William stayed inside, armed. Ellen was moved to a safe house outside the city. A writ was issued for their arrest; the federal marshal declined to serve it. A judge reportedly stated he would not authorize breaking down a person’s door to execute the warrant.
One prominent Whig offered to purchase the Crafts’ freedom outright — to literally buy them from their Georgia enslaver, to make the legal claim on them extinct by satisfying it. William refused. His reasoning, recorded in the account, was explicit: accepting purchase as the mechanism of their freedom would undermine the nearly two hundred to three hundred other fugitives in Boston who had no wealthy benefactor to buy their way out. He would not accept a freedom that came at that cost.
Hughes and Knight eventually left Boston by a circuitous route, having accomplished nothing. But the effort to reclaim the Crafts had demonstrated something important: the Fugitive Slave Act gave Collins a legal claim that Boston’s good intentions could delay but not dissolve. Samuel May, the Unitarian minister and abolitionist who had become a friend to the Crafts, wrote that their best friends believed they should leave America for England.
In December 1850, they did.
## Liverpool: The Shore of Another World
William Craft later wrote about the moment they stepped ashore at Liverpool: “It was not until we stepped ashore at Liverpool that we were free from every slavish fear.”
The precision of that phrasing matters. In Philadelphia, in Boston, with the Vigilance Committees and the free Black community and the abolitionist networks around them, they had been relatively free in practice. But the legal claim persisted. The Fugitive Slave Act made them property in the eyes of federal law regardless of which state they were standing in. Liverpool ended that. British law did not recognize the property claims of American enslavers. Ellen and William Craft were, from the moment they walked onto that dock, no longer anyone’s legal possession.