Then another official, apparently moved by the sight of the bandaged invalid, intervened. He told the first official to let them proceed. The train boarded. The door closed.
Later that day — Christmas Day, December 25, 1848 — they stepped onto a platform in Philadelphia.
Ellen Craft said, according to William’s account: “Thank God, William, we are safe.”
She had held the disguise for four days across more than a thousand miles of slaveholding territory.
## Philadelphia: First Hours of Freedom
The first landlord they encountered in Philadelphia was surprised. He had expected to admit a white Southern planter and his enslaved attendant. What he found, when the reality of their situation became clear, was a young Black couple who had just walked through the entire machinery of Southern slavery in disguise and come out the other side.
Local abolitionists arrived quickly. The Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, which operated as part of the network of activists and formerly enslaved people who moved fugitives through the city toward safety, welcomed them. Robert Purves, a prominent Black abolitionist who was himself biracial and could have passed for white if he had chosen to, was among those who received them.
Ellen’s first response to being among the white abolitionists was not gratitude but wariness. In William’s account, she said: “I have no confidence whatever in white people, they are only trying to get us back to slavery.” The years of her life had given her every reason for this assessment. The abolitionists’ response was to introduce them to Barkley Ivens, a Quaker farmer in the countryside outside Philadelphia, whose family hosted them for approximately three weeks.