CHAPTER XLII. JOHN BROWN’S RAID ON HARPER’S FERRY.
The year 1859 will long be memorable for the bold attempt of John Brown and his companions to burst the bolted door of the Southern house of bondage, and lead out the captives by a more effectual way than they had yet known; an attempt in which, it is true, the little band of heroes dashed themselves to bloody death, but, at the same time, shook the prison walls from summit to foundation, and shot wild alarm into every tyrant heart in all the slave-land. What were the plans and purposes of the noble old man is not precisely known, and perhaps will never be; but whatever they were, there is reason to believe they had been long maturing,—brooded over silently and secretly, with much earnest thought, and under a solemn sense of religious duty.
Of the five colored men who were with the hero at the attack on Harper’s Ferry, only two, Shields Green and John A. Copeland, were captured alive. The first of these was a native of South Carolina, having been born in the city of Charleston, in the year 1832. Escaping to the North in 1857, he resided in Rochester, New York, until attracted by the unadorned eloquence and native magnetism of John Brown.
Shields Green was of unmixed blood, good countenance, bright eye, and small in figure. One of his companions in the Harper’s Ferry fight, says of Green, “He was the most inexorable of all our party; a very Turco in his hatred against the stealers of men. Wiser and better men no doubt there were, but a braver man never lived than Shields Green.”[53]
He behaved with becoming coolness and heroism at his execution, ascending the scaffold with a firm, unwavering step, and died as he had lived, a brave man, expressing to the last his eternal hatred to human bondage, prophesying that slavery would soon come to a bloody end.
John A. Copeland was from North Carolina, and was a mulatto of superior abilities, and a genuine lover of liberty and justice. He died as became one who had linked his fate with that of the hero of Harper’s Ferry.