Henry Box Brown

was an enslaved man from Virginia 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.

Brown became a well-known speaker for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and got to know Frederick Douglass. He was nicknamed “Box” at a Boston antislavery convention in May 1849, and thereafter used the name Henry Box Brown.

He published two versions of his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown. The first, written with the help of Charles Stearns and conforming to expectations of the slave narrative genre,
was published in Boston in 1849.

The second was published in Manchester, England, in 1851, after he had moved there. While on the lecture circuit in the northeastern United States, Brown developed a moving panorama with his partner James C. A. Smith which detailed both Brown’s journey as well as the daily life of free and enslaved people.
They separated in 1851.

Brown married and started a family with an English woman, Jane Floyd.
His first wife, Nancy, remained in slavery. 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 (1886–97) was spent in Toronto, where he died in 1897.