It Takes Two

Fast forward to Ockham in September 2018 and an event to celebrate the unveiling of new signs at the entrance to the village. A tall, stocky, seventy-year-old man with a jaunty cravat tucked into his blue open-necked shirt is standing in the middle of a field holding up one of the green signs with the help of local historian Garry Walton. The sign bears the legend ‘Historic Ockham Village’; then, underneath, ‘Refuge of Fugitive American Slaves William & Ellen Craft’. The man is Christopher Clark, great-great-grandson of the Crafts, to whom the sign is a tribute. At the ceremony Christopher gives a moving speech: ‘I like to think that if people are thought of and spoken about, they still in some respects live among us,’ he says. ‘I would like to thank everybody responsible for the signs … but most of all I would like to thank William and Ellen for what they strove for and what they achieved.’[2]

What the Crafts strove for and how they achieved it – how, in other words, they ended up in Ockham in 1851 – is one of the most incredible stories ever told. Fittingly, they told it themselves in the book they published in 1860, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery.

If anything, their tale is even more incredible than that of the celebrated runaway slave, Henry ‘Box’ Brown from Virginia, who in 1849 arranged to have himself posted in a three-foot-long wooden crate to Philadelphia in the free state of Pennsylvania. He moved to Britain where he married an English woman and became, appropriately enough, a magician.

Brown was obliged to conceal himself. But Ellen and William Craft did everything brazenly, in plain sight. The disguise Ellen adopted allowed her – though not William – to stay at the best hotels, travel first class on trains and dine at the captain’s table on ships. It was an incredible performance on Ellen’s part, even if the stress of it – the couple were nearly caught on several occasions – left her not only physically sick but suffering from what we would now recognise as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The idea, however, was William’s. And they would not have been able to pull off the whole crazy scheme if they had not been so close as a couple. They were totally trusting, capable of intuiting down to the subtlest raised eyebrow what the other was thinking and going through. Separation was unthinkable to them. At the same time, they knew that if one of them was caught then the other would have to struggle on alone, with everything that that implied.

At the centre of it all was an absolute steadfast conviction that slavery was wrong – that if all men were indeed created equal, none had the right to hold others as chattels and deprive them of their rights. In the Southern states of America, wrote the Crafts, there is ‘a greater want of humanity and high principle amongst the whites, than among any other civilised people in the world’.[3]

Ellen and William were originally from Macon, Georgia. Like his mother, brother and sister, William had been auctioned off by his original master at sixteen to settle gambling debts. Owned thereafter by a local bank clerk, he still worked at the furniture store to which he had been apprenticed as a cabinetmaker, but while he was allowed to be paid – and hence able to save money for his and Ellen’s escape – he received only a fraction of the wages due to him.

William was dark-skinned: his ethnicity was not and never would be in doubt. Ellen, on the other hand, was far paler. This was because she was a so-called ‘quadroon’, the daughter of a mixed-race slave named Maria, who had been raped by her planter master Major James Smith. So similar to her ‘legitimate’ half-siblings did she look that she was often mistaken for their white sister. Although Ellen was relatively well treated for a slave – inasmuch as she was not flogged or sexually assaulted – her whiteness angered the mistress of the house and in 1837 she gifted Ellen, aged eleven, to her daughter, Eliza Cromwell Smith, to get her out of the way. When Eliza subsequently married and moved to Macon, she took Ellen with her.

How exactly William and Ellen met, became a couple and married, it’s hard to say. But William knew the household that Ellen worked for because he was part-owned by her master. When plotting their escape, the pair ran through a variety of theoretical plans in their heads, dismissing each as impossible to execute for one reason or another. The basic problem was how to flee the area quickly enough when it was unlawful for slaves to take any public transport without their masters’ consent. Slave-hunters with their bloodhounds would track them down in no time. William and Ellen would have been separated for life and either put to ‘the meanest and most laborious drudgery’,[4] or tortured to death as a warning to other slaves.

The key to William’s plan was that slaveholders could take their slaves to any state, including ‘free states’ where slavery did not exist. White women in the South did not usually travel with their servants. But what if Ellen, with her fair complexion, pretended to be his master – a white man?

William and Ellen were ‘favourite slaves’ so managed to obtain passes from their masters over Christmas (even if their illiteracy meant they were unable to read what they were permitted to do). This gave them a few days to get away before anyone noticed they were missing. William had managed to save some money from his job. He went to different parts of town at odd times, buying supplies and clothes – including parts of Ellen’s ‘white man’s’ costume – which he took back to the cottage where his wife worked. Being a favourite, she had a room to herself containing a lockable chest of drawers.

Once on the run, the difficulty for Ellen was preserving the continuity of her performance as a man; making it seamless and plausible while also avoiding male company, where she would run the risk of exposure. She could not, for example, drink and smoke with other men. She had to be careful in conversation, lest she unwittingly said something that gave her away. The courage it took to enact the plan hardly bears thinking about. There were so many ways it could (and nearly did) go wrong. But William’s presence made it marginally easier for Ellen than other female slave escapees who dressed as men, such as Clarissa Davis of Virginia, who successfully reached Philadelphia in 1854, having hidden in a chicken coop for ten weeks to evade bounty hunters.

Before they set out, William cut Ellen’s hair to neck length. As neither she nor William could read or write, Ellen put her right arm in a sling to deter port authorities or hotel receptionists from asking her to sign documents or registries. To flesh out her identity as an invalid, Ellen asked William to wrap bandages around her face to hide her smooth, beardless skin. She wore the right kind of clothes, clothes that identified her as a man who would own slaves: men’s trousers which she had sewed; a jacket; a cravat; a pair of green spectacles; and a top hat.

Throughout the slave states, as the Crafts wrote in their book, ‘every coloured person’s complexion is prima facie evidence of his being a slave; and the lowest villain in the country, should he be a white man, has the legal power to arrest, and question, in the most inquisitorial and insulting manner, any coloured person, male or female, that he may find at large’.[5] They each took a different route to the railway station. William got into the ‘negro car’ while Ellen bought a ticket for herself and one for William to the port of Savannah, 200 miles away. Ellen had to do all the talking, including the purchasing of tickets and hotel rooms. They were nearly caught at the outset when William spotted his boss questioning the ticket seller and peering through the train windows, obviously suspecting that his slave had done a runner. William shrank back in his seat. The boss searched the first-class carriage but did not notice Ellen in her disguise. Before he had a chance to reach William’s car, the bell rang and the train left the station.

It got worse, however. Ellen had been staring out of the window, but then turned and realised the man sitting beside her was an old friend of her master and mistress who had known Ellen since childhood and had only recently attended a dinner party at the house where she lived. Her panic at the thought that he had almost certainly discovered her identity and was there to capture her only faded when he greeted her with a: ‘It is a very fine morning, sir.’ Ellen then feigned deafness and eventually the man gave up trying to talk to her.

In Savannah, William and Ellen boarded a steamer for Charleston, South Carolina. William prepared flannels and opodeldoc – a treatment for his master’s supposed rheumatism consisting of soap, camphor and wormwood in alcohol – which he warmed on the stove in the gentlemen’s saloon. Then, while Ellen slept, William paced the deck – there was nowhere for black passengers to sleep – eventually finding some cotton bags by the funnel where he sat until morning. This was obviously noticed by the captain, for at breakfast the next day he singled out William, turning to Ellen and saying: ‘You have a very attentive boy, sir; but you had better watch him like a hawk when you get to the North. He seems all very well here, but he may act quite differently there …’[6] At the same meal, a slaver tried to persuade Ellen to sell William to him. ‘I think not, sir,’ she said. ‘I have great confidence in his fidelity.’ At this the slaver became so enraged that he slammed his fist on the table – so hard that his neighbour’s coffee spilled.[7]

The level of threat is unimaginable – the slaves are surrounded by violent, racist Yankees. How on earth did they cope? They are constantly having to parry questions about slavery and abolitionism, staying in character all the while. Say too much and you give yourself away. Say too little and you arouse suspicion for being antisocial.

Ellen and William finally arrived in Philadelphia – in the free state of Pennsylvania – on Christmas Day. Ellen’s first reaction, understandably, was to burst into tears. She was exhausted: so weak and faint she could barely stand. In Philadelphia they were given assistance by the underground abolitionist network. A local Quaker man, Barkley Ivens, invited them to stay at his home beside the Delaware river, ‘the first act of great and disinterested kindness we had ever received from a white person’.[8] Ellen could not relax and was convinced they were about to be double-crossed; but no. Still, it was not safe to stay in Pennsylvania. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it illegal to assist slaves on the run, even in free states. So three weeks later they moved to Boston where William found a job as a cabinetmaker and furniture broker and Ellen as a seamstress.

For a time, all went well. Then, later that year, two slave-hunters from Macon arrived to capture them. The pair were obliged to flee again, this time to England. Their owner had even written to the US president, Millard Fillmore, to ask him to intervene in the matter. He ruled that the Crafts should be returned, even if that involved using military force.

Ellen and William sailed for Liverpool via Canada. She became ill on the voyage, nearly died and took several weeks to recover after they arrived. But once they were in England the abolitionist network – including Harriet Martineau and Ada Lovelace – ensured they were looked after and received an education. Afterwards Ellen wrote that since escaping from slavery she had ‘gotten so much better in every respect … I had much rather starve in England, a free woman, than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.’[9]

In one sense it’s absurd to say that the Crafts were ‘fortunate’. How could they be described as such, after all they went through? But it is not totally nonsensical. Through a combination of luck and judgement, this astonishing couple were able to forge an unbreakable commitment to each other, despite the many obstacles in their path. That commitment also gave them far more power and autonomy than many slaves could hope for.

Consider that most slaves were not entitled to marry legally in any American colony or state (even the Northern states where slavery ended in 1830); also that enslaved families could be separated and individual members sold off one by one at any point. If a white master wanted to have sex with a female slave, that was perfectly permissible. Quite often, in what were termed ‘abroad marriages’, an enslaved man might have a different owner to the mother of his children; might even live a significant distance away on a different plantation, in which case he would only be able to see his family when his owner allowed it. In this context of forcible dislocation, coupledom was a precious commodity: a safe space, to use a modern term, where slaves were able to be themselves and form trusting, secure relationships.

Perhaps we have, ever so slightly, lost the sense that coupledom can have a radical edge. A feeling prevails in the modern world that few things are more boring than content couples, particularly if they’re ‘smug marrieds’ forever berating, with a sigh, others’ inability to ‘settle down’ or demonstrate ‘maturity’ in love. To sceptics, romantic coupledom is fairy-tale schmaltz – conformist, prescriptive, suffocating. Not so long ago, they point out, marriages were business arrangements between families. Whether or not a husband and wife liked each other was beside the point. Like the novels that fed demand for it, romantic love was an eighteenth-century invention.

You can certainly make the case that domesticity, or at least the ‘minutiae of daily living’, is a passion killer, as Laura Kipnis does in her book Against Love: A Polemic: ‘Taking out the garbage, tone of voice, a forgotten errand – these are the rocky shoals upon which intimacy so often founders.’[10] Kipnis maintains that individuals can only endure sharing living space for extended periods by compromising and adapting. But there is a problem with this: our ‘post-Romantic ideals of unconstrained individuality’, which require both parties to rid themselves of those qualities that might prove troublesome while retaining enough individuality to feel their autonomy is not being sacrificed.[11]

One of the most fascinating examples of committed coupledom dates from precisely the point when these kinds of issues were being debated by artists and philosophers. The Romantic period, broadly 1750 to 1850, celebrated the idea of the individual as heroic and solitary. The couple we are about to meet possessed a sort of ‘double singleness’ – to use the phrase Charles Lamb coined to describe his relationship with his sister Mary, of which more later. Both halves combined to present a unified front which was stylised and performative but also emotionally sincere.

This tale also starts with an escape. On the evening of Monday, 30 March 1778, a twenty-three-year-old Anglo-Irish woman called Sarah Ponsonby climbed out of the parlour window of her guardians’ mansion in Woodstock, Kilkenny. She was wearing men’s clothing and carrying both a pistol and her small dog, Frisk. A trusted workman friend escorted her to a barn on the family estate where Lady Eleanor Butler, a spinster sixteen years Sarah’s senior, was waiting for her. She too had changed into men’s clothes, before saddling up her horse and riding away from Butler Castle, the family pile up the road.

This first getaway attempt was thwarted, however. ‘I cant Paint our distress,’ wrote the wife (and Sarah’s cousin) of her guardian Sir William Fownes, Lady Betty, to a friend. ‘My Dr Sally leapt out of a Window last Night and is gon off. We learn Miss Butler of the Castle is wt her. I can say no more. Help me if you can.’[12]

Eleanor and Sarah had been planning this for a while. Eleanor’s mother wanted her to enter a convent as she was no longer marriageable because of her age. Sarah, an orphan, was facing the unwanted attentions (attempted rape, followed by repeated declarations of love) of her guardian, Sir William Fownes – her late father’s cousin – who hoped Sarah might provide him with a male heir. (Lady Betty had only given him a daughter.)

Their friendship had begun over a decade earlier when Sarah was only thirteen. Aged twenty-nine, Eleanor was charged with looking after Sarah, who had been placed at Miss Parke’s school near Kilkenny Castle in 1768. It began as bookish – the pair’s favourite novels were Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall – but had matured via the sending of turbid letters into a grand passion for each other and the sort of life they could enjoy together. (‘Poor Soul if she had not been so fond of her pen so much would not have happened,’ observed Lady Betty.) Only by leaving Ireland could they escape the shadow of their families’ ambitions and live as they pleased, which is to say without being criticised; for Eleanor this was for being ‘masculine’ and ‘satirical’.

The first stop on their journey was Waterford, where they planned to catch a boat to England. But they missed the boat and were discovered sheltering in a barn. Sarah caught a cold which turned into a serious fever. Her narrow evasion of death only confirmed for her and Eleanor the rightness of their course of action. They insisted to anyone who would listen that they would only be happy together and that there were no men involved. Eventually, after a second escape attempt, their families acquiesced. They were permitted to go with something approaching a blessing, accompanied by one of Eleanor’s maids, Mary Carryl.

On a tour of Wales, the ladies settled in Llangollen and found a five-roomed stone cottage. They christened it Plas Newydd and set about transforming it, despite their lack of funds (a running theme). It was perfect for their needs in the sense that they had the freedom to reconstruct it to their sombrely Gothic specifications. They added a library (famously well stocked) and a dairy and a glasshouse in which they grew peaches and melons. Everywhere there were ornate wooden carvings, while the windows were filled with stained glass covered in celestial motifs. In the garden there was even a ‘ruined’ archway.

Their stated goal was ‘retirement’ – not what we think of it: they were not old, plainly. Rather, they sought what their biographer Elizabeth Mavor calls a ‘dignified withdrawal from the press and vulgarity of the world to a life of virtue and rustic simplicity’.[13] ‘Rustic’ in this context meant an idealised version of rural life. And if things were not rustic enough, they could be made so. ‘Sat in the rustic seat,’ Eleanor wrote in her journal, ‘disliked the appearance of the Stones over which the Water falls, thought it appeared too formal. Sent our workman to it with a spade and Mattock.’

As for ‘simplicity’: they still had a gardener, a footman and several maids, despite having an annual income of under £300, which is why they were constantly asking for a government pension (which they eventually received) and borrowing money from friends and relatives, including Eleanor’s estranged brother. So stressful did Eleanor find dealing with her brother that a letter from him would often trigger one of her migraines. These she detailed – together with minute accounts of other aspects of their lives – in meticulous journals from which we can piece together what the ladies called ‘the system’. Their lives were strictly ordered, every day broken down into chunks. The goal was improvement, of their minds (though not their bodies) and of the house and garden. They read a huge amount and took pride in their library. ‘My B[eloved] has a Book of (I think) very well chosen Extracts from all the Books she has read since we had a home,’ Sarah wrote to a friend.[14] These contained recipes, notes about plants and the names of local tradesmen. They liked each day to be similar to the one before.

Their personalities complemented each other. Eleanor dominated and could be forceful. She was given, says Mavor, to ‘discharging gardeners like cannon balls’[15] and whipped boys she suspected of stealing strawberries (tipping them apologetically when she realised she had accused them unjustly). Sarah could be taciturn and, in the account book it was her job to keep, indulgent and emollient. They often fell out with people. ‘Miss Davies, Mrs Barrett and we meet no more,’ Eleanor noted. ‘The Barretts having manifested themselves ungrateful, unworthy, treacherous and in every respect the reverse of what we so long thought them.’[16]

The paradox of the Ladies of Llangollen is that they, like Greta Garbo, became famous for wanting to be alone – so famous that their visitors book reads like a roll call of the late eighteenth-century great and good, from William Wordsworth to Josiah Wedgwood, the Duke of Wellington and Lady Caroline Lamb. Their idea of perfect contentment was walking a short local route they called the Home Circuit, then sitting in front of a blazing fire and reading aloud to each other. Occasionally visitors stayed with them, but this was discouraged; if possible people were shunted along the road to a local pub, the Hand.

They dined well and plentifully, even if they gave up hog’s puddings after Eleanor decided they were ‘too savoury, too rich for our abstemious Stomachs’. ‘Abstemious’! It’s hardly the right word. In one letter Eleanor tempts someone by describing what she would typically be served if she came to stay: ‘New laid Eggs from our Jersey Hens Who are in the Most beautiful Second Mourning you ever beheld … Dinner Shall be boil’d chickens from our own Coop. Asparagus out of our garden. Ham of our own Saving and Mutton from our own Village … Supper Shall consist of Goosberry Fool, Cranberry Tarts roast Fowel and Sallad.’[17]

Within five years of taking their ‘retirement’ the ladies’ celebrity was so great that Queen Charlotte asked to see plans of their cottage and garden. It seems likely they never reached her, as the ladies were in the habit of dousing all their letters (and everything else, including linen) in a musky scent which the Queen was known to dislike.

Still, how had this celebrity come to pass? The answer is that the ladies were compulsive writers of letters and diaries and journal entries. They idealised their life in their letters to their friends and relatives and these were discussed in salons where influential people met to discuss the matters of the day. Their Francophilia was, in the run-up to the French revolution, extremely fashionable. They seemed to be living the Romantic dream – the eighteenth-century equivalent of Instagram perfection. Elizabeth Mavor describes the scene beautifully: ‘The public rooms of the Gothick cottage burbled and scratched and rustled with readings, writings, illuminations and purse settings. In the domestic offices six species of fruit were being expertly converted into wines; bread baked, meat salted, sheets stitched; while outside in the dairy, fowl yard and potager, there were regular milkings and churnings, wringings of turkey necks, generous dungings and vigorous rakings of gravel paths.’[18]

The other element in the ladies’ system was the almost dandyish invention of themselves as living works of art. They powdered their hair and wore black riding habits and men’s top hats. This was their way of setting themselves apart and of showing their impatience with gender protocols. On the whole, the ladies seem to have been liked locally: John Gibson Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott’s son-in-law, wrote that they were the ‘guardian angels’ of Llangollen, ‘worshipped by man, woman and child about them’.[19] Others weren’t so sure. Lady Louisa Stuart wrote that they clearly belonged to the ‘Genus Mountebankum’. She felt that the ladies had a schtick: ‘You may think me severe on these poor ladies, but if I were to count up to you the persons of my acquaintance who have at several times visited them, and been each the very individual they had all their lives particularly longed to see, and for whose favourite relation, or friend, or patron, or chef de parti, they had ever had the most peculiar partiality, or admiration, or veneration (as the word chanced to suit), you would not wonder.’[20]