“The privates shall be divided into bands or messes of seven each, numbering from one to eight, with a corporal to each, numbered like his band.
“Two bands will comprise a section. Sections will be numbered from one to four.
“A sergeant will be attached to each section, and numbered like it.
“Two sections will comprise a platoon. Platoons will be numbered one and two, and each commanded by a lieutenant designed by like number.”[[204]]
Four companies composed a battalion, four battalions a regiment, and four regiments a brigade.
So much for his resources and plans. Now for the men whom he chose as co-workers. The number of those who took part in the Harper’s Ferry raid is not known. Perhaps, including active slave helpers, there were about fifty. Seventeen Negroes, reported as probably killed, are wholly unknown, and those slaves who helped and escaped are also unknown. This leaves the twenty-two men usually regarded as making the raid. They fall, of course, into two main groups, the Negroes and the whites. Six or seven of the twenty-two were Negroes.
First in importance came Osborne Perry Anderson, a free-born Pennsylvania mulatto, twenty-four years of age. He was a printer by trade, “well educated, a man of natural dignity, modest, simple in character and manners.” He met John Brown in Canada. He wrote the most interesting and reliable account of the raid, and afterward fought in the Civil War.
Next came Shields Green, a full-blooded Negro from South Carolina, whence he had escaped from slavery, after his wife had died, leaving a living boy still in bondage. He was about twenty-four years old, small and active, uneducated but with natural ability and absolutely fearless. He met Brown at the home of Frederick Douglass, who says: “While at my house, John Brown made the acquaintance of a colored man who called himself by different names—sometimes ‘Emperor,’ at other times, ‘Shields Green’.... He was a fugitive slave, who had made his escape from Charleston, S. C.; a state from which a slave found it no easy matter to run away. But Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character. John Brown saw at once what ‘stuff’ Green ‘was made of,’ and confided to him his plans and purposes. Green easily believed in Brown, and promised to go with him whenever he should be ready to move.”[[205]]
Dangerfield Newby was a free mulatto from the neighborhood of Harper’s Ferry. He was thirty years of age, tall and well built, with a pleasant face and manner; he had a wife and seven children in slavery about thirty miles south of Harper’s Ferry. The wife was about to be sold south at this time, and was sold immediately after the raid. Newby was the spy who gave general information to the party, and lived out in the community until the night of the attack.
John A. Copeland was born of free Negro parents in North Carolina, reared in Oberlin and educated at Oberlin College. He was a straight-haired mulatto, twenty-two years old, of medium size, and a carpenter by trade. Hunter, the prosecuting attorney of Virginia, says: “From my intercourse with him I regarded him as one of the most respectable prisoners that we had.... He was a copper-colored Negro, behaved himself with as much firmness as any of them, and with far more dignity. If it had been possible to recommend a pardon for any of them, it would have been for this man Copeland, as I regretted as much, if not more, at seeing him executed than any other one of the party!”[[206]]