The daughter in whose Charleston household Ellen and William spent their final years is similarly opaque in the record. She had built a life in Charleston; her parents came to live with her; Ellen died there in 1891 and William died in 1900 — nine years he lived after Ellen, in a daughter’s household, the last decade of the life of a man who had escaped slavery fifty years earlier and spent the intervening decades building and then losing what freedom made possible.
## The West Africa Engagement
William Craft’s commercial dealings in West Africa, which the sources mention in connection with efforts to disrupt the Atlantic slave trade at its African-side commercial foundations, represent a dimension of his activities in England that the accessible record describes only briefly.
The logic of the enterprise, as the sources frame it, was economic: if the supply of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas could be interrupted at the African end of the trade — by substituting legitimate commerce for the slave trade, by building economic relationships that didn’t depend on human trafficking — the trade would lose part of its commercial foundation. This was a theory with a long history in British abolitionist circles; the idea that free trade could undermine the slave trade had been argued since the late eighteenth century.
How extensively William pursued these activities, what specific commercial connections he built, what results the enterprises produced, and how these activities interacted with his work in the British abolitionist movement are questions the accessible sources don’t fully answer. He traveled to West Africa on at least one occasion, apparently. He had business relationships there. The details beyond this are not well documented in the secondary sources available for this article.