During the appalling period in which slavery was legal in much of the southern United States, daring tales of enslaved men and women risking their lives in the pursuit of freedom captivated the country’s attention.
One of the most famous escapes was undoubtedly that of Henry “Box” Brown, who had been born a slave in Louisa County, Virginia, around 1815. As a teenager, he was hired out to work in a Richmond tobacco factory and later married a fellow slave named Nancy, who was enslaved on a neighboring plantation. The slaveholder who owned Brown’s wife and children blackmailed Brown, who was earning an income at the factory, into paying him so that he wouldn’t sell his family away. Yet eventually Brown couldn’t keep up the payments, and Nancy, then pregnant, and their three children were sold to a plantation in North Carolina.
According to an account later written by Brown, it was in these intolerable circumstances that he came up with the ingenious idea to mail himself to freedom in Philadelphia. With the help of two sympathetic acquaintances, Brown had himself shut inside a rectangular box measuring approximately 3 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 2.5 feet high. The box, lined with coarse cloth and cut with an air hole, ostensibly contained dry goods and was labeled “This Side Up" and "Handle With Care” when it was dropped off at the Adams Express Company, a private mail delivery service.
Despite the warning on the crate’s side, Brown was jostled along, often with the box upside down, on a journey that involved multiple wagons and trains as well as a steamboat and a ferry. At one point, two men sat on the box, while at another, it was roughly thrown to the ground, hurting Brown’s neck. All in all, the nightmarish journey took 27 hours. Despite fearing multiple times that he would die along the way, Brown emerged alive and singing a song based on Psalm 40 at the office of Quaker abolitionist Passmore Williamson in Philadelphia, where he was warmly greeted by Williamson and other members of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.
As a free man, Henry “Box" Brown went on a speaking tour in New England, organized by abolitionists. However, he soon clashed with some of the movement’s leading figures, including Frederick Douglass, who disapproved of Brown’s theatrical retelling of his escape in the shipping crate, as this made it far less likely for anyone else to succeed with the same method.
Fearing capture after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Brown moved to Britain, where he developed a popular stage show recounting the story of his life in slavery and his escape. At one point, he shipped himself from Bradford to Leeds, England, to promote his show and took to dressing as an African prince. His shows included numerous creative and fantastical elements, including hypnotizing the audience and performing magic tricks. Brown would appear onstage by bursting out of a box, like the one from his famous escape, which remained part of his show decades after the event.
Henry Brown, out of the box:
- After several decades in Britain, Brown returned to the United States before moving to Toronto, where he died in 1897, aged 81 or 82.
- Douglass and other abolitionists objected to aspects of Brown’s performances, which some viewed as entertainment and self-promotion rather than a serious anti-slavery message. However, historians contend that Brown’s outlandish performances and persona can be seen as a rejection of the narrow boundaries placed upon African Americans in the 19th century, long after slavery had ended.
- One of the most puzzling parts of Brown’s story is that he never bought his wife and children out of slavery, despite having the chance to do so soon after his arrival in Philadelphia. While living in England in 1855, he married Jane Floyd, the daughter of a Cornish tin worker, with whom he began a new family.
