Exposing Hypocrisy

Dear William Craft,


Thank you for sharing the story of your escape from slavery. You and your wife were so brave, and I’m almost certain that your resolution in your rightly held beliefs, and your astute awareness of the hypocrisies in southern culture allowed your convince the many different people that tried to prevent your journey to Philadelphia of your disguise. I especially appreciated your opening statement: “Without stopping to write a long apology for offering this little volume to the public, I shall commence at once to pursue my simple story.” You immediately struck me as humble yet unapologetic about sharing your story, no matter how many unpleasant details whites may have to discover are their responsibility and a result of their inhumanity and criminality. You rightly explain how all white people, both northerners and southerners, men and women, are to blame for the oppression of your people: “In the Southern States of America...I believe there is a greater want of humanity and high principle amongst the whites, than among any other civilized people in the world.” You further elaborate on how “it always appears strange to me that any one who was not born a slaveholder, and steeped to the very core in the demoralizing atmosphere of the Southern States, can in any way palliate slavery. It is still more surprising to see virtuous ladies looking with patience upon, and remaining indifferent to, the existence of a system that exposes nearly two millions of their own sex in the manner I have mentioned, and that too in a professedly free and Christian country.” When your master sold a dear brother and sister, and both of your parents, you rightly pointed out the fallacy and disgrace of the “slaveholding piety” that pervades the south and allows many criminals to retain their self-worth in a twisted form of Christianity. You educate us on the Georgia law that allows masters to beat their slaves death, so long as “they died under ‘moderate correction,’ it was quite lawful; and of course the murderers were not interfered with.” Furthermore, a law that applies to your marriage to Ellen, who although of African-American descent, looks white, states that “it is unlawful in the slave States for any one of purely European descent to intermarry with a person of African extraction.” But you point out that a white man may nonetheless “live with as many coloured women as he pleases without materially damaging his reputation in Southern society.” Your shrewd understanding, and subsequent presentation, of the many contradicting and hypocritical practices that allowed whites to uphold slavery while preserving their own self image as pious and law-abiding citizens must have caused many whites, both northerners and southerners, to question their understanding of slavery and their complacency in the face of these hypocrisies.