Ellen and William Craft moved through several naming systems in the course of their lives, each reflecting a different aspect of their social position.
In Macon, Ellen was known by whatever name the Collins household used for her — her surname, Craft, came from William after their marriage, following the convention that an enslaved wife took her husband’s enslaver’s name. William’s surname came from his enslaver. Neither name was chosen; both were assigned.
On the journey, Ellen became William Johnson. The choice of Johnson as the surname is interesting — it was a common name, generic, untrackable, the kind of name that didn’t invite follow-up questions. The first name William created a minor ambiguity: Ellen traveled as William Johnson while the man accompanying her was actually William Craft. In the narrative, this is managed by the convention of referring to Ellen as “Mr. Johnson” throughout the journey sections and distinguishing her consistently from William. But the shared first name was an additional layer of the disguise’s construction that could, in theory, have caused confusion.
In England, they were the Crafts — William and Ellen Craft, the name known from the lecture circuit and eventually from the book. The name Craft, which had come from an enslaver’s choice, became theirs in a different sense: it was the name they carried into freedom, the name that appeared on the title page of the 1860 narrative, the name by which posterity knows them.
This is one of the small ironies that the escape is full of. The names, the clothes, the passes — all were originally products of the system they were escaping. The system had assigned them their names, restricted their clothing, issued their passes. They took those products and turned them into instruments of liberation. The name on the book is a name given by an enslaver, used by two free people to tell the story of how they became free.