Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

This compelling narrative offers a firsthand account of a couple's remarkable flight from slavery in the antebellum South. William and Ellen Craft devised a daring plan in which the light-skinned wife disguised herself as a man and the husband posed as her servant. This brief memoir recounts their journey northward in 1848, when they made their way to Philadelphia and later settled in Boston, where they were active in abolitionist circles. Originally published in 1860, the Crafts' account of their escape was an immediate success. Their story offers fascinating insights into issues of race, gender, and class in nineteenth-century America.