John Ernest - Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself

Table of Contents

2008 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Filosofia and Engravers Bold types
by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence
and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for
Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Henry Box, b. 1816.

Narrative of the life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself /
edited and with an introduction by John Ernest.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3196-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8078-5890-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN : 97-8-080-78888-5

1. Brown, Henry Box, b. 1816. 2. Fugitive slavesVirginia
Biography. 3. African AmericansVirginiaBiography.
4. SlaveryVirginiaHistory19th century. 5. African
American abolitionistsBiography. I. Ernest, John. II. Title.

E450.B873 2008

306.362092dc22 [B] 2007047523

Portions of the introduction are drawn from other publications
by the author: The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Browns
The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, PMLA 113 (1998): 1108-21, reprinted
by permission of the copyright owner, Modern Language Association of
America; Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge
of History, 1794-1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004);
The Family of Man: Traumatic Theology in the Narrative of the Life of Henry
Box Brown, Written by Himself, African American Review 41, no. 1 (Spring
2007); Outside the Box: Henry Box Brown and the Politics of Antislavery
Agency, reprinted by permission of the Arizona Board of Regents from
Arizona Quarterly 63, no. 4 (Winter 2007).

cloth 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

paper 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of people and institutions have contributed to the preparation of this edition. I am grateful to Sian Hunter, Nathan McCamic, Paul Betz, and Stephanie Wenzel of the University of North Carolina Press for their encouragement and expert guidance. I am indebted as well to the editorial board; the editorial, production, and marketing staffs; and readers Eric Gardner and Joyce-lyn Moody for their thoughtful and detailed suggestions. These readers and editors have helped me considerably in preparing an edition that will be of use and interest to a broad range of readers. I benefited as well from the encouragement and suggestions of Robert S. Levine. As is the case in all of my endeavors, I am especially indebted to Rebecca Mays Ernest for her encouragement, her thoughtful editing and suggestions, and her patience over the time and the distances weve crossed to research, prepare, and proofread this edition.

Various people helped me with the illustrations included in this edition. I am indebted to R. A. Friedman of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Edward Gaynor in Special Collections and the Digital Services Staff at the University of Virginia Library; Janie C. Morris of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University; Jackie Penny of the American Antiquarian Society; and Linda Wisniewski of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Im grateful as well to Nathan McCamic and Paul Betz for their guidance in arranging for and obtaining these illustrations.

Finally, I want to acknowledge my great debt to those few scholars who have done so much to recover and explain the life of Henry Box Brown. Ive learned a great deal from the work of William Andrews, R. J. M. Blackett, Daphne A. Brooks, Audrey Fisch, Richard Newman, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, and Marcus Wood. Im especially indebted, though, to Kathryn Grovers exemplary research in The Fugitives Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), and to the truly remarkable work of archival research and biographical recovery in Jeffrey Ruggless The Unboxing of Henry Brown (Richmond: The Library of Virginia, 2003). Without Ruggless work especially, the life and lessons of Henry Box Brown would be, not boxed up, but rather scattered and lost in various archives. This edition would not have been possible without the work of these dedicated scholars.

INTRODUCTION

THE EMERGENCE OF HENRY BOX BROWN

Behind every slave narrative is a significant escape from enslavement, an escape that captured the imaginations of nineteenth-century readers and audiences. In newspaper accounts, autobiographical narratives, fiction, and drama, and in antislavery gatherings large and small, people followed the various stories of individuals who managed to make the difficult journey from enslavement to relative freedom in the northern United States and beyond to Canada and England. There was something about the heroic struggle against the odds that gave point and purpose to debates over slavery, forcing many to confront the realities of life under the peculiar institution by giving a face, a story, and a driving spirit to the abstract concept of freedom. British reformer Harriet Martineau spoke for many when she wrote in 1838 that the finest harvest-field of romance perhaps in the world is the frontier between the United States and Canada. The vowed student of human nature, Martineau suggested, could not do better than take up his abode there, and hear what fugitives and their friends have to tell, for there have been no exhibitions of the forces of human character in any political revolution or religious reformation more wonderful and more interesting than may almost daily be seen there. As Martineaus comments indicate, one did not need to be a reformer to feel the tug of this story, and indeed many such students of human nature gathered at the shores of the slave narratives to explore the various frontiers that defined the boundaries of freedom in the United States.

For those who had experienced slavery, though, this fascination with romantic escapes was a mixed blessing, for while the publicity generated by successful escapes might inspire white Americans to aid in the antislavery cause, it could also alert the authorities about the methods used by the fugitives. The great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass worried about this in his first autobiographical narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). When Douglass reaches that point in his story when he escaped from slavery, he refuses to offer his reader details. I have never approved, writes Douglass, of the very public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad, but which, I think, by their open declarations, has been made most emphatically the upperground railroad. Those who thus publicize the operations of the Underground Railroad, Douglass asserts, do nothing towards enlightening the slave, whilst they do much toward enlightening the master.

Douglass was referring to the subject of the narrative you are about to read, Henry Brown, whose escape from slavery in 1849 became almost immediately one of the most celebrated stories of liberation in the history of American enslavement. Browns story, in short, quickly extended beyond the priorities of antislavery persuasion and became an iconic presence in American culture.