## The Significance of the Renewal of Vows
Before the Crafts left for England in December 1850, Theodore Parker conducted a ceremony renewing their marriage vows. The ceremony was held in his church, with the abolitionist community as witnesses.
This was not simply a religious occasion. The renewal was a specific response to the legal condition of their original 1846 marriage: a marriage contracted between enslaved people in Georgia had no legal validity. It existed in their understanding of themselves and in their community, but it had never been recognized by any court or government. Renewing the vows in a church in Massachusetts, in front of witnesses, gave the marriage a formal public recognition it had never had.
Parker, who kept a pistol on his desk while writing sermons in these months, appears to have understood the ceremony as a political act as well as a pastoral one. The message it sent — that William and Ellen Craft were a married couple with a legitimate claim on each other and on the protections that marriage conventionally provided — was one that needed to be made clearly and publicly before they crossed the Atlantic.
That Ellen and William had lived as married for four years before this ceremony, had escaped slavery together and built a new life together, made the ceremony in one sense a formality. But the formality mattered. The difference between a relationship that existed only in the private understanding of the parties and one that had been publicly solemnized in a church, in front of witnesses, in a free state — this was the difference between a claim that could be denied and one that was on the record.