Henry ‘Box’ Brown was an enslaved African American who escaped slavery by mailing himself in a wooden crate from Virginia to Philadelphia in 1849.
Born into slavery around 1815, he was sent to work in a tobacco factory in Richmond, Virginia. During that time, Brown married another enslaved woman, Nancy, and they had several children together. But in 1848, he was forcibly separated from his family as they were sold off to another slaveholder.
Conditions for slaves were brutal, causing many to attempt an escape despite the immense risks. Not only were there slave patrols seeking to capture those fleeing from their slaveholders, but there was also the risk of severe punishment if one got caught.
Slaves were considered private property with no legal rights and were forced to work from sunrise to sunset. Food was limited and there was a perpetual sense of fear of making a mistake in the field or factory; something that could result in whipping or branding – burning a mark into the skin of a slave using a hot iron.
To Henry Brown, however, the combination of physical suffering, injustice and the anguish of losing his family tipped him over the edge.
He would try to escape.
While it’s not entirely sure how Henry Brown got to know James Smith (a free black man) and Samuel Smith (a white sympathiser), he enlisted their help in having himself shipped in a wooden crate to Philadelphia (in the free state of Pennsylvania).
On 23rd March 1849, Brown climbed into a 3 feet long and 2.5 feet wide wooden box that had the label “dry goods”. With only a small amount of water and a tool to make air holes if needed, he was delivered to Philadelphia over the course of 27 hours, being transported by wagon, train, steamboat and ferry.
When the box arrived at 31 North Fifth Street, the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, it was opened and Henry Brown’s first words were, “How do you do, gentlemen?”
Once Brown had escaped, he became an active abolitionist, conveying the horrors of slavery to the wider public. In particular he highlighted the grief he felt at being separated from his family and the helplessness of never being able to see them again. Slavery wasn’t just physical torture, it was also psychological torture.
One and a half years after Henry Brown’s escape, The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, a federal law that required slaves be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. Fearing that he’d be caught and sent back to slavery, Brown moved to England in 1850 and published his autobiography a year later; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown.
The autobiography gave a first hand account of the brutality of slavery and also went into detail about his escape. While certainly an exhilarating story, it didn’t impress everyone.
The renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in his autobiographical slave narrative ‘My Bondage and My Freedom’, “The practice of publishing every new invention by which a slave is known to have escaped from slavery, has neither wisdom nor necessity to sustain it. Had not Henry Box Brown and his friends attracted slaveholding attention to the manner of his escape, we might have had a thousand Box Browns per annum.”
Henry Brown remarried in England and finally returned to the United States in 1875, continuing to lecture and perform a panorama titled “Mirror of Slavery”, a moving canvas displaying different aspects of slavery that Brown commented on scene by scene. He died around 1897.
Henry Brown’s legacy lives on not only because of the innovative way in which he escaped but also because of his impact as an abolitionist speaker, highlighting the immense mental and physical toll slavery took on multiple generations of enslaved African Americans. It also demonstrated the resilience exercised by enslaved people. As long as there was oppression, there would continue to be escapes, resistance and rebellions against slavery.
