Douglass worried publicly that the publication of the box escape had cost a method that others might have used. If the route was known, it was closed. Samuel Smith’s subsequent attempt to ship other enslaved people — which led to Smith’s arrest and imprisonment — gave some weight to this concern.
## The Narratives: Two Books, Two Voices
In September 1849, a book appeared in Boston: Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. It was written not by Brown himself — he was not literate — but by Charles Stearns, a Massachusetts abolitionist who compiled the account from Brown’s testimony and shaped it according to his own antislavery aims.
The 1849 Stearns narrative is a document of its time and place. It opens with Stearns’s own framing, which is heavy with the rhetorical apparatus of the abolitionist movement — the moral denunciations, the appeals to Christian conscience, the formal prose of an educated white New England reformer addressing an audience he expected to persuade. Brown’s own voice, as much as it appears, is filtered through Stearns’s choices about what to include, what to emphasize, and how to frame it.
The book sold. Brown and Stearns toured New England together, selling copies and lecturing into the fall of 1849. The story had a reach that extended far beyond the abolitionist circuit; it appeared in newspapers across the country, including in Southern papers that viewed it with alarm.
But the 1849 narrative is not the only version Henry Box Brown gave of his own life.