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"The 'Running' of Slaves: The Extraordinary Escape of Henry Box Brown and of Wm. & Ellen Crafts" [in] THE NEW YORK WEEKLY EVENING POST

Mailed Himself To Freedom

"The 'Running' of Slaves: The Extraordinary Escape of Henry Box Brown and of Wm. & Ellen Crafts" [in] THE NEW YORK WEEKLY EVENING POST

[Henry "Box" Brown]

1849

Rare newspaper account from one of Henry "Box" Brown's first public appearances, the Boston lecture where he received the nickname "Box," just two weeks after he mailed himself to freedom.

About very good overall.

Price: $500.00

"The 'Running' of Slaves: The Extraordinary Escape of Henry Box Brown and of Wm. & Ellen Crafts" [in] THE NEW YORK WEEKLY EVENING POST

"... transported three hundred miles through a slave-holding country and by public thoroughfares, in a box, by measurement, exactly three feet one inch long, two feet wide, and two feet six inches deep."

This complete June 7th, 1849 issue of the NEW YORK WEEKLY EVENING POST contains a dispatch from the Anti-Slavery Society of Boston the previous month's meeting, summarizing the extraordinary escape from bondage of Henry "Box" Brown. It includes a lengthy account of the meeting, which also featured three other people famous for escaping to freedom: Frederick Douglass, William Craft, and Ellen Craft. Brown's method of gaining his freedom, safely reaching the home of a Philadelphia abolitionist by mail, "created such a sensation." While popular depictions of Brown's odyssey were often tinged with humor (as here), his was a dangerous undertaking. He recounted for the Boston audience how his box — which was both nailed and strapped closed, with no air holes and only a small amount of water and biscuits to sustain him — was stood on its (his) head, thrown from a train, and rolled down a hill.

Though this issue was printed in early June, 1849, the article's description of Brown's escape just "two weeks since" places the date of the meeting described in May, 1849. At this very event, he received the nickname ("Box") for which he would be popularly known. Brown would go on to have a long public life, befriending Douglass, penning two autobiographies, and frequently lecturing on slavery, abolition, and his own remarkable story — most prominently in Britain, where he fled after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.

A rare and ephemeral contemporary account of one of the most unusual escapes from enslavement, and one that would go on to be one of the best known of the era.

The Object

New York: William C. Bryant & Co, 1849. 25.75'' x 37'' unfolded. 13'' x 19'' folded twice (so that full mast of paper shows). Single sheet printed recto and verso. [4] pages. Moderate wear and creasing overall, with some splitting at the folds – though still sound. Contemporary inked ownership signature above mast.

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