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Henry “Box” Brown HENRY “BOX” BROWN 1815 In about this year Henry Brown was born as a slave to a Louisa County, Virginia plantation owner, in this land of the free and home of the brave. HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY BROWN HENRY “BOX” BROWN 1830 Having reached about the age of 14 or 15, Henry Brown was separated from his parents and taken into Richmond, Virginia — to perform his life’s labors as a slave at a tobacco factory. HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN 1835 The oldest multiple-arch stone viaduct in the USA, the Thomas Viaduct, was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Jr. and constructed for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Eight full-centered arches bridged 617 feet. HISTORY OF RR Work began on another railroad viaduct, near Canton, Massachusetts for the Boston and Providence Railroad. BRIDGE DESIGN Cuttings of Morus multicaulis that had been being sold in the previous year for $3 to $5 a hundred were at this point being sold for $10 a hundred. Along the banks of the Cuyahoga River in northern Ohio, at Franklin Mills, a number of investors planned a new company, the Franklin Land Company, that would raise silk worms for an American silk industry. They had noticed that mulberry trees grew well in this locality, but had yet to discover that in the cold winters of this locale, the silkworm did not thrive. John Brown got on board, purchasing more than 95 acres with borrowed money. In the national financial crisis of 1837 he would be driven into bankruptcy. At some point toward the middle of the 1830s, Henry Brown, no relation to the above John Brown, having reached approximately the age of maturity, got married with an enslaved washerwoman named Nancy. It would have been in about this year that Catherine Cassidy was born. Her father was James Cassidy (together they would constitute a determined team of American victimizers — and let this serve as a warning to you to be on the alert, and never ever do anything to fix the focus of such opportunists on yourself). In about this timeframe John Buchanan Floyd took up cotton planting and the practice of law at Helena, Arkansas. He would sustain severe financial losses, and he and numerous of his black slaves would succumb to malignant fever. HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY BROWN HENRY “BOX” BROWN 1848 Boston’s citizens again petitioned Boston’s authorities to end the racial segregation of its public schools. At Boston’s Abiel Smith School, enrollment had dropped from a peak of about 100, by this point in the boycott, to 66. The Boston school board responded to this concern by voting 59 to 16 to continue its practice of racial segregation. From Waldo Emerson’s journal during this year of protest, a remark that we today might consider –on account of our recently raised sensitivities?– to veer dangerously toward a reliance upon Wubya’s waterboarding: It is better to hold the negro race an inch under water than an inch over. Emerson was having his portrait painted as an oil on panel, in the outskirts of Edinburgh, by a Scottish engraver HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN and artist, an admirer of his writings, whom he had met at a dinner party: David Scott (1806-1849) was depicting, of course, one of Emerson’s usual gestures, the clenching of a hand into a fist. Emerson would describe Scott as “a sort of Bronson Alcott with easel and brushes, a sincere great man, grave, silent, contemplative, and plain.” Emerson’s son Edward regarded this likeness, like the panel upon which it was painted, as “wooden.” He would explain, however, that the symbolic rainbow in the background was appropriate: “my father stood for Hope.” Completion of the serialization of William Makepeace Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR, a tale of two middle-class London families which had begun in the previous year, and this novel’s issuance as a book. “This I set as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without a positive hump, may marry whom she likes.” HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY BROWN HENRY “BOX” BROWN In the novel, the above is a truism only within the white race. The origins of Miss Swartz are an issue in regard to whether George Osborne will marry her. She is obviously of partly African ancestry and there a reveling in stereotypes: “I daresay she wore a nose ring when she went to court,” is George’s initial remark and, when he finally dismisses her from consideration, he goes “I’m not going to marry a Hottentot Venus.” Thackeray’s design for the character (an ugly design) depends on this, since he uses Miss Swartz to underscore the venality of old Mr. Osborne. Nothing more clearly brings home this venality, per Thackeray, than Osborne’s willingness to have his son marry a “mahogany charmer” in order to obtain her fortune. Apparently no imagined partner would be more preposterous or grotesque for Thackeray and his readers than this “dark object of the conspiracy” (as the narrator phrases it). This reveals how deeply this reading audience was steeped in its racism and fully explains why so many Victorians of mixed ancestry attempted to “pass.” In Virginia, Henry Brown’s wife Nancy and their children were sold and were to be transported to North Carolina. Brown had been able to earn some spending money by exceeding his weekly production quota of chewing twists at the tobacco factory in Richmond, Virginia at which he was a slave, and so had been reimbursing Nancy’s master for the time she had been spending caring for their family. As Nancy began the coffle walk south shackled to other adult slaves, with their not fewer than three children loaded in a wagon, Brown walked hand-in-hand with her for the first few miles. Then he watched as his wife and children disappeared from his view — why, it was almost enough to make a man lose his faith in America. Perhaps he will feel better if he takes the Sage of Concord’s advice and goes and holds his head an inch under water. Perhaps, if he holds his head under water long enough, he will be able to glimpse Emerson’s rainbow of hope! The antislavery people were having trouble persuading the American BIBLE-believers. At least rhetorically, the proslavery people were likely to win each and every such argument based on scripture. For instance, in this year Jefferson Davis made a speech to Congress in which he declared that: If slavery be a sin, it is not yours. It does not rest on your action for its origin, on your consent for its existence. It is a common law right to property in the service of man; its origin was Divine decree. In amplification of this attitude, Davis would write: [Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God ... it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation ... it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.... Let the gentleman go to Revelation to learn the decree of God — let him go to the Bible.... I said that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible, authorized, regulated, and recognized from Genesis to Revelation.... Slavery existed then in the earliest ages, and among the chosen people of God; and in Revelation we are told that it shall exist till the end of time shall come. You find it in the Old and New Testaments — in the prophecies, psalms, and the epistles of Paul; you find it recognized, sanctioned everywhere (Dunbar Rowland’s JEFFERSON DAVIS, Volume 1, pages 286 and 316-17). This was the year in which Illinois more or less (a little less) abolished slavery within its borders, the year in which, with about 74,000 slaves on Martinique alone, France abolished slavery in all its West Indies colonies, and Samuel Langhorn Clemens was merely a child on a Southern farm — so in this context I will arbitrarily incorporate one of his later reminisces: In my school-boy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind — and then the texts were read aloud to us HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery, they were wise and said nothing. MARK TWAIN HDT WHAT? INDEX HENRY BROWN HENRY “BOX” BROWN 1849 March 23, Friday morning before dawn: With a pouch of water, and some crackers to stave off hunger, his hat and a sharp tool with which to poke air holes, Henry Brown, about 5-foot-8 and 200 pounds, crammed himself into a canvas-lined wooden crate of dimensions 2'X3'X23'' and had himself shipped from Richmond to freedom. The box had been made and was being shipped for him by a white shoe dealer, Samuel A. Smith, at the enormous charge of $84. Smith had also made and shipped off two other such boxes, but the news of this initial escape was communicated back down south by the Morse telegraph and the other two escapees would be intercepted before their boxes reached their shipping destinations.
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