Narrative of Henry Box Brown / Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide

WHO ESCAPED FROM SLAVERY ENCLOSED IN A BOX 3 FEET LONG AND 2 WIDE. WRITTEN FROM A STATEMENT OF FACTS MADE BY HIMSELF. WITH REMARKS UPON THE REMEDY FOR SLAVERY. BY CHARLES STEARNS. BOSTON: PUBLISHED BY BROWN & STEARNS. FOR SALE BY BELA MARSH, 25 CORNHILL.

ABNER FORBES, PRINTER, 37 Cornhill.
Not for the purpose of administering to a prurient desire to “hear and see some new thing,” nor to gratify any inclination on the part of the hero of the following story to be honored by man, is this simple and touching narrative of the perils of a seeker after the “boon of liberty,” introduced to the public eye; but that the people of this country may be made acquainted with the horrid sufferings endured by one as, in a portable prison , shut out from the light of heaven, and nearly deprived of its balmy air, he pursued his fearful journey directly through the heart of a country making its boasts of liberty and freedom to all, and that thereby a chord of human sympathy may be touched in the hearts of those who listen to his plaintive tale, which may be the means of furthering the spread of those principles, which under God, shall yet prove “mighty to the pulling down of the strong-holds” of slavery.
A William and an Ellen Craft, indeed performed an almost equally hazardous undertaking, and one which, as a devoted admirer of human daring has said, far exceeded any thing recorded by Macaulay, and will yet be made the ground-work for a future Scott to build a more intensely interesting tale upon than “the author of Waverly” ever put forth, but they had the benefit of their eyes and ears—they were not entirely helpless; enclosed in a moving tomb, and as utterly destitute of power to control your movements as if death had fastened its icy arm upon you, and yet possessing all the full tide of gushing sensibilities, and a complete knowledge of your existence, as was the case with our friend. We read with horror of the burial of persons before life has entirely fled from them, but here is a man who voluntarily assumed a condition in which he well knew all the chances were against him, and when his head seemed well-nigh severed from his body, on account of the concussion occasioned by the rough handling to which he was subject, see the Spartan firmness of his soul. Not a groan escaped from his agonized heart, as the realities of his condition were so vividly presented before him. Death stared him in the face, but like Patrick Henry, only when the alternative was more a matter of fact than it was to that patriot, he exclaims, “Give me liberty or give me death;” and death seemed to say, as quickly as the lion seizes the kid cast into its den, “You are already mine,” and was about to wrap its sable mantle around the form of our self-martyred hero—bound fast upon the altars of freedom, as the Hindoo widow is bound upon the altar of a husband’s love; when the bright angel of liberty, whose dazzling form he had so long and so anxiously watched, as he pored over the scheme hid in the recesses of his own fearless brain, while yet a slave, and whose shining eyes had bewitched his soul, until he had said in the language of one of old to Jesus, “I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest;” when this blessed goddess stood at his side, and, as Jesus said to one lying cold in death’s embrace, “I say unto thee, arise,” said to him, as she took him by the hand and lifted him from his travelling tomb, “thy warfare is over, thy work is accomplished, a free man art thou, my guidance has availed thee, arise and breathe the air of freedom.”