In his day, Henry “Box” Brown was a celebrated stage magician who incorporated performance into his lectures on abolitionism in the United States and England. Much of what we know about him comes from his memoir, the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (1851).
Brown was born enslaved in 1816 at the Hermitage plantation near present-day Cuckoo, Virginia. Brown recalled a memory of his childhood when the plantation owner, John Barret, told him and his siblings “All you children run into the house now, for its going to thunder.” The children ran for shelter, and the rain began. Not realizing Barret saw the rain clouds coming from a distance, Brown believed Barret had the ability to conjure rain until he was eight years old.
Brown learned his first sleight-of-hand tricks around the age of nine from a man enslaved on the same plantation. This man, known as Tricky Sam, informally performed the tricks as a way of entertaining each other.
Henry Brown eventually married a woman named Nancy, who was enslaved at a nearby plantation. They had four children together before they were forcibly separated. Angry and vowing to escape, Brown later said “I felt my soul call out to Heaven to breathe a prayer to Almighty God.” And then, in response, he heard a voice say “Go get a box, and put yourself in it.”
From this, Henry Brown developed a plan to have himself mailed as freight to a free state. With the help of a carpenter named Samuel Smith, they built a box three feet long, two feet wide, and two-and-a-half feet tall with three small air holes and lined with a woolen felt cloth. On March 29, 1849, Brown climbed into the finished box with a small container of water, a few biscuits, and a tool for poking additional air holes in the box if needed. The crate was closed and addressed to William Johnson, a barber in Philadelphia who was an operator in the Underground Railroad.
A note was added to the box indicating “Right side up with care.” Despite this caution, the box was roughly handled by the Adams Express company on its way from Richmond, Virginia to Philadelphia. The box arrived a day later, and a small gathering of abolitionists were in attendance. Worried that Brown had died en route, one of the members present knocked on the box and asked, “All right?” to which Brown immediately responded, “All right, sir.” The lid was quickly removed, and Brown stepped out of the box and into freedom for the first time in his life. From that moment, he was known as Henry “Box” Brown.