Barbara McCaskill’s work on Ellen as a cultural figure has pushed against the tendency to reduce her to the escape and the disguise. Her research has examined how Ellen has been remembered, represented, and misrepresented across the century and a half since her death — how the image of the invalid gentleman with the sling became the image by which she was known, while the open letter writer and the Woodville co-founder were less remembered. This is useful scholarship not just for what it reveals about Ellen but for what it reveals about how historical memory works: the dramatic moment becomes the icon, and the icon crowds out the longer, more complicated truth.
## The Two Escapes
There is a sense in which Ellen and William Craft escaped twice.
The first escape was the four-day journey from Macon to Philadelphia in December 1848 — the trains and steamships and disguise and close calls and the Christmas morning arrival. This is the escape that the narrative is about, the escape that the lectures described, the escape that is on the record in rich and specific detail.
The second escape was the flight to England in December 1850, two years after the first. This escape was less dramatic in its execution — they boarded a ship in Boston and sailed to Liverpool, not in disguise, not pursued by anyone in that immediate moment — but it was, in some respects, a more complete escape. The first escape had taken them to a free state where they remained legally property. The second escape took them to a country where the American slaveholder’s legal claim could not follow them.