There were countless ways slaves found freedom in the antebellum era. We’ve all heard about abolitionists and the Underground Railroad. But one man took his destiny into his own hands. What he did was incredible.
Henry Brown was born a slave on a plantation in northern Virginia’s Louisa County in 1816. When he was 15, his master sent him to work in a tobacco factory in Richmond. His experience was quite different from that of slaves who toiled on the cotton, rice, and sugar plantations in the Deep South. Brown recalled in his autobiography, “Our master was uncommonly kind to us (for even a slaveowner may be kind) … [who] seemed rather pleased with the reverential feelings which we entertained toward him.”
But that relatively decent treatment didn’t insulate Brown from the horrors of slavery. While working in Richmond, he later rented a house, took a wife, and had three children. Since the marriage wasn’t recognized by the law, Brown paid his wife’s master to keep the family together.
That worked for a while until the owner betrayed his promise and sold Brown’s then-pregnant wife and their children to another man.
That was when Brown devised a daring scheme. With the help of a free black man and a sympathetic white man, they contacted abolitionists in Philadelphia for assistance. On a Thursday morning in late March 1849, they set their plan in motion.
It began with Brown intentionally burning his hands with sulfuric acid to get out of work. Then, he crammed himself into a specially prepared wooden box labeled “dry goods.” Its inside was lined with woolen cloth and provisioned with a few biscuits and a little water. A single small hole had been discreetly drilled for air. Then the box was nailed shut, fastened with straps, and taken to the Adams Express (a forerunner of today’s UPS or FedEx) and was sent via the 1849 version of overnight delivery. That company was specifically picked because of its reputation for not looking inside customers’ boxes.
Brown was secretly carried by wagon, railroad, steamboat, wagon again, railroad again, ferry, railroad yet again, and wagon one last time before finally arriving at a Quaker merchant’s office in Philadelphia 27 hours later. When the lid was pried open, his first words were, “How do you do, gentleman?” followed by his singing a psalm from the Bible about freedom.
It had been quite a trip. Despite being marked “Handle with care” and “this side up,” Brown’s container was repeatedly dropped, manhandled, and stacked upside down. From that time on he was known as “Box Brown.”
News of his exploit created a national sensation. Slavery opponents in the North celebrated his ingenuity and bravery. Furious Southerners demanded all postal and private shipping be inspected to prevent future escapes. Brown regretted details of his scheme had been made known; when several other slaves tried the same technique, they were arrested.
Box Brown went on the lecture circuit and published his autobiography. When his wife’s new owner offered to sell his family to him, Brown declined, causing great embarrassment within the abolitionist movement.
Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which required law enforcement in free states to assist in capturing escaped slaves and return them to their owners, made Brown fear for his safety. So he fled to England where he became a lecturer and then an entertainer, married a white woman, and started a second family.
Returning to the U.S. in 1875, he performed as a magician billed as “Professor H. Box Brown” and the “African Prince.” He died in Canada in 1897 at age 82.
Had it been worth it? Brown believed it had. Looking back, he summed up with eloquent simplicity why his dangerous escape 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.”
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
