Escape to freedom, in a wooden box

Numerous organizations and individuals supported the Underground Railroad. The daring escape of Henry "Box" Brown relied on the help of an unlikely ally: the mail.

Born in the early 1800s at a plantation near Yanceyville, Va., Brown was sent to Richmond at age 15 to work on a tobacco farm. He married Nancy, a slave owned by a different master, and the couple had three children and were expecting their fourth when Nancy was sent to work in North Carolina. Brown stood powerless as his pregnant wife and children shuffled past in a coffle gang. He never saw them again.

Brown mourned for months before "the idea suddenly flashed across my mind of shutting myself up in a box, and getting myself conveyed . . . to a free state," he related in Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself. Free blacks, members of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, and other Philadelphia-based abolitionists discussed and resolved Brown's plan.

Having procured a wooden box from a friendly carpenter, Brown knocked off from work by pouring "oil of vitriol" (sulfuric acid) on his finger. Then Brown - 5-foot-10 and more than 200 pounds - squeezed into what he described as a wooden box 3 feet long, 2½ feet deep, and 2 feet wide. This side up with care was emblazoned on its side.

Labeled as "dry goods" and sent north by rail, steamboat, and wagon, Brown encountered the gentleness so often associated with mail carriers, then and now.

"I felt my eyes swelling as if they would burst from their sockets; and the veins on my temples were dreadfully distended with pressure of blood upon my head," Brown recalled of being placed wrong side up by porters.

Upon hearing "We are in port and at Philadelphia," Brown felt his spirits lift. "I was only 27 hours in the box, though traveling a distance of 350 miles."

Taking delivery of the box at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society's office, William Still, a prominent Underground Railroad conductor, and others nervously gathered.

Still later wrote: "All was quiet. The door had been safely locked. The proceedings commenced. . . . The witnesses will never forget that moment. Saw and hatchet quickly had the lid off, and the marvelous resurrection of Brown ensued. Rising up in his box, he reached out his hand saying, 'How do you do, gentlemen?' The little assemblage hardly knew what to do or think at that moment. He was about as wet as if he had come up out of the Delaware."

The ordeal earned him the sobriquet "Box," which he used for the remainder of his life. Recounting his daring escape at antislavery rallies in New England before the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act risked his forcible return to Virginia, Brown set sail - as a passenger - to England, where he primarily worked as a performer and mesmerist.

In 1875, Brown returned to the United States, where he would often climb back into his original box during performances. He died in Toronto in 1897.