Southern newspapers also ran the story, and their accounts are interesting for what they reveal about how the story was received at the other end of the telegraph and mail route. Some Southern editors treated it with ridicule, some with alarm, some with a kind of reluctant respect for the ingenuity of the escape even as they condemned the act. The story was, in short, impossible to contain.
Douglass’s concern about publicizing the escape method was, in practical terms, already moot by the time he expressed it. The story was out. The method was known. The question of whether it should have been published was, from the moment the first newspaper picked it up, a question about the past rather than a guide to the future.
The newspaper record also documents the assault on Brown in Providence in August 1850 — months before the Fugitive Slave Act was formally signed, but as its passage was clearly imminent. The Providence assault is preserved in contemporary accounts as an instance of the escalating physical threat that made his departure for Britain not a retreat but a practical necessity.
The British press covered his arrival and subsequent performances. Reviews of the Mirror of Slavery, notices of his mesmerism demonstrations, accounts of the libel case victory, advertisements for his shows — all of these are part of a newspaper record that scholars have used to reconstruct his British career in considerable detail. The provincial press of Lancashire and Yorkshire was extensive and local in a way that captured the texture of a performer’s career in ways that major metropolitan papers might not.