Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom / Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery

William and Ellen Craft
Slaves cannot breathe in England: if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free; They touch our country, and their shackles fall.
HAVING heard while in Slavery that God made of one blood all nations of men, and also that the American Declaration of Independence says, that 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 among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; we could not understand by what right we were held as chattels. Therefore, we felt perfectly justified in undertaking the dan- gerous and exciting task of running a thousand miles in order to obtain those rights which are so vividly set forth in the Declaration.
I beg those who would know the particulars of our journey, to peruse these pages.
This book is not intended as a full history of the life of my wife, nor of myself; but merely as an account of our escape; together with other matter which I hope may be the means of creating in some minds a deeper abhorrence of the sinful and abominable practice of enslaving and brutifying our fellow-creatures.
Without stopping to write a long apology for offering this little volume to the public, I shall commence at once to pursue my simple story.
——-+——-
God gave us only over beast, fish, fowl, Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation. But man over man He made not lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free.
MY wife and myself were born in different towns in the State of Georgia, which is one of the principal slave States. It is true, our condition as slaves was not by any means the worst; but the mere idea that we were held as chattels, and de- prived of all legal rights—the thought that we had to give up our hard earnings to a tyrant, to enable him to live in idleness and luxury—the thought that we could not call the bones and sinews that God gave us our own: but above all, the fact that another man had the power to tear from our cradle the new-born babe and sell it in the shambles like a brute, and then scourge us if we dared to lift a finger to save it from such a fate, haunted us for years.