Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

William and Ellen Craft 1860

This personal account follows William and Ellen Craft's escape from slavery in Georgia to freedom in the North. Ellen travels disguised as a white male slaveholder, while William poses as her enslaved servant.

92 pages 1h 47m reading time

One of the most famous American slave narratives, often read alongside the life stories of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.
Shows that the lines of race, gender, and class that slavery depended on could be crossed with a costume and a confident act, which exposes how flimsy those lines really were.
Argues that slavery was cruel and lawless even under so-called kind masters, and that the American laws protecting it, including the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, made the whole nation guilty.
The Crafts' escape, told in their lectures across the North and in Britain, became a well-known story that helped turn public opinion against slavery.
Ellen Craft's disguise has made the book a key text for modern studies of how people perform race and gender, and it is still widely taught in schools and universities today.

Written in exile in England

The Crafts wrote it in England, where they had fled after slave catchers came to Boston to seize them.
A sling to hide a secret

Ellen could not write, so she wore her right arm in a sling to avoid signing hotel guest books.
Learned to write in England

The couple studied reading and writing at a village school in England during the years before the book appeared.
A famous picture of Ellen

A printed portrait of Ellen in her disguise sold widely in Britain and made the couple's story well known.