The Hermitage, owned by John Barret, was a large enough operation that Henry Brown grew up alongside brothers and sisters — at least four sisters and three brothers, by his own later account. The family was intact in his early childhood. That fact, and its subsequent dismemberment, is the biographical foundation on which his entire life rests.
John Barret was a former mayor of Richmond, a man of some standing in Virginia’s political and economic life. His ownership of people extended from his Louisa County plantation to, after his death, his son William’s tobacco factory in Richmond. The family’s wealth was built on the labor of the people they owned, and when Barret died in 1830, that wealth was transferred — along with the people who had generated it — to the next generation.
Henry Brown was approximately fifteen when he was sent to Richmond. The siblings who were dispersed at the same time or in subsequent years went to other plantations, to other enslavers, to destinations that the historical record does not trace. He lost his family once, as a teenager, in a way that foreshadowed what would happen to his own family decades later.
This pattern — the deliberate destruction of family connections as an instrument of control, and then the reconstruction of new family connections that were always vulnerable to the same destruction — is one of the defining features of chattel slavery as an institution. Brown experienced it twice, in his own person, which is why the decision to escape, when Nancy and the children were sold, makes the specific sense it makes. He had already lost one family to this institution. He was not going to lose himself to it as well.