A year after the Crafts passed through Henry “Box” Brown crossed the Susquehanna, or more accurately, he was freighted across. In the predawn hours of March 23, 1849, Samuel A. Smith and James C. A. Smith sealed Henry Brown in a two foot by three foot crate in Richmond and addressed the box to James Johnson, 131 Arch Street, Philadelphia. Brown had a difficult, painful trip ahead but he was determined to reach freedom. His supplies were meager, a container of water and a few biscuits. His air supply came from one hole in the box. His friends delivered the crate to the Adams Express office in Richmond at 6 a.m.; at 4 p.m. the box sat at the Washington, D.C. wharf; at 11 p.m. the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad transferred the box to the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad in Baltimore; and at 1 a.m., March 24, Brown was freighted across the Susquehanna and reloaded on the train. Unlike Douglass and the Crafts, Brown crossed the river without incident. At five am the crate arrived in Philadelphia, and at 6 a.m., Mr. McKim, the man who had the delivery brought to his office, and others worked to cut away the hoops securing the box and pried off the lid. Henry Brown emerged a free man.[1]
[1] Still, 81-84; Jeffrey Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown [Richmond: The Library of Virginia, 2003], 32-35.