Then Nancy’s enslaver sold her. To another man. Who then extorted Brown further — $50 a year, again to prevent another sale. The extortion held for a while. And then, in August of 1848, that second enslaver sold Nancy and all three children to a Methodist minister heading to North Carolina.
Nancy was pregnant with their fourth child.
The moment of that sale has been described in accounts drawn from Brown’s own later testimony, preserved in the 1849 narrative compiled by Charles Stearns and in the more directly personal 1851 account. He walked alongside the coffle — the chain of people being marched away — for four miles. Then he watched them go. He never saw them again.
We do not know Nancy’s children’s names. We do not know what became of the fourth child she carried. We do not know where they went after North Carolina or what their lives looked like. The historical record does not give us these things, because the record was not designed to preserve them. What we know is that Henry Brown walked back to Richmond and decided that he would not stay.
## How You Plan an Escape in a Slave State
Planning the escape of an enslaved person from Virginia in 1849 required more than courage. It required infrastructure — people in multiple cities, across multiple states, who were willing to risk significant legal consequences to make the thing work. It required money. And it required the specific kind of discretion that meant not telling anyone who didn’t absolutely need to know.