Fugitive Mail: The Deliverance of Henry "Box" Brown and Antebellum Postal Politics

Abstract

On March 29, 1 849, in Richmond, Virginia, a thirtyfour-year old, 200-pound slave named Henry Brown asked two friends to pack him in a wooden box and ship it by express mail to Philadelphia. They did and he arrived alive twentyseven hours later with a new name and a marketable story. Narrative of the Life of Henry Brown, published months later (with the help of ghostwriter Charles Stearns), made Brown quickly famous.1 Brown toured America and England describing his escape and jumping out of his famous box. In 1850, Brown and partner James C.A. Smith added to the show a moving panorama, The Mirror of Slavery, depicting the horrors of slavery and the slave trade. Audiences dwindled, however, and after a dispute over money in 1851, Brown parted ways with Smith and with most of his supporters. By 1855, Brown was largely forgotten. In the last dozen years, Henry Box Brown's Narrative has re-emerged to enjoy a kind of academic second act in African American Studies. Recent books and articles by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Richard Newman, John Ernest, Jeffrey Ruggles, Daphne Brooks, Marcus Wood, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff celebrate the rich symbolism of deliverance in Brown's story.2 As Gates writes in his forward to a recent edition of Brown's Narrative, the appeal of the tale