Exchanging Fugitive Identity: William and Ellen Craft’s Transatlantic Reinvention (1850–69)

Abstract

As I write this, there is an embittered battle raging in the United States over the Democratic Party’s Presidential Candidate. Senator Barack Obama, at the moment a forerunner in the race, has — at turns in his campaign — relied on, shunned, marginalised and confronted his bi-racial heritage, and his own family’s legacy and living memory of the transatlantic slave trade. In a twist to the proceedings, news of an amateur genealogist’s findings revealed Obama’s ancestors to be slave-owners and publicised a transposition that has become common in the historiography of our modern multi-cultural societies.’ Thus in the commemorative year of 2007, the cultural memory of slavery, fugitives and the transatlantic slave trade reaches forwards from history to involve, however unwillingly or inaccurately, the aspirations of a young American politician. Obama’s ancestral past was not the only one to be publicly laundered in 2007, but his was certainly held as representative of the cultural remaking employed by generations of people who choose to live without a racialised past or with an annotated one in order to create a new future. I am very interested in those who selectively rearranged their pasts amid the immediate backdrop of abolition in the nineteenth century. I see this as an important part of the cultural memory of abolition; a performative part of that history, which is often not explored or included in the popular culture of abolition.

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