The Ockham School in Surrey, where they studied, gave them the educational foundation they had been denied their entire lives. By the time they were publishing a book and writing open letters and organizing the London Emancipation Society, they were different people in their outward capabilities from the couple who had left Macon in 1848 unable to read their own passes. The decade and a half in England was not only asylum; it was formation.
William’s work in West Africa — the commercial and diplomatic connections he developed in what is now Benin — reflected something about his understanding of the slave trade that went beyond the American domestic context. The trade had African dimensions as well as American ones; he seems to have believed that disrupting it at its commercial foundations on the African side was part of addressing it whole.
Ellen’s work in women’s suffrage was one of the few direct windows onto her own politics and priorities that exists in the record beyond the escape and the abolitionist lectures. She made choices about which causes deserved her time and attention, and she acted on them.
## The Decision to Return
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery, was passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified by the end of that year. For the Crafts, this changed the calculation. The legal claim that had made the United States unsafe — the claim that they were property, that the Fugitive Slave Act could be used against them — no longer existed. They were no longer fugitives from a law that would enslave them. They were free people who could return.