The 1859 Raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry

 Abolitionism in general (to be provided later)

 Was the Republican Party white, or black? (to be provided later)

 The Town That Started The Civil War (to be provided later)

 The "Secret Six": The Finance Committee

Higginson, Howe, Parker, Sanborn, Smith, Stearns

 The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson (to be provided later)

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth "Charles P. Carter" Higginson of the Secret "Six" believed that "Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others." It was up to American black people to demonstrate their courage, and their worthiness to be free — basically by getting themselves exterminated. After Harpers Ferry he would attempt to organize an expedition to raid the Charles Town lockup and rescue John Brown.

 Doctor Samuel Gridley Howe 

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day to buy Sharp’s rifles for use in "Bleeding Kansas," enough to arm 200 men to the teeth. He, as well as the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These five of the white conspirators of the Secret "Six" finance committee clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (This dashing doctor, who cared for little blind Laura Bridgman, was a racist, and a womanizer who couldn't keep it in his pants. I bet you didn’t know that. When Henry David Thoreau applied for a job at his Perkins Institute for the Blind, he turned him down -- would you have turned Henry down for such a position?)

 The Reverend Theodore Parker (to be provided later)

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a stone racist, declared from his pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of four or five men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. Sharps rifles, the very latest in deadliness, cost $25 apiece, when had in sufficient quantity: 

       "I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war."

He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to "Bleeding Kansas" with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of Rights of the People as in "The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed." He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret "Six", fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These five of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their allies among the Northern and Southern black Americans slave and free, in order to foment a rectification of the Southern white Americans.

 Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (to be provided later)

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These five of the white Secret "Six" conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.
John Brown, who had himself buried one wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, in regard to the young man’s grief over the prompt death of his young bride Ariana Walker, that he was too young to be married to a gravestone.

 Gerrit Smith (to be provided later)

The H. Ross Perot of that era, a former Millerite millenialist. In this immensely wealthy American’s mansion outside Syracuse NY, standing in the center of his study, was an ornate mahogany desk. Rumor had it that this had once been the desk of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The millennium not having arrived on schedule, he would be determined to "make himself a colored man" – to explore his inner blackness– and would befriend Frederick Douglass, up to the point at which he would determine blacks to be inherently racially inferior to whites and thus unworthy of any consideration. He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret "Six" fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These five of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to disrupt relations between Northern and Southern white Americans.

 The Reverend George Luther Stearns (to be provided later)

The Reverend George Luther Stearns (1809-1867), as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith of the Secret "Six", fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These five of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Others connected with the raid on Harpers Ferry:

Ann Brown, a daughter of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath she would move to the West Coast.

 Frederick Brown (to be provided later)

Frederick Brown was fanatically religious to the extent that he attempted to sever his sexual organs when he was attracted to a young lady. He would have been 28 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, but in 1856 had been killed in the fighting in "Bleeding Kansas."

 Jason Brown (to be provided later)

Jason Brown, one of the elder sons of Captain John Brown, was a gentle sort of person who actually was trying to become an inventor. He took part in the battle at Black Jack in " Bleeding Kansas", and in the killings on the Osawatomie Creek, but was not at Harpers Ferry. He and his brother Owen Brown would become grape growers in the mountains above Pasadena, California.

 Captain John Brown (to be provided later)

John Brown, "Captain" John "Shubel Morgan" "Isaac Smith" Brown.

 John Brown, Junior (to be provided later)

John Brown, Jr., 38 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid and Captain John Brown’s eldest son, had trained as a phrenologist. After the raid he would go into hiding in Ohio and, when summoned to appear before the investigatory committee of the US Senate, would refuse to appear.

 Martha Brewster Brown (to be provided later)

Martha Brewster Brown, wife of Oliver Brown and daughter-in-law of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry.

 Oliver Brown (to be provided later)

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, was born in Franklin OH on March 9, 1839. He was a bookish lad. He went to "Bleeding Kansas" in 1855, with his father, and returned to North Elba in October 1856, where he married Martha E. Brewster ( Martha Brewster Brown) in 1858. She was sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry and he was shot dead at the age of 20 while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge.

 Owen Brown (to be provided later)

Owen Brown, 3d of John Brown’s sons and his stalwart aid both in "Bleeding Kansas" and at Harper’s Ferry, was born November 4, 1824, at Hudson OH. He had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers. He was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped from Harpers Ferry on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit, and physical endurance despite a withered arm, that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader did reach safety. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names, on an oil well crew in Crawford County PA. He never married. After the civil war he would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with two of his brothers, before migrating to California. He was the only one of the five escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war, and was the last of the raiders when he died on January 9, 1891 near Pasadena at his mountain home "Brown’s Peak." A marble monument marked the mountain grave until in July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the site is not a registered historical landmark or cemetery, there is not going to be an investigation.

 Salmon Brown (to be provided later)

Salmon Brown, 23 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, was said to have been exactly like his father, Captain John Brown, in every particular. After his brother Watson Brown expired of the wounds he had received at Harpers Ferry, he married with his brother’s widow Isabella M. Thompson Brown. He would once comment to a newspaper reporter that "The tannery business, farming, wool buying and the raising of blooded stock were my father’s life occupations, though all of them were subordinated to his one consuming passion — freeing the slaves." Salmon would die in Portland, Oregon in 1919.

 Watson Brown (to be provided later)

Watson Brown, born at Franklin OH on October 7, 1835, married Isabella M. Thompson in September 1856. His son by this marriage would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive him. He was sent out by his father John Brown to negotiate and was shot down by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He managed to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and lived on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a considerable period. He expired on October 18th and his widow remarried with Salmon Brown. Recovering his body, his mother Mary Ann Day Brown eventually would be able to rebury it in the Adirondacks before heading off to her retirement in California.

 Charles Francis Adams, Senior (to be provided later)

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the racist agenda of Eli Thayer's and Amos Lawrence’s New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the creation of an Aryan Nation in the territory then well known as "Bleeding Kansas," to the tune of $25,000.

 Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson (to be provided later)

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, one of Captain Brown’s lieutenants, was born April 17, 1833, in Indiana, the son of John Anderson. His maternal grandfather, Colonel Jacob Westfall of Tygert Valley VA, had been a soldier in the revolution and a slaveholder. He went to school at Galesburg IL and Kossuth IA and worked as a peddler, farmer, and sawmill laborer before settling a mile from Fort Bain on the Little Osage in Bourbon County in " Bleeding Kansas" in August 1857. He was twice arrested by the proslavery activists, and for ten weeks was held at Fort Scott. He then became a lieutenant of Captain Montgomery and was with him in the attack on Captain Anderson’s troop of the First US Cavalry. He witnessed a murder on his own doorstep by border ruffians, of a Mr. Denton. He went with John Brown on the slave raid into Missouri and remained with him thereafter. On July 5, 1859 he wrote of his determination to continue to fight for freedom: "Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre." He was killed by a bayonet-thrust of one of the Marines at Harpers Ferry. "One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall [to which he was pinned by the bayonet] in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open."

 John Anderson (to be provided later)

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was trapped along with his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Henry Kagi in "Hall’s Rifle Works" at the Harpers Ferry armory. When the three men made a run for the Shenandoah River they were trapped in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester VA. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker stated in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been "the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly." Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– "Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out." (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid that his middle name was Anthony rather than Anderson.)

 Osborn Perry Anderson 

Osborn Perry Anderson, "O.P. Anderson, or as we used to call him Chatham Anderson," the only participant of color to survive Harpers Ferry and elude capture, had been born free on July 27, 1830 in West Fallowfield PA. He had learned the printing trade in Canada, where he had met John Brown in 1858. He would write later of the fight at Harpers Ferry and his escape in A Voice from Harper’s Ferry: "We were together eight days before [ John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [ Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated…." Anderson, Coppoc, and Meriam had journeyed separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Anderson enlisted in the US Army in 1864, becoming a noncommissioned officer, and mustered out in Washington DC at the close of the war, to die a pauper of TB and lack of care in Washington on December 13, 1872.

 Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew (to be provided later)

 The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (to be provided later)

 John Edwin Cook (to be provided later)

John Edwin Cook, a well-connected 5'7" gentleman with blue eyes and long, curly blond hair, born in Summer 1830 to a well-to-do family in Haddam CT, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College for some indiscretion, and had in 1855 become a member of the guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in " Bleeding Kansas" by Charles Lenhart and had made himself an excellent shot. He had been dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground, and had secured employment as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He married a Chambersburg PA woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18, 1859. After having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching after Brown had sent him out to collect weapons, and after evading capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food, was captured on October 25th eight miles from Chambersburg PA. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet. In a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting at Harper’s Ferry (Samuel C. Young), Cook would detail for his captors all his movements from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment he would seek to save his life by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed "Judas" by the friends of Brown. Despite his confession and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end be also hanged for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, one of the last, on December 16th.

 John Anderson Copeland, Junior (to be provided later)

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was trapped along with his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Henry Kagi in "Hall’s Rifle Works" at the Harpers Ferry armory. When the three men made a run for the Shenandoah River they were trapped in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester VA. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker stated in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been "the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly." Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– "Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out." (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid that his middle name was Anthony rather than Anderson.)

 Barclay Coppoc (to be provided later)

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale IA, was born in Salem OH on January 4, 1839, and had not attained his majority at the time of the raid on Harpers Ferry. This Quaker escaped, although his adopted brother Edwin Coppoc surrendered and was tried and hanged. "We were together eight days before [ John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [ Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [ John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars." Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay then went to his family home in Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. There a band of young men armed themselves to defend him, and the Religious Society of Friends disowned him for bearing arms. He was back in " Bleeding Kansas" in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life in a second undertaking of this kind. He became a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he was killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.

 Edwin Coppoc (to be provided later)

Edwin Coppoc, who had been born on June 30, 1835 and orphaned and adopted at the age of 6 into a nonresistant-abolitionist Quaker farm family first of Salem, Ohio and then of Springdale IA. On March 6, 1857 he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends and in the spring of 1858 went to " Bleeding Kansas" as a settler — but did not take part in the fighting. It was during a visit to Springdale in the fall of 1858 that he met John Brown. He would surrender with Captain Brown in the engine house at Harpers Ferry, and would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown while his still-Quaker brother Barclay Coppoc was eluding capture. He was sentenced on November 2. From prison before his hanging, he wrote his adoptive mother that he was
                     "sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun."

He was hung with John Edwin Cook on December 16, 1859 and a day later his brother turned up at home in Iowa (he also would soon be disowned). The body of Edwin Coppoc was buried in Winona IA after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem OH).

 Doctor Martin Robison Delany (to be provided later)

Dr. Martin Robison Delany. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, Doctor Delany, the Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the "Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States," as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

 Frederick Douglass, Unindicted Co-Conspirator (to be provided later)

Waldo Emerson urged Frederick Douglass early on, to make himself into the General Toussaint Louverture of the North American continent. When Captain John Brown made a speech offering himself as the leader for the forces of freedom in "Bleeding Kansas", Douglass stood in the audience and endorsed Brown and his mission despite the unpleasant fact that the plan of the abolitionists was to permanently exclude all persons of color, whether free or enslaved, from that new state. When the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was raided, his role was intended to be the raising aloft of the sword of General George Washington and the generaling of the black forces. His involvement in this raid was acceptable to such personages as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher only because his blood had been mixed with white it was removed to a degree from its original "low animal condition" (the Reverend’s category, the Reverend’s words) of blackness. At the very last moment Douglass perceived that the prospects of the raid were for either failure or betrayal, and fled by way of Canada to England.

 Ralph Waldo Emerso, Unindicted Co-Conspirator (to be provided later)

Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur of race war, recommended to Frederick Douglass in 1844 that he become the liberator of his people on the North American continent, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture. "Let me hold your coat while some white man kills you," or something to that effect.We only know about this because Henry Thoreau rushed down to Boston right after the lecture, and had the lecture printed up as a pamphlet — after which there was no lying about the provocation that had been made and so all Emerson could do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present.

 Hugh Forbes (to be provided later)

Captain John Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the "Subterranean Pass Way," was that the escaped, armed slaves were to "swarm" into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular, the Scottish adventurer Hugh Forbes, Brown’s onetime principal lieutenant, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another country. Evidently the two planners parted company over issues such as this after Forbes had functioned in Tabor, Iowa as the leader of military training for the recruits, and then Forbes attempted blackmail. When not offered a payoff, he wrote long, detailed letters to congressmen and to others, and it is one of the unresolved issues, how anyone in high office in Washington DC could have avoided knowing in advance that Brown was plotting a strike of some sort against slavery.

 George B. Gill (to be provided later)

 The Reverend James Gloucester (to be provided later)

The Reverend James Gloucester of Brooklyn.

 Shields Green (to be provided later)

Shields Green was an escapee from South Carolina who had served as clothes cleaner in Rochester, New York (his business card there declared "I make no promise that I am unable to perform") and acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Douglass. He was known as "Emperor," although how he obtained this nickname is not now known. He decided to go with John Brown when Douglass turned back at the stone quarry prior to the Harpers Ferry raid, saying to his boss "I believe I’ll go with the old man." He took part in the raid and then refused to speak during his trial. At the time of his hanging he was about 23 years of age. His cadaver would be dug up and used for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester VA. He, like John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

 James H. Harris (to be provided later)

 James H. Harris

 Lewis Hayden 

Lewis Hayden, a black leader in downtown Boston whose escape from Kentucky had been aided by Delia Webster in 1844. Eight years after escaping from slavery, he raised, as an act of gratitude and duty, a sum of $650, in order to ransom the Reverend Calvin Fairbanks out of the Kentucky State Prison at Frankfort, where the Reverend had been languishing under the accusation that he had assisted 47 slaves in their escape, and had served 14 years, and had been whipped and beaten. Just before the raid on Harpers Ferry, Hayden helped recruit Francis Jackson Meriam to carry a message and cash money to the hideout of  John Brown, and take part in that struggle.

 Albert Hazlett (to be provided later)

Albert Hazlett, born in Pennsylvania on September 21, 1837, did not take part in the fight at Harpers Ferry but, with  John Edwin Cook who had escaped from that fight by climbing a tree and who later identified him to the prosecutors, would be belatedly hanged. Before the raid he had worked on his brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and he had joined the others at Kennedy Farm in the early part of September 1859. He was arrested on October 22nd in Carlisle PA, near Chambersburg, where he was using the name "William Harrison," was extradited to Virginia, was tried and sentenced at the spring term of the Court, and was hanged on March 16, 1860. George B. Gill said that "I was acquainted with Hazlett well enough in Kansas, yet after all knew but little of him. He was with Montgomery considerably, and was with [ Aaron D. Stevens] on the raid in which Cruise was killed. He was a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and social feelings.... Brown got acquainted with him just before leaving " Bleeding Kansas"." To Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring he wrote on March 15, 1860, the eve of his execution, "Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause."

 "Charles P. Carter" (to be provided later)

 Richard J. Hinton (to be provided later)

Richard J. Hinton, abolitionist journalist whose opposition to slavery led him to transform himself into a gunslinger. Refer to: Richard J. Hinton, John Brown and His Men (NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894; Reprint NY: The Arno Press, 1968).

 Julia Ward Howe (to be provided later)

Julia Ward Howe was a white racist (nothing unusual about that) and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret "Six" finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of its activities.

 Thaddeus Hyatt (to be provided later)

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of " Bleeding Kansas" as a "free soil" or "Aryan Nation" enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear — and would be imprisoned for a period but ultimately would get away with this refusal.

 John Jones (to be provided later)

John Jones was a Chicago businessman. He and his wife Mary Richardson Jones were active Chicago abolitionists, agitating for the repeal of the Illinois Black Laws. (Not only did these laws obligate black Americans to prove that they were free in order to enter the state, but once they were in state these laws barred them not only from visiting white homes, but from owning any property or merchandise, or entering into any contracts.) John Brown stayed at his home.

 John Henry Kagi (to be provided later)

Although John Henry Kagi, the best educated of the raiders, was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era testify to his grounding. A debater, public speaker, stenographer, wannabee writer, and total abstainer from alcohol, he was cold in manner and rough in appearance. A nonparticipant in organized religion, he was an able man of business. He had been born on March 15, 1835, a son of the blacksmith for Bristolville OH in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). In 1854-1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown VA but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and had been compelled to return to Ohio under a pledge never to return. He had gone to Nebraska City in 1856 and been admitted to the bar. He then entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane’s parties and enlisted in Aaron D. Stevens’s ("Colonel Whipple’s") 2d Kansas Militia. In fighting in the town of Tecumseh in " Bleeding Kansas" he proved himself by killing at least one man, who had been coming after him with a club. After being captured by US troops he had been imprisoned at Lecompton and at Tecumseh, but was finally released. On January 31, 1857 he had been struck on the head with a gold-headed cane by a proslavery judge, drew his revolver and shot the judge in the groin, but Judge Elmore got off three shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long in recovering from these wounds, with his family in Ohio, he then returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. He bore the title of Secretary of War in the provisional government and was next in command to John Brown; he was also the adjutant. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner. At Harpers Ferry he was trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves trapped in a crossfire and John Henry Kagi was the first killed, his body being left to float in the river. [Eyal J. Naveh in Crown of Thorns: Political Martyrdom in America from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr. (NY: New York UP, 1990) described Kagi as black (Page 31: "Even though black followers of Brown, such as John Henry Kagi, were also executed in Virginia, for blacks, John Brown became the most famous martyr for their freedom."), but this was just another of the long series of tendentious but uncontested errors which make such literature so unreliable.]

 Amos Lawrence (to be provided later)

Amos Lawrence provided the large bulk of the investment capital needed by Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company for the purchase land in the new territory then well known as " Bleeding Kansas", needed in order to encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there as "decent antislavery" homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior

 Lewis Sheridan Leary (to be provided later)

Lewis Sheridan "Shad" Leary was a mulatto citizen of Oberlin, Ohio. He was descended from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who had fought in the Revolution under General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who had married a woman of mixed blood, partly African, partly of that Croatan Indian stock of North Carolina, which is believed by some to be lineally descended from the "lost colonists" left by John White on Roanoke Island in 1587. Leary was born at Fayetteville NC on March 17, 1835, and was therefore in his 25th year when killed during the raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Like his father, he was a saddler and harness-maker. In 1857 he had gone to Oberlin to live, marrying there and making the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harper’s Ferry, he left his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, his wife being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr. He was isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he was taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He was able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying "I am ready to die." A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free men of color, Leary, Copeland, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.

 William H. Leeman (to be provided later)

William H. Leeman was born on March 20, 1839 and was recruited in Maine as a 17-year-old very impressed with John Brown. Being of a rather wild disposition, he had early left his home in Maine. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell ME, he was working in a shoe factory in Haverhill MA at the age of 14. In 1856 he entered " Bleeding Kansas" with the second Massachusetts colony of that year, and became a member of Captain Brown’s "Volunteer Regulars" on September 9, 1856. He fought well at Osawatomie when but 17 years old. Owen Brown found him hard to control at Springdale IA. George B. Gill said of him that he had "a good intellect with great ingenuity." By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he had reached the age of 20. On October 17, 1859, the youngest of the raiders, he made a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to swim down the Potomac River but two militiamen caught up with him and shot him down on an islet in the river. His body would be used for target practice for hours by the drunken citizenry, until the hail of bullets pushed it into the current and it was carried downstream. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: "He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive."

 Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia (to be provided later)

 Francis Jackson Meriam (to be provided later)

Francis Jackson Meriam, grandson and namesake of the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson, was a young manic-depressive with but one good eye. He helped James Redpath collect materials in Haiti and across the American South for use in a book dedicated to John Brown and Redpath arranged for Meriam to join Brown’s guerrillas. He was not captured or killed at Harpers Ferry because he had been left in one of his fits of despair at the Kennedy farmhouse during the raid. After escaping through Shippensburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Concord, and the area of St. Catharines, Canada he served as a captain in the 3rd South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he urged wild schemes upon his superiors and sometimes attempt them. In an engagement under General Grant he received a serious leg wound. He died suddenly on November 28, 1865 in New-York.

 Edwin Morton (to be provided later)

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret "Six." He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with his family, and after the raid, while the congressional investigation was going on, he fled overseas and chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry David Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley.

 Charles Moffett (to be provided later)

Charles Moffett, a drifter from Iowa about whom little is known.

 Dangerfield Newby 

Dangerfield Newby, a free light mulatto, very tall and with a splendid physique, was serving as a sentinel at the Harpers Ferry bridge and was shot to death as he and the two white men with him retreated before the charge of the Jefferson Guards of Charles Town VA, coming across the Potomac from the Maryland side. He was not brought down by ball or bullet, but by a 6-inch spike being used as a musket projectile, which caught him in the throat and ripped him severely. Since neither of the two white men were shot, it appears that as a mulatto he was targeted. The body was beaten savagely, and its ears snipped off as trophies, and then a herd of hogs was driven up to root on it.

 Luke F. Parsons (to be provided later)

Luke F. Parsons, 22 years old and already a mercenary fighter seasoned in " Bleeding Kansas", a petty thief in need of a paycheck and a legitimating excuse.

 Richard Realf (to be provided later)

Richard Realf was a 23-year-old Englishman, the son of a rural constable. In 1852 he had put out a collection of poetry, Guesses at the Beautiful, and in 1854, after giving up being the lover of Lady Noell Byron, widow of George Gordon, Lord Byron, he was led to the United States of America by "instincts" which he characterized as "democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical." He had been introduced to John Brown at the end of November 1857 in Lawrence in " Bleeding Kansas" while working as a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette. It has been John Edwin Cook who had persuaded him to sign up with Brown’s god-squad.

 James Redpath (to be provided later)

James Redpath, crusading journalist out to make a buck in the best way.

 George J. Reynolds 

George J. Reynolds was a mulatto between the red and black races who worked as a coppersmith. He had guilty advance knowledge but didn't go along on the Harpers Ferry raid.

 Richard Richardson (to be provided later)

Richard Richardson, a fugitive slave from Lexington, Missouri who had joined John Brown in southern Iowa, was going through that unfortunate but now well-understood initial period of reaction to freedom in which a former slave, accustomed to servitude and unaccustomed to self-origination, attaches himself to some authoritative white man who is able with courtesy to make use of him.

 Judge Thomas and Mary Ellen Russell (to be provided later)

Mary Ellen Russell visited John Brown in jail a few weeks before his execution. She said that although she had never approved of his violent methods, she admired him as a man of vision and idealism. Brown had been friends with the Russells for years, and had stayed at their home on several occasions despite the fact that Thomas Russell was a prominent member of the Massachusetts judiciary. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret "Six" would allege long after the raid on Harpers Ferry that "Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9" to Judge Russell.

 Stephen Smith (to be provided later)

Stephen Smith, lumber dealer of Philadelphia PA.

 Lysander Spooner (to be provided later)

The anarchist Boston attorney Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith in January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast, at threat of execution should Brown be executed.

 Aaron D. Stevens (to be provided later)

Aaron D. Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, born in Lisbon CT on March 15, 1831, had run away from home in 1847 at the age of 16 to serve with a Massachusetts volunteer regiment in Mexico. He made himself proficient with the sword. At Taos NM in May 1855, at well over six feet in height, he received a sentence of death for "mutiny, engaging in a drunken riot, and assaulting Major George A.H. Blake" of the 1st US Dragoons. This was commuted by President Pierce to three years hard labor but he escaped from Fort Leavenworth in 1856, 1st finding refuge with the Delaware tribe and then joining the Kansas Free State militia of James Lane under the name "Whipple." He became Colonel of the 2d Kansas Militia and met Brown on August 7, 1856 at the Nebraska line when Lane’s Army of the North marched into " Bleeding Kansas". He became a devoted follower. He was a spiritualist. At Harpers Ferry, when Brown sent this middleaged man out along with his son Watson Brown to negotiate under a flag of truce, he received four bullets and was taken alive. The never-married Stevens was of old Puritan stock, and his great-grandfather had been a captain in the Revolutionary army. Because of a relationship with Rebecca B. Spring of the Eagleswood social experiment near Perth Amboy NJ, after his execution on March 16th he would be buried there alongside Albert Hazlett. According to George B. Gill, writing after his death, "Stevens — how gloriously he sang! His was the noblest soul I ever knew. Though owing to his rash, hasty way, I often found occasion to quarrel with him more so than with any of the others, and though I liked [ John Henry Kagi] better than any man I ever knew, our temperaments being adapted to each other, yet I can truly say that Stevens was the most noble man that I ever knew."

 Stewart Taylor (to be provided later)

Stewart Taylor, the only raider not of American birth, had been born on October 29, 1836 at Uxbridge in Canada. He became a wagonmaker and in 1853 he went to Iowa, where in 1858 he became acquainted with John Brown through George B. Gill. He was a spiritualist. A relative, Jacob L. Taylor of Pine Orchard, Canada West, wrote to Richard J. Hinton on April 23, 1860 that he had been "heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause. An excellent debater and very fond of studying history. He stayed at home, in Canada, for the winter of 1858-1859, and then went to Chicago, thence to Bloomington IL, and thence to Harper’s Ferry. He was a very good phonographer [stenographer], rapid and accurate. He was overcome with distress when, getting out of communication with the John Brown movement, he thought for a time that he was to be left out."

 Henry David Thoreau (to be provided later)

When, in 1844, Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur, recommended to Frederick Douglass’s face that, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture, he fashion himself into the liberator of his people and initiate on the North American continent a servile insurrection or race war, it was Henry Thoreau who after the lecture rushed this information right down to Boston, and had a pamphlet printed up, after which there was no way to dissimulate about the provocation that had been made — and so all Emerson was able to do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present. (We, of course, have credited Emerson’s cover story, not because there is any corroboration for it but because ... well, he’s Emerson, and he wouldn’t lie to us.)

 Charles Plummer Tidd (to be provided later)

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo, Maine in 1834 and had emigrated to Kansas in 1856 with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter of Worcester in search of excitement. After joining John Brown’s party at Tabor in 1857 he became one of the followers of "Shubel Morgan" who returned to " Bleeding Kansas" in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857-1858 encampment of the Brown forces in the Iowa Territory, he "ruined" a Quaker girl and the other members of the team had to sneak him away from Springdale IA during the night. Nevertheless, the group obtained some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. He and John E. Cook were particularly warm friends. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County PA. He visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and took part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he was able to enlist under the name "Charles Plummer" and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he died of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island. (This was a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates.) Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne NC.

 Eli Thayer (to be provided later)

Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur who believed in "doing well by doing good," formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to purchase land in the new territory then well known as " Bleeding Kansas" and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such "decent antislavery" homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. Thayer would comment in retrospect, about the antebellum abolitionists with whom he had been affiliated, that they had constituted "a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it." He would instance that there was never "any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises."

 Dauphin Adolphus Thompson (to be provided later)

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, brother of William Thompson and a North Elba neighbor of the family of John Brown, was born April 17, 1838. He was "very quiet, with fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes." His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown and his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. The two brothers were shot dead at Harpers Ferry.

 William Thompson (to be provided later)

William Thompson was born in New Hampshire in August 1833, the son of Roswell Thompson. In Fall 1858 he married a Mary Brown who was not related to the family of John Brown. His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown; his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. He had started for " Bleeding Kansas" in 1856 but upon meeting the Brown sons returned with them to North Elba. Along with his brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, he took part in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the two of them were shot dead. When Captain Brown sent him out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body into the Potomac River.

 Harriet Tubman (to be provided later)

Harriet Tubman was negotiated with by John Brown for participation in the raid on the federal arsenal. She mistrusted these men and had persistent dreams in which Brown and his sons appeared as serpents. The attack had been scheduled to occur on the 4th of July, symbolic of national birth. At the last moment she alleged she was ill, and for this reason as well as delays in the deliveries of supplies, the attack needed to be postponed for months. On the day of the actual attack at Harpers Ferry she had a premonition that it would fail.

 Henry Watson (to be provided later)

Henry Watson, barber of Chambersburg PA involved both with John Brown and with Frederick Douglass.

 Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia (to be provided later)

He probably knew a whole lot more about the prospect of servile insurrection than he was willing to let on. The one thing he could not afford was a class war in which the poor white men of the south rose up and slaughtered the resistant black slaves in order to destroy the wealth, and the primacy, of the detested Southern white propertied class.

George B. Gill had come to " Bleeding Kansas" in 1857 after whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and had there been recruited by John Brown. During the year before the raid, Captain Brown sent Gill to visit a black con artist named Mr. Reynolds who persuaded Gill that he had gone through the South organizing and had brought into existence in areas of the South a militant organization of black men and women. Pointing out to Gill that Southern newspapers carried numerous references to the death of a favorite slave, he alleged that these were leaders of liberation plots who were being discovered and offed. Southern blacks were ready and needed only to be given a cue. There is evidence that several slaves from the Harpers Ferry area did participate in the raid itself, but returned hastily to their plantations when it became obvious that the raid was a failure. Several fires were set in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid, probably by slaves and free Negroes. Richard Hinton estimates that $10,000,000 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the year 1859. Census figures show that between 1850 and 1860 there was almost a 10% decline in blacks in the three counties surrounding Harpers Ferry while the total number of blacks in Maryland and Virginia was increasing by about 4%.

 The first casualty of war is Truth. 

(Stay Tuned, Much More is Coming!)