William’s account of stepping ashore at Liverpool — “It was not until we stepped ashore at Liverpool that we were free from every slavish fear” — identifies this as the moment of genuine freedom. Philadelphia and Boston had been relatively free in practice but not in law; Liverpool was free in both. The Fugitive Slave Act had been built to prevent the first escape from being sufficient. It could not reach across the Atlantic.
The two escapes are connected by the Fugitive Slave Act: the first escape created the fugitives the Act was designed to reclaim; the Act’s passage made the first escape insufficient and forced the second. In this reading, the Act accomplished something the slaveholders intended and also something they didn’t: it pushed the Crafts out of the country, off the lecture circuit, out of the range of people who might otherwise have heard them. It didn’t return them to slavery, which was the intent. It sent them to England, where they spent twenty years building the skills and connections and family that they eventually brought back.
The second escape also illustrates something about what freedom required in this period. It was not just a legal status; it was a geography. The free states were not free enough. England was. The specific geography of freedom in 1850 ran to the other side of the Atlantic.
## The Night the Marriage Was Renewed
Theodore Parker performed the ceremony renewing Ellen and William’s vows in his church sometime before their departure for England in December 1850. The specific date is not recorded in the accessible sources; what is recorded is that it happened, that Parker was the officiant, and that he kept a pistol on his desk in this period as a statement of his willingness to use force to prevent the Crafts’ capture.