The Life and Magic of Henry 'Box' Brown

Brown was born into slavery and escaped in an astonishing way. His story of gaining his freedom was so sensational that he basically spent the rest of his life making a living talking about it in one form or another.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Before we get started, we have a couple
of live shows to announce. First April, we will be
at Universal Fan Con in Baltimore, Maryland. Our exact schedule
for that show is still in the works, but this
will include a live show, and our listeners can get
discounted tickets using the offer code History. And for all

(00:20):
the folks who have asked us to do a show
in the Boston area, of which there have been many,
we are finally on the way with the show in
Quincy at Adams National Historical Park on Sunday, July eight
at two pm. That one is an outdoor show. It
will happen rain or shine. And we also have more
appearances that will be announcing soon, as well as more

(00:41):
details about both of these shows, and we will put
that all at our website also at miss in history
dot com. Welcome to Steph you missed in History class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Honley Fry and I'm Tracy bing Wilson.

(01:03):
And today, Tracy, I'm kind of excited because I've had
this story on my list for a while. Uh, We're
going to talk about a man who was born into slavery,
which sounds not so levity enhanced as my giggles might suggest,
but he escaped in a really astonishing way, and his
story of how he gained his freedom was so sensational

(01:24):
that he basically spent the rest of his life making
a living talking about it in one form or another.
So today we are talking about Henry Box Brown and
we're just going to jump right into his story. Yes,
so he was born in eighteen fifteen or eighteen sixteen.
There's no known record of his exact birthday, but he
was born in Louisa County, Virginia, which is about forty

(01:46):
five miles from Richmond. This is on a plantation called
the Hermitage, and he was enslaved from birth. And in
his account of his life, Henry talked about uh an
incident where he would carry grain to any miles to
a mill several times a year as a boy, and
those trips which he took with his brother were also

(02:06):
fact finding missions where the two boys would get information
about the other enslaved people that lived nearby and any
other news going on in Virginia. And on one such trip,
the boys met a large group of enslaved men and
they spoke with them, and they started to realize that
the two of them were in a unique situation. The
boys had clothes and they had shoes, and the other

(02:29):
enslaved men remarked upon them, uh as something that they
did not have. And the boys also heard enslaved men
being beaten. They were also asked by a white man
whether they had ever been whipped, and they replied that
they hadn't. That caused this white man to reply that
they would never amount to anything. So through all of

(02:52):
these interactions, the boys became really aware that they had
a kind of precarious place in the world. They I mean,
it's they were still enslaved, but were in a position
that was a little better in some ways, and they
realized they could easily end up in a similar situation
to these people they had spoken with, who didn't have

(03:14):
clothes and shoes and were routinely beaten. Yeah, they kind
of appreciated the fact that they did get close. They
dig issues. They were not beaten as a matter of course,
and they understood very quickly that people who were enslaved
had no control over their life's course, and they could
easily end up just wherever they might land. Based on

(03:37):
the whim of someone else. When Henry was about fifteen,
he and his mother were called to the deathbed of
their owner, John Barrett, and things on Barrett's plantation had
gotten a little bit rougher because Barrett had hired an
overseer to manage things when he could not really keep
up with running everything himself, and so they had had

(03:59):
a taste of that more difficult situation, and Henry and
his mother believed that their summons to Barrett's bedside was
in fact so that they could tell them that they
were going to be freed upon his death. They literally
believed this when they walked into that room, but instead
they got the news that John Barrett was giving Henry
to his son William, And with Barrett's death, his estate

(04:21):
was divided four ways among his sons, and Henry's family
was torn apart in the process. He later wrote of
this time, quote, this kind of torture is a thousandfold
more cruel and barbarous than the use of the lash
which lacerates the back. The lashes which the whip or
the cowskin makes may heal, and the place which was

(04:41):
marked in a little while may cease to exhibit the
signs of what it had endured. But the pangs which
lacerate the soul and consequence of the forcible disruption of
parent and the dearest family ties only grow deeper and
more piercing. As memory fetches from a greater distance the
horrid acts wish they have been produced. Henry was moved

(05:03):
to Richmond to work in the tobacco factory that William
Barrett owned. William assured Henry that if he worked hard
and he behaved, that he would be taken care of,
and he would also be paid a small bit of money.
William was overheard at one point by Henry telling the
overseer at the factory that Henry should never be whipped,
that he had been raised by William's father, and that

(05:24):
he was a very smart boy. In eighteen thirty one,
Henry witnessed the aftermath of Nat Turner's rebellion, and which
more than sixty black men, some enslaved and some free,
had killed more than fifty people. After the rebellion, there
was a lot of retaliatory violence against enslaved people. Henry
later wrote about witnessing many people quote whipped, hung and

(05:47):
cut down with swords in the streets and worse. He
asked William Barrett what was happening and was told only
that some enslaved men quote had plotted to kill their owners.
Henry only figured out long after the fact that he
had seen this famous rebellion. In eighteen thirty six, Henry

(06:08):
wanted to marry a woman that he had met named Nancy.
Nancy was also enslaved, but she was owned by a
man named Mr Lee, who was a banker and not
William Barrett, who owned Henry. So Henry spoke with Mr Lee,
who said that he had no intention of selling Nancy
and that if William Barrett could say the same of
Henry that he would approve the marriage. So Nancy and

(06:28):
Henry were married, but just a year later Mr Lee
reneged on his promise. He sold Nancy to a saddler
named Joseph A. Coal Quit, and coal Quit and his
wife treated Nancy far worse than her previous owner had,
and after a great deal of animosity, particularly on the
part of Mrs coal Quit, Nancy was sold once again,

(06:49):
but the coal Quits soon bought her back when they
realized just how much she had been doing for them.
Eventually she was sold once again, but this time the
man who purchased Samuel Catrell cut Henry a deal that
if Henry regularly paid him fifty dollars, he would let
the couple and their children live together. Henry, of course

(07:10):
had to arrange and pay for a home in addition
to the regular annual payments that he had to make. Yeah,
this is like one of those situations where in effect
Catrell couldn't make the initial payment to purchase Nancy outright
he was short, and that fifty dollars made up the gap.
But then he also charged Henry another fifty dollars annually,

(07:33):
and Henry had to pay for all of Nancy's life necessities,
room board, etcetera. So Catrell was basically getting paid to
keep this woman enslaved by her husband because it was
the only way that Nancy and Henry could be together.
And it was during this time that Henry met James

(07:54):
Caesar Anthony Smith, a free black man that he knew
from church, and James helped and rEFInd a home where
he and Nancy and the children could live. Is at
this point they had several James c. A. Smith arranged
for the rental of a home in his own name
at seventy one dollars per year for the Browns, and
for a while, though Henry was basically being extorted by

(08:16):
Cattrell to not sell Nancy, they were living happily as
a family in The Browns had been married for twelve years,
they had three children and a fourth on the way.
And then Catrell abruptly sold Nancy and the children, who
were all immediately removed from their home and taken to
a prison for holding until the next day, at which

(08:39):
point they would begin a journey to North Carolina. In addition,
he had all the Brown family's possessions seized for auction.
Henry begged his owner to buy his family, but he
got nowhere Pursuing that line of thinking. He managed to
buy back some of their things with the small amount
of money he had, but he could only watch as
his family, along with several hundred other people, were marched

(09:02):
down the street to begin this journey to North Carolina.
As his wife approached, Henry took her hand and he
held it as he walked for approximately four miles with
the group before they were parted for good. One of
the themes of Henry's account of his life is the
discussion of the hypocrisy of the white men who would
call themselves Christian and still engage in slavery like This

(09:25):
has made several appearances on the podcast, including in our
recent episode on Phillis Wheeley. After his loss of Nancy
and the children, his own faith was not shaken, but
he believed that slave owners could not truly be men
of God. That forced separation after such a constant state
of shifting assurances from owners catalyzed a fervent desire for

(09:49):
freedom in Henry. He had been lied to and toyed with,
and finally had what was most important to him taken away,
and he was intent on ending his own enslavement. We'll
talk about Henry's bolt of inspiration for his escape plan
after we pause for a quick sponsor break. Henry describes

(10:14):
precisely the moment where he had his idea for escape
in his writing quote, one day, while I was at
work and my thoughts were eagerly feasting upon the idea
of freedom, I felt my soul called out to heaven
to breathe a prayer to Almighty God. I prayed fervently
that he who seeth in secret and knew the inmost
desires of my heart would lend me his aid in

(10:36):
bursting my fetters asunder, and in restoring me to the
possession of those rights of which men had robbed me.
When 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, the idea of sealing
himself in a box to be shipped to freedom was

(10:57):
obviously not without danger. Was a very real risk that
he could die in the process, but Henry Brown was
willing to take that risk rather than remain enslaved. To
make his escape, Henry was going to need some help,
and so he turned once again to James Caesar Anthony Smith,
and he also had assistance from a white man that
James introduced him to named Samuel Smith, who was no

(11:20):
relation to James. Henry knew he would have to get
a few days of leave from work to give himself
a good chance where nobody would be alarmed that he
was absent. He had a finger that was infected, and
he thought he might use that as an excuse, but
his overseer didn't think this injury was bad enough for
him to need to miss work. So Henry poured what

(11:43):
was called oil of vitriol on it. This was really
sulfuric acid. He wound up causing a lot more damage
than he intended to, but it worked. He got permission
to miss work and treat the wound, and his friends
managed to make contact with people in Philadelphia who would
be willing to receive this box. Brown's box was lined
with fabric very similar to what you might find on

(12:05):
a pool table, and Henry had cut three holes in
the box for air, and he took a gimlet, which
is kind of like an awl, with him into the
box in case he needed to cut more during the journey.
He also took a bladder of water, both so that
he could hydrate himself in small amounts and also so
he could potentially put it on his face if he
needed to. And this box was, according to Henry's account,

(12:29):
three ft one inch wide, two ft six inches high
and two ft wide. Henry had hired a carpenter to
specially make it for him with the small amount of
money that he had saved up, and it was marked
as dry goods. Henry folded himself into this box and
then his friends nailed its shut he was taken a

(12:49):
mile to the shipping station. He Samuel shipped the box
on March nine by the Adams Express Company, and the
box then made a journey over the course of twenty
seven hours. Almost immediately it was flipped on its end,
so Henry's head was down, and then when he was
moved from a wagon to a baggage car, it landed

(13:11):
on its side, which was a little more comfortable, But
when he was placed onto a steamer at Potomac Creek,
he once again was stood on end with his head down.
He thought he might die because the pressure around his
face was so much that he focused on the idea
of freedom and resolved to just get through the discomfort.

(13:31):
As he was becoming convinced that his life really was
in danger, two men on the steamer shifted the crate
to its side to use it as a seat. After
some additional jostling and being tossed around and put into
a position that was bottom end up again, he finally
came to rest in luggage storage at the train depot
until a gentleman came to ask about the box and
collect it. To me, it sounds so terrifying one to

(13:55):
be shut up in a box. But to the idea
of being stood head down out four hours on end
like that is so scary. Uh. And from there after
the man collected the box. It was taken to the
Philadelphia Anti Slavery Society. They had a headquarters there and
underground Railroad conductor William Still, who was part of this

(14:19):
group that had assembled to receive the box, wrote of
the moment that the box was open, all was quiet,
the door had been safely locked. The proceedings commenced. Mr J.
M mckinn wrapped quietly on the lid of the box
and called out, all right. Instantly came the answer from within,
all right, sir. The witnesses will never forget that moment.

(14:42):
Saw and Hatchett quickly had the five hickory hoops cut
and the lid off, and the marvelous resurrection of Brown ensued.
Rising up in the box. He reached out his hands, saying,
how do you do, gentlemen? The little assemblage hardly knew
what to think or do at the moment. He was
about as wet as if he had come up out
of the Delaware. Very soon he remarked that before leaving Richmond,

(15:04):
he had selected for his arrival him if he lived
the psalm beginning with these words, I awaited patiently for
the Lord, and he heard my prayer. And most touchingly
did he sing the psalm, much to his own relief
as well as to the delight of his small audience.
So Henry Brown was free. The success of Brown's escape

(15:26):
also really caused a rift among abolitionists. There were people
who wanted to publicize it as a victory for the
anti slavery cause, and these folks thought that it might
inspire similarly creative ideas among enslaved people and their sympathizers.
But other people, including Frederick Douglas, thought that it should
be kept a secret. If you've heard our episode on

(15:46):
Frederick Douglas, he didn't want to publicize his own way
of escape because of the risk um. The logic was
that if they didn't let word get out that Henry
had escaped slavery in this manner, that other people could
potentially be free the same way. And Samuel Smith, who
was the white man who had assisted Brown in Virginia,

(16:07):
came to the decision as well that this shipping method
should be used to free other enslaved people. So Smith,
once again with the help of James Caesar. Anthony Smith
made another attempt on May eighth, eighteen forty nine, but
unfortunately their efforts were discovered. Both men were arrested. Although
James Smith did not face any jail time for his involvement,

(16:28):
he was kind of written off because as a black man,
they believed that he had not been smart enough to
really be a mastermind in this whole plan. But in
November of that year, Samuel Smith was sentenced to six
and a half years in prison. Ultimately, Henry, who was
now nicknamed Henry Box Brown, became a public story. It
was really not possible to keep the secret of such

(16:51):
an amazing escape secret. Within a matter of weeks, he
was well known within the abolitionist movement. Brown began touring
to the tale of his twenty seven hours in the
box to find his way to freedom. He first told
the story at the New England Anti Slavery Convention in
Boston at the end of May nine, so just two
months after he began. He also wrote his life story,

(17:14):
including his daring chip to freedom and actuality the same
This account, which is titled Narrative of Henry Box Brown,
was written largely by abolitionist Charles Stearns, who also published it.
Henry Brown and Charles Stearns actually went on book tour together,
and the proceeds from that book were used to fund
a new lecture tour and for his stage appearances. Henry

(17:37):
Brown developed his act to add a panoramic painting that
he had had commissioned titled Mirror of Slavery, and this
painting was spooled across the stage almost like a slide show,
to tell the story of how people had been stolen
from Africa and enslaved and what slavery in the US
was truly like from the enslaved person's perspective. His friend

(17:57):
James Caesar Anthony Smith, who had left Richmond after his
arrest and release, joined him on stage for these presentations.
The two men eventually had a falling out, however, and
we'll talk about that towards the end of the episode.
Next up, we're going to talk about how the Compromise
of eighteen fifty once again changed Henry's life, but we're
going to take another quick sponsor break before we get

(18:19):
to that part of the story. The Fugitive Slave Act
of eighteen fifty shifted Henry Box Brown's life yet again
for a quick refresher, This is a very quick version.
The Fugitive Slave Act was part of the Compromise of
eighteen fifty. It stated that people who had escaped enslavement

(18:41):
and were found in states where slavery was abolished would
still be shifted back to their owners with the support
of the federal government in their capture and return, and
that fugitive enslaved people were not entitled to jury trial
and they could not testify on their own behalf. In
August of a seen fifty, just before the Fugitive Slave
Act was asked, Brown was in Providence, Rhode Island, when

(19:02):
he was assaulted in the street. Was convinced him that
it wasn't safe to stay in the United States, so
he moved to England and took his stage show with him.
He continued to perform his anti slave react there, and
he added additional dimensions to it. In eighteen fifty one.
Henry Box Brown also wrote a second memoir, This one

(19:22):
titled Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written
by himself. In truth, it is almost exactly the same
as the first book, although it is written in less
flowery prose and includes additional details. While Brown was always
insistent that he had not been treated nearly as badly
as a lot of other enslaved people, he wanted to

(19:43):
add his voice to the other testimonies and narratives that
would evidence just how dehumanizing and wrong the institution of
slavery was. His book opens with a preface that reads, quote,
so much has already been written concerning the evils of slavery,
and by men so much more able to port tray.
It's hard form than I am. That I might well
be excused if I were to remain altogether silent on

(20:05):
the subject. But however much has been written, however much
has been said, and however much has been done. I
feel impelled by the voice of my own conscience, from
the recent experience which I've had of the alarming extent
to which the traffic and human beings carried on, and
the cruelties, both bodily and mental, to which men in
the condition of slaves are continually subjected, and also from

(20:28):
the hardening and blasting influences which this traffic produces on
the character of those who thus treat as goods and
chattels the bodies and souls of their fellows to add
yet one other testimony of and protest against this foul
blot of the state of morals, of religion, and of
cultivation in the American Republic. For I feel convinced that

(20:49):
enough has not been written, enough has not been said,
enough has not been done, while nearly four millions of
human beings possessing immortal souls are in chains dragging out
their existence in the Southern States and just uh for
the sake of transparency, it is generally believed that Henry

(21:10):
Box Brown did not actually write all of this, even
though it is listed as written by himself. That probably
he verbally spoke all of this and someone took it
down and probably cleaned up the grammar for him. But
it is basically the same story that he was telling
on stage night after night after night, so it's corroborated
in his his verbal history. It's not as though someone

(21:32):
wrote a completely different version of his life. Uh So,
for the next twenty five years, Henry Box Brown lived
and performed in England, and he also married a second
wife there named Jane, and they started a family together.
During that time in England, he continued to tell his
tale of escape, but after his falling out with James Smith,
his act became less about abolition and more about magic.

(21:55):
He would perform slight of hand tricks where he transformed
a nail into an acorn, and on occasion he would
stage a re enactment of his box journey on stage,
which played out like a magician's escape trick, but with
the added gravity of recalling his harrowing escape. In eighteen
fifty one, he staged a large scale re enactment of
his box escape when he had himself shipped from Bradford

(22:18):
to Leeds in West Yorkshire. And it is actually unknown
where Henry Box Brown first learned to perform magic tricks.
It could well have been as far back as his
childhood as something that was done among the enslaved people
as entertainment. But as his act evolved, his knowledge expanded

(22:38):
and he started to transform himself into other stage personas.
He would sometimes dress as an African chief and walk
through towns that he was touring into as an advertisement
for his shows, conjuring for this character version of himself
a noble lineage, and all of this done to entice
an audience. He began to combine the worlds of magic

(23:00):
and science as he and his act started exploring mesmerism
and electro biology. There's been speculation among Brown biographers that
the use of mesmerism or hypnotism offered him a chance
to try to control white audience members and a turnabout
of the power dynamic from when he was enslaved. Henry
Brown returned to the United States in eighteen seventy five

(23:23):
with his new family, his wife Jane and their daughter Annie,
and he billed himself as Professor Box Brown, and he
continued to tour as an entertainer, primarily in the Northeast
and then moving to Canada in the early eighteen eighties.
His act at this point had evolved so that in
additions who were laying his personal story, which always drew
a crowd, he would also do some of his tricks

(23:46):
and also give brief scientific lectures. He'd also give musical
performances under the heading Professor Box Brown's Troubadore Jubilee Singers
and which his family would perform. Song had been part
of his act for a law time when he talked
about slavery and abolition, and he said to have had
an outstanding voice. Henry Box Brown performed his magic act

(24:09):
in Ontario, Canada, on February of eighteen eighty nine, and
that is his last known stage appearance. For a long time,
the date and place of his death were always recounted
as unknown, and a lot of sources you look at
will still say they are not known. But in recent
years Martha J. Cutter, a professor of English and Africana
studies at the University of Connecticut, started looking for documentation

(24:33):
of the deaths and burials in the Toronto area, and
appears to have identified his death as June fifteenth, seven,
including locating his grave at the Necropolis Cemetery in Toronto.
Brown's wife, Jane, lived with their daughter, whose married name
was Annie Jefferson, until she died in four It's really

(24:54):
not clear what happened to Henry's first wife, Nancy, and
their four children together. You don't know if he sought
them out once he was free or after slavery was abolished.
And the fallout between Brown and James Smith that happened
back in eighteen fifty one was in part due to
Smith's criticism that Henry Box Brown hadn't tried to buy

(25:15):
his family's freedom. Yeah, we don't really know that whole
story though, for all we know, he did look into it,
or maybe he couldn't because it was too painful. We
have no idea. It's really interesting. One of the things
that that scholar we just mentioned, Martha J. Cutter, brought
up in an article I was reading, was how, in
a strange way, even though Henry Box Brown escaped slavery,

(25:39):
he was sort of a slave to his own life
story because he ended up telling it for decades and
decades over, even after it had been long past abolition
and not a tool to try to help educate people,
but just became like part of this narrative that he
had to live over and over, which was an interesting
perspective to have. There's also a really beautiful version of

(26:01):
this story from the podcast The Memory Palace. It's called
Picture a Box. It's really fascinating, and he used the
actual box that he was shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia
in as part of his stage show for a long time.
So there's this whole gravity to all of that. Like
I can't I mean, again, it's from my perspective, which

(26:24):
can't really understand his mindset at all, but like I
can't imagine having to like go through that over and
over and relive what had to have been a terrifying,
though ultimately successful experience. It's interesting to think about. I
have listener mail. Is it it's about Andrew Carnegie. It's
from our listener Kathy. We have mentioned her on the

(26:46):
show before, we read her listener email about Anne Lister,
but she wrote this morning and said, I just finished
the Andrew Carnegie episode. Towards the end, when you talked
about Carnegie wanting to buy off the Kaiser to end
World War One, you said he was stopped by President
Teddy Roosevelt. I'm sure you know that Teddy Roosevelt wasn't
president during World War One, and that Woodrow Wilson was.
Maybe you were just trying to keep your listeners on

(27:07):
our toes. So this is a clarification thing because that
is my clunky and poor synthesis of information. Uh, it
was Roosevelt's. But here is what was actually playing out.
It wasn't to end the war, but to prevent it
to begin with. So towards the end of the Bosnian Crisis,
which is a nineteen o nine, there were a lot
of other things happening in Europe that we're making it

(27:28):
pretty apparent that war was a very likely possibility, and
uh teddy. Roosevelt had promised Andrew Carnegie at that point
that he would be his envoy of peace two leaders
of Europe that Carnegie, even though he was very influential
at this point, just couldn't quite get connections to And
this was actually in exchange for Carnegie funding one of

(27:49):
Roosevelt's big game expeditions in Africa, which is very expensive.
And so Roosevelt had promised that he was going to
talk to the Kaiser and explain that he would relay
all of their conversations to Carnegie US auntually acting as
sort of a go between. And in n Roosevelt did
start his European tour UH and his meeting of kaiserville
Helm the second was going to be part of that,

(28:10):
and he was going to try to broker this piece,
but King Edward died in the midst of this process,
which halted all diplomatic discussions. Roosevelt and Wilhelm did meet,
but only unofficially, and they did not speak of the
piece plans that Andrew Carnegie had devised, which was part
of all of that. So that was my poor way
to um to put it in there. So that's my

(28:30):
apology for being clunky. But I wanted to read this
quote that Carnegie wrote about how this whole thing played out,
and it kind of evidence is how unhappy he was
and why he felt that his whole efforts at peace
at the time were kind of a failure. He said, quote,
there has been a fatal flaw in my strategy to
stop the war, the misplaced trust in those I counted

(28:52):
on as my colleagues in my quest for peace. Uh
So he felt like he failed in trusting Roosevelt because
he did not make good on his his promise to
broker a piece. Uh. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast at
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(29:13):
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(29:36):
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