( A very well written one of the best books, A true story of slavery and escape to feedom which played outsize part in sequence of events that led to civil war and abolition of slavery)

A few days before Christmas in 1848, an enslaved woman named Ellen Craft donned a stovepipe hat in Macon, Ga. The hat completed a daring costume that Craft used to disguise herself as a white man and book travel all the way to Pennsylvania on a series of trains, steamboats and carriages. Ellen told fellow travelers that she was a planter going north to seek medical care. Her enslaved husband, William, came with her, pretending to be her property.

The ruse worked. Together, Ellen and William Craft pulled off one of the most dramatic escapes in American history by performing, in broad daylight, as master and slave. But their story did not end there. By the time the American Civil War began, the Crafts had international reputations. And as Ilyon Woo makes clear in her excellent new book, “Master Slave Husband Wife,” the couple also played no small part in the sequence of events that led to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

It started with a plan that some sources, including Woo, credit to Ellen, who was born enslaved to her own father, James Smith, a white planter who also enslaved Ellen’s 18-year-old mother, Maria. The laws of slavery offered Maria no protection from rape by her owner, and in 1837, no doubt because of Ellen’s light complexion and physical resemblance to Smith, his wife gave Ellen to their daughter Eliza, as a wedding present upon her marriage to Robert Collins of Macon.

In Macon, while legally owned by her half sister, Ellen met and fell in love with William Craft, an enslaved cabinetmaker in town. They shared traumatic memories of separation from family members. In Ellen’s case, her transfer from Smith’s plantation to Collins’s house wrenched her away from her mother. William had been permanently torn from a beloved sister, who was sold at a public auction when the siblings were children. Determined not to be separated from each other or to have children who might be sold away from them, the Crafts decided to act on their plan for escape as 1848 came to a close.

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posted by f.sheikh

Today we celebrate Juneteenth, the day when word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the farthest outpost in America. Many people do not realize that Emancipation did not legally end slavery in the United States, however. The 13th Amendment — the culmination of centuries of resistance by enslaved people, a lifetime of abolitionist campaigning and a bloody civil war — prohibited involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

In the North, that so-called exception clause was interpreted as allowing the private contracting of forced prison labor, which was already underway, and in the ex-Confederacy it gave rise to the much more brutal system by which freed men and women were routinely arrested under false charges and then leased out to plantation owners and industrialists to work off their sentence. Some historians have described this convict leasing system as “worse than slavery,” because there was no incentive to avoid working those people to death.

Over time, courts accepted that all people who are incarcerated lose the protection against slavery or involuntary servitude. The legacy of that legal deference is a grim one. Today, a majority of the 1.2 million Americans locked up in state and federal prisons work under duress in jobs that cover the entire spectrum, from cellblock cleaning to skilled manufacturing, for wages as low as a few cents per hour or, in several states, for nothing at all.

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posted by f.sheikh