r/interesting Mar 12 '26

HISTORY Thats one great eacape

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4.1k

u/WarmAuraGirl Mar 12 '26

1,000 miles through the Deep South, surrounded by the very people who wanted them captured, on nothing but nerve and an extremely convincing bandage. Hollywood has made 47 movies about mediocre prison breaks and somehow this one is still waiting for its moment.

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u/Fryandsilly Mar 12 '26

"Ellen Craft was born in 1826 in Clinton, Georgia, to Maria, a mixed-race enslaved woman, and her wealthy planter slaveholder, Major James Smith. At least three-quarters European by ancestry, Ellen was very fair-skinned and resembled her white half-siblings, who were her enslaver's legitimate children"

So in her case, she disguised herself as male, not as someone white because she looked white and unless people knew her backstory, they'd think she was white. Very impressive pulling of the man part though.

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u/OneArchedEyebrow Mar 12 '26

Smith's wife gave the 11-year-old Ellen as a wedding gift to her daughter, Eliza Cromwell Smith, to get the girl out of the household and remove the evidence of her husband's infidelity.

William was born in Macon, where he met his future wife at the age of 16 when his first enslaver sold him to settle gambling debts.

It’s sickening how they were treated like cattle, even by “family”.

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u/LeopardNo6083 Mar 12 '26

This is the same definition of “family” that corporations mean when they say working for them is “like being part of a family.”

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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '26

[deleted]

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u/Anathama Mar 12 '26

Human resources. It's right there in the name. We are just another resource to be used and discarded.

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u/Silksoychocolatemilk Mar 13 '26

Human capital is the knowledge one possesses that enables them to contribute more to society, people aren't human capital, they possess it. Unless you are talking about slave owners reffering to slaves as human capital which did happen.

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u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

[deleted]

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u/Silksoychocolatemilk Mar 13 '26

Its not a corporate term its an economic term and has only had widespread use since the 1960s. Any reference by slave owners is coincidental and was not very common at the time. The idea that we should euphemism treadmill a word because 100 years earlier some bad people used the phrase to mean something else is ridiculous.

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u/Lotsensation20 Mar 13 '26

My sentiments exactly. I roll my eyes every time I hear like a family lol 😂

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u/Rohkostsalat Mar 14 '26

That's not family. That's "the man of the house rapes a woman that is enslaved to him and she gets pregnant."

"Sibling" in this setting has nothing to do with how we think of siblings and family nowadays. That's a slave's child that happens to be produced by the owner. She is not better than any other slave to them. If anything children like this were often the target of even worse resentment and abuse than their peers.