The country he escaped from had abolished slavery thirty-two years before his death. The state that had owned him — Virginia — had been part of the Confederacy, had fought a war to preserve the institution, had lost. The Fourteenth Amendment had made the formerly enslaved citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment had given Black men the right to vote. Reconstruction had come and been dismantled. Jim Crow had risen.
The world was entirely changed and the country had not, in the ways that mattered most, come to terms with what it had been. It has not fully done so since.
The crate has become a symbol. Museum exhibits, theatrical productions, academic articles, and memorial installations have used its dimensions and its story to carry ideas about freedom, confinement, risk, and self-determination. The symbol is powerful because it is real — because there was an actual box, and an actual man inside it, and an actual twenty-seven-hour journey that ended with a man singing a psalm in a Philadelphia office in the early morning of March 24, 1849.
What is known: the dimensions of the box, the route of the journey, the names of the helpers, the events of the arrival, the arc of the subsequent career, the date and place of death.
What remains uncertain: the birth year, the name of his parents, the names and fate of Nancy and his children, the full interior record of his later years, the precise authorship conditions of the 1851 narrative, what he thought and felt during the decades that separated the morning in Philadelphia from the evening in Toronto.