The renewal happened at a moment when the Crafts were under active threat. Hughes and Knight were in Boston or had recently been there; the federal machinery that could compel their return was operational; the decision to go to England had been made or was being made. The ceremony was therefore both a religious occasion and a kind of farewell — a formal recognition of what they had been to each other through all the years before any authority had recognized it, made in public, on the record, before they left the country.
Parker’s abolitionism was not a position held at comfortable intellectual distance. He had publicly declared his willingness to resist the Fugitive Slave Act by force. He had organized the Vigilance Committee with people who made the same commitment. The ceremony he conducted was, in his understanding and in the Crafts’ understanding, an act of defiance as well as an act of faith — a refusal to let the system that had denied the marriage its validity for the first four years have the last word on what the marriage meant.
That Ellen and William had been through what they had been through — had planned and executed a four-day escape from slavery, had built a life in Boston, had faced down the slave catchers sent from Macon, had navigated the abolitionist lecture circuit, had been celebrated and supported and also politically instrumentalized by a movement that needed them as much as they needed it — and were still, unambiguously, together: this was the content of what the ceremony formalized. The ceremony gave it a different kind of recognition. It didn’t change what they were to each other. It put it in a different kind of record.