Henry Brown was born a slave, sometime around 1815, in Louisa County, Virginia. After the farmer who owned his family died, the teenage Brown was separated from his parents and siblings, and sent to work in a tobacco factory in the city of Richmond. There, at the Baptist Church, he fell in love with a woman named Nancy, whom he married in 1836. It was in the late 1840s, when the pregnant Nancy and their three children were sold to a Methodist preacher in North Carolina, that Brown decided he would try escaping to freedom in the North. “Ordinary modes of travel he concluded might prove disastrous to his hopes”, the abolitionist William Still writes of Brown in The Underground Railroad; “he, therefore, hit upon a new invention altogether, which was to have himself boxed up and forwarded to Philadelphia direct by express.” With the aid of a Massachusetts-born white man called Samuel Smith, who, in exchange for a sum of money, arranged for the box to be received at the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in downtown Philadelphia, Brown had himself shipped via Adams Express on March 23, 1849. After twenty-six hours of rough handling by deliverymen, he was pried from his coffin and — being a deeply religious man — sung a song of thanksgiving he had written, based on Psalm 40. -Public Domain Review