Brown went to Boston. He began to speak.
## The New England Circuit and a New Name
By late May 1849, less than two months after his arrival in Philadelphia, Henry Brown stood before the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston. He was introduced. He told his story.
It was at this convention, or in the weeks surrounding it, that the antislavery movement gave him the name he would carry for the rest of his life. He became Henry “Box” Brown. The box, the mechanism of his escape, was incorporated into his very identity — an insistence that this extraordinary thing was him, that his self-liberation could not be separated from the method he had chosen to achieve it.
He performed the song he had sung on arrival in Philadelphia. He told the story of Nancy and the children. He described the box. He answered questions. The crowds were substantial. The abolitionist circuit of New England in 1849 was a well-organized machine for generating public attention and fundraising for the cause, and Henry Box Brown was, by any measure, the most dramatic story the circuit had seen in some time.
He met Frederick Douglass, who had himself escaped from Maryland in 1838 and who was by 1849 the most prominent freedom seeker turned abolitionist speaker in the country. The encounter between the two men is recorded in the historical record primarily through what Douglass said later about the escape method — a criticism that became one of the defining controversies of Brown’s public career.