GO TO LIST OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN HARPERS FERRY

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FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

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, Virginia. 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.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

THOSE INVOLVED, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY

SECRET “SIX”

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. No No No Finance white

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 Yes Yes Captain or Lt. 26 white

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 ? ? Private < 30 of color

John Anderson, a free black youth from Boston allegedly killed at Harpers Ferry. Nothing is known as to who he was, other than that he was young, or where he came from, other than from Boston — and it is even possible that actually there had been no such person as this in John Brown’s company. (The John Anderson we do know about had an entirely different life trajectory, in Canada.)

Osborn Perry Anderson Yes No No Private 29 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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.

John Albion Andrew No white

Despite the fact that John Albion Andrew was a prominent Massachusetts politician, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would indicate long after the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s “general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Governor Andrew.

Henry Ward Beecher No No No Propaganda white

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of his Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” and to stamp upon that crate the term of art BIBLES. The Reverend’s personal attitude toward American blacks was that although those like Frederick Douglass whose blood had become partly mingled with the blood of whites were worthy of consideration as human beings, those who yet remained of pure African stock were still in such a “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness that such consideration as human beings would be inappropriate.

Ann Brown No No No Supporter white

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 No No No Supporter white

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 No No No Supporter 38 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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.

John Brown Yes Multiple Yes Commander white wounds

John Brown, “Captain” John “Shubel Morgan” “Isaac Smith” Brown.

John Brown, Jr. No No No Supporter 38 white

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. During the Civil War he served as Captain of Company K of the 7th Kansas Cavalry. He and his family would then find permanent safe haven on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Martha Brewster Brown No No No Supporter white

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 Yes Yes Captain 20 white

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, was born in Franklin, Ohio 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 Yes No No Captain 35 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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, Ohio. With a withered arm, he had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers and was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit and his endurance that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader managed to make it out. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names on an oil-well crew in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He was the only one of the 5 escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war. He would never marry. He would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with 2 of his brothers, and then migrate west, and would be the final survivor of the raiders when he would die on January 9, 1891 at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak” near Pasadena, California. A marble monument marked the mountain grave, until during July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the grave was not a registered historical landmark, and not in a cemetery, there would be no investigation.

Salmon Brown No 23 white

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. 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 Yes Yes Captain 24 white

Watson Brown, born at Franklin, Ohio on October 7, 1835, got married with Isabella M. Thompson during September 1856. His son by this union would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive him, because he was sent out by his father John Brown to negotiate at the federal arsenal 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, expiring on October 18th. Recovering the 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.

John E. Cook Yes No Yes Captain 29 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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, Connecticut, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College on account of some student 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 had gotten married with a Chambersburg, Pennsylvania woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18th, 1859. After being sent out by Captain Brown to collect weapons, and having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching the events transpire, and after having evaded capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food and was captured on October 25th, 8 miles from Chambersburg. 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 Samuel C. Young, a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting, 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 himself by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas.” Despite his confession, and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end, one of the last, be also hanged for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, on December 16th.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color

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, Virginia. 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 Yes No No Private < 21 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Iowa, 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 Yes Unwounded Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

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, Iowa after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio).

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. No No No Enabler white

Treason being punished as what it is, why would the downtown Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. allow himself to become legal counsel to a “Secret Six” committee that was funding the activities of Captain John Brown, as that loose cannon prepared to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia? He was going to be implicated as having obviously had guilty prior knowledge, and was obviously making himself of necessity a prime candidate for the noose. As the going got hot he would make himself unavailable for prosecution –by venturing on a luxury trip around the globe– but the issue is not how he might extricate himself from this, but why he would have so endangered himself.

Martin Robison Delany No No No Supporter of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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 No No No Supporter 41 of color

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 Emerson No No No Supporter white

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 No No No Lieutenant white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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

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 “mumper” (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%.

Reverend James Gloucester No Financial support of color

The Reverend James Newton Gloucester of Brooklyn.

Shields Green Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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, Virginia. 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 3 fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

James H. Harris

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 Yes No Yes Capt. or Lt. < 30 white

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 22d in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 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.”

The Reverend Thomas Went- No White worth Higginson HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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 therefore 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 the accused — this was an expedition Henry Thoreau would oppose, asserting that to the contrary Captain Brown’s highest and best purpose was to be hung.

Richard J. Hinton

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).

WHAT TO TAKE: Let your trunk, if you have to buy one, be of moderate size and of the strongest make. Test it by throwing it from the top of a three-storied house; if you pick it up uninjured, it will do to go to Kansas. Not otherwise. — James Redpath and Richard J. Hinton, HAND-BOOK TO KANSAS TERRITORY, 1859, as quoted on page 3

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day, to buy enough Sharp’s rifles to arm 200 men to the teeth in “Bleeding Kansas.” 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 (black Americans against white), would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 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 sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Julia Ward Howe No White

Julia Ward Howe was a racist 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 that committee’s agendas.

Thaddeus Hyatt No white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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 No Support white

John Jones was a Chicago businessman of color (John Brown stayed at his home). He and his wife Mary Richardson Jones were active 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 Henry Kagi Yes Yes Secretary of War, 24 white adjutant

Although John Henry Kagi was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era reveal him as the best educated of the raiders. 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, Ohio in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). During 1854/1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown, Virginia but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and been compelled to return to Ohio with 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 3 shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long with his family in Ohio recovering from these wounds, but 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 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got ca in crossfire and 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 No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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 Yes Yes Private 25 of color

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 Yes Yes Captain < 21 white

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, Iowa. 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.”

Francis Jackson Merriam Yes No No Private < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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.

Charles Moffett Yes

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

Edwin Morton No

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 Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley.

Dangerfield Newby Yes Yes bridge sentinel 39 light mulatto

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.

The Reverend Theodore No White Parker HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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 4 or 5 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 the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 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.

Luke F. Parsons

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

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

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

G.J. Reynolds

George J. Reynolds, a light mulatto blacksmith or coppersmith of Sandusky, Ohio, from Virginia although saying he was from Vermont, with native American as well as black African heritage, age 35 at the time of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and active in the Underground Railroad. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Richard Richardson of color

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 Russell No White

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.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn No White

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 5 of the white Secret “Six” conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies for servile insurrection in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (John Brown, who had himself buried a wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to 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 No White

The immensely wealthy “H. Ross Perot” political figure of that era was a former Millerite millennialist: Gerrit Smith. In this American’s mansion outside Syracuse, New York, 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 of William Miller not having arrived on schedule, Smith had become determined to, as he put it, “make himself a colored man” –he desired to explore his inner blackness– and thus he befriended Frederick Douglass (Smith would be Douglass’s friend, that is, up to the point at which he would discover that black Americans were inherently racially inferior to white Americans and thus unworthy of 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 that the probable result of their attempt to incite a servile insurrection of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces. These 5 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, toward the generation of a sectional civil war. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith, lumber dealer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lysander Spooner

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.

George Luther Stearns

George Luther Stearns, a Boston manufacturer of lead pipe and the secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, 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 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in servile insurrection in order to foment a sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Aaron Dwight Stevens Yes Badly Yes Captain 28 white wounded

Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, born in Lisbon, Connecticut 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 in May 1855, 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 Franklin Pierce to 3 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, New Jersey, 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 Yes Yes Private 23 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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.”

Eli Thayer No

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 Yes Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

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 Yes Yes Captain? < 30 white

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.

Henry David Thoreau No white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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 Mr. Emerson and wouldn’t lie to us.)

Charles Plummer Tidd Yes No No Captain 25 white

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo ME 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, Iowa 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. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Harriet Tubman No of color

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 No of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

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

etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

1834

August 15, Friday: John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was born in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Aboard the Pilgrim in Boston Harbor, the sailor Richard Henry Dana, Jr. began to appreciate how very much he had to learn.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: The next day we were employed in preparations for sea, reeving studding-sail gear, crossing royal yards, putting on chafing gear, and taking on board our powder. On the following night, I stood my first watch. I remained awake nearly all the first part of the night from fear that I might not hear when I was called; and when I went on deck, so great were my ideas of the importance of my trust, that I walked regularly fore and aft the whole length of the vessel, looking out over the bows and taffrail at each turn, and was not a little surprised at the coolness of the old salt whom I called to take my place, in stowing himself snugly away under the long boat, for a nap. That was a sufficient look-out, he thought, for a fine night, at anchor in a safe harbor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

1842

John Anderson Copeland, Jr.’s parents removed to Oberlin, Ohio. He would be for some time a student in the preparatory department of Oberlin College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

1857

The mulatto Lewis Sheridan Leary went to Oberlin, Ohio to live.

(He would marry there and make the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry, he would leave behind his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, she 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., a student at Oberlin College. He would get isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi

in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men would make a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they would get themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he would be taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He would be able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.)

Charles Plummer Tidd joined John Brown’s party at Tabor, Kansas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

(He would become one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who would return to Kansas in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857-1858 encampment of the Brown forces in the Iowa Territory, he would “ruin” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team would need to sneak him away from Springdale, Iowa during the night. Nevertheless, the group would obtain 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. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Tidd and John E. Cook would be 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, Pennsylvania. He would visit Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and take 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 would be able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he would die of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island, 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, North Carolina.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

1858

September 13, Monday: In Oberlin, Ohio, gas street lights were beginning to be provided by a private gas factory on what is now Vine Street, run by Samuel Plum. But was that fine technological innovation the real big news of the day in this town? No, for on the morning of this day, John Price, an 18-year-old black fugitive slave who had been staying at the house of James Armstrong, a black laborer who often boarded fugitives, while attempting to find work in the local area, was “hired” to “harvest potatoes” by Shakespeare Boynton, son of a wealthy Oberlin landholder. Boynton had been deputized by a group of Kentucky slavecatchers and was in cahoots with two deputies from Columbus, Ohio! These deputies intercepted the buggy in which Boynton and the young black man were riding and with guns and knives forced the young black man into their own carriage. News of this reached Oberlin about noon and a large crowd of black and white Oberlinians, both townies and students, rode off toward the nearby town of Wellington, where the captive was being held at a hotel. This was no mean posse, for it included Charles Langston, brother of the black attorney John Mercer Langston, and James M. Fitch, the bookseller who was superintendent of the Oberlin Sunday School, as well as Professor Henry C. Peck and preparatory student John Anderson Copeland, Jr.

John Watson, a grocer, arrived in Wellington about 2PM, sounding the alarm by hollering “Kidnappers!” (he meant, by “kidnappers,” of course, these approaching law-defying rescuers, rather than these righteous slave-catching officials who were merely implementing the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Act). The slavecatchers secreted their slave in the attic of the Wadsworth Hotel (The Herrick Memorial Library in Wellington now occupies the site of this hotel) and hid, while a posse was collected to guard the doors of the hotel. This mob of Oberlinians rode up and demanded John Price’s release. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

Here is a later publicity photograph of the rescuers in their finest fettle:

They must have made a fine sight, churning about on the street in front of the hotel on their snorting steeds! Meanwhile, Charles Langston, John Watson, and O.B. Wall were fruitlessly attempting to obtain legal redress from the stonewalling village constable, alleging that a crime was being committed and seeking a writ of habeas corpus. There was bargaining, the slave catcher and the federal marshal trying to allege that their prisoner was a fugitive slave while the townspeople objected that no proper warrant had been shown to any local magistrate. Charles Langston attempted to calm the crowd, and went inside to talk with Jacob Lowe, one of the deputies. Realizing that the kidnappers had no intention of giving up their captive, he threatened that “we will have him anyhow.” Wilson Evans, John Copeland, Jr., and Jerry Fox rushed the door guards and some of the rescuers got inside the hotel. During a struggle inside, Richard Winsor, a theological student, was able to climb a ladder placed against the back of the structure and help John Price to a buggy, and everyone rushed back to Oberlin. The rescuers secreted John Price in the home of Oberlin College President James Fairchild,

to be later taken across the border into Canada. Thirty-seven of them would face arrest, including Professor Peck and student John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Over the course of their trial, in solidarity with Charles Langston who was sentenced to 20 days and Simeon Bushnell who was sentenced to 60 days, they would HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

refuse to post any bail and remain in the Cleveland lockup. These “jail-birds,” as they preferred to be known, would put out from the jail a newspaper, The Rescuer. While they were being held, Professor Peck was permitted to preach from his cell, and Sunday School children trooped through the corridors of the institution to view these happenings with their own eyes (this is what is known technically as “bad press”). Eventually the slavecatchers from Kentucky and from Columbus, Ohio would be arrested by state officials on a charge of kidnapping and, in return for the charge being dropped, would agree to drop the charges against the rescuers. Thus, on July 7, 1859, everyone except Simeon Bushnell, who was still serving out his 60-day sentence, would be able to return to Oberlin and be the guests of honor at a great celebration. When Simeon Bushnell also would be released and would be able to return on July 11, 1859, he also would be greeted by a hailing crowd of his fellow citizens.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

September 13. P. M.–To Annursnack. Solidago puberula, apparently in prime and handsome, roadside, Colburn’s Hill. I noticed the black willows quite imbrowned on the 10th, and the button-bushes beginning to look yellowish. A. Hosmer is pleased because from the cupola of his new barn he can see a new round-topped mountain in the northwest. Is curious to know what one it is. Says that if he lived as near Annursnack as Heywood does, he should go up it once a week, but he supposes that Heywood does not go up it more than once a year. What is that grass still in bloom a foot or more in height in Heywood’s potato-field, some fifty rods west of houseleek? It is somewhat like what I have wrongly called Danthonia spicata, but with a longer and a round spike, etc., etc. Vide press. There is a man there mowing the Panicum Crusgalli, which is exceedingly rank and dense, completely concealing the potatoes, which have never been hoed, it was so wet. He saves this grass and says the cattle like it well. I notice that the large ant-hills, though they prevent bushes and ferns from growing where they are built, keeping open a space four to seven feet wide in their midst, do not keep out grass, but they are commonly little grassy mounds with bare tops. Looking from the top of Annursnack, the aspect of the earth generally is still a fresh green, especially the woods, but many dry fields, where apparently the June-grass has withered uncut, are a very pale tawny or lighter still. It is fit that some animals should be nearly of this color. The cougar would hardly be HDT WHAT? INDEX

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observed stealing across these plains. In one place I still detect the ruddiness of sorrel. Euphorbia hypericifolia still, and gone to seed, on the top of Annursnack. From many a barn these days I hear the sound of the flail. For how many generations this sound will continue to be heard here! At least until they discover a new way of separating the chaff from the wheat. Saw one raking cranberries on the 10th; rather early.

September 13: A small dense flock of wild pigeons [American Passenger Pigeons Ectopistes migratorius] dashes by over the side of the hill, from west to east, –perhaps from Wetherbee’s to Brooks, for I see the latter’s pigeon-place. They make a dark slate-gray impression. Fringed gentian out well, on easternmost edge of the Painted-Cup Meadows, by wall.[FOOTNOTE] Saw a striped snake run into the wall, and just before it disappeared heard a loud sound like a hiss! I think it could hardly have been made by its tail among leaves. The squirrels know better than to open unsound hazelnuts. At most they only peep into them. I see some on the walls with a little hole gnawed in them, enough to show that they are empty. Muskmelons and squashes are turning yellow in the gardens, and ferns in the swamps. Hear many warbling vireos these mornings. Many yellow butterflies in road and fields all the country over.

[FOOTNOTE] Caroline Pratt tells me the 20th that her father found it out full a fortnight before that date HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

July 7, Thursday: The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the Secret “Six” conspiracy wrote to Gerrit Smith that “I could not live with myself if I thought I were knowingly sending Brown [!] in the way of certain death.”1

Eventually the slavecatchers from Kentucky and from Columbus who had trapped the fugitive John Price had been arrested by Ohio officials and charged with kidnapping and, in return for that charge being dropped, had agreed to drop their charges against the rescuers, including Professor Henry C. Peck of Oberlin College. Thus,

on this day, everyone except Simeon Bushnell, who was still serving out his 60-day sentence, was able to return to Oberlin, Ohio. There they were the guests of honor at a great celebration. Bonfires lined the streets that led to the church in which this celebration was held. Even their Cleveland jailer got introduced during the celebrations, and was able to go on about how he had been acting as the prisoners’ “postmaster.” All sang the “Marseillaise.” (When Simeon Bushnell also would be released and would be able to return on July 11, 1859,

1. Later, with the benefit of hindsight and with the benefit of self-legitimation, it would become clear to Higginson that his co- conspirators Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” conspiracy had, unlike him, 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 other 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. But not him, he believed in the light of his Monday-morning quarterbacking, and he dug out this old letter to Smith to prove how unaware he himself had been of the outcome to be anticipated for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. (However, if you look carefully at this quoted letter, you see that Higginson was not agonizing over the fate to which he had unknowingly subjected a number of anonymous black men, but was, rather, agonizing over the fate to which he had unknowingly subjected one particular named white friend: “…if I thought I were knowingly sending Brown in the way of certain death.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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he also would be greeted by a hailing crowd of his fellow citizens.)2

July 7: P.M.–To Great Meadows. P. Hutchinson says he once found a wood duck’s nest in a hollow maple by Heywood’s meadow (now by railroad), and tried to get the young as soon as hatched, but they were gone too soon for him. On the first, or westerly, part of the Great Meadows, i. e. the firmer parts and the bank, I find, mixed with sedges of different kinds, much red-top (coloring the surface extensively), fowl-meadow (just begun to bloom and of a purplish lead-color, taller than the red-top), the slender purple-spiked panic, Agrostis (perennans? or scabra??). In the wet, or main, part, beside various other sedges,–as [CAREX] stellulata, lanuginosa, stricta, etc., etc.,–wool-grass, now in flower, a sedge (apparently C. ampullacea var. utriculata toward Holbrook’s) thicker-culmed than wool-grass, but softer and not round, with fertile spikes often three inches long, and slender. A great part of the meadow is covered with, I think, either this or wood grass (not in flower). I am not certain which prevails, but I think wool-grass, which does not flower. Also, mixed with these and lower, dulichium, Eleocharis palustris, etc., etc. [Vide back, June 16th.] First notice pontederia out; also tephrosia, how long? The note of the bobolink has begun to sound rare?

2. We know definitely that Oberlin College preparatory student John Anderson Copeland, Jr. did not go to jail with the other rescuers. The rumor was that he had escorted John Price to Canada and was staying there with his adopted sister. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Do not young nighthawks run pretty soon after being hatched? I hear of their being gone very soon. Bathing at Barrett’s Bay, I find it to be composed in good part of sawdust, mixed with sand. There is a narrow channel on each side, deepest on the south. The potamogeton is eight feet long there in eighteen inches of water. I learn from measuring on Baldwin’s second map that the river (i. e. speaking of that part below Framingham) is much the straightest in the lower part of its course, or from Ball’s Hill to the Dam. It winds most in the broad meadows. The greatest meander is in the Sudbury meadows. From upper end of Sudbury Canal to Sherman’s Bridge direct is 558 rods (1 mile 238 rods); by thread of river, 1000 rods (3 miles 40 rods), or nearly twice as far. But, though meandering, it is straighter in its general course than would be believed. These nearly twenty-three miles in length (or 16+ direct) are contained within a breadth of two miles twenty-six rods; i. e., so much it takes to meander in. It can be plotted by the scale of one thousand feet to an inch on a sheet of paper seven feet one and one quarter inches long by eleven inches wide. The deep and lake-like are the straightest reaches. The straightest reach within these limits above Ball’s Hill is from Fair Haven Pond to Clamshell Hill. I observed in Maine that the dam at the outlet of Chesuncook Lake, some twenty miles off, had raised the water so as to kill the larches on the Umbazookskus extensively. They were at least four or five miles up the Umbazookskus. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September: Uniforms were distributed to Boston’s policemen.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr., a student at Oberlin College, was enlisted for Captain John Brown by Lewis Sheridan Leary, his uncle, who at that time was also in Oberlin, Ohio.

uncle nephew

To get the two of them to Harpers Ferry, the uncle was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg. He would have to leave behind his wife and 6-month-old child at Oberlin, keeping her in ignorance as to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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purpose of his trip.

He would be isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men would make a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they would get themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, the uncle would be taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning, while the nephew would attempt to swim for it in the river (he wouldn’t make it either). The uncle would be able to dictate messages to his family back in Oberlin and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” (The child left behind would subsequently be educated with financial assistance from James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 25, Tuesday: New-York Herald headline: THE EXPOSURE OF THE NIGGER-WORSHIPING INSURRECTIONISTS.

John N. Merriman to Governor Henry A. Wise: Collectors Office Georgetown So.Ca. Oct[o]b[e]r. 25. 1859 Sir, The desire to see specemins of those Weapons captured in the late insurrection at Harpers Ferry, has been manifested by several of our largest Planters and most prominent Citizens of this Town, and requested me, to petition your Excellency for a sample of the different Weapons; I therefore, in complying with the wishes of my fellow Citizens, would respectfully beg you, to send me Per Adams Express Co. in care of Messrs. Z & H. Ravenel & Co. in Charleston So.Ca. One of the captured Pikes, one do. Rifle, and one do. revolving Pistol— and to inform me of the time you require me to return same to you. In conclusion Sir, permit me to convey to you the high Esteem of the Citizens of this District for your Excellency, in quelling so promtly and efficiently a Movement, which treatned to desolate our Homes. I am Sir with the greatest Respect Your Obdt. Servant John N. Merriman Collector His Excellency Henry A. Wise Governor of Virginia In Virginia, John Brown, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., Edwin Coppoc, Shields Green, and Aaron D. Stevens (nearly dead anyway, needing to be propped up by the bailiffs of the court) were indicted for treason. The HDT WHAT? INDEX

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decision was reached, to try each of the accused separately.

During his portion of the trial Copeland would stand silent, refusing to participate in any manner.

Green Copeland Hazlett HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After evading capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades John E. Cook became reckless in his search for food and was captured by some local citizens (Claggett Fitzhugh and Dan Logan of Quincy) in Carlisle eight miles from Chambersburg PA, where Cook’s wife Mary V. Kennedy Cook resided.

As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet, and in a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of Samuel C. Young, a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting at Harper’s Ferry, 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 Cook would seek to save his neck 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 hang for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, one of the last to be taken to the gallows, on December 16th.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR OCTOBER 25th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 30, Sunday: The trial of John Brown concluded, with a finding of guilt. The separate trials of the others indicted, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., Edwin Coppoc, Shields Green, and Aaron D. Stevens, would begin, and would come to their conclusions, shortly.

Green Copeland Haslitt

Henry Thoreau notified Concord town officials that he would speak that evening on “The character of John Brown, now in the clutches of the slaveholder.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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KILLED OR WOUNDED BY THE INSURGENTS AT HARPERS FERRY

Heywood Shepherd black railroad porter Killed

Fontaine Beckham white railroad agent and mayor of Harpers Ferry Killed

G.W. Turner white resident of Jefferson County VA Killed

Thomas Boerly white resident of Harpers Ferry Killed

Quinn white Marine Corps private Killed

Rupert white Marine Corps private Wounded

Murphy white resident in vicinity of Harpers Ferry Wounded

Young white resident in vicinity of Harpers Ferry Wounded

Richardson white resident in vicinity of Harpers Ferry Wounded

Hammond white resident in vicinity of Harpers Ferry Wounded

McCabe white resident in vicinity of Harpers Ferry Wounded

Dorsey white resident in vicinity of Harpers Ferry Wounded

Hooper white resident in vicinity of Harpers Ferry Wounded

Woollet white resident in vicinity of Harpers Ferry Wounded

That evening, Thoreau delivered “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN” in the vestry of the First Parish Meetinghouse in Concord. Emerson was present, and would report to Charles Wesley Slack in Boston that “He read it with great force & effect, & though the audience was of widely different parties, it was heard without a murmur of dissent.” In regard to Thoreau’s impassioned oration, this is what I have to offer. Take it for granite, Thoreau always knows what he is saying. Speaking not only of John Brown’s sharp tongue HDT WHAT? INDEX

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but also of his carbine bought and paid for, one of the things Henry said on the evening of October 30, 1859 was

The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.

This is now on page 133 of REFORM PAPERS. But what I need to get you to understand is that it means exactly what it means, not what you maybe thought it would mean were it you who had said it. The thing I need you to notice is that Thoreau’s remark is an implicit reference to Miguel de Cervantes’s

En manos eftâ el pandero que le fabra bien tañer, refpondio Sancho Pança.

This is an aphorism from Part II, Chapter 22 of EL INGENIOSO HIDALGO DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA. In current Spanish: En manos está el pandero que le sabrán bien tañer, or “In hands is the drum that it they know well to beat” or, rather, “The drum is in the hands of one who well knows how to thump HDT WHAT? INDEX

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it.” Thus Thoreau’s remark about the rat-a-tat-tat of Brown’s sharp tongue and Christian carbine is also an implicit reference to the most-quoted passage in WALDEN by far, the passage in which an obscure metaphor is drawn apparently on the basis of the drummer-boy rat-a-tat-tatting away on Concord common during the annual militia training!

What is happening in that passage of Cervantes’s book is that Sancho Panza was lowering Don Quijote into the Montecinos cave by a rope. And he was using this old Spanish proverb to say don’t worry, I know how to handle this rope, I won’t let you fall. He was practicality incarnate, all means and no end, while Don Quijote was impracticality ensouled, on his way to make his central attempt to define the relationship between reality and illusion, all end and no means.

We may well ask ourselves in what way a reference to Don Quijote might be seen as appropriate in this context of Thoreau’s defense of Brown. I can think of several right off.

1st, many scholars would insist to us that a study of the work of Cervantes is central to any consideration of the manner in which our representations of the world can, and cannot, modify the contexts in which our lives are embedded. That Sharps rifle was supposed to be the lever by which Brown was rearranging reality, but in actuality in that world of men at arms such a stick was of influence primarily as a symbol, while Brown’s primary lever for rearranging the reality of American race relations was –as Thoreau was emphasizing– his sharp tongue. Holding that Sharps rifle in his hand only served to draw attention to that tongue of his, attention that his sharp tongue deserved. We can say Thoreau’s problem essentially was, in the case of Brown, that he had decided he could not be satisfied with reality. Refusing to repeat the gestures that custom, tradition, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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instinct make so easy, Thoreau was insisting on the coming into being of our myth of equality and fraternity.

After they would take Captain John Brown’s Sharps rifle away from him at Harpers Ferry, they would allow this little boy to pose with it. Grow up, son, and be a Christian like us: kill people, own slaves.

2d, Don Quijote was un hombre exageradamente grave y serio o puntilloso, and this is a fine and accurate description not only of Concord’s own knight of the woebegone countenance, Bronson Alcott, but also of John Brown. If Alcott could be said to have been a Quijote whose favorite reading was the New Testament, Brown was a Quijote whose favorite reading was the Old. Don Quijote said

These saints and knights were of the same profession as myself, which is the calling of arms. Only there is this difference between them and me, that they were saints, and fought with divine weapons, and I am a sinner and fight with human ones.

3d, there is the problem of the ridiculous mismatch of means and objectives about which Brown commented in his note on the morning of his hanging. Brown wanted a world of justice and peace and dignity so he set about enthusiastically to kill us until we got his idea, which is a fine way to get someone’s attention but is inherently self-defeating.

4th, in associating Brown with Don Quijote, Thoreau was making an implicit reference to the freeing of slaves as a knightly suspension of the ethical — for Don Quijote’s pity, compassion, and love came to outweigh the rigor of justice in that knight’s liberating of the galley slaves, and in the declaration he made to the guards of the slaves, and in his comments to Sancho and the priest. He said

It is not right that honorable men should be executioners of others. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Finally, this “tool” aphorism extracted from the episode in which Don Quijote descended on a rope into the cave of Montecinos is central to the story’s process of sanchificación of the knight’s spirituality and quijotización of the squire’s carnality. By virtue of their shared adventures, the righteously indignant northern white American and the desperately indignant southern white American needed to figure out a way to rid themselves of a society based on shackles: they needed to sanchify and quijotize each other. That’d be preferred to our northern Quijotes and southern Panzas using their efficient tools to kill each other standing in rows, which was otherwise the obvious prospect. When Don Quijote emerged from the cave of Montecinos he said to Sancho Panza

Everything that offers some difficulty seems impossible to you.

But he added

Time will pass.

In this writing I will not only attempt to salvage Thoreau’s talk about Christian carbines and sharp tongues by linking it (via its implicit referent in Cervantes’s rub-a-dub-dub text about the foolishness of desperate acts of chivalry) to its implicit referent in Thoreau’s rat-a-tat-tat text about the foolishness of a life of quiet desperation.

I will also demonstrate that this sound metaphor of Thoreau’s –the distant different drummer– is, itself, an implicit reference to a Quaker non-violent metaphor of the inner light in common usage among members of the Religious Society of Friends, particularly those of the liberal faction including Friend Elias Hicks and his student Friend Lucretia Mott, and that such a metaphor cannot be bent –as it is commonly now bent by the unspirited– to sponsor the path of violence. Thoreau left himself an escape hatch and, in his appeal for sympathy for Captain Brown after that man’s desperate attempt to set free the despairing slaves of America, neither explicitly nor implicitly sanctioned any of John Brown’s violent means. I would maintain that Thoreau’s deportment and his words subsequent to the ill-advised Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 were precisely HDT WHAT? INDEX

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parallel to Friend Lucretia’s deportment and her words after the ill-advised “Christiana Riot” in 1851.

Thoreau said in public, in regard to American slavery, that he did not wish to kill nor to be killed, but could foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by him unavoidable (REFORM PAPERS 133). Playing to his audience, our author elided the vast difference between killing and dying precisely as Richardson elided Charles Baudelaire. It was only in Thoreau’s private notes during his lifetime –to his Journal that is, and although as he says there was no lock on the door of his cabin there was in fact a lock on the desk in which he kept his Journal– that he was able to say plainly that when he said “both these things” he meant precisely “both these things,” not one and, if he turned out to be a lucky and competent killer, not the other, that if it came to the sacrificing of others to his own principles, this would necessarily involve his own simultaneous self-sacrifice for his principles, that he meant he might decide to not be alive rather than continue to be alive in a world that also included slavery.3 Now, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard pointed out in a writing that,

3. There is a phrase “noble army of Martyrs” in the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER that came into use in 1549 that may explain Thoreau’s remark about becoming willing to kill, or to die, to end enslavement. The phrase may have come into the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER from the TE DEUM, quite a bit older. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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although it dates to the same year of 1859, was unavailable to Thoreau,4 that

Assuming then that a person is the victim of an illusion, and that in order to communicate the truth to him the first task, rightly understood, is to remove the illusion — if I do not begin by deceiving him, I must begin with direct communication. But direct communication presupposes that the receiver’s ability to receive is undisturbed. But here such is not the case; an illusion stands in the way. That is to say, one must first of all use the caustic fluid. But this caustic means is negativity, and negativity understood in relation to the communication of the truth is precisely the same as deception. What then does it mean “to deceive”? It means that one does not begin directly with the matter one wants to communicate, but begins by accepting the other man’s illusion as good money.

I am not saying Thoreau was wrong to elide in this way in that place at that time, for he was doing his level best to communicate with a bunch of people who were getting ready to line up and shoot each other down in windrows, and also I was not there and also I have great respect for his judgment, but I am saying that if there was a time for this sort of elision, it is now past. If not then, at least now, we should face the issue squarely. But unfortunately, as I said, the issue is not being faced squarely. For instance, on the night of July 10th in the Center Galleria of Worcester, an actor employed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, David Barto, sponsored in part by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management, re-enacted Thoreau’s lecture “A Plea for Capt. John Brown.” Worcester’s Mechanics Hall where the lecture was originally delivered was under restoration, but every effort was made for verisimilitude and Barto was able to lean on the wooden lectern that Thoreau had used on November 3, 1859 at Mechanics Hall. My impression is that Barto makes a Thoreau who is entirely too belligerent, for instance humorously threatening to beat children with his walking stick should they ask questions at the wrong times, humorously inviting one fellow to join him outside for a fight after the talk should he fail to follow Thoreau’s rules, etc. Therefore, in the question and answer period, I raised my hand

4. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR. NY: Harper & Row, 1962, pages 25-6. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and posed the following question to Barto in his rôle as Thoreau:

I have heard you, and am troubled, troubled by what would seem to be a studied ambiguity on an issue of the greatest relevance. Tell me, in the dark of the night when you could not sleep, and you scratched these lines frantically across scraps of paper with your pencil – can you recollect that frame of mind?– what was you intention? If it came to kill or be killed, for those are two very different things, if it came to the taking of the life of another for liberty, or giving your own for liberty –for these are two very different things– if it came to continuing your life but as a murderer– if it came to the point of doing evil so that good will come– what, sir, was your secret intention as you scratched out your draft of this speech? Is it your intention to teach us, by your life, how and when to die or how and when to kill?

In response Barto feigned anger and told me I had no right to inquire as to his private musings. He was unable or unwilling to address the question as posed. Need I mention that this might have got him in trouble with his employer, an agency which also employs a number of armed men in blue and a number of armed men in green, and instructs these armed employees in the fine art of when and how to kill in the name of their employer?

“A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN”

This topic of elision is an interesting topic for those of us who find this sort of topic interesting. While Thoreau was delivering his “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN” at the Concord Town Hall, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was delivering a sermon in his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Later on he would revise this sermon for publication, so we can credit it with some seriousness of preparation, and yet in the sermon he was portraying the raid on Harpers Ferry as having been perpetrated by 17 white men who had gone South without any black sponsorship or involvement and, in their whiteness, had created a race panic: “Seventeen white men surrounded two thousand, and held them in duress.”

A black newspaper would need to comment upon this elision, as of course it had been the noticing of men of mixed race among the members of that invading party which had set off the pronounced race panic: “Mr. Beecher must have read the papers, must have read that there were twenty-two invaders, seventeen white and five black. Why does he omit all mention of the latter? Were they not men?”5

November 26, Saturday: Louis Moreau Gottschalk arrived back in Havana aboard the English steamer Trent after a concert tour of several Caribbean islands.

From his cell in Charles Town, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., who had remained entirely silent throughout his trial for the Harpers Ferry treason, wrote his parents:6

DEAR P ARENTS,— my fate as far as man can seal it is sealed but let

5. It is very clear from several other things that the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher had written, that had he been forced to respond to this “Were they not men?” rhetorical question, he would easily have responded that indeed they were men — inasmuch as they were all of mixed race rather than being in that “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness. 6. Letter later in the possession of his sister, Miss Mary Copeland of Oberlin, Ohio. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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this not occasion you any misery for remember the cause in which I was engaged, remember that it was a “Holy Cause,” one in which men who in every point of view better than I am have suffered and died, remember that if I must die I die in trying to liberate a few of my poor and oppress people from my condition of servitude which God in his Holy Writ has hurled his most bitter denunciations against and in which men who were by the color of their faces removed from the direct injurious affect, have already lost their lives and still more remain to meet the same fate which has been by man decided that I must meet. OBERLIN COLLEGE The Reverend Andrew T. Foss, who been holding to the nonviolent principles of William Lloyd Garrison and the Reverend Adin Ballou when he took part in the attempt to rescue Anthony Burns in the streets of Boston, had at some later point entered into an alliance with Charles Lenox Remond and ceased to be a Nonresistant. He explained that although he would not press the slaves toward rebellion, “when it comes, God knows, I will pray that the slave may be victorious.” At a meeting of an antislavery society in Worcester County, the Reverend Adin Ballou proposed that they reaffirm their original Declaration of Sentiments of December 4,

1833, inclusive of its words “Our principles forbid the doing of evil that good may come.” Charles Lenox Remond responded that he had never supposed, in joining that society, that he had committed himself to such a thing! In fact “I should be glad if a National Vigilance Committee was formed to hang upon every tree and lamppost every slaveholder.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Abby Kelley Foster joined with this challenge to the Reverend Ballou. Then Stephen Symonds Foster declared that although he was a nonresistant, he claimed also “not to be a fool.”

In response, the Reverend Ballou pointed out the very real scenario, that if America’s blacks freed themselves by means of a bloody massacre, this would render them psychically incompetent to collaborate with whites for many generations, and fill whites with such horror that they also would be animated by loathing and a lust for vengeance: “It may seem hard to wait, but if we do not wait, we shall do worse.” However, the Reverend Ballou’s resolution reaffirming its Declaration of Sentiments, which had been adopted at its founding and which had included the words “Our principles forbid the doing of evil that good may come,” was voted down, and the assembly embraced instead this Charles Lenox Remond/Andrew T. Foss viewpoint.

Stephen Symonds Foster tried to organize a new political party which favored “revolution” over “dissolution” of the union, to be named the New England Political Anti-Slavery Society:

“I claim to be a Non-Resistant, but not to be a fool. John Brown has shown himself a man, in comparison with the Non-Resistants.”

A contrasting attitude was taken, however, by the Russian Minister, Edouard de Stoeckl, who reported to the government of the Tzar that

When the sad results of this foray became known, John Brown was proclaimed from the very roof-tops as the equal of our Savior. I quote these facts to point out how far Puritan fanaticism can go. Little by little, the extreme doctrines of New England have spread throughout the land.

November 26, Saturday: P.M.–Walk over the Colburn Farm wood-lot south [OF] the road. I find, sometimes, after I have been lotting off a large wood-lot for auction, that I have been cutting new paths to walk in. I cut lines an inch [SIC] or two long in arbitrary directions, in and around some dense woodlot which perhaps is not crossed once a month by any mortal, nor has been for thirty or fifty years, and thus I open to myself new works [SIC],–enough in a lot of forty acres to occupy me for an afternoon. A forty-acre wood-lot which otherwise would not detain a walker more than half an hour, being thus opened and carved out, will entertain him for half a day. In this case there was a cultivated field here some thirty years ago, but, the wood being suffered to spring up, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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from being open and revealed this part of the earth became a covert and concealed place. Excepting an occasional hunter who crossed it maybe once in several months, nobody has walked there, nobody has penetrated its recesses. The walker habitually goes round it, or follows the single cart-path that winds through it. Woods, both the primitive and those which are suffered to spring up in cultivated fields, thus preserve the mystery of nature. How private and sacred a place a grove thus becomes!–merely because its denseness excludes man. It is worth the while to have these thickets on various sides of the town, where the rabbit lurks and the jay builds its nest. When I ran out the boundary lines of this lot, I could commonly distinguish the line, not merely by the different growth of wood, but often by a kind of ditch which I think may have been produced by the plow, which heaped up the soil along the side of the field when it was cultivated. I could also detect trees variously bent and twisted, which probably had made part of a hedge fence when young, and others which were scarred by the fencing-stuff that had been fastened to them. The chickadee is the bird of the wood the most unfailing. When, in a windy, or in any, day, you have penetrated some thick wood like this, you are pretty sure to hear its cheery note therein. At this season it is almost their sole inhabitant. I see here to-day one brown creeper [Certhia americana] busily inspecting the pitch pines. It begins at the base, and creeps rapidly upward by starts, adhering close to the bark and shifting a little from side to side often till near the top, then suddenly darts off downward to the base of another tree, where it repeats the same course. This has no black cockade, like the nuthatch. In the midst of this wood there occur less valuable patches, of an eighth of an acre or more, where there is much grass, and cladonia, shrub oaks, and lichen-covered birches, and a few pitch pines only,–places of a comparatively sterile character, as if the soil had been run out. The birches will have much of the birch fungus on them, and their fallen dead tops strew the ground.

PER MABEE, PAGES 322-4: Even among those who still considered themselves nonviolent Garrisonians, Brown’s raid brought excited speculation that slave revolts might sharply increase if abolitionists encouraged them. Becoming uneasy over this speculation and the acceptance of violence it implied, Adin Ballou once president of the Nonresistance Society and still the leader of the nonresistant community at Hopedale, Massachusetts, brought the issue out into the open. While Brown was still in a Virginia jail, at a meeting of a Garrisonian Worcester County antislavery society Ballou proposed a resolution reaffirming the Declaration of Sentiments, which had been adopted at the founding of the American Antislavery Society, including the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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words, “Our principles forbid the doing of evil that good may come.” Ballou interpreted the declaration as a nonresistance pledge. The Salem Negro Charles Remond –who at the 1843 Negro national convention opposed Garnet’s calling for slave insurrection but recently had been calling for it himself– grew excited. “I never supposed on becoming a member of this society,” Remond told Ballou, “that I committed myself to the nonresistant sentiments lo which you have referred. For whenever I have heard the question asked, ‘What constitutes a member of the American Antislavery Society?’ the only answer I have heard given was this: that a man who believed that the immediate, unconditional emancipation of the slave was right ... is a member of this society.” And then Remond made clear the extent to which he had become willing to accept violence: “I should be glad if a National Vigilance Committee was formed,” he said, “to hang upon every tree and lamppost every slaveholder. They would be doing a glorious work!” “I am not contending,” replied Ballou evenly, “that ... a man cannot be a member of this society unless he is a nonresistant.... What the society should be, as a society, is one thing, and what its individual members should be outside of the society is another thing. In respect to the measures of the society, as a society, it is bound by its declarations.... As a society we are pledged not to resort to ... violence.” The Quaker come-outer, Abby Kelley Foster, put Ballou on the spot. She said she would rejoice if the North had gone so far up the moral scale as to point its guns not at slaves, as was then the case, but at slaveholders instead. Would you? she asked Ballou bluntly. Ballou was cautious. “I should rejoice with trembling and sorrow,” he replied. Abby’s husband, the doughty Stephen S. Foster, spoke up. “I claim to a be nonresistant,” he said, “but not to be a fool.” The audience laughed. “Every man is bound to use the most formidable weapons in his power,” Foster continued. “Why should I use the sword when I can do better without it? But,” he admitted, “Brown has shown himself a man in comparison with the nonresistants.” Foster explained, I want to act more like a man myself. Since slave insurrections are coming in the South, “I want to go down South and guide an insurrection, to preserve it from those excesses which Brother Ballou so much deprecates.” Evidently Foster considered that slave revolt by nonviolent methods –such as Birney had hinted at in 1835– was hopeless. He was proposing to be an adviser to slave insurrectionists with the hope of keeping them from the excesses of violence only. Ballou ridiculed Foster’s notion that he could guide an insurrection. “How pretty he would look,” said Ballou, “undertaking to regulate myriads of raging insurrectionists scattered over the Southern country! A rebellion once started would involve all the outrages in the calendar of crime.” Besides, if the slaves were freed by rebellion, Ballou added with prescience, “what is to be done with them for the next hundred years? It would take at least a century to educate them out of the ferocity engendered by such conflict. How are they to be employed, trained for liberty, and organized into well ordered communities? And above all how is this work to be HDT WHAT? INDEX

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accomplished with the great mass of the whites in the country full of horror, loathing, and revenge toward them? ... Can’t we wait the operations of a more peaceful process? Can’t we content ourselves with holy efforts to bring about a change of public sentiment, so that this thing may be accomplished, without resorting to such horrible measures? It may seem hard to wait, but if we do not wait, we shall do worse.” The New Hampshire abolitionist agent, Andrew T. Foss, a long-time Baptist minister, said that he had held to the nonviolent principles of Garrison and Ballou as recently as when he took part in the attempt to rescue Burns in the streets of Boston. But since then he had ceased to be a nonresistant. Indicating Ballou, Foss said, “I do not say that he is not higher than I am. I have an impression, a sort of instinct, that he is. [But] I ask the privilege of working on this platform in my own way.... I don’t undertake to justify rebellion [by slaves], but when it comes, God knows, I will pray that the slave may be victorious.” The crowd cheered. “Men will come to see,” added Foss, “that if our fathers had a right to strike for their liberty, then John Brown had a right to strike for the liberty of the slave.” Why did so many abolitionists forget, Ballou replied later in a prophetic statement, “the vast differences between a people trained for liberty and self-government through a century and a half, and millions of long crushed slaves, schooled to servility and studiously kept in ignorance? Such a people need all the help and benefit of a peaceful emancipation.” But the meeting accepted the Remond-Foss view. It voted down Ballou’s resolution reaffirming the American Society’s tradition of nonviolence. Even among Garrisonians, John Brown was reducing faith in nonresistance.

December 10, Saturday: From his cell in Charles Town, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., who had remained entirely silent throughout his trial, wrote to his brother: Charlestown, Va. Dec. 10, 1859: MY DEAR BROTHER:— I now take my pen to write you a few lines to let you know how I am, and in answer to your kind letter of the 5th instant. Dear Brother, I am, it is true, so situated at present as scarcely to know how to commence writing; not that my mind is filled with fear or that it has become shattered in view of my near approach to death. Not that I am terrified by the gallows which I see staring me in the face, and upon which I am so soon to stand and suffer death for doing what George Washington, the so-called father of his great but slavery-cursed country, was made a hero for doing, while he lived, and when dead his name was immortalized, and his great and noble deeds in behalf of freedom taught by parents to their children. And now, brother, for having lent my [faith?] to a General no less brave, and engaged in a cause no less honorable and glorious, I am to suffer death. Washington entered the field to fight for the freedom of the American people- not for the white men alone, but for both black HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and white. Nor were they white men alone who fought for the freedom of this country. The blood of black men flowed as freely as that of white men. Yes, the very first blood that was spilt was that of a negro. It was the blood of that heroic man, (though black he was,) Crispus Attucks. And some of the very last blood shed was that of black men. To the truth of this, history, though prejudiced is compelled to attest. It is true that black men did an equal share of the fighting for American Independence, and they were assured by the whites that they should share equal benefits for so doing. But after having performed their part honorably, they were by the whites most treacherously deceived- they refusing to fulfill their part of the contract. But this you know as well as I do, and I will therefore make no more in reference to the claims which we, as colored men, have on the American people. It was a sense of the wrongs which we have suffered that prompted the noble but unfortunate Captain Brown and his associates to attempt to give freedom to a small number, at least of those who are now held by cruel and unusual laws, and by no less cruel and unjust men. To this freedom they were entitled by every known principal of justice and humanity, and for the enjoyment of it God created them. And how dear brother, could I die in a more noble cause? Could I, brother die in a manner and for a cause which would induce true and honest men more to honor me and angels more readily to receive me to their happy home of everlasting joy above? I imagine that I hear you and all of you mother, father, sisters and brothers, say- “No there is not a cause for which we with less sorrow, could see you die.” Believe me when I tell you, that though shut up in prison and under sentence of death, I have spent some very happy hours here. And were it not that I know that the heart of those to whom I am attached by the nearest and most endearing ties of blood relationship- yea, by the closest and strongest ties that God has instituted- will be filled with sorrow, I would almost as [unintelligible] die now as at any time, for I feel that I am now prepared to meet my Maker. Dear brother, I want you and all of you to meet me in Heaven. Prepare your soul for death. Be ready to meet your God at any moment, and then, though we meet no more on earth, we shall meet in Heaven where parting is no more. Dear William and Fred, be good boys- mind your mother and father- love and honor them- grow up to be good men, and feat the Lord your God. Now, I want you, dear brothers, to take this advice and follow it; remember, it comes from your own brother, and is written under most peculiar circumstances. Remember it is my dying advice to you, and I hope you will, from that love you have for me, receive it. You may think I have been treated very harshly since I have been here, but it is not so. I have been treated exceedingly well- far better than I expected to be. My jailor is a most kind-hearted man, and has done all he could, consistent with duty, to make me and the rest of the prisoners comfortable. Capt. John Avis is a gentle man who has a heart in his bosom as brave as any other. He met us at the Ferry and fought us as a brave man would do. But since we have been in his power has protected us from insults and abuse which cowards would have heaped upon us. He has done as a brave man HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and gentleman only would do. Also one of his aids, Mr. John Sheats, has been very kind to us and has done all he could to serve us. And now, Henry, if fortune should ever throw either of them in your way, and you can confer the least favor on them, do it for my sake. Give my love to all my family, and now my dear brothers, one and all, I pray to God we may meet in Heaven. Good bye. I am now, and shall remain, your affectionate brother, John Copeland OBERLIN COLLEGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A depiction of “Emperor” Shields Green appeared in Leslie’s Weekly:

During the specific uproar over the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry, a public crisis of sorts had broken out in our general discussions about how to achieve progress in our nation. This public crisis had to do with the materials contained in Hinton Rowan Helper’s polemical compilation of census data published in Baltimore in 1857, titled THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT. This admirer of the thought processes of Waldo Emerson was an egregious case of what we might term an Antislavery Racist. —Which is to say, he was a Southern white man, from North Carolina, who owned no slaves, whose fixation was that of the victim. It wasn’t the blacks who were being harmed by slavery, it was real decent folks like him who were being harmed by slavery. All these slaves, who belonged to other people, were impacting his life! He hated the nigger who was doing him wrong, He hated the slavemaster who was doing him wrong. What he needed most urgently was a lily-white, pure America of which he could be proud, where he could stand tall. Slavery was a tainted and archaic social system that was standing in the way of white people’s cultural and material progress. Blacks were a tainted and inferior group who had no business being here in our New World in the first place.7

“History, among its many ironies, often places enemies in life into various positions of posthumous conjunction.” — Stephen Jay Gould

7. This interesting book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST- RACIST (University AL: 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Here is how Peter Wallenstein has parsed the situation in his article “Incendiaries All”: Different as they were, then, THE IMPENDING CRISIS and Harpers Ferry brought similar messages to proslavery Southerners. Regardless of whether either Brown or Helper in fact spoke for mainstream Northern public opinion, each appeared to garner widespread approval across the North, and each had declared war on slavery in the South. Each represented, at least in part, the dreaded triple threat against slavery — from nonslaveholding whites in the South, from the slaves themselves, and from outside forces. Each, too, pointed up the need and offered the opportunity to unify white Southerners against all such threats, an observation that could come from a variety of perspectives. Thus, as a letter from one Southern slaveholder [a Southern Whig, to Congressman John Sherman] put the matter in December [10] 1859, “John Brown and Helper may do more to build up the Democratic party than anything that has happened for years.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 16, Friday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the 2d volume of a 5-volume set prepared 1818-1821 (THEOPHRASTI ERESII QUAE SUPERSUNT OPERA: ET EXCERPTA LIBRORUM by Theophrastus of Eresus (circa 372-circa 287BCE), JOHANN GOTTLOB SCHNEIDER, HEINRICH FRIEDRICH LINK. Lipsiae: Sumtibus Frid. Christ. Guil. Vogelii) of .

THEOPHRASTUS

He also checked out the two volumes of Aristotle’s HISTOIRE DES ANIMAUX D’ARISTOTE in Greek and in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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French translation by M. Camus (Paris: Chez la veuve Desaint, 1783).

HISTOIRE DES ANIMAUX I HISTOIRE DES ANIMAUX II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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While at the Harvard Library, Thoreau read from but did not check out John Gerard’s 1597 botanical resource, THE HERBALL OR GENERALL HIſTORIE OF PLANTES: GREAT HERBALL OF 1597

INTERNET COMMENTARY

December 16, 1859: A.M.–To Cambridge, where I read in Gerard’s Herbal. [Vide extracts from preface made in October 1859.] His admirable though quaint descriptions are, to my mind, greatly superior to the modern more scientific ones. He describes not according to rule but to his natural delight in the plants. He brings them vividly before you, as one who has seen and delighted in them. It is almost as good as to see the plants themselves. It suggests that we cannot too often get rid of the barren assumption that is in our science. His leaves are leaves; his flowers, flowers; his fruit, fruit. They are green and colored and fragrant. It is a man’s BOTANY knowledge added to a child’s delight. Modern botanical descriptions approach ever nearer to the dryness of an algebraic formula, as if c + y were = to a love-letter. It is the keen joy and discrimination of the child who has just seen a flower for the first time and comes running in with it to its friends. How much better to describe your object in fresh English words rather than in these conventional Latinisms! He has really seen, and smelt, and tasted, and reports his sensations. Bought a book at Little & Brown’s, paying a nine-pence more on a volume than it was offered me for elsewhere. The customer thus pays for the more elegant style of the store. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Select Committee on the Invasion of Harpers Ferry created by Democratic Senator James Mason of Virginia held its first meeting in regard to the John Brown affair and its Secret “Six” conspiracy. The committee would be in existence for six months before delivering its final report and would summon, in all, 32 witnesses.

Edwin Coppoc and John E. Cook were hanged in Charlestown, Virginia.8 Edwin’s body would be buried in Winona after a funeral attended by the entire town. Later his body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio.

(Edwin had written from the prison to his adoptive mother, of a nonresistant-abolitionist Quaker farm family, that he was “sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.”

8. I have been advised that according to THE QUAKERS OF IOWA by Louis Thomas Jones, a scholarly work published under the auspices of the State Historical Iowa at Iowa City, Iowa in 1914 (I haven’t myself actually seen this book), prior to their deaths the Coppoc brothers were disowned by the Red Cedar Monthly Meeting of Friends in the West Branch/Springdale area. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Edwin’s brother Barclay Coppoc was still eluding capture.)

John E. Cook had made a full confession of his activities with the raiders and at the last moment had sought to save his neck by representing that he had been deceived through false promises, but this had not saved him, nor had the fact that his brother-in-law A.P. Willard was Governor of Indiana.

When it came the turn of John Anderson Copeland, Jr. to be hanged, too short a drop was used. He strangled slowly.

Just before being taken from his cell to the execution field that morning, he had completed a last letter to his family: Charlestown Jail, Va., Dec. 16, ‘59 Dear Father, Mother, Brothers Henry, William and Freddy, and Sisters Sarah and Mary: The last Sabbath with me on earth has passed away. The last Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday that I shall ever see on this earth have now passed by God’s glorious sun, which he has placed in the heavens to illuminate this earth- whose refulgent beams are watched for by this poor invalid, to enter & make as it were in heaven of the room in which he is confined- I have seen declining behind the western mountains for the last time. Last night for the last time, I beheld the soft bright moon as it rose, casting its mellow light into my felons cell, dissipating the darkness and filling it with that soft pleasant light which causes such thrills of joy to all those in like circumstance with myself. This morning for the last time, I beheld the glorious sun of yesterday rising in the far-off East, away off in the country where our Lord Jesus Christ first proclaimed salvation to man, and now as he rises higher and his bright light takes the place of the pale, soft moonlight, I will take my pen, for the last time, to write you who are bound to me by those strong ties (yea, the strongest that God ever HDT WHAT? INDEX

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instituted,) the ties of blood and relationship. I am well, both in body and in mind. And now, dear ones, if it were not that I know your hearts will be filled with sorrow at my fate, I could pass from this earth without a regret. Why should you sorrow? Why should your hearts be racked with grief? Have I not everything to gain and nothing to lose by the change? I fully believe that not only myself but also all three of my poor comrades who are to ascend the same scaffold- (a scaffold already made sacred to the cause of freedom, by the death of that great champion of human freedom, Capt. JOHN BROWN) are prepared to meet our God. I am only leaving a world filled with sorrow and woe to enter one in which there is but one lasting day of happiness and bliss. I feel that God in his mercy has spoken peace to my soul, and that all my numerous sins are now forgiven me. Dear parents, brothers and sisters, it is true that I am now in a few hours to start on a journey from which no traveler returns. Yes, long before this reaches you, I shall as I sincerely hope, have met our brother and sister who have for years been worshiping God around his throne — singing praises to him, and thanking him that he gave his Son to die that they might have eternal life. I pray daily and hourly that I may be fitted to have my home with them, and that you, one and all, may prepare your souls to meet your God, that so, in the end, though we meet no more on earth, we shall meet in Heaven, where we shall not be parted by the demands of the cruel and unjust monster Slavery. But think not that I am complaining, for I feel reconciled to meet my fate. I pray God that his will be done; not mine. Let me tell you that it is not the mere act of having to meet death, which I should regret, (if I should express regret I mean,) but that such an unjust institution should exist as the one which demands my life; and not my life only, but the lives of those to whom my life bears but the relative value of zero to the infinite. I beg of you one and all that you will not grieve about me, but that you will thank God that he spared me time to make my peace with Him. And now, dear ones, attach no blame to anyone for my coming here for not any person but myself is to blame. I have no antipathy against anyone, I have freed my mind of all hard feelings against every living being, and I ask all who have any thing against me to do the same. And now dear parents, Brothers and sisters, I must bid you to serve your God and meet me in heaven. I must with a few words, close my correspondence with those who are the most near and dear to me: but I hope, in the end, we may again commune, never to cease. Dear ones, he who writes this will, in a few hours, be in this world no longer. Yes, these fingers which hold the pen with which this is written will, before to-day’s sun has reached his meridian have laid it aside forever, and this poor soul have taken its flight to meet its God. And now dear ones I must bid you that last, long, sad farewell. Good-day, Father, Mother, Henry, William, and Freddy, Sarah and Mary, serve your God and meet me in heaven. Your Son and Brother to eternity, John A. Copeland. OBERLIN COLLEGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Is it that Aaron D. Stevens, and 10 of Captain Brown’s black supporters, having been duly found guilty of treason and murder by a jury of their white male peers, were hanged on this date?

Or is it that the other surrendered survivors of the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., Shields Green, and Aaron D. Stevens, having been duly found guilty of treason and murder by a jury of their white male peers, were hanged on this date?9

A monument would be erected by the citizens of Oberlin, Ohio in honor of their three free citizens of color who had died in the raid or been hanged, Shields Green, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., and Lewis Sheridan Leary (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

9. In THE CAPTURE AND EXECUTION OF JOHN BROWN: A TALE OF MARTYRDOM, BY ELIJAH AVEY, EYE WITNESS, WITH THIRTY ILLUSTRATIONS, dated 1906, we have on page 45 an assertion that the white men John E. Cook and Edwin Coppoc, and then the black men John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Shields Green, were hanged on December 16th, 1859. The reference says that, the gallows being not large enough, the 2 black men Copeland and Green were forced to stand and watch the 2 white men Cook and Coppoc being hanged before themselves ascending the scaffold. But I have from another reference this assertion that it was one surrendered surviving white man, Aaron D. Stevens, who was hanged on the 16th along with 10 black supporters of Captain John Brown, and that Cook actually would be among the last hanged. Which account would be correct — and why is there such a glaring discrepancy between these various accounts?

The book SECRET SIX treats each retreating admission of each of the co-conspirators in treason as if it were holy writ. No attempt has been made to discern, behind this haze of post-facto explanations and justifications, what the brags of these participants might have been had their plot been successful in initiating the race war they contemplated and had this race war been completed, as it would certainly have been completed, by a historic genocide against black Americans. (Joel Silbey has contended, in “The Civil War Synthesis in American History,” that postbellum American historians have been misconstruing antebellum American politics by viewing them in conjunction with our knowledge of the bloodbath that followed. It is only after the fact that we can “know” that the US Civil War amounted to a sectional dispute, North versus South. We avoid learning that before the fact, it was undecided whether this conflict was going to shape up as a race conflict, a class conflict, or a sectional conflict. We avoid knowing that the raid on Harpers Ferry might have resulted in a race war, in which peoples of color would be exterminated in order to create an all-white America, or might have resulted in a class war, in which the laboring classes might have first destroyed the plantation owners’ equity by killing their slaves, and then gone on to purge the nation of the white plantation owners themselves, with their privileged-class endowments.) Also, according to the endmatter, the SECRET SIX study had obtained its material on Frederick Douglass basically from McFeely’s FREDERICK DOUGLASS of 1991, and its material on Thoreau from Sanborn’s HENRY DAVI D THOREAU of 1917, neither of which were the last word on the subject when the book was prepared. In addition, this work provides no reference whatever for the Emerson life: evidently he was simply presumed not to be of even marginal pertinence. There is no consideration to be found anywhere in this volume of the comparison event: the other American struggle for freedom, the one which had taken place in Haiti under General Toussaint Louverture. For these reasons, the study is, fundamentally, incompetent. It is as if O.J. Simpson and his Dream Team had been allowed to control what would appear in our social history texts. Or, it is as if the White House staff had been allowed to define once and for all the extent of President Richard Milhouse Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in, with, after their initial defensive testimony, after their establishment of the official consensus “truth,” all explanations accepted at their putative face value — with no further questioning tolerated. SECRET “SIX” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

December 17, Saturday: Oberlin College Professor James Monroe set off from Oberlin, Ohio to retrieve the corpse of John Anderson Copeland, Jr. from Virginia authorities.

Precious opportunity! Lydia Maria Child responded to the indignant letter she had received from the slaveholding wife of Senator James Mason: Wayland, Mass., Dec. 17th, 1859. Prolonged absence from home has prevented my answering your letter so soon as I intended. I have no disposition to retort upon you the “two-fold damnation” to which you consign me. On the Contrary, I sincerely wish you well, both in this world and the next. If the anathema proved a safety valve to your own boiling spirit, it did some good to you, while it fell harmless upon me. Fortunately for all of us, the Heavenly Father rules His universe by laws, which the passions or the prejudices of mortals have no power to change. As for John Brown, his reputation may be safety trusted to the impartial pen of History; and his motives will be righteously judged by Him who knoweth the secrets of all hearts. Men, however great they may be, are of small consequence in comparison with principles; and the principle for which John Brown died is the question issue between us. You refer me to the Bible, from which you quote the favorite text of slaveholders:— “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the forward.” — 1 PETER, 2:18.

Abolitionists also have favorite texts, to some of which I would call your attention:— “Remember those that are in bonds as bound with them.” — HEBREWS 13:3. “Hide the outcasts. Betray not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee. Be thou a convert to them from the face of the spoiler.” — ISAIAH 16: 3, 4. “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee where it liketh him best. Thou shalt not oppress him.” — DEUTERONOMY 23: 15, 16. “Open thy mouth for the dumb, in the cause of all such are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.” — PROVERBS 29: 8,9. “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of Jacob their sins.” — ISAIAH 58: 1. I would especially commend to slaveholders the following portions of that volume, wherein you say God has revealed the duty of masters:— “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.” — COLOSSIANS 4:1.

“Neither be ye called masters; for one is your master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.” — MATTHEW 23: 8, 10.

“Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” — MATTHEW 7: 12. “Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?” — ISAIAH 58: 6.

“They have given a boy for a harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink.” — JOEL 3: 3.

“He that oppresseth the poor, reproacheth his Maker.” — PROVERBS 14: 31. “Rob not the poor, because he is poor; neither oppress the afflicted. For the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those who spoiled them.” — PROVERBS 22: 22, 23. “Woe unto him that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.” — JEREMIAH 22: 13.

“Let him that stole, steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands.” — EPHESIANS 4: 28. “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless.” — ISAIAH 10: 1, 2. “If I did despise the cause of my man-servant or my maid-servant, when they contend with me, what then shall I do when God riseth up? and when he visiteth, what shall I answer Him?” — JOB 31: 13, 14. “Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken. Therefore snares are round about thee, and sudden fear troubleth thee; and darkness, that thou canst not see.” — JOB 22: 9, 10, 11. “Behold, the hire of your laborers, who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourishes your hearts as in a day of slaughter; ye have condemned and killed the just.” — JAMES 5: 4.

If the appropriateness of these texts is not apparent, I will try to make it so, by evidence drawn entirely from Southern sources. The Abolitionists are not such an ignorant set of fanatics as you suppose. They know whereof they affirm. They are familiar with the laws of the Slave States, which are alone sufficient to inspire abhorrence in any humane heart or reflecting mind not perverted by the prejudices of education and custom. I might fill many letters with significant extracts from your statue-books; but I have space only to glance at a few, which indicate the leading features of the system you cherish so tenaciously. The universal rule of the slave State is, that “the child follows the condition of its mother.” This is an index to many things. Marriages between white and colored people are forbidden by law; yet a very large number of the slaves are brown or yellow. When Lafayette visited this country in his old age, he said he was very much struck by the great change in the colored population HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of Virginia; that in the time of the Revolution, nearly all the household slaves were black, but when he returned to America, he found very few of them black. The advertisements in Southern newspapers often describe runaway slaves that “pass themselves for white men.” Sometimes they are described as having straight, light hair blue eyes, and clear complexion.” This could not be, unless their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had been white men. But as their mothers were slaves, the law pronounces them slaves, subject to be sold on the auction-block whenever the necessities or convenience of their masters or mistresses required it. The sale of one’s own children, brother, or sisters, has an ugly aspect to those who are unaccustomed to it; and, obviously, it cannot have a good moral influence, that law and custom should render licentiousness a profitable vice. Throughout the Slave States, the testimony of no colored person, bond or free, can be received against a white man. You have some laws, which, on the face of them, would seem to restrain inhuman men from murdering or mutilating slaves; but they are rendered nearly null by the law I have cited. Any drunken master, overseer, or patrol, may go into the negro cabins, and commit what outrages he pleases, with perfect impunity, if no white person is present who chooses to witness against him. North Carolina and Georgia leave a large loophole for escape, even if white persons present, when murder is committed. A law to punish persons for “maliciously killing a slave” has this remarkable qualification: “Always provided that this act shall not extend to any dying of moderate correction.” We at the North find it difficult to understand how moderate punishment can cause death. I have read several of your law books attentively, and I find no cases of punishment for the murder of a slave, except by fines paid to the owner, to indemnify him for the loss of his property: the same as if his horse or cow had been killed. In South Carolina Reports is a case where the State had indicated Guy Raines for the murder of slave Isaac. It was proved that William Gray, the owner of Isaac, had given him a thousand lashes. The poor creature made his escape, but was caught, and delivered to the custody of Raines, to be carried to the county jail. Because he refused to go, Raines gave him five hundred lashes, and he died soon after. The counsel for Raines proposed that he should be allowed to acquit himself by his own oath. The Court decided against it, because white witnesses had testified; but the Court of afterward decided he ought to have been exculpated by his own oath, and he was acquitted. Small indeed is the chance for justice to a slave, when his own color are not allowed to testify, if they see him maimed or his children murdered; when he has slaveholders for Judges and Jurors; when the murderer can exculpate himself by his own oath; and when the law provides that it is no murder to kill a slave by “moderate correction”! Your laws uniformly declare that “slave shall be deemed a chattel personal in the hands of his master, to all intents, constrictions, and purposes whatsoever.” This, of course, involves the right to sell his children, as if they were pigs; also, to take his wife from him “for any intent or purpose HDT WHAT? INDEX

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whatsoever.” Your laws also make it death for him to resist a white man, however brutally he may be treated, or however much his family may be outraged before his eyes. If he attempts to run away, your laws allow any man to shoot him. By your laws, all a slave’s earnings belong to his master. He can neither receive donations or transmit property. If his master allows him some hours to work for himself, and by great energy and perseverance he earns enough to buy his own bones and sinews, his master may make him pay two or three times over, and he has no redress. Three such cases have come within my knowledge. Even a written promise from his master has no legal value, because slave can make no contracts. Your laws also systematically aim at keeping the minds of the colored people in the most abject state of ignorance. If white people attempt to teach them to read or write, they are punished by imprisonment or fines; if they attempt to teach each other, they are punished with from twenty to thirty-nine lashes each. It cannot be said that the anti-slavery agitation produced such laws, for they date much further back; many of them when we were Provinces. They are the necessities of the system, which, being itself an outrage upon human nature, can be sustained only by perpetual outrages. The next reliable source of information is the advertisements in the Southern papers. In the North Carolina (Raleigh) Standard, Mr. Mieajah Ricks advertises, “Runaway, a negro woman and her two children. A few days before went off, I burned her with a hot iron on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.” in the Natchez Courier, Mr. J.P. Ashford advertises a runaway negro girl, with “a good many teeth missing, and the letter A branded on her cheek and forehead.” In the Lexington (Ky.) Observer, Mr. William Overstreet advertises a runaway negro with “his left eye out, scars from a dirk on his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.” I might quote from hundreds of such advertisements, offering rewards for runaways, “dead or alive,” and describing them with “ears cut off,” “jaws broken,” scarred by rifle-balls,” &c. Another source of information is afforded by your “Fugitives from Injustice,” with many of whom I have conversed freely. I have seen scars of the whip and marks of the branding-iron, and I have listened to their heart-breaking sobs, while they told of “piccaninnies” torn from their arms and sold. Another source of information is furnished by emancipated slaveholders Sarah Moore Grimké, daughter of the late Judge Grimké, of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, testifies as follows: “As I left my native State on account of Slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shrieks of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar. But this cannot be. They come over my memory like gory sceptres, and implore me, with resistless power, in the name of a God of mercy, in the name of a crucified Saviour, in the name of humanity, for the sake of the slaveholder, as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors of the Southern prison-house.” She proceeds to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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describe dreadful tragedies, the actors in which she says were “men and women of the families in South Carolina;” and that their cruelties did not, in the slightest degree, affect their standing in society. Her sister, Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, declared: “While I live, and Slavery lives, I must testify against it. Not merely for the sake of my poor brothers and sisters in bonds; for even were Slavery no curse to its victims, the exercise of arbitrary power works such fearful ruin upon the hearts of slaveholders, that I should feel impelled to labor and pray for its overthrow with my latest breath.” Among the horrible barbarities she enumerates is the case of a girl thirteen years old, who was flogged to death by her master. She says: “I asked a prominent lawyer, who belonged to one of the first families in the State, whether the murderer of this helpless child could not be indicted, and he coolly replied that the slave was Mr. ----’s property, and if he chose to suffer the loss, no one else had any thing to do with it.” She proceeds to say: “I felt there could be for me no rest in the midst of such outrages and pollutions. Yet I saw nothing of Slavery in its most vulgar and repulsive forms. I saw it in the city, among the fashionable and the honorable, where it was garnished by refinement and decked out for show. It is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction, but this is a cause worth dying for. I say so from what I have seen, and heard, and known, in a land of Slavery, whereon rest the darkness of Egypt and the sin of Sodom.” I once asked Miss Angelina if she thought Abolitionists exaggerated the horrors of Slavery. She replied, with earnest emphasis: “They cannot be exaggerated. It is impossible for imagination to go beyond the fact.” To a lady who observed that the time had not yet come for agitating the subject, she answered: “I apprehend if thou wert a slave, toiling in the fields of Carolina, thou wouldst think the time had fully come.” Mr. Thome, of Kentucky, in the course of his eloquent lectures on this subject, said: “I breathed my first breath in an atmosphere of Slavery. But though I am heir to a slave inheritance, I am bold to denounce the whole system as an outrage, a complication of crimes, and wrongs, and cruelties, that make angels weep.” Mr. Allen of Alabama, in a discussion with the students at Lane Theological Seminary in 1834, had told of a slave who was tied up and beaten all day, with a paddle full of holes. “At night, his flesh was literally pounded to a jelly. The punishment was inflicted within hearing of the Academy and the Public Green. But no one took any notice of it. No one thought any wrong was done. At our house, it is so common to hear screams from a neighboring plantation, that we think nothing of it. Lest any one should think that the slaves are generally well treated, and that the cases I have mentioned are exceptions, let me be distinctly understood that cruelty is the rule, and kindness is the exception.” In the same discussion, a student from Virginia, after relating cases of great cruelty, had related: “Such things are common all over Virginia; at least, so far as I am acquainted. But the planters generally avoid punishing their slaves before HDT WHAT? INDEX

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strangers.” Miss Mattie Griffith, of Kentucky, whose entire property consisted in slaves, emancipated them all. The noble-hearted girl wrote to me: “I shall go forth into the world penniless; but I shall work with a heart, and, best of all, I shall live with an easy conscience.” Previous to this generous resolution, she had never read any Abolition document, and entertained the common Southern prejudice against them. But her own observation so deeply impressed her with the enormities of Slavery, that she was impelled to publish a book, called “The Autobiography of a Female Slave.” I read it with thrilling interest; but some of the scenes made my nerves quiver so painfully, that told her I hoped they were too highly colored. She shook her head sadly, and replied: “I am sorry to say that every incident in the book has come within my own knowledge.” St. George Tucker, Judge and Professor of Law in Virginia, speaking of the legalized murder of runaways, said: “Such are the cruelties to which a state of Slavery gives birth — such the horrors to which the human mind is capable of being reconciled by its adoption.” Alluding to our struggle in ’76, he said: “While we proclaimed our resolution to live free or die, we imposed on our fellow-men, of different complexion, a Slavery ten thousand times worse than the utmost extremity of the oppressions of which we complained.” Governor Giles, in a Message to the Legislature of Virginia, referring to the custom of selling free colored people into Slavery, as a punishment for offences not capital, said: “Slavery must be admitted to be a punishment of the highest order; and, according to the just rule for the apportionment of punishment to crimes, it ought to be applied only to crimes of the highest order. The most distressing reflection in the application of this punishment to female offenders, is that it extends to their offspring; and the innocent are thus punished with the guilty.” Yet one hundred and twenty thousand innocent babies in this country are annually subjected to a punishment which your Governor declared “ought to be applied only to crimes of the highest order.” Jefferson said: “One day of American Slavery is worse than a thousand years of that which we rose in arms to oppose.” Alluding to insurrections, he said: “The Almighty has no attribute that can take side with us in such a contest.” John Randolph declared: “Every planter is a sentinel at his own door. Every Southern mother, when she hears an alarm of fire in the night, instinctively presses her infant closer to her bosom.” Looking at the system of slavery in the light of all this evidence, do you candidly think we deserve “two-fold damnation” for detesting it? Can you not believe that we may hate the system, and yet be truly your friends? I make allowance for the excited state of your mind, and for the prejudices induced by education. I so not care to change your opinion of me; but I so wish you could be persuaded to examine this subject dispassionately, for the sake of the prosperity of Virginia, and the welfare of unborn generations, both white and colored. For HDT WHAT? INDEX

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thirty years, Abolitionists have been trying to reason with slaveholders, through the press, and in the halls of Congress. Their efforts, though directed to the masters only, have been met with violence and abuse almost equal to that poured on head of John Brown. Yet surely we, as a portion of the Union, involved in the expense, the degeneracy, the danger, and the disgrace, of the iniquitous and fatal system, have a right to speak about it, and a right to be heard also. At the North, we willingly publish pro-slavery arguments, and ask only a fair field and no favor for the other side. But you will not even allow your own citizens a chance to examine this important subject. Your letter to me is published in Northern papers, as well as Southern; my reply will not be allowed to appear in any Southern paper. The despotic measures you take to silence investigation, and shut out the light from your own white population, prove how little reliance you have on the strength of your cause. In this enlightened age, all despotisms ought to come to an end by the agency of moral and rational means. But if they resist such agencies, it is in the order of Providence that they must come to an end by violence. History is full of such lessons. Would that the evil of prejudice could be removed from your eyes. If you would candidly examine the statements of Governor Hincks of the British West Indies, and of the Rev. Mr. Bleby, long time a Missionary in those Islands, both before and after emancipation, you could not fail to be convinced that Cash is a more powerful incentive to labor than the Lash, and far safer also. One fact in relation to those Islands is very significant. While the working people were slaves, it was always necessary to order out the military during the Christmas holidays; but since emancipation, not a soldier is to be seen. A hundred John Browns might land there, without exciting the slightest alarm. To the personal questions you ask me, I will reply in the name of all the women of New England. It would be extremely difficult to find any woman in our villages who does not sew for the poor, and watch with the sick, whenever occasion requires. We pay our domestic generous wages, with which they can purchase as many Christmas gown as they please; a process far better for their characters, as well as our own, than to receive their clothing as a charity, after being deprived of just payment for their labor. I have never known an instance where the “pangs of maternity” did not meet with requisite assistance; and here at the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies. I readily believe what you state concerning the kindness of many Virginia matrons. It is creditable to their hearts: but after all, the best that can be done in that way is a poor equivalent for the perpetual wrong done to the slaves, and the terrible liabilities to which they are always subject. Kind masters and mistresses among you are merely lucky accidents. If any one chooses to be a brutal despot, your laws and customs give him complete power to do so. And the lot of those slaves who have the kindest masters is exceedingly precarious. In case of death, or pecuniary difficulties, or marriages in the family, they may at any time be suddenly transferred from protection and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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indulgence to personal degradation, or extreme severity; and if they should try to escape from such sufferings, any body is authorized to shoot them down like dogs. With regard to your declaration that “no Southerner ought henceforth to read a line of my composition,” I reply that I have great satisfaction in the consciousness of having nothing to loose in that quarter. Twenty-seven years ago, I published a book called “An Appeal in behalf of that class of Americans called Africans.” It influenced the minds of several young men, afterward conspicuous in public life, through whose agency the cause was better served than it could have been by me. From that time to this, I have labored too earnestly for the slave to be agreeable to slaveholders. Literary popularity was never a paramount object with me, even in my youth; and, now that I am old, I am utterly indifferent to it. But, if I cared for the exclusion you threaten I should at least have the consolation of being exiled with honorable company. Dr. Channing’s writings, mild and candid as they are, breathe what you would call arrant treason. William C. Bryant, in his capacity of editor, is openly on our side. The inspired muse of Whittier has incessantly sounded the trumpet for moral warfare with your iniquitous institution; and his stirring tones have been answered, more or less loudly, by Pierpont, Lowell, and Longfellow. Emerson, the Plato of America, leaves the scholastic seclusion he love so well, and disliking noise with all his poetic soul, bravely takes his stand among the trumpeters. George W. Curtis, the brilliant wealth of his talent on the altar of Freedom, and makes common cause with rough-shod reformers. The genius of Mrs. Stowe carried the outworks of your institution at one dash, and left the citadel open to besiegers, who are pouring in amain. In the church, on the ultra-liberal side, it is assailed by the powerful battering-ram of Theodore Parker’s eloquence. On the extreme orthodox side is set a huge fire, kindled by the burning words of Dr. [George Barrell?] Cheever. Between them is Henry Ward Beecher, sending a shower of keen arrows into your entrenchments; and with him ride a troop of sharp-shooters from all sects. If you turn to the literature of England or France, you will find your institution treated with as little favor. The fact is, the whole civilized world proclaims Slavery an outlaw, and the best intellect of the age is active in hunting it down. L. MARIA CHILD.

After escaping from the raid on Harpers Ferry Barclay Coppoc appeared on this day at the family home in Cedar County, Iowa. A most unusual situation developed there: despite its Quaker status, during his presence the Coppoc house would be surrounded at night by men waiting in the dark with firearms, to protect him in his rest if the occasion arose, from capture by federal agents! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE TOUCHSTONE. BY WILLIAM ALLENGHAME. A man there came, whence none could tell, Bearing a touchstone in his hand, And tested all things in the land By its unerring spell. A thousand transformations rose, From fair to foul, from foul to fair; The golden crown he did not share, Nor scorn the beggar’s clothes. Of heirloom jewels, prized so much, Were many changed to chips and clods, And even statues of the gods Crumbled beneath its touch. Then angrily the people cried, “The loss outweighs the profit far, Our goods suffice us as they are, We will not have them tried.” But since they could not so avail To check his unrelenting quest, They seized him, saying, “Let him test How real is our jail.” But though they slew him with their swords, And in the fire the touchstone burned, Its doings could not be o’erturned, Its undoings restored. And when, to stop all future harm, They strewed his ashes to the breeze, They little guessed each grain of these Conveyed the perfect charm.

On March 6, 1857 Edwin Coppoc had been disowned by the Red Cedar Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in the West Branch/Springdale area. During April 1857 Barclay Coppoc had been disciplined by the Quakers for using profane language and for striking a man in anger. Several months after his return from Harpers Ferry, Barclay Coppoc would be disowned for absenting himself from meetings for worship and for bearing arms. The following is from chapters entitled “The Iowa Quakers and the Negroes” and “The Springdale Quakers and Old John Brown” in Louis Thomas Jones’s THE QUAKERS OF IOWA (Iowa City: Iowa State Historical Society, 1914, pages 195-7): Haggard and worn with his long flight, with a price upon his head, and hunted by an official with a requisition from Governor Wise of Virginia upon Governor Kirkwood of Iowa for his immediate rendition to justice, Barclay Coppoc reached his home in Iowa on December 17th [1859]. On the day before, his brother Edwin, loaded with chains and shackles, had yielded up his life upon a Virginia scaffold. Thus the mother’s parting prophecy had been fulfilled. [According to this source, when the two departed the mother had said to them: “When you get the halters around your necks, will you think of me?”] For the sake of accurate history, it now seems necessary to make plain the real relation which the much-eulogized Coppoc boys bore to the Society of Friends at the time of the events in question. Early in life both of the boys developed wayward tendencies, discomfiting to their mother and to the church. Edwin took to dancing, and though repeatedly dealt with in the “spirit of restoring love” by the Monthly Meeting, he spurned HDT WHAT? INDEX

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all advice, refused to “condemn his course,” and was in consequence duly disowned from membership in the Society on March 6, 1857. Barclay, also, about the same time gave the Springdale Friends grave concern. Fresh from the stirring scenes in Kansas, he had engaged in a fight soon after reaching home, and a month after his brother’s disownment the complaint was entered on the records of the Monthly Meeting that “Barclay Coppoc has used profane language, and struck a man in anger.” “Coppoc gave the proper satisfaction for this first offense. and the meeting “passed it by.” But immediately upon his return from Harpers Ferry his conduct called for new attention. With the officers close upon his heels Coppoc sought his home in Cedar County; and upon his arrival there a large number of the young men in the vicinity united as a military guard to prevent his capture, while he himself went heavily armed. His presence of course attracted wide attention, and the Overseers of the Preparative Meeting called upon him. Action was made to the [Red Cedar] Monthly Meeting that “Barclay Coppoc has neglected attendance at our religious meetings & is in the practice of bearing arms.” The usual care was extended to him, but with no avail. Two months later Barclay, like his brother, was formally disowned; and thus came to a close this interesting episode in the history of the Iowa Friends.

December 24, Saturday: Oberlin College Professor James Monroe returned empty-handed that Christmas Eve to Oberlin, Ohio, having failed to retrieve John Anderson Copeland, Jr.’s body from Virginia authorities.

The Reverend Samuel Joseph May had written to the Reverend Theodore Parker — who had gone off to Rome in part for his health and in part because he knew what was going to happen at Harpers Ferry and very well understood that he would pay for his part in this were he captured by the federal government. Now a belligerent letter arrived from Parker in Italy characterizing John Brown as “an upright & a downright man, who took his life in his hand & said ‘Slavery shall go down.’.”

[NOTE THAT FRIEND JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, WHEN OFFERED ONE OF THE PIKES WHICH HAD BEEN INTENDED FOR DISTRIBUTION TO REBELLING SLAVES FOR HIS INSPECTION, WOULD DECLINE WITH THE COMMENT “IT LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE MURDER,” AND THAT THE REVEREND ADIN BALLOU HAD JUST INSISTED THAT TO CHARACTERIZE SUCH A MAN AS JOHN BROWN, A MERE “MILITARY ADVENTURER,” AS A “SELF-SACRIFICING REDEEMER” ON THE MODEL OF JESUS WOULD BE “UNTRUTHFUL, UNJUST, AND UTTERLY ABSURD.”]

December 24: P.M.–To Flint’s Pond. A strong and very cold northwest wind. I think that the cold winds are oftenest not northwest, but northwest by west. There is, in all, an acre or two in Walden not yet frozen, though half of it has been frozen more than a week. I measure the blueberry bush on Flint’s Pond Island. The five stems are united at the ground, so as to make one round and solid trunk thirty-one inches in circumference, but probably they have grown together there, for they become separate at about six inches above. They may have sprung from different seeds of one berry. At three feet from the ground they measure eleven inches, eleven, eleven and a half, eight, and six and a half, or, on an average, nine and a half. I climbed up and found a comfortable seat with my feet four feet above the ground, and there was room for three or four more there, but unfortunately this was not the season for berries. There were several other clumps of large ones there. One clump close by the former contained twenty-three HDT WHAT? INDEX

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stems within a diameter of three feet, and their average diameter at three feet from the ground was about two inches. These had not been cut, because they stood on this small island which has little wood beside, and therefore had grown the larger. The two prevailing lichens on them were Parmelia caperata and saxatilis, extending quite around their trunks; also a little of a parmelia more glaucous than the last one, and a little green usnea and a little ramalina. [Vide specimens in drawer.] This island appears to be a mere stony ridge three or four feet high, with a very low wet shore on each side, even as if the water and ice had shoved it up, as at the other end of the pond. I saw the tracks of a partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] more than half an inch deep in the ice, extending from this island to the shore, she having walked there in the slosh. They were quite perfect and reminded me of bird-tracks in stone. She may have gone there to bud on these blueberry trees. I saw where she spent the night at the bottom of that largest clump, in the snow. Perhaps yet larger ones were seen here before we came to cut off the trees. Judging from those whose rings I have counted, the largest of those stems must be about sixty years old. The stems rise up in a winding and zigzag manner, one sometimes resting in the forks of its neighbor. There were many more clumps of large ones there.

December 25, Christmas Day: Walden Pond had frozen during the night.

A memorial service for John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Shields Green was held at First Church in Oberlin, Ohio.

T. Drew wrote from Boston to Charles Wesley Slack sending a “small specimen of the ornithological productions,” and Christmas greetings.

We find the following indication of the tension between the sacred and the secular observation of Christmas in two diary entries of Miss E.W. Lindsley of Downsville, New York: Sunday 25 A.M. Heard Mr. Hearnel lecture to the Children on Missions P.M. — Evening — He preached from Deut. 4.5 — a very pointed discourse against frivolity and dancing December Tuesday 27 1859 Attended the Masonic festival, with Julia, at H.A. Williams — Addresses by Dr Meerwin & Rev. L. Learicom — Had a Ball in the evening — Felt very much grieved at Mr. Beares dancing, after what Mr. Harnel Said Sabbath evening.

December 25: The last our coldest night, as yet. No doubt Walden froze over last night entirely.

P.M.–To Carlisle Bridge on river and meadow. I now notice a great many flat, annular, glow-worm-like worms frozen in the ice of the Great Meadow, which were evidently washed out of the meadow-grass lately; but they are almost all within the ice, inaccessible to birds; are only in certain parts of the meadow. especially about that island in it, where it is shallow. It is as if they were created only to be frozen, for this must be their annual fate. I see one which seems to be a true glow- worm. [No. I compare it with description September 16, 1857, and find it is not the glow-worm, though somewhat like it.] The transparent ice is specked black with them, as if they were cranberry leaves in it. You can hardly get one out now without breaking it, they are so brittle. The snow buntings are about, as usual, but I do not think that they were after these insects the other day. Standing by the side of the river at Eleazer Davis’s Hill, –prepared to pace across it,– I hear a sharp fine screep from some bird, which at length I detect amid the button-bushes and willows. The screep was a note of recognition meant for me. I saw that it was a novel bird to me. Watching it a long time, with my glass and without it, I at length made out these marks: It was slate-colored above and dirty-white beneath, with a broad and very conspicuous bright-orange crown, which in some lights was red-orange, along the middle of the head; this was bounded on each side by a black segment, beneath which was a yellow or whitish line. There was also some yellow and a black spot on the middle of the closed wings, and yellow within the tail-feathers. The ends of the wings and the tail above were dusky, and the tail forked. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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It was so very active that I could not get a steady view of it. It kept drifting about behind the stems of the button- bushes, etc., half the time on the ice, and again on the lower twigs, busily looking for its prey, turning its body this way and that with great restlessness, appearing to hide from me behind the stems of the button-bush and the withered coarse grass. When I came nearest it would utter its peculiar screep, or screep screep, or even screep screep screep. Yet it was unwilling to leave the spot, and when I cornered it, it hopped back within ten feet of me. However, I could see its brilliant crown, even between the twigs of the button-bush and through the withered grass, when I could detect no other part. It was evidently the golden-crested wren [Golden-crowned Kinglet Regulus satrapa], which I have not made out before. This little creature was contentedly seeking its food here alone this cold winter day on the shore of our frozen river. If it does not visit us often it is strange that it should choose such a season. I see that the strong wind of yesterday has blown off quite a number of white pine cones, which lie on the ice opposite E. Davis’s Hill. As I crossed Flint’s about 4 P. M. yesterday on my way home, when it was bitter cold, the ice cracked with an exceedingly brittle shiver, as if all the pond’s crockery had gone to smash, suggesting a high degree of tension, even of dryness,–such as you hear only in very cold weather,–right under my feet, as if I had helped to crack it. It is the report of the artillery which the frost foe has discharged at me. As you arc swiftly pacing homeward, taking your way across the pond, with your mittened hands in your pocket and your cap drawn down over your ears, the pond loves to give a rousing crack right under your feet, and you hear the whole pond titter at your surprise. It is bracing its nerves against the unheard-of cold that is at hand, and it snaps some of them. You hear this best where there is considerable depth and breadth of water,–on ponds rather than on the river and meadow. The cold strains it up so tight that some of the strings snap. On hearing that sound you redouble your haste toward home, where vestal virgins keep alive a little fire still. In the same manner the very surface of the earth cracks in frosty weather. To-night, when I get just below Davis’s Hill the ice displays its green flag and fires its evening gun as a warning to all walkers to return home. Consider how the pickerel-fisher lives. G., whom I saw at Flint’s Pond on the 22d, had been there all day, eaten all the dinner he had brought, and caught only four little fish, hardly enough for his supper, if he should cook them. His companion swore that he would not go a-fishing again for ten years. But G. said nothing of that sort. The next day I found him five miles from here on the other side of the town, with his lines set in the bay of the river off Ball’s Hill. There, too, he had been tramping about from hole to hole,–this time alone,–and he had done a trifle better than the day before, for he had caught three little fish and one great one. But instead of giving up here, he concluded to leave his lines in overnight,–since his bait would die if he took them off,–and return the next morning. The next was a bitter cold day, but I hear that Goodwin had some fish to dispose of. Probably not more than a dollar’s worth, however. You may think that you need take no care to preserve your woodland, but every tree comes either from the stump of another tree or from a seed. With the present management, will there always be a fresh stump, or a nut in the soil, think you? Will not the nobler kinds of trees, which bear comparatively few seeds, grow more and more scarce? What is become of our chestnut wood? There are but few stumps for sprouts to spring from, and, as for the chestnuts, there are not enough for the squirrels, and nobody is planting them. The sweet-gale rises above the ice of the meadow on each side of the river, with its brown clusters of little aments (some of its seeds begun to fall) amid its very dark colored twigs. There is an abundance of bright- yellow resin between its seeds, and the aments, being crushed between the fingers, yield an odoriferous, perhaps terebinthine (piney) fragrance and stain the fingers yellow. It is worth the while, at this season especially, when most plants are inexpressive, to meet with one so pronounced. I see the now withered spikes of the chelone here and there, in which (when diseased?) a few of its fiat winged seeds are still found. How different are men and women, even in respect to the adornment of their heads! Do you ever see an old or jammed bonnet on the head of a woman at a public meeting? But look at any assembly of men with their hats on; how large a proportion of the hats will be old, weather-beaten, and indented, but I think so much the more picturesque and interesting! One farmer rides by my door in a hat which it does me good to see, there is so much character in it,–so much independence to begin with, and then affection for his old friends, etc., etc. I should not wonder if there were lichens on it. Think of painting a hero in a bran-new hat! The chief recommendation of the Kossuth hat is that it looks old to start with, and almost as good as new to end with. Indeed, it is generally conceded that a man does not look the worse for a somewhat dilapidated hat. But go to a lyceum and look at the bonnets and various other headgear of the women and girls,–who, by the way, keep their hats on, it being too dangerous and expensive to take them off!! Why, every one looks as fragile as a butterfly’s wings, having just come out of a bandbox,–as it will go into a bandbox again when the lyceum is over. Men wear their hats for use; women theirs for ornament. I have seen the greatest philosopher in the town with what the traders would call "a shocking bad hat" on, but the woman whose bonnet does not come up to the mark is at best a "bluestocking." HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The man is not particularly proud of his beaver and musquash, but the woman flaunts her ostrich and sable in your face. Ladies are in haste to dress as if it were cold or as if it were warm,–though it may not yet be so,–merely to display a new dress. Again, what an ado women make about trifles! Here is one tells me that she cannot possibly wear india-rubber hoots in sloshy weather, because they have heels. Men have been wearing boots with heels from time immemorial; little boys soon learn the art, and are eager to try the experiment. The woodchoppers and teamsters, and the merchants and lawyers, go and come quietly the livelong day, and though they may meet with many accidents, I do not remember any that originated in the heels of their boots. But not so with women; they bolt at once, recklessly as runaway horses, the moment they get the boots on, before they have learned the wonderful art of wearing them. My informant tells me of a friend who has got a white swelling from coming down-stairs imprudently in boots, and of another seriously injured on the meeting-house steps,–for when you deal with steps, then comes the rub,–and of a third who involuntarily dashed down the front stairs, knocked a hat- tree,through the side-lights, and broke I do not know how many ribs. Indeed, that quarter-inch obstruction about the heels seems to be an insuperable one to the women.

December 29, Thursday: An empty-casket10 funeral was staged for John Anderson Copeland, Jr. in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio and 3,000 of his family’s friends, neighbors, and supporters attended. A year later, a monument would be erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three free men of color who had died in the raid or been hanged, Copeland, his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Martin Luther King, Jr. Park on Vine Street in 1971). OBERLIN COLLEGE

December 29: A very cold morning,–about–15 at 8 A.M. at our door. I went to the river immediately after sunrise. I could [SEE] a little greenness in the ice, and also a little rose- color from the snow, but far less than before the sun set. Do both these phenomena require a gross atmosphere? Apparently the ice is greenest when the sun is twenty or thirty minutes above the horizon. From the smooth open place behind Cheney’s a great deal of vapor was rising to the height of a dozen feet or more, as from a boiling kettle. This, then, is a phenomenon of quite cold weather. I did not notice it yesterday afternoon. These open places are a sort of breathing-holes of the river. When I look toward the sun, now that they are smooth, they are hardly to be distinguished from the ice. Just as cold weather reveals the breath of a man, still greater cold reveals the breath of, i. e. warm, moist air over, the river. I collect this morning the little shining black seeds of the amaranth, raised above the snow in its solid or dense spike. P.M.–To Ball’s Hill, skating. Walked back, measuring the river and ice by pacing. [Feb. 15,1860, when the river was much more open than Dec. 29, 1859, it was scarcely open at the narrowest place above Bound Rock, only puffed up in the channel, and the first decided opening was at Rice’s Bend; all below Bound Rock to Fair Haven Pond, etc., was quite solid. Hence the statements below are true.] The first open place in the main stream in Concord, or no doubt this side Carlisle Bridge, coming upstream, were [SIC]:–

1st, Holt Ford, 10 rods by 1 (extreme width). 2d, east side Holt Bend, near last, 8 by 1 1/2. 3d, west side Holt Bend (midway), 3 by 1/2. (On the 28th it must have been open nearly all round to Holt Bend.) 4th, Barrett’s Bar, 42 rods by 6 at west end, where it reaches 12 rods above ford; extends down the north side very narrow to the rock and only little way down the south side; can walk in middle half-way. 5th, a bar above Monument, 10 by 5. 6th, from Hunt’s Bridge to Island, or say 54 rods by 4. 7th, from 8 below willow-row to 5 below boat’s place, or 80+ rods by 3. This as far as I looked to-day, but no doubt [Proved by looking the 30th.] the next was:– 8th, just above ash tree, probably three or four rods long.

10. 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, Virginia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

9th, at Hubbard’s Bath Bend. 10th, Clamshell Bend. 11th, below Nut Meadow, probably two or three rods long.

This is the last in Concord. (I do not include the small openings which are to be found now at bridges.) The longest opening is that below my boat’s place; next, at junction next Barrett’s Bar; next, either Clamshell or Hubbard’s Bath. But for area of water that below the junction is considerably the largest of all. [Vide Jan. 22.] When I went to walk it was about 10 above zero, and when I returned, 1. I did not notice any vapor rising from the open places, as I did in the morning, when it was–16 and also–6. Therefore the cold must be between +1 and–6 in order that vapor may rise from these places. It takes a greater degree of cold to show the breath of the river than that of man. Apparently, the river is not enough warmer than the air to permit of its rising into it, i. e., evaporating, unless the air is of a very low temperature. When the air is say four or five degrees below, the water being + 32, then there is a visible evaporation. Is there the same difference, or some 40, between the heat of the human breath and that air in which the moisture in the breath becomes visible in vapor? This has to do with the dew-point. Next, what makes the water of those open places thus warm? and is it any warmer than elsewhere? There is considerable heat reflected from a sandy bottom where the water is shallow, and at these places it is always sandy and shallow, but I doubt if this actually makes the water warmer, though it may melt the more opaque ice which absorbs it. The fact that Holt Bend, which is deep, is late to freeze, being narrow, seems to prove it to be the swiftness of the water and not reflected heat that prevents freezing. The water is apparently kept warm under the ice and down next to the unfrozen earth, and by a myriad springs from within the bowels of the earth. I notice that, on the thin black ice lately formed on these open places, the breath of the water has made its way up through and is frozen into a myriad of little rosettes, which nearly cover its surface and make it white as with snow. You see the same on pretty thick ice. This occurs whenever the weather is coldest in the night or very early in the morning. Also, where these open places have lately closed, the ice for long distances over the thread of the river will often be heaved up roofwise a foot or more high and a rod wide, apparently pushed up by the heat of this breath beneath.

As I come home, I observe much thin ice, just formed as it grows colder, drifting in gauze-like masses down these open places, just as I used to see it coming down the open river when it began to freeze. In this case it is not ice which formed last night, but which is even now forming. The musquash make a good deal of use of these open spaces. I have seen one four times in three several places this winter, or within three weeks. They improve all the open water they can get. They occasionally leave their clamshells upon the edges of them now. This is all the water to reflect the sky now, whether amber or purple. I sometimes see the musquash dive in the midst of such a placid purple lake. Where the channel is broad the water is more sluggish and the ice accordingly thick, or it will answer just as well if the channel is deep, i. e., if its capacity is the same, though it be very narrow. The ice will be firm there too, e. g. at Ash Tree Rock (though it was lately open off the willows eight or ten rods above, being less deep and narrower); and even at the deeper hole next below the opening is not where it is deep, though very narrow, but half a dozen rods below, where it is much wider. To-night I notice the rose-color in the snow and the green in the ice at the same time, having been looking out for them. The clouds were very remarkable this cold afternoon, about twenty minutes before sunset, consisting of very long and narrow white clouds converging in the horizon (melon-rind-wise) both in the west and east. They looked like the skeletons and backbones of celestial sloths, being pointed at each end, or even like porcupine quills or ivory darts sharp at each end. So long and slender, but pronounced, with a manifest backbone and marrow. It looked as if invisible giants were darting them from all parts of the sky at the setting sun. These were long darts indeed. Well underneath was an almost invisible rippled vapor whose grain was exactly at right angles with the former, all over the sky, yet it was so delicate that it did not prevent your seeing the former at all. Its filmy arrows all pointed athwart the others. I know that in fact those slender white cloud sloths were nearly parallel across the sky, but how much handsomer are the clouds because the sky is made to appear concave to us! How much more beautiful an arrangement of the clouds than parallel lines! At length those white arrows and bows, slender and sharp as they were, gathering toward a point in the west horizon, looked like flames even, forked and darting flames of ivory-white, and low in the west there was a piece of rainbow but little longer than it was broad. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Taking the river in Concord in its present condition, it is, with one exception, only the shallowest places that are open. Suppose there were a dozen places open a few days ago, if it has grown much colder since, the deepest of them will be frozen over; and the shallowest place in all in Concord is the latest of all to freeze, e. g. at the junction. So, if you get into the river at this season, it is most likely to be at the shallowest places, they being either open or most thinly frozen over. That is one consolation for you. The exception is on the west side of the Holt (and the depth is one side from the opening), but that is on account of the narrowness of the river there. Indeed, the whole of Holt Bend is slow to freeze over, on account of the great narrowness and consequent swiftness of the stream there; but the two narrowest points of it are among the first to freeze over, because they are much the deepest, the rush of waters being either below or above them, where it is much shallower, though broader. To be safe a river should be straight and deep, or of nearly uniform depth. I do not remember any particular swiftness in the current above the railroad ash tree, where there is still an opening (seen December 30th), and it may be owing to the very copious springs in the high bank for twenty rods. There is not elsewhere so long a high and springy bank bounding immediately on the river in the town. To be sure, it is not deep. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

In Fairfield, South Carolina in the fall of 1843, one John L. Brown had been sentenced “to hang by the neck until your body be dead” for having aided a South Carolinan who was trying to escape from enslavement in South Carolina. But this had not been the famous enslaver of Providence, Rhode Island, John Brown, nor had it been the businessman John Brown of Newburyport, nor had it been the businessman John Brown of Concord, nor had it been the northern interloper of 1859, Captain John Brown — this had been a Maine man. The national and international petitions for clemency in this case, landing on the desk of Governor James Henry Hammond (1810-1864), had caused the governor to commute the sentence of death and then to respond at length in defense of the institution of chattel slavery and in opposition to the practice of slave stealing, and the Charleston SC Mercury had subsequently put his thoughts out in the form of pamphlets, and then they had been republished as PRO-SLAVERY ARGUMENT, and in this year this Southern gentleman’s responses received additional general publication as COTTON IS KING AND PRO-SLAVERY ARGUMENTS. COTTON UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

William Still went into the stove business. Later he branched out into the coal business.

Oberlin, Ohio’s population of 2,115 including 422 black Americans, which would work out to be 20%. A monument was erected in honor of the town’s three free men of color who had died in the raid on Harpers Ferry or been hanged for treason, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary, and “Emperor” Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Martin Luther King, Jr. Park on Vine Street in 1971).

There was severe drouth in Kansas and 30,000 disillusioned white settlers abandoned the state. “BLEEDING KANSAS” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR NOT CIVIL WAR

1971

A monument had been erected by the citizens of Oberlin, Ohio in honor of their 3 free citizens of color who had died during the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry before the US Civil War, or been hanged afterward in Charles Town, Virginia: Shields Green, John Anderson Copeland, Jr., and Lewis Sheridan Leary. At this point the 8-foot marble monument was moved to Vine Street Park.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 2005. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: August 18, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.