Lewis Sherrard Leary was born in slavery in North Carolina and also reared in Oberlin, where he worked as a harness-maker. An Oberlin friend testified: “He called again afterward, and told me he would like to keep to the amount I had given him, and would like a certain amount more for a certain purpose, and was very chary in his communications to me as to how he was to use it, except that he did inform me that he wished to use it in aiding slaves to escape. Circumstances just then transpired which had interested me contrary to any thought I ever had in my mind before. I had had exhibited to me a daguerreotype of a young lady, a beautiful appearing girl, who I was informed was about eighteen years of age....”[[207]] But here Senator Mason of the Inquisition scented danger, and we can only guess the reasons that sent Leary to his death. He was said to be Brown’s first recruit outside the Kansas band.
John Anderson, a free Negro from Boston, was sent by Lewis Hayden and started for the front. Whether he arrived and was killed, or was too late has never been settled.
The seventh man of possible Negro blood was Jeremiah Anderson. He is listed with the Negroes in all the original reports of the Chatham Convention and was, as a white Virginian who saw him says, “of middle stature, very black hair and swarthy complexion. He was supposed by some to be a Canadian mulatto.”[[208]] He was descended from Virginia slaveholders who had moved north and was born in Indiana. He was twenty-six years old.
Of the white men there were, first of all, John Brown and his family, consisting of three sons, and two brothers of his eldest daughter’s husband, William and Dauphin Thompson.
Oliver Brown was a boy not yet twenty-one, though tall and muscular, and had just been married. Watson was a man of twenty-five, tall and athletic; while Owen was a large, red-haired prematurely aged man of thirty-five, partially crippled, good-tempered and cynical. The Thompsons were neighbors of John Brown and part of a brood of twenty children. The Brown family and their intermarried Anne Brown says that William, who was twenty-six years of age, was “kind, generous-hearted, and helpful to others.” Dauphin, a boy of twenty-two, was, she writes, “very quiet, with a fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes. He always seemed like a very good girl.”[[209]]
The three notable characters of the band were Kagi, Stevens and Cook, the reformer, the soldier, and the poet. Kagi’s family came from the Shenandoah Valley. He was twenty-four, had a good English education and was a newspaper reporter in Kansas, where he earnestly helped the free state cause. He had strong convictions on the subject of slavery and was willing to risk all for them. “You will all be killed,” cried a friend who heard his plan. “Yes, I know it, Hinton, but the result will be worth the sacrifice.” Hinton adds: “I recall my friend as a man of personal beauty, with a fine, well-shaped head, a voice of quiet, sweet tones, that could be penetrating and cutting, too, almost to sharpness.”[[210]] Anderson writes that Kagi “left home when a youth, an enemy to slavery, and brought as his gift offering to freedom three slaves, whom he piloted to the North. His innate hatred of the institution made him a willing exile from the state of his birth, and his great abilities, natural and acquired, entitled him to the position he held in Captain Brown’s confidence. Kagi was indifferent to personal appearance; he often went about with slouched hat, one leg of his pantaloons properly adjusted, and the other partly tucked into his high boot-top; unbrushed, unshaven, and in utter disregard of ‘the latest style.’”[[211]]
Stevens was a handsome six-foot Connecticut soldier of twenty-eight years of age, who had thrashed his major for mistreating a fellow soldier and deserted from the United States army. He was active in Kansas and soon came under John Brown’s discipline.
“Why did you come to Harper’s Ferry?” asked a Virginian.
He replied: “It was to help my fellow men out of bondage. You know nothing of slavery—I know, a great deal. It is the crime of crimes. I hate it more and more the longer I live. Even since I have been lying in this cell, I have heard the crying of 3 slave-children torn from their parents.”[[212]]
Cook was also a Connecticut man of twenty-nine years, tall, blue-eyed, golden-haired and handsome, but a far different type from Stevens. He was talkative, impulsive and restless, eager for adventure but hardly steadfast. He followed John Brown as he would have followed anyone else whom he liked, dreaming his dreams, rushing ahead in the face of danger and shrinking back appalled and pitiful before the grim face of death. He was the most thoroughly human figure in the band.