The Great Escapes: Four Slave Narratives is part of the
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Collected in this volume are four published slave narratives of daring escapes to freedom. William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom (1860), tells the story of the couple reaching freedom in 1848 by travelling openly by train—with Ellen Craft posing as a white male planter and William as her servant. This is followed by two versions of Henry “Box” Brown’s escape by mailing himself to Philadelphia in 1849—Narrative of Henry “Box” Brown, published that same year in America and Narrative of the Life of Henry “Box” Brown, published in 1851 in Britain. Finally, William Wells Brown’s Narrative of William Wells Brown (1847), tells of the young man’s surreptitious exit from a steamboat docked in Ohio, a free state, in 1834.
