Henry Brown’s Mail Delivery
1849
At the age of thirty-four, and upside down in a fetal position, Henry Brown was ready to be born into a new life. It was a tight fit, folding his five-foot-eight, two-hundred-pound frame into a claustrophobic wooden crate. The blood pressure in his head and the sweltering heat was almost unbearable. His muscles were cramping, and the lack of fresh air in his dark enclosure was making him light-headed. And yet, it would all be worth it if only he could be released into freedom.
Henry Brown had been born the first time around 1815 on a slave plantation in Louisa County, Virginia. In 1830 when his master died, he had seen his family split apart, divvied up among his master’s heirs. Henry was hired out to work in a tobacco-manufacturing plant in Richmond, Virginia, at age fourteen. He was allowed to keep a portion of his earnings, enabling him to later provide a modest house for his wife, Nancy, and their three children. Though he was given preferential treatment, it never made up for the pain of having been separated from his family during his childhood. Eighteen years later, he was to suffer the pain of separation yet again.
Henry returned home from the tobacco factory for lunch one day to find his wife and children missing. He was stunned to learn they had been put on the auction block, sold, and imprisoned until their departure the next day. His wife’s owner, Mr. Cotrell, had previously promised not to sell Henry’s wife or their children if Henry paid him $50 a year. Cotrell collected the money and broke his promise. When Henry begged to buy his own family, he was told, “You can get another wife.”
A bewildered Brown watched in abject horror as 350 dejected souls filed by, heading toward their new home in North Carolina. Five wagonloads of anguished children wailed for their parents. Henry’s eldest child called for him with outstretched arms. His wife of twelve years was led along in a chain gang like an animal, stupefied with a rope around her neck. Henry stood engulfed in grief—stripped of his manhood, deprived of the ability to rescue, provide, and care for his family.
Henry Brown was incensed at the injustice of losing his family. He vowed to run away and retrieve them, but first he had to let time pass so as not to bring undue attention upon himself. Five months later, with little left to lose, Henry decided to make a break for freedom. A bold plan came to him: “The idea suddenly flashed across my mind of shutting myself up in a box, and getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state.” He only needed to survive the journey.
Henry consulted with Samuel A. Smith, a white shoe dealer in Richmond, whom he could trust to help execute the plan. Smith traveled to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Henry’s behalf to make the necessary arrangements with the Vigilance Committee, a branch of the Pennsylvania Anti-slavery Society established to assist runaway slaves. They were informed to look for a box containing human cargo.
John Mattaner, a black carpenter, was asked to construct a hickory box large enough to hold a person but small enough so as not to arouse suspicion of its contents. Henry had previously visited the train depot to ascertain the various-sized boxes coming through. A free black dentist, James C. A. Smith, outfitted the crate with baize—a coarse, feltlike, napped fabric—to afford some comfort inside the small compartment. Henry would contort his body into a ball, knees tight against his chest in a cushion of cloth meant to keep him from shifting about inside the wooden crate.
Having made all the necessary arrangements, Henry Brown just needed a pass from his master that would allow him to be away from the tobacco factory. He intentionally doused his finger with some corrosive acid, oil of vitriol, that he had acquired to secure a brief reprieve from work. Injured and temporarily freed from his responsibilities, he set his plan into action.
On March 29, 1849, Henry gulped a last breath of fresh air and let himself be confined inside his box with nothing more than a few biscuits, a beef bladder of water, a hat to fan himself, and a gimlet (a screwlike tool used to bore air holes). The box was secured with hickory hoops by Samuel A. Smith, who crated Henry Brown inside.
There were substantial risks of being arrested and prosecuted for everyone involved in Henry’s audacious escape plan. A large box delivered to the Anti-slavery Society might cause suspicion. Therefore the crate was addressed to “William H. Johnson, 131 Arch Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.” The words “This Side Up With Care” were neatly printed atop the container. That afternoon Smith sent a telegram to the Pennsylvania Anti-slavery Society office in Philadelphia stating, “Your case of goods is shipped and will arrive tomorrow morning.”
Henry’s 350-mile journey from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began at 4:00 a.m. The box was put on an open horse cart and taken to the express office. The first leg of the trip was made upside down, with no regard for the printed directions. The box was then placed on its side on the baggage car en route to the steamer ship, then loaded upside down again on the steamer itself, where it remained for a period of ninety minutes. Henry’s head pulsated with excruciating pain, and his eyeballs bulged from the pressure of the blood rushing to his head. Yet, for Henry Brown, risking death was favorable over being enslaved.
Voices on deck the steamship indicated that people were coming and going. Henry couldn’t try to roll the box himself for fear of being discovered. But then as if in answer to his prayers, he heard two men complaining about how they’d been standing for such a length of time. They toppled his box over on its side to make a seat. The unbearable pressure on Henry’s head and neck was relieved just in time.
There was more rough handling during the remaining overland journey, during which he was placed right side up, then dropped. He was nearly left behind at the station due to lack of space aboard the luggage train, but at the last minute the box was loaded—upside down. Eventually he was placed right side up, and remained that way until his arrival at the Adams Express Office in Philadelphia.
Henry Brown arrived at the depot at 3:00 a.m. He was picked up at 6:00 a.m. Again, to avoid suspicion, E. M. Davis, an abolitionist who dealt with the Adams Express Office, sent a hired man to retrieve the box and bring it to the Pennsylvania Anti-slavery Society office, where members of the Vigilance Committee awaited his arrival.
On the morning of March 30, several members of the committee gathered inside the office with curtains drawn: J. M. McKim, Professor Cleveland, Lewis Thompson, and William Still—all dedicated abolitionists. The doors were secured, and the gentlemen looked uneasily at each other, dreading Henry Brown might not have survived the ordeal. They rapped upon the box. “Is all right within?” With the reply, “All right!” the elated men broke open the box and gingerly lifted the cramped Henry Brown to his feet.
Henry felt faint, perhaps from the sudden release of his confinement, the rush of fresh air, or simply the emotion of the moment. He had survived nearly twenty-seven hours entombed inside the suffocating compartment. After the newly freed man, soaked with perspiration, was revived, he quoted a hymn of thanksgiving: “I waited patiently for the Lord . . . and he heard my calling.”
News of Henry’s bold, imaginative escape was well received, and he soon found a new life on the antislavery lecture circuit. He was dubbed Henry “Box” Brown, and his amazing tale of escape drew empathy and support for the antislavery sentiment. He took letters of introduction with him to Boston and New York, sitting on a passenger seat of the train this time—not crated in a box. Telegrams from the abolitionists in Philadelphia recommending him were sent ahead.
Seven months later Samuel A. Smith, the shoe dealer in Richmond, was sentenced to eight years in prison for assisting with two similar escape plans. He spent five of those months in solitary confinement, chained in a four-by-eight-foot cell. James C. A. Smith, the free black man who had outfitted the crate, was also convicted, but paid $900 for an attorney who was able to acquit him.
After a year on the lecture circuit, Henry Brown came close to being captured in Providence, Rhode Island, and returned to slavery—which would have been sanctioned by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Abolitionists wisely secreted him to England with the aid of workers on the Underground Railroad. For a while Henry “Box” Brown and James C. A. Smith toured together on antislavery speaking engagements. They took along a several-thousand-foot painted canvas titled The Mirror of Slavery as a pictorial representation of slavery’s evils.
Henry Brown was criticized in the press by antislavery supporters for publicizing his mode of escape. Since similar attempts were foiled, it prohibited others from using the same method. Brown, however, insisted that through his notoriety, by educating the public on the horrors of slavery and inciting them to take action, he could do more for the antislavery movement than by remaining silent.
Sadly, Henry Brown was never reunited with his family. But his life narrative, published both in the United States and in England, did much to bolster support for the abolitionist movement.