Henry Box Brown

Henry "Box" Brown (c. 1815 – June 15, 1897) 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. For a short time, Brown became a noted abolitionist speaker in the northeast United States. As a public figure and fugitive slave, Brown felt extremely endangered by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which increased the pressure to capture escaped slaves. He moved to England and lived there for 25 years, touring with an anti-slavery panorama, and becoming a magician and showman. Brown married and started a family with an English woman, Jane Floyd. Brown's 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.