Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

"The story of William and Ellen Craft had been told, repeated in fragments, and retold among proslavery people as well as by Abolitionists for at least a decade before the Crafts were in a position to publish their narrative. Apparently no two slaves in their flight for freedom ever thrilled the world so much as did this handsome young couple. It began, as the narrative indicates, when the near-white wife, disguised in man's clothes as a young planter, and her young black mate left Macon, Georgia, during the Christmas holidays of 1848. When the ruse succeeded, they became heroes, about whom speeches were made and poems written....Here was romance with dimensions which Shakespeare might not have missed, and which President James K. Polk did not, altogether. ...Polk declared after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law that he would employ military force for their capture." - Arna Wendell Bontemps, "Great Slave Narratives," 1969 "We would look in vain through the most trying times of our revolutionary history...for an incident of courage and noble daring to equal that of the escape of William and Ellen Craft; the future historians and poets would tell this story as one of the most thrilling in the nation's annals." -The Liberator