HENRY “BOX” BROWN

1815

In about this year Henry Brown was born as a slave to a Louisa County, 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 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. The $84 would turn out to be not so much gain after all for shoemaker Smith, as he would be serving the next seven years in prison.

TELEGRAPHY In this year, this would likely have been the sort of “ramshorn”-design of telegraph-line insulator, created by Marshall Lefferts, that would likely have been being used for the transmission of that electrical signal from the North to the South (closeups to the right):

The following anonymous article headlined “The Lyceum” appeared in the Eastern Argus Semi-Weekly of Portland, Maine: The lecture on Wednesday evening, was by H.D. Thoreau, Esq., of Concord, Mass. The subject was announced in the papers as “Home, or domestic economy,” but the real topic was “Myself—I.” The lecture was unique, original, comical, and high-falutin. It kept the audience wide awake, and most pleasantly excited for nearly two hours.... It was like the dashing out of a comet that had broken loose from its orbit—hitting here and there, a gentle rap at this folly, and a severe one at that— but all in good nature. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN March 24, Saturday: The box containing Henry Brown was put right-side-up and unpacked at the Anti-Slavery office in . , the free black man who served as the local Philadelphia coordinator for the , was present.

With the assistance of Charles Stearns, Brown would create his NARRATIVE OF HENRY BOX BROWN, WHO ESCAPED FROM SLAVERY IN A BOX THREE FEET LONG, TWO WIDE, AND TWO AND A HALF HIGH, WRITTEN FROM A STATEMENT OF FACTS MADE BY HIMSELF, WITH REMARKS UPON THE REMEDY FOR SLAVERY BY CHARLES STEARNS, and during this year it would be published in Boston, presumably out of the downtown Anti-Slavery office of Garrison.

THE ESCAPE GENRE (Later in this year, the fugitive Henry Brown would be offered refuge in the home of Friend Joseph Ricketson of New Bedford.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY BROWN HENRY “BOX” BROWN

1850

November: Representative Horace Mann, Sr. was re-elected to the federal Congress from Massachusetts’s 8th District.

During this month William and Ellen Craft, refugees from Georgia, would be rescued from slave catchers emboldened by the new federal Fugitive Slave Act, by a Boston Vigilance Committee, which would see them safely aboard a steamer headed for exile in .

When returned from Alabama to Philadelphia without having been able to purchase the freedom of his wife and children, he was approached by a Quaker, Seth Concklin, who had learned of the reunion in freedom of Peter with his mother and his siblings in New Jersey. The white man was volunteering to rescue Peter’s family out of Alabama.

Also packed off to England during this month was Henry “Box” Brown of course taking with him his “Mirror of Slavery” panorama, a lecture aid or “PowerPoint Presentation” consisting of a moving scroll of scenes exhibiting slave life and his unusual escape. The anti-slavery association of course sent along with him the usual white-guy escort.

A pro-slavery mob outside Faneuil Hall in Boston spoiled a reception for the English reformer George Thompson who had had such a leading role in the emancipation of the slaves of the British West Indies. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN

1851

June 19, Thursday: According to the National Anti-Slavery Standard., Henry “Box” Brown had had himself put in a

box in Bradford, England, and shipped to Lees — when the box was opened with ceremony, he arose to deliver to the assembly one of his anti-slavery lectures.

This must have been quite a crowd-pleaser!

August 6, Wednesday: J.C.A. Smith, the white-guy escort whom the anti-slavery society had sent along with Henry “Box” Brown during his lecture tour in England, reported back to William Lloyd Garrison that Brown had quarreled with him, and that he had picked up bad habits, and that he was denying to him his “fair share” of the moneys “they” were collecting from the British crowds. (Uh, dude, why don’t you crawl back into your box — this ain’t about you.)

Richard Wagner and Theodor Uhlig completed a walking tour from Brunnen, Switzerland that included the Surenen Pass. With this experience, he added Das Rheingold and Die Walküre to his Nibelung concept.

August 6, Wednesday: The motions of circus horses are not so expressive of music –do not harmonize so well with a strain of music as those of animals of the cat kind– An Italian has just carried a hand-organ through the village– I hear it even at walden wood –it is as if a cheeta had skulked howling through the streets of the village with knotted tail. Neglected gardens are full of Flea-bane? now not yet in blossom. Thoroughwort has opened –& golden-rod is gradually opening the smooth sumac shows its red fruit The berries of the bristly aralia are turning dark– The wild holly’s scarlet fruit is seen & the red dwarf chock cherry Cerasus is (Prunus Obovata– After how few steps –how little exertion –the student stands in pine woods above the solomon’s seal & the cow wheat – in a place still unaccountably strange & wild to him –& to all civilization. This so easy & so common –though our literature implies that it is rare –we in the country make no report of the seals & sharks in our neighborhood to those in the city We send them only our huckle berries not free wild thoughts. Why does not man sleep all day as well as all night –it seems so very natural & easy –for what is he awake. A man must generally get away some hundreds or thousands of miles from home before he can be said to begin his travels– Why not begin his travels at home –! Would he have to go far or look very closely to discover novelties. The traveller who in this sense pursues his travels at home, has the advantage at any rate of a long residence in the country to make his observations correct & profitable. Now the American goes to England while the Englishman comes to America in order to describe the country– No doubt there some advantages in this kind of mutual criticism– But might there not be invented a better way of coming at the truth than this scratch-my back & I’ll scratch your’s method? Would not the American for instance who had himself perchance HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY BROWN HENRY “BOX” BROWN travelled in England & elsewhere –make the most profitable & accurate traveller in his own country. How often it happens that the travellers principal distinction is that he is one who knows less about a country than a native. Now if he should begin with all the knowledge of a native –& add thereto the knowledge of a traveller– Both natives & foreigners would be obliged to read his book. & the world would be absolutely benefitted It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country –in his native village –to make any progress between his door & his gate. But such a traveller will make the distances which Hanno & Marco Polo –& Cook BOTANIZING & Ledyard went over ridiculous. WM BARTRAM So worthy a traveller as Wm Bartram heads his first chapter with the words “The author sets sail from Philadelphia, and arrives at Charleston, from whence he begins his travels.” CHARLESTON I am perchance most & most profitably interested in the things which I already know a little about –a mere & utter novelty is a mere monstrosity to me. I am interested to see the yellow pine which we have not in Concord though Michaux says it grows in Mass –. or the English Oak having heard of the royal oak –& having oaks ourselves Or the oriental Plane having often heard of it –& being well acquainted with its sister the occidental plane –but the new Chinese flower whose cousin I do not happen to know I pass by with indifference. I do not know that I am very fond of novelty. I wish to get a clearer notion of what I have already some inkling. These Italian boys with their hand-organs remind me of the keepers of wild beasts in menageries –whose whole art consists in stirring up their beasts from time to time with a pole. I am reminded of bright flowers & glancing birds & striped pards of the jungle– these delicious harmonies tear me to pieces while they charm me – the tigir’s musical smile. How some inventions have spread –some brought to perfection by the most enlightened nations have been surely & rapidly communicated to the most savage– The gun for instance How soon after the settlement of America were comparitively remote Indian tribes –most of whose members had never seen a white man supplied with guns– The gun is invented by the civilized man & the savage in remote wildernesses on the other side of the globe throws away his bow & arrows & takes up this arm. Bartram travelling in the S states bet 70 & 80 describes the warriors as so many gun-men. Ah, yes even here in concord horizon Apollo is at work for King Admetus– Who is King Admetus? ADMETUS It is Business with his four prime ministers Trade & Commerce –& Manufactures & Agriculture. And this is what makes Mythology true & interesting to us HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN

1855

By the age of 6 the slave “Blind Tom” was improvising on the piano. He would explain that the sound of the wind or the rain or the birds suggested his musical compositions. THOMAS GREENE WIGGINS

While in England Henry “Box” Brown remarried, with a white Cornish tin worker’s daughter. He and Jane Floyd Brown would produce at least 3 offspring. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY BROWN HENRY “BOX” BROWN

1859

Mrs, Henry “Box” Brown (Jane Floyd Brown) offered a panorama “Depicting Africa, America and the Holy Land with the Indian Mutiny.”

By this point James “Ambrose” Cutting, the developer of a technique for sealing the “Ambrotype” photograph, had given up up the business of photography and opened Cutting & Butler’s Grand Aquarial Gardens on Bromfield Street, which was Boston’s 1st aquarium. There would come to be 41 specimens in his collection, which ranged from snails to a stuffed kangaroo — and on a balcony overlooking this exhibit a small band played music for the customers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN

1860

During the decade of the 1860s, at the close of many of their concerts, Asa Hutchinson’s company of singers were performing Abby Hutchinson’s “Kind Words Can Never Die.” (Several Hutchinson Family Singers original productions, such as “Get Off the Track!” and “One Hundred Years Hence,” have been revived over the years; but only “Kind Words Can Never Die” has been in continuous use up to the present day.)

Henry “Box” Brown was performing as a magician, a mesmerist, and a conjuror, using stage names such as “Prof. H. Box Brown” and “The African Prince.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN

1862

At about this point Henry “Box” Brown was beginning to put on shows that were more light-hearted than his “Mirror of Slavery” panorama about his escape from slavery in a box, using black ventriloquists and singers as performers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN

1864

Henry “Box” Brown was at this point living in Wales. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN

1875

Rutherford B. Hayes came out of political retirement as a gentleman farmer on his inherited estate Spiegel Grove in Fremont, Ohio to run a 3d time for Governor of Ohio.

Henry “Box” Brown returned with his family to the United States of America, to offer a group magic act. Subsequently, there would be a mention of the “Brown Family Singers.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN

1889

February 26, Tuesday: On a journey to the south in the hope of improving his health, Charles Louis Flint died at the Electric Mound Hotel in Hillman, Georgia. Three boxes of his papers are stored at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library of the University of Massachusetts – Amherst.

There was an account in a newspaper in Brantford, , Canada of a performance by Henry “Box” Brown with his wife Jane Floyd Brown and their daughter Annie Brown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN

1890

Durfing the early 1890s Henry “Box” Brown was continuing to perform.

It would be during the early 1890s that the anti-pest campaign would begin in New England in real earnest against the accidentally-on-purpose introduced “European” gypsy moth Porthetrea dispar (which, actually, had originated in Japan prior to its denuding the woodlands of Europe and then being introduced into America). The moth was spreading, and would continue to spread, in all directions at a rate of about 15 miles per year. Immediately about one in ten of the sprayers were poisoned by the arsenic they were using.

A St. Louis physician formulated peanut butter as a food for invalids. (In 1893 the health food faddist famous for breakfast cereals, J.H. Kellogg, would offer a peanut butter to patients with poor teeth. Nowadays we have little signs to warn people of anything that might ever have touched a peanut — because the plant is for some so utterly toxic, one little crumb stopping their breathing.) PLANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN

1897

June 15, Tuesday: Henry “Box” Brown died in Toronto.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2019. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: December 28, 2019 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

HENRY “BOX” BROWN HENRY BROWN the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.