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

Author: Ilyon Woo

If there is one book that you read this year, let it be this one. I have read many books and seen a few movies on the antebellum South, but this one is sweeping and very well laid out. At it’s spine the book tells the story of the enslaved couple Ellen and William Craft that made a historical escape from their owners in Macon Georgia. 

Woo transports you back in time starting in Macon Georgia 1848 and works her way up the eastern seaboard to Philadelphia and then Boston. She meticulously combs through historical literature to find contemporaneous events that she peppers into the narrative so you get a sense of what was happening around Ellen and William Craft during that period. Rather than make up what they said to each other, she finds quotes from their books, so she can reproduce their dialog as faithfully as humanly possible. 

While the story of their escape is ingenious and pulse pounding, Woo has a much bigger story to tell. She describes the broader abolitionist movement and some of the key characters like

• William Wells Brown who also had escaped from slavery at the young age of 19. He was giving lectures and raising money to free slaves and quickly brought in Ellen and William along with him.
• WIlliam Lloyd Garrison was a prominent abolitionist at the time who had founded the anti-slavery newspaper called “The Liberator”.
• Theodore Parker was a Unitarian minister who remarried William and Ellen in a Christian ceremony before they departed for England in 1850, due to the dangers of the “Fugitive Slave Act”
• Lady Byron and Harriet Martinueau who supported the Crafts during their time in England in the 1850s. It is at Lady Byron’s Ockham School in Surrey that the crafts finally stopped touring and took the time to further their education.

Soon after arriving in Boston in late 1848, William and Ellen Craft were encouraged by prominent abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and William Wells Brown to recount their daring escape from slavery in public lectures to abolitionist circles all across New England. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, they were at high risk of being captured and sent back to their owners in the South. Finally in December of 1950, they fled to England which turned out to be another challenge.

All of this story is so beautifully told that the book is a joy to read. You get a great perspective on what was definitely the top issue that rocked the nation in the mid nineteenth century.