The Exhibition also provided a specific visual context that made the statement pointed. The American exhibits were there to demonstrate the nation’s productive capacity. The cotton in the exhibits came from labor that the law called property. The Crafts — who were that law’s definition of property, who had escaped from it at considerable risk, who were standing in this building as free people because they happened to be in England rather than Massachusetts — were an embodied refutation of the patriotic display.
Whether visitors to the Exhibition registered all of this, or most of it, or any particular part of it, is not recorded. What is recorded is that the Crafts were there, and that they were there deliberately, as a political choice.
## The Parallel Lives of the Children
The five children the Crafts had in England grew up in a specific world: Hammersmith in the 1850s and 1860s, in a household where abolition was not a political position held at some distance from daily life but the organizing activity of the adults around them. The Craft home hosted meetings, received visitors, was a node in the network of British and transatlantic reform.
The children’s names and individual trajectories are not consistently documented in the sources available for this article. What is in the record is that when the Crafts returned to Georgia around 1870, they brought the youngest three children with them; the older two are not accounted for in the accessible record. The daughter with whom the Crafts eventually settled in Charleston is not named in the sources consulted here.