Henry Box Brown, who was born in 1815, escaped from the Virginia slave owner who sold his pregnant wife and three children, even though Brown had been paying him not to sell them. Out of grief and determined to escape the horrors of slavery, he devised a unique plan. He mailed himself to freedom!
Brown devised a plan to have himself shipped in a box to a free state by the Adams Express Company. Samuel Smith, a free Black, traveled to Philadelphia and spoke with members of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society on how to accomplish the escape. He met with Rev. James Miller McKim, William Still, and Cyrus Burleigh. He corresponded with them to work out the details after returning to Richmond. They advised him to mail the box to the office of Quaker merchant Passmore Williamson, who was active with the Vigilance Committee.
To get out of work the day he was to escape, Brown burned his hand to the bone with sulfuric acid. Beginning on March 29, 1849, the box measuring 3x2.67x2 feet and marked as “dry goods,” traveled by wagon, railroad, steamboat, wagon again, railroad, ferry, railroad, and delivery wagon. Despite the instructions on the box of “handle with care” and “this side up,” carriers placed the box upside-down or handled it roughly several times.
The box arrived twenty-seven hours later. Williamson, McKim, William Still, and other members of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee opened the box on March 30, 1849. Brown’s first words were “How do you do, gentlemen?” To celebrate his freedom, he sang a psalm from the Bible.
Brown became a well-known speaker for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and got to know Frederick Douglass. They nicknamed him “Box” at a Boston antislavery convention in May 1849, and after that used the name Henry Box Brown.
With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Brown, afraid of capture, moved to England. He remarried and had another family while working for twenty-five years in show business.
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