Growing up as the children of escaped fugitives in England, in the middle of a political campaign for the abolition of slavery in America, and then returning at the ages of whatever they were when the family came back — to the state their parents had fled, to the county their parents had been enslaved in — was an experience for which the available record provides little direct testimony. The children appear in the story as context, as evidence of the family’s continuity, as the people who received their parents at the end. Their own experience of all of it is not on record in the sources consulted here.
What’s notable about the family’s return to Georgia in 1870 is that they returned at all. The children who had grown up in England would have had no direct memory of Georgia; for them, England was home in a way it never fully could have been for their parents. The decision to go back was made by Ellen and William. Its consequences fell on all of them.
## The Farm, the School, and the Accusations
The Woodville Co-operative Farm School that the Crafts established in Bryan County in 1873 was an ambitious project. Eighteen hundred acres was a substantial holding. The combination of a working farm with an educational institution for freedpeople — people recently liberated from legal slavery who needed not just formal education but economic footing — reflected the Crafts’ understanding of what emancipation required.
This understanding drew on what they had themselves experienced. They had arrived in Philadelphia in 1848 unable to read or write. The Ivens family had given them a few weeks of basic instruction; the Ockham School had given them several years of more sustained education; their time in England had given them the professional and intellectual formation that made the book and the lectures and the organizational work possible. They knew, from their own trajectory, what the combination of education and economic opportunity could do for people who had been denied both.