In 1849, Henry “Box” Brown (a US enslaved man from Virginia) folded himself into a wooden crate marked “dry goods,” and two friends shipped him from Richmond to Philadelphia. Brown was inside the box (3 x 2.5 x 2 feet) for the 26-hour trip, with three small holes cut for air. As abolitionists pulled Brown from the box, he sang a paraphrase of Psalm 40, expressing his hope in the God who promises freedom. “If you have never been deprived of your liberty, as I was,” Brown later wrote, “you cannot realize the power of that hope of freedom, which was
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