The libel case of 1852 — in which he won against a newspaper that had published racial slurs about his performances — is a marker of his comfort with the legal systems of the country he had made his home. He did not simply absorb the insult and move on. He sued. He won. He had rights in Britain that he had never had in Virginia, and he used them.
## The End of the Partnership and the Critics’ Voices
The split with James C. A. Smith in June 1851 was not a clean break but a public and somewhat ugly dissolution of a partnership that had survived enormous stress. The two men had risked their lives together — Smith literally, in the months after the escape when his arrest became a real possibility — and built the panorama together, and crossed the Atlantic together. Whatever the financial and personal disagreements that ended the partnership, the history between them was substantial.
Smith’s criticism of Brown for not pursuing Nancy was directed at the abolitionist network in the form of letters to movement figures. It was a grievance made public rather than private, which suggests Smith intended it to have consequences for Brown’s standing in the antislavery community. Whether it did is difficult to assess from the historical record, though Brown did continue to perform and speak in Britain for years after the split without apparent significant damage to his reputation.
The other dimension of Smith’s criticism — that Brown had become involved with an English woman — reflected the social dynamics of the antislavery movement and the specific vulnerabilities of a formerly enslaved man whose family remained unaccounted for in the American South. Whether the English woman Smith referenced was Jane Floyd, whom Brown married in 1855, or someone else, is not established clearly in the record.