The daughter’s name is not consistently identified in the accessible sources. The children born in England are recorded as five in number; the ones who returned with them from England in 1870 were apparently the three youngest. The family that absorbed them at the end was the family they had built in the two decades of English exile.
Ellen died in Charleston in 1891. She was approximately sixty-five years old. William died in 1900. He was approximately seventy-six.
The record of their later years is less detailed than the record of the escape. The scholarship that exists — Barbara McCaskill’s studies of Ellen as a historical and cultural figure, Lisa Merrill’s work on the Great Exhibition performance, the Georgia Encyclopedia’s careful account of the school and its collapse — tends to be more detailed about the 1848 escape and the England years than about the final decades in Georgia and South Carolina. This is partly because the documentation is sparser, partly because the drama of the earlier period attracts more scholarly attention, and partly because the final years were years of defeat in ways that are harder to narrativize as triumph.
The defeat was real. The school that was supposed to be the work of their freedom — the thing they had built with the decades of their post-escape life — closed in controversy. The land was lost. The allies were gone. The South had, by 1890, largely succeeded in reconstructing the racial hierarchies that the Civil War and Reconstruction had briefly disrupted.
## The Questions the Record Doesn’t Answer