Henry Box Brown and his Anti-Slavery Panorama, 1851

Henry Box Brown gained fame after escaping slavery in Richmond in 1849. Although many others self-emancipated to freedom, Brown is the only person documented to have shipped himself to freedom. He used his fame to speak out against slavery as a performer in New England and England.

Born in 1816, Brown was taken from his parents as a teen when bequeathed in a will to his enslaver’s son. Brown moved from a plantation in Louisa County to Richmond, where he began working in a tobacco factory. Enslaved people in urban areas could sometimes experience a degree of freedom because they often lived apart from their enslavers and generally were permitted to move about the city with their enslavers’ permission. It was here that Brown met his wife Nancy—who was owned by another—and they had several children. He and his family attended First African Baptist Church, where he sang in the choir. Brown made money for himself and his family by working past his required hours in the factory, something encouraged by the factory owners to increase production. Here, he reported, he experienced a wide range of overseers—from generally fair-minded to harsh. Brown later wrote that he paid his enslaver money to provide a kind of bond to make sure that his family stayed together, but in 1848 Nancy's enslaver—pregnant with their fourth child—and three children away to North Carolina.   

After grieving the loss of his family, Brown developed a plan to escape to the North. With the help of a free Black man and a northern-born shoemaker who was willing to ship Henry for a price, he had a box constructed and shipped himself to Philadelphia’s Anti-Slavery League headquarters. On March 23, 1849, Brown stepped into a box three feet long, two and one-half feet deep, and two feet wide. His journey lasted twenty-six hours over railroad and steamboat, and part of the time his box was upside down. When the box was opened in Philadelphia Brown was free. His daring scheme gained almost instant notoriety, prompting several other enslaved people to try to do the same. Because word spread about his escape so quickly, others who tried to ship themselves got caught, and the men who helped him escape were later arrested. The white shoemaker served six years in prison, but the Black co-conspirator evaded conviction and moved to Boston, where he joined Brown.

Brown adopted the name Henry Box Brown and capitalized on his story by began speaking as an abolitionist across New England, making money as an orator. He and his partner from Richmond soon produced a panorama, essentially a show in which a painted screen rolled behind Brown as he talked of the horrors of the slave system. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Brown left the U.S. for England, where he toured for several more years with his panorama. After parting ways with his partner, Brown continued to perform on stage. He married an Englishwoman and later returned to the U.S. in the 1870s. He died in Toronto, Canada, in 1897.

This engraving from the Liberty Almanac for 1851, printed by the American and Foeign Anti-Slavery Society, shows the moment when Henry Brown was released safely from his box. The article published in the Staunton Spectator was reprinted from a New York newspaper. Note how it juxtaposes slavery with the lives of British miners and millworkers. At this time, manual laborers in the North often compared their poor working conditions and meager pay with enslavement in order to garner sympathy and improve their situations. Instead, they provided southern slavery advocates a way to justify enslavement, as they are doing in this article. Henry Box Brown rarely appeared in southern newspapers, but this article was likely reprinted because of its description of southern slavery.

Citations: Engraving in Liberty Almanac for 1851 (New York: American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1850), Special Collections, and Henry Box Brown article reprinted in the Staunton Spectator, July 23, 1851, p. 2, both Library of Virginia. 


Learn more about Henry Box Brown in his Dictionary of Virginia Biography entry online.

VS.7, USI.8, USI.9, VUS.7, VUS.8

Take a Look: Look at the engraving. What do you notice about the image? How would you describe the body language of the participants? Look at the image on the wall, which represents an engraving made from the famous nineteenth-century painting by John Trumbull of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This painting is in the U.S. Capitol rotunda and can be viewed here. Why do you think this image was on the wall of the Anti-Slavery society?

Map It: Henry Brown's box traveled by railroad and steamship over a 24-hour period. The first leg of his journey was by train from Richmond to Aquia Landing, at the juncture of Aquia Creek and the Potomac River. The box was transferred to a steamboat that traveled up the Potomac to Washington, D.C., where the box was then loaded on a train that traveled to Baltimore, Maryland. From there the train crossed the Susquehanna River via railcar ferry at Havre de Grace, Maryland, and traveled through Wilmington, Delaware, before reaching Philadelphia. Pull up Google maps and focus on the region between Richmond and Philadelphia. Drop pins in these locations on a map and calculate the approximate distance Henry Brown traveled in his box to reach freedom.