Find out how a 200-pound man survived the trip in a coffin-like box.
What is one of the most novel ways a slave devised to escape bondage?
Here
you see a man by the name of Henry Brown, Ran away from the South to
the North, Which he would not have done but they stole all his rights,
But they'll never do like again. Chorus: Brown laid down the shovel and
the hoe, Down in the box he did go; No more slave work for Henry Box
Brown, In the box by Express he did go. --"Song Composed by Henry Box
Brown on His Escape From Slavery," Narrative of the Life of Henry Box
Brown, Written by Himself
Job ben Solomon, as we saw in an
earlier column, was the first and probably the only slave who literally
wrote his way out of American slavery. He penned a letter in Arabic to
his father, from his jail cell in Maryland, which led quite circuitously
to its translation at Oxford, England, and then to his purchase,
release and repatriation to Senegambia in 1734 -- only after a stop in
London where he was feted by British royalty and the intellectual elite,
had his portrait painted and a book about his remarkable escapades
published.
But another slave plotted his own escape from bondage in even more astonishing and harrowing way, and his name was Henry Brown.
If
Job ben Solomon expressed his desperate quest for freedom in a letter,
Henry Brown expressed his own desperate desire to be free in an even
more novel form: He actually mailed his own body from slavery to
freedom, from Richmond to Philadelphia, from the slave state of Virginia
to the free state of Pennsylvania, a distance of 250 miles.
Brown
was the ultimate "escape artist," as Daphne Brooks brilliantly labels
him in her book Bodies in Dissent. He was a precursor, she argues, to
Houdini. And as we shall see, he not only performed his amazing -- and
quite dangerous -- escape once, but reprised part of the journey during a
lecture tour in England. But I get ahead of my story.
Henry
Brown was born into slavery on a plantation called "The Hermitage" in
Louisa County, Va., around 1815, fairly close to Charlottesville, where
Thomas Jefferson was still living at Monticello. Upon his master's
death, when Brown was 15, he was sent to work for his late owner's son,
William, in his tobacco factory in Richmond. In about 1836, he married
another slave (curiously, with their owners' consent), a woman named
Nancy, who was owned by a bank clerk. Brown was able to rent a house for
his family. Together, they had three children.
Over time, Nancy
was sold twice. Her third owner, Samuel Cottrell, actually charged Brown
$50 a year to keep Nancy from being sold. But in August 1848, Cottrell
sold Nancy anyway, along with their three children, to a Methodist
minister in North Carolina. Brown raced to the jail where his family was
being held, but it was too late. As they were shuffled through the
streets of Richmond, Brown held Nancy's hand for four miles. Nancy and
the three children were marched on foot along with 350 other slaves, in
the horrendous second Middle Passage, all the way to North Carolina.
Nancy was pregnant with their fourth child. The two would never see each
other again.
Brown tells us in his slave narrative that he
begged his own master to purchase his family but his master refused: "I
went to my Christian master … but he shoved me away."
Devastated
and overcome with the most acute sense of his own sheer powerlessness,
Brown sought solace and guidance through prayer. "An idea," he reported,
"suddenly flashed across my mind." And what an idea it was! Perhaps
only God -- or an official at the expanding express delivery service in
America -- could have fashioned such a bizarre plan: "Brown's
revelation," Paul Finkelman and Richard Newman write in their entry on
him in The African American National Biography, "was that he have
himself nailed into a wooden box and 'conveyed as dry goods' via the
Adams Express Company from slavery in Richmond to freedom in
Philadelphia."
How was he to realize such a bold, and wild, idea?
How would he avoid suffocation in this coffin-like encasement? What
about claustrophobia? How long could a human being live in a box without
dehydration? Not to mention deal with his body functions? As Brown's
biographer, Jeffrey Ruggles, explains in The Unboxing of Henry Brown,
Adams Express advertised the one-day trip from Richmond to Philadelphia,
a distance of 250 miles -- but only if the package encountered no
glitches, no delays. If so, the trip could take much longer. Could a
human being survive such a trip? Or would his crate turn into his
casket?
How He Did It
Though only 5 feet, 8 inches tall,
Brown at the time weighed 200 pounds, so this was not going to be an
easy thing to accomplish, and impossible, of course, without a lot of
assistance. Two friends, both named Smith, decided to help Henry with
this crazy scheme: James Caesar Anthony Smith, a free black man who sang
with Brown in the choir of First African Baptist Church, introduced
Brown to Samuel Alexander Smith, a white shoemaker and gambler. Brown
paid Samuel Smith $86 to help him.
Through James Smith's
intervention, a black carpenter named John Mattaner built the wooden box
-- "complete with baize lining, air holes, a container of water and
hickory straps" -- to fit Brown's rotund frame. Samuel Smith
corresponded with James Miller McKim, the Philadelphia abolitionist (and
the father of future famed architect, Charles McKim) for guidance.
McKim asked Smith to address the package to James Johnson, 131 Arch
Street.
As Henry Brown scholar Hollis Robbins writes in a 2009
American Studies article, "Smith's correspondence with McKim about the
timing of the trip, particularly his attention to the breakup of the ice
on the Susquehanna [River], indicates his -- and perhaps Brown's --
practical understanding of the conditions necessary for the box to
arrive swiftly enough for Brown to survive the journey." The entire box
measured only 3 feet 1 inch long, 2 feet wide and 2 feet 6 inches high.
Brown burned his hand with sulphuric acid (oil of vitriol) so he could
justify taking the day off without raising suspicion. He took along a
few biscuits, or crackers, and a small bladder of water to sustain him.
With
"This Side Up With Care" painted on the container, at 4:00 a.m. on
March 23, 1849, Brown's friends loaded his boxed self onto a wagon, and
delivered it to the depot. In his slave narrative, Brown describes his
harrowing journey, including the sickening effect of traveling much of
the journey upside-down, head-first, in spite of the label on the box.
One wrong move, one unguarded sound or smell, would lead to his
detection, capture, imprisonment and return to slavery, and perhaps to
the Deep South.
Brown nearly died on the 27-hour trip: At one
point, he was turned upside-down for several hours. His sole relief came
when two passengers, wanting to talk, tipped the box flat to sit on it.
The box was flipped again when it was boarded on a train in Washington,
D.C. Brown had no choice but to remain silent and not move, no matter
how the box was positioned.
Some 24 hours later, as Robbins
describes, traveling by wagon to the depot, hefted by express workers
from wagon to railcar, to steamboat, to another wagon, to another
railcar, to a ferry and the once again by railcar, Brown finally arrived
at the depot in Philadelphia. Three hours later, Brown's box was taken
by wagon to the Anti-Slavery Committee's offices on North Fifth Street
in Philadelphia. No one could know if their cargo was alive or dead. The
four waiting abolitionists, including McKim, tapped on the lip of the
crate four times, the signal that all was clear.
Finkelman and
Newman describe what happened next: "A small, nervous group, including
William Still, the African-American conductor of Philadelphia's
Underground Railroad, pried open the lid to reveal … the disheveled and
battered Henry Brown, who arose and promptly fainted," but not before
exclaiming, "How do you do, gentlemen!" Revived with a glass of water,
Brown sang Psalm 40: "Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me!" McKim noted
that the trip "nearly killed him," and that "Nothing saved him from
suffocation but the free use of water … with which he bathed his face,
and the constant fanning of himself" with his hat. He managed to breathe
through the three small holes that he bore in the box with a gimlet.
Brown called his trip "my resurrection from the grave of slavery."
Henceforth,
the word "Box" would become Henry's self-chosen legal middle name, with
no quotation marks around it. His friend, James Smith, however, did
gain a nickname from the adventure: He became known as James "Boxer"
Smith.
How His Fame Grew
Henry Box Brown had done what no
slave anywhere had ever done before: He had mailed himself to freedom.
Overnight, Brown became quite the celebrity on the abolitionist lecture
circuit, much to Frederick Douglass' annoyance. He and his friend James
Smith became a standard feature at abolitionist rallies, reciting the
incredible saga of his escape, singing songs he wrote, as well as his
psalm of deliverance, and selling his book, which was published just a
few months after his escape. Woodcuts of his head popping out of the
wooden crate were widely circulated. Even a children's book contained a
chapter about his incredible escape.
Brown was not only an
effective speaker; you might say that he was also the entrepreneur of
entrepreneurs on the fugitive-slave circuit. In an email, his biographer
Jeffrey Ruggles said that "Brown's imagination and creativity were akin
to his entrepreneurial contemporary," P.T. Barnum, though on a much
smaller scale, of course. With a loan of $150 from the wealthy white
abolitionist, Gerritt Smith, and in collaboration with the artist Josiah
Wolcott, Brown created a "large, didactic panorama, 'The Mirror of
Slavery,' which consisted of thousands of feet of canvas, divided into
scores of panels painted with scenes depicting the history of slavery."
Brown
debuted his routine in Boston, along with James Smith. The panorama was
a hit: As Christine Crater reports, "The Boston Daily Evening Traveller
hailed it as 'one of the finest panoramas now on exhibition … Many
people would walk a long way to see this curious specimen of American
freedom … We wish all the slaveholders would go and view their system on
canvas.' "
Accompanied onstage by Benjamin F. Roberts, a black
abolitionist, who would lecture on "The Condition of the Colored People
in the United States," Brown toured the North testifying about the evils
of slavery and repeating the details of his imaginative mode of escape.
Brown -- a great storyteller with a gifted voice for song -- was for a
short time the darling of the abolitionist circuit.
Douglass'
irritation with Brown stemmed not so much from a sense of rivalry (since
Douglass had dominated the fugitive-slave category on the abolition
lecture circuit since 1845) as it did from Douglass' worry that
disclosure of Brown's novel method of escape might keep other slaves
from employing a similar strategy, alerting authorities to the
possibility that crates could contain a fleeing slave.
But as
Ruggles explains, revelation of Brown's method of escape wasn't really
his fault: "Douglass wasn't entirely correct in blaming the Garrisonians
[abolitionists] for revealing the box method. They had tried to keep
quiet about Brown's escape, but word leaked out in a Vermont newspaper
and soon an article appeared in the New York Tribune. That article
alerted the Adams Express Company and a second box escape from Richmond,
attempted by both Smiths in May, 1849, was intercepted. It was only
after articles about that failure had appeared in many newspapers that
the Boston abolitionists went public about Brown's escape at the New
England Anti-Slavery Convention in late May 1849."
Regardless of
how it happened, Douglass proved to be right about the effects of
disclosure: Upon discovery of the rescue attempt of a second slave on
May 8, 1849, Samuel Smith, the white shopkeeper who had helped Brown,
was arrested, and served six and a half years in the Virginia state
penitentiary for doing so. A few months later, on Sept. 25, James Smith
would also be arrested for an attempt to help still another slave to
escape in the same way, though he would be acquitted in a trial, after
which he joined Brown in Boston. (Another slave, a woman named Rose
Jackson, was willingly smuggled by her owners from Oklahoma in a box
over the Oregon Trail in the same year that Brown escaped, but she was
allowed to emerge each night.)
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 put
an end, for a time, to Brown's celebrity, at least on this side of the
Atlantic. After being assaulted twice on the streets of Providence,
R.I., Brown -- like many other prominent fugitive slaves -- fled to
England in October 1850, to avoid arrest by a slave-catcher.
There,
he published a second edition of his slave narrative in Manchester in
1851, this one "written by himself." (The first edition had been
dictated to, and heavily edited by, a white abolitionist named Charles
Stearns. John Ernest's edition, published in 2009, is the authoritative
text.) Ever the showman, Brown soon became a most colorful feature on
the British lecture circuit, traveling with his moving panorama from
Liverpool to Manchester. He even re-enacted his escape, at least
partially.
Jeffrey Ruggles writes that "Ads for Henry Box Brown
stated that he would get into the original box as a part of his
exhibition, but the only instance known of him actually being conveyed
in his box was from Bradford to Leeds in May 1851." The Leeds Mercury
reported that on May 22, 1851, as Ruggles discovered, " 'He was packed
up in the box at Bradford' and 'forwarded to Leeds' on the 6 P.M. train.
'On arriving at the Wellington station, the box was placed in a coach
and, preceded by a band of music and banners, representing the stars and
stripes of America, paraded through the principal streets of the town.'
"
Ruggles explained that this didn't amount to a replication of
Brown's original trip, however: "The distance was much less than
Richmond to Philadelphia. For this event, Brown was in the box for
two-and-three-quarter hours, and James Smith accompanied him outside the
box the whole way, so it was neither as long nor as harrowing as his
journey to escape. The box was taken to a theater where Brown emerged
onstage."
How He Changed With the Times
Brown was a
complicated figure. There is some evidence that he could have purchased
the freedom of his wife, Nancy, and their children, but chose not to. He
married an Englishwoman and returned to the stage, performing for the
remainder of the decade throughout Great Britain, in a traveling one-man
version of Black History Month. The consummate multiplatform performer,
Brown created a number of personas to match his skills as a narrator,
singer, magician, hypnotist, electro-biologist and "boxing" champion,
among them "The African Prince," "The King of All Mesmerizers" and
"Professor H. Box Brown."
Finkelman and Newman report that
Brown's British act featured "a large moving panorama to depict the
history of black people in Africa and America, as he lectured on
'African and American Slavery.' He often appeared as an 'African Prince'
as he melded antislavery sentiments and propaganda, popular history and
entertaining theatrical production." Not one to miss a marketing
opportunity, Brown took advantage of the raging Civil War, introducing
to his act in 1862 "a new lecture and panorama called the 'Grand Moving
Mirror of the American War.' " Near the end of the war, in 1864, Brown
transformed himself once again, this time into a magician, billing
himself as "Mr. H. Box Brown, the King of All Mesmerisers."
May 6, 2013
| Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Posted on Sat May 11 05:01:39 2013 by nickcarraway
No comments:
Post a Comment