Ilyon Woo - Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

In 1848 William and Ellen Craft, an enslaved couple in Georgia, embarked upon a five-thousand-mile journey of mutual self-emancipation across the world. Theirs is a love story that begins in a time of revolutiona revolution unfinished in the American War for Independence, a revolution that endures.

This story opens in that year of global democratic revolt, when, in wave upon waveSicily, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and all across Europethe people rose up against tyranny, monarchy, the powers that be. News of these uprisings ricocheted, carried across the seas by high-speed clipper ships, overland by rail, and in defiance of time and space by the marvelous Electro-Magnetic Telegraph. From New York down to New Orleans, Americans raised torches in celebration, sure that these revolutions rhymed with their own.

Americans watched Europe, while the ground shifted beneath their own feet.

In 1848 the war with Mexico was over, and the United States laid claim to five hundred thousand square miles of new territory. More than six states would emerge from this gigantic stretch of land, including California, where the discovery of gold would bring a rush of forty-niners the next year. The spirit of Manifest Destiny ran high: that will to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government.

But cracks were forming along with this movement. A global pandemic, the cholera, was traveling fast. New immigrants joined the nation from Ireland, Germany, China, and other distant lands, challenging ideas of what an American could be. The two-party political system was breaking down, as voters became polarized over the engine that powered all that national growth: slavery. Politicians came to blows over the future of slavery in the territories, the rights of slavers, the question of who would inhabit the nations expanded lands. Meanwhile, those who could not claim the rights of American citizenship demanded the rights denied them.

In July 1848, at the historic first Womans Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, signers of a Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed, We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. A leader among them was Frederick Douglass, who connected the revolutions in Europe to Americas, and denounced the gulf between American aspirations and realities. As he would declare a few years later, one memorable July Fourth: There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Still, Douglass held out hope. Change was coming: The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion.

Space, he said, is comparatively annihilated.

Across space and time, in Macon, Georgia, William and Ellen Craft would also find inspiration in the American Declaration of Independence, whose words they knew, even as they were forbidden to read themwords that were read aloud in celebration every year on the very courthouse steps where William had once been sold.

This line caught their attention: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that from these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So, too, did this biblical verse, spoken by the apostle Paul: God made of one blood all nations of men (Acts 17:26). And in these words, William and Ellen Craft found fodder for a revolution of their own.

On their revolutionary travels, they did not swim, run, or hide, navigating by starlight. No Underground Railroad assisted them out of the South. Rather, they moved in full view of the world, harnessing the latest technologies of their day: steamboats, stagecoaches, and, above all, an actual railroad, riding tracks laid by the enslaved, empowered by their disguise as master and slave, by the reality of their love as husband and wife.