page_title: Henry Box Brown
section_title: Childhood and slavery
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Box Brown / Childhood and slavery
caption_attribution_description: La Résurrection d'Henry Box Brown à Philadelphie
context_page_description: Henry Box Brown was a 19th-century Virginia slave who escaped to freedom at the age of 33 by arranging to have himself mailed in a wooden crate in 1849 to abolitionists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
  For a short time, Brown became a noted abolitionist speaker in the northeast United States. As a public figure and fugitive slave, Brown felt extremely endangered by passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which increased pressure to capture escaped slaves. He moved to England and lived there for 25 years, touring with an anti-slavery panorama, becoming a magician and showman. Brown married and started a family with an English woman, Jane Floyd. This was Brown's second wife; his first wife, Nancy, had been sold by her slaveowner. Brown returned to the United States with his English family in 1875, where he continued to earn a living as an entertainer. He toured and performed as a magician, speaker, and mesmerist until at least 1889. The last decade of his life was spent in Toronto, where he died in 1897.
context_section_description: Henry Brown was born into slavery in 1816 on a plantation called Hermitage in Louisa County, Virginia. Henry may have  remembered his parents fondly, stating that his mother was the one to instill Christian values into him. He is believed to have had at least two siblings, mentioning a brother and a sister in his autobiography. At the age of 15, he was sent to work in a tobacco factory in Richmond.  In his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, he describes his owner: "Our master was uncommonly kind, (for even a slaveholder may be kind) and as he moved about in his dignity he seemed like a god to us, but not with standing   his kindness although he knew very well what superstitious notions we formed of him, he never made the least attempt to correct our erroneous impression, but rather seemed pleased with the reverential feelings which we entertained towards him."
caption: The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, a lithograph by Samuel Rowse published in 1850
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