HollyGale Millette’s work on transatlantic identity examines the England years in the context of the Crafts’ construction of themselves as public figures on both sides of the Atlantic — how their identity as American escapees from slavery was received and shaped in Britain, and how the British context inflected the public role they played.
The growth of this scholarship reflects something about what the Craft story offers to academic inquiry: it sits at the intersection of race, gender, disability, performance, transatlantic reform, and the history of slavery in ways that make it legible from multiple methodological directions. The escape itself is a narrative about passing — about identity, appearance, performance, and social legibility — that invites analysis from fields ranging from literary criticism to disability studies to performance theory.
## Between Then and Now
A plaque in Hammersmith marks where they lived. A foundation in their name works in Georgia to preserve and extend their story. The 1860 narrative is in print and in digital form, freely readable. The scholarly apparatus that has grown around their story continues to add to what we know about them and what we understand about the world they moved through.
What connects the plaque in Hammersmith to the train platform in Macon is a single continuous life — two lives, in fact, that touched at almost every significant point. The green spectacles packed for the journey. The sling that Ellen wore for four days on trains and steamships. The Christmas morning in Philadelphia. The Quaker farmhouse where they first learned to read. The Boston winter when the slave catchers came. The ship to Liverpool. The school in the Surrey countryside. The Hammersmith house where they raised five children. The journey back. The farm in Bryan County. The school they built and the school they lost. The Charleston house where Ellen died in 1891 and where William lived until 1900.