinned, illiterate, and enslaved, sews a gentleman's coat by candlelight. Her husband William, twenty-two, a skilled cabinetmaker, forges passes and builds a mahogany traveling case with a false bottom. By dawn, Ellen is Mr. William Johnson, a deaf, one-armed planter with green spectacles and a white sling. William is his valet. Their destination: Philadelphia. Their weapon: love.
They board trains, steamers, and ferries under the noses of slave-catchers and bounty hunters.
- Macon to Savannah: Central of Georgia Railway, 4:00 a.m.
- Savannah to Charleston: Steamer Gen. Clinch. The purser eyes Ellen's sling.
- Charleston to Richmond: 480 miles of rail. A slave trader at breakfast.
- Richmond to Washington: Potomac ferry iced over.
- Washington to Philadelphia: Final 180 miles. Christmas morning, 1848, 4:17 a.m. First free breath at Mother Bethel AME.
Every whistle is a heartbeat. Every mile, a miracle.
Boston, 1849-1850. Tremont Temple: 2,000 weep as Ellen speaks, unable to read. The Liberator front page: Never was a tale more thrilling. Fugitive Slave Act, 1850. Georgia deputies storm Boston. The Crafts flee in a coffin aboard the Cambria, surviving an Atlantic storm.
London, 1851-1868. Lady Byron's townhouse: Ellen learns to read and write in six months. Craft & Co.: William imports slave-free goods, 20,000 pounds profit. Anti-slavery tours: 30,000 copies of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom sold. Civil War: 100,000 pounds sent to Union camps, Ellen's letters in the Lincoln Papers. Five free-born children: Hope (1849), Charles (1852), Brougham (1854), William Garrison (1854), Alfred (1859).
Georgia, 1868-1900. Woodville Cooperative Farm: 1,800 acres, their former master's land, 15,000 dollars cash. Woodville School: 500 freedchildren by 1869. KKK arson, 1871 and 1872: school burned twice. Ellen's reply: We plant again. 1874: stone schoolhouse rises, unburnable. 1,000 graduates by 1880. Ellen dies 1897, pneumonia, age 71. William follows 1900, heart failure, age 76.
Spanning seven decades, three continents, and two Reconstruction arsons, Disguised in Daylight is resurrection. Primary sources: Ellen's primer, Liberator pages, Freedmen's Bureau reports, Cambria manifest listing one coffin, cargo. Maps and images: 1848 rail route, Boston safe houses, Woodville ruins (1874), Ellen's 1851 daguerreotype. Modern pilgrimage: 2024 Christmas Eve Amtrak journey retracing every mile, led by great-great-granddaughter Dr. Ruth Hope Hill.
Love outran the chains. Ellen Craft's final letter, December 1, 1900.
Perfect for fans of The Underground Railroad, Twelve Years a Slave, Master Slave Husband Wife. Includes timeline (1824-1900), cast, 12 public-domain images, hyperlinked endnotes, 3 annotated maps. Lexile 1080L. Ideal for AP U.S. History, African American Studies, college seminars.
