What the West Africa engagement suggests about William’s understanding of slavery is interesting. He and Ellen had escaped American domestic slavery; his activities in West Africa engaged with the transatlantic slave trade that had produced American slavery. The two were connected — the enslaved people in Georgia were there because of the trade, or their ancestors were — and his decision to engage with the African dimension of the system reflects an understanding of the problem that went beyond the American domestic context.
## The Long Aftermath of Woodville
The collapse of the Woodville Co-operative Farm School in the late 1870s and the loss of the farm in the 1880s represent the most painful chapter of the Crafts’ post-escape history. The school had been the culmination of thirty years of work — everything from the escape itself to the lecture circuit to the England years had been building toward the possibility of doing something like Woodville: using freedom to create more freedom, using education and economic opportunity to give other people what they themselves had eventually found.
The school closed in controversy. The controversy involved money; the verdict was against William; the relationships that had sustained the project were damaged. The school’s educational work, which had been real and which had served real students, was interrupted and eventually ended. The physical infrastructure — the 1,800 acres, the buildings, the farm — was lost.
What should be said about this, and said clearly, is that the collapse of Woodville was not primarily a product of the accusations and the lawsuit. It was a product of the larger political and economic environment in which the school was trying to operate. The organized white supremacist violence that burned schools was not stopped by the courts. The falling cotton prices that undermined the agricultural economy of the region could not be addressed by any single institution, however well-intentioned. The withdrawal of federal commitment to Reconstruction created the conditions in which Black educational and economic initiatives across the South were losing ground.