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HENRY BOX BROWN

Henry Box Brown (c. 1815 – 1897) was an American slave from Virginia who escaped to freedom at the age of 33. What an escape.

Henry Brown was born in either 1815 or 1816 at the Hermitage, a plantation about ten miles from Yanceyville in Louisa County, Virginia.

Brown spent his formative years with his parents (whose names are unknown) and his four sisters and three brothers, who were all enslaved by John Barret, a former mayor of Richmond. After Barret’s death on June 9, 1830, Brown was separated from his family and sent to Richmond to work in the tobacco factory of Barret’s son William Barret, whose property he became. Brown’s brothers and sisters were sent to various plantations, except for his sister Martha, who, according to Brown, was kept by William Barret as his “keep Miss,” or mistress.

Slave family on the auction block, Richmond, VA, 1861

The Illustrated London News, Feb. 16, 1861

Brown married Nancy, an enslaved woman owned by a different enslaver, in Richmond in about 1836 and together they had three children, born into slavery under the partus sequitur ventrem principle ('that which is born follows the womb') according to which, children born to enslaved women were themselves enslaved.

The family joined the First African Baptist Church, pictured below, where Brown sang in the church’s choir.

He had become a skilled tobacco worker and earned enough money through overwork to set up his family in a rented house.

Brown had been paying his wife's master to not sell his family, but the man betrayed Brown by selling Nancy, who was pregnant at the time, and their three children to a different slave owner.

After mourning his loss for several months, Brown resolved to escape from slavery. Through James Caesar Anthony Smith, a free Black man and fellow member of the church choir, he contacted Samuel Alexander Smith, a white shoemaker and sometimes gambler, who agreed to help Brown escape for a price. (Smith himself owned enslaved laborers.) The three men rejected several possible means before Brown had the inspiration to be shipped in a box by rail to Philadelphia. Samuel Smith accordingly contacted James Miller McKim, a Philadelphia leader of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society who was involved in Underground Railroad activities.

To get out of work the day he was to escape, Brown burned his hand to the bone with sulfuric acid.

On March 23, 1849, the Smiths sealed Brown into a wooden box 1 metre (three feet) long, 76 cm (two and one-half feet) deep, and 60 cm (two feet) wide, and conveyed the package as “dry goods” from Richmond to Philadelphia.

The box in which Brown was shipped was lined with baize, a coarse woolen cloth, and he carried only a small portion of water and a few biscuits. There was a single hole cut for air, and it was nailed and tied with straps.

Recreation.

Recreation

Brown later wrote that his uncertain method of travel was worth the risk: "if you have never been deprived of your liberty, as I was, you cannot realize the power of that hope of freedom, which was to me indeed, an anchor to the soul both sure and steadfast."

On the steamboat transfer up the Potomac River to Washington from the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad‘s terminus at Aquia Creek, Brown was turned head down in the box for several hours and nearly died. At other transfers the box was roughly handled, but he endured silently. He later wrote that he “was resolved to conquer or die,” even as “I felt my eyes swelling as if they would burst from their sockets; and the veins on my temples were dreadfully distended with pressure of blood upon my head.” Even as he thought he might die, Brown heard a man telling another that he had been standing too long and needed a place to sit; “so perceiving my box, standing on end, he threw it down and then two sat upon it. I was thus relieved from a state of agony which may be more easily imagined than described.”

After the parcel finally arrived in Philadelphia early on March 24, McKim took delivery at the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, where the box was opened with great trepidation. After twenty-seven hours’ confinement, Brown emerged, alive and free. “I had risen as it were from the dead,” Brown wrote.

When the box was opened, Brown tried to stand and lost consciousness. When he eventually awoke, he sang his own version of Psalm 40: “I waited patiently, I waited patiently for the Lord, for the Lord; And he inclined unto me, and heard my calling.”

The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, a lithograph by Samuel Rowse published in 1850

For a short time, Brown became a noted abolitionist speaker in the northeast United States. He was nicknamed "Box" at a Boston antislavery convention in May 1849, and thereafter used the name Henry Box Brown.

As a public figure and fugitive slave, Brown felt extremely endangered by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which increased the pressure to capture escaped slaves.

Brown ruffled feathers among the abolitionist community for highlighting his escape, preventing other slaves from using the same method. He was especially criticized when he was contacted by his family’s new owner who offered to sell his wife and kids back to him but Brown refused.

Fearful of the possible consequences for him of the Fugitive Slave Act, in 1850 he moved to England where he continued to tour and present his anti-slavery panorama. He tried his hand at acting and even became a magician for a time before remarrying and returning to the States as a traveling performer.

He lived in England for 25 years, touring with an anti-slavery panorama, and becoming a magician and showman.

Brown married and started a family with an English woman, Jane Floyd. Brown's first wife, Nancy, remained in slavery. Brown returned to the United States with his English family in 1875, where he continued to earn a living as an entertainer. He toured and performed as a magician, speaker, and mesmerist until at least 1889. The last decade of his life (1886–97) was spent in Toronto, where he died in 1897.

Samuel Alexander Smith attempted to ship more enslaved from Richmond to liberty in Philadelphia, but was discovered and arrested. As for James C. A. Smith, he too was arrested for attempting another shipment of slaves.