While awaiting the execution of his sentence, Edwin wrote to Mrs. Brown, wife of his dead leader:
"I was with your sons when they fell. Oliver lived but a very few moments after he was shot. He spoke no word, but yielded calmly to his fate. Watson was shot at ten o'clock Monday morning and died about three o'clock Monday afternoon.... After we were taken prisoners he was placed in the guardhouse with me. He complained of the hardness of the bench on which he was lying. I begged hard for a bed for him, or even a blanket, but could obtain none. I took off my coat and placed it under him and held his head in my lap, in which position he died without a groan or struggle."
In a letter to friends in Iowa, under date of November 22d, three weeks before his execution, he wrote:
"Eleven of our little band are sleeping now in their bloody garments with the cold earth above them. Braver men never lived; truer men to their plighted word never banded together."
Rigidly true to their convictions were all these young heroes. Not one showed the white feather in the last hour. Serenely and without a quiver each of them met his cruel fate.
John Brown had trained up his men in the strictest discipline. Not a drop of liquor was allowed in his camp. Tobacco was tabooed. Profane language was forbidden.
These men were in deadly earnest and their asceticism attested their single-hearted fidelity to their cause. They were profoundly convinced that slavery was a national crime and that it was their patriotic duty, at whatever cost, to wipe that insufferable stigma from the land.
And who shall say that they were not right; or that they forfeited their brave lives in vain?
A few days before the gallows claimed him, John Brown wrote to his family, "I feel no consciousness of guilt and I am perfectly certain that very soon no member of the family will feel any possible disposition to blush on my account."
The Coppock brothers were typical of all the brave young abolitionists who banded together to strike a blow that rocked this nation as if Jehovah in his wrath had laid hold on it. Quaker lads, "grave, quiet, reserved, even rustic in their ways," they lived bravely up to their convictions and sealed their devotion to the cause of freedom with their precious young life blood.