When he opened it, out scrambled a man named Henry Brown: five feet eight inches tall, two hundred pounds, and, as far as anyone knows, the first person in United States history to liberate himself from slavery by, as he later wrote, “getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state.” The person to whom the box had been shipped, James Miller McKim, was waiting there to receive it. After arriving in the nation’s capital, it was loaded onto a wagon, dumped out at the train station, loaded onto a luggage car, sent on to Philadelphia, unloaded onto another wagon, and, finally, delivered to 31 North Fifth Street. From there, it was taken to the railroad depot, loaded onto a train, and, on reaching the Potomac, transferred to a steamer, where, despite its label- THIS SIDE UP WITH CARE-it was placed upside down until a tired passenger tipped it over and used it as a seat. Three feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet deep, it had been packed the previous morning in Richmond, Virginia, then carried by horse cart to the local office of the Adams Express Company. The crate arrived, via overland express, one spring evening in 1849. Stories of the Underground Railroad provide the possibility of moral comfort in a profoundly uncomfortable past.
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