## Samuel Smith and James C. A. Smith: What Happened Next
Henry Brown arrived in freedom with two collaborators still in Virginia whose futures were not resolved.
Samuel Alexander Smith, the white shoemaker who had been paid $86 to help arrange the escape, did not keep a low profile after March 1849. On May 8, 1849 — less than two months after Brown’s escape — he attempted to ship two other enslaved people out of Richmond by the same method. He was caught. His arrest, and the method that had enabled Brown’s escape, now became public in a way that closed the route permanently and confirmed Douglass’s concern about publicizing the details.
Smith was tried and convicted. In November 1849, he was sentenced to six and a half years in the Virginia state penitentiary. He served his time. He did not, so far as the historical record shows, recant or cooperate with authorities in a way that further endangered the network.
James Caesar Anthony Smith — the free Black man, the choir member, the person who had first introduced Brown to Samuel Smith — had also helped with the subsequent May 1849 attempt. He was arrested on September 25, 1849. His case went before a divided panel of magistrates who ultimately did not convict him. He was released, and by December 1849 he had made his way to Boston and rejoined Brown on the abolitionist circuit.
James C. A. Smith became an important figure in Henry Box Brown’s subsequent years — a collaborator in the creation of the panorama, a co-performer and business partner in the abolitionist lecture circuit, and eventually a source of the most pointed public criticism Brown would face.