The network that made the escape possible was not an abstraction. It was people, specific people, with specific relationships to one another that had developed over years in a community. The choir. The church. The city of Richmond, whose specific economic arrangements had put Brown in a position where he had both the resources to finance the escape and the trusted relationships to execute it.
## Adams Express and the Freight System That Carried a Man
Henry Box Brown did not slip through a crack in the system. He moved through the system itself — the commercial freight infrastructure of the mid-nineteenth century American economy — and used it as the vehicle of his escape. This is one of the things that makes the story distinctive and that gives it its particular resonance as a comment on the contradictions of American capitalism and slavery.
Adams Express Company was founded in 1840 by Alvin Adams and had, by 1849, become one of the dominant freight and express delivery companies in the eastern United States. It moved packages, goods, documents, and currency across a network that connected the major cities of the East Coast. It was the FedEx of its moment, though the analogy requires care: the technology, the scale, and the legal environment were entirely different.
The company moved goods by contracting with the railroads, steamboat lines, and stage lines that formed the actual transport infrastructure. A package shipped through Adams Express would travel on whatever carrier was fastest and most available on each leg of the route, transferred from one mode of transport to another at transit points. The Adams Express brand was the guarantee of custody and delivery; the actual movement was through a network of independent carriers that Adams had contracted with.