Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery / Edition 1

by William Craft, Richard J. M. Blackett

Overview

Husband and wife William and Ellen Craft's break from slavery in 1848 was perhaps the most extraordinary in American history. Numerous newspaper reports in the United States and abroad told of how the two — fair-skinned Ellen disguised as a white slave master and William posing as her servant — negotiated heart-pounding brushes with discovery while fleeing Macon, Georgia, for Philadelphia and eventually Boston. No account, though, conveyed the ingenuity, daring, good fortune, and love that characterized their flight for freedom better than the couple's own version, published in 1860, a remarkable authorial accomplishment only twelve years beyond illiteracy. Now their stirring first-person narrative and Richard Blackett's excellent interpretive pieces are brought together in one volume to tell the complete story of the Crafts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807123201
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1999
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Richard J. M. Blackett is the Andrew Jackson Professor ofHistory at Vanderbilt University and the author of several booksabout nineteenth-century history, including Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War.

Editorial Reviews

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is the most significant fugitive slave narrative to come out of Georgia. I know of no other account that provides as riveting an account of an actual escape experience. It offers so much more in its treatment of gender and racial role-reversals, of husband-wife and master-slave relations, and of abolitionist activity on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

Georgia Historical Quarterly

"Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is the most significant fugitive slave narrative to come out of Georgia. I know of no other account that provides as riveting an account of an actual escape experience. It offers so much more in its treatment of gender and racial role-reversals, of husband-wife and master-slave relations, and of abolitionist activity on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.”--Georgia Historical Quarterly

From the Publisher