Brown earned money. He turned over the required portion to Barret. He kept some. He used it to pay the ongoing extortion for Nancy’s continued presence — the annual payment to Nancy’s enslaver that was the price of keeping his family physically accessible. He accumulated savings over years.
This portrait of relative autonomy is important to hold alongside the portrait of absolute subjugation, because both are true and neither cancels the other. Brown could rent a house. He could not protect his children from being sold. He could accumulate $166 in savings. He could not prevent Nancy’s pregnancy from being disregarded by the man who decided to sell her south. The autonomy was real and the subjugation was complete, and the co-existence of those two facts is part of what makes the history of urban slavery in the antebellum South so difficult to hold in a single frame.
When August 1848 came and Nancy and the children were taken, Brown had the experience of having built something over more than a decade — the church membership, the choir, the household, the relationship, the accumulated money — and watching its most important elements be destroyed by a decision that was not his to make. He had no legal recourse. He had no political remedy. He had only the question of what he would do next.
The answer he found was the box.
## The First African Baptist Church and the Community That Made Brown
The First African Baptist Church of Richmond was not a minor institution. Founded in 1841 from an older congregation with roots going back to the 1780s, it was one of the oldest and largest Black Baptist congregations in the United States. By the 1840s it had a membership numbering in the hundreds, and it served as one of the central community institutions for both free Black people and enslaved people in the city.