by Tony Horwitz
At just after eight P.M., a militiaman patrolling the street outside the prison glimpsed a figure rising above the wall. The head of a second man also appeared. The sentinel called out, received no answer, and fired. Coppoc immediately ducked down. Cook, daring to the end, appeared ready to jump into the street. But when the guard threatened to impale him with his bayonet, Cook followed Coppoc back into the prison yard, where both men were quickly seized.
“We do not wish that any one should be unjustly censured on our account,” Cook and Coppoc stated in a signed confession intended to absolve their jailers, who were suspected of being too lenient or possibly having accepted bribes. “We received no aid from any person, or persons whatever.”
The two men did, however, admit to having been given a second knife blade by a fellow prisoner, Shields Green. As a fugitive slave, Green was subject to special scorn from Virginians. He was also illiterate, and no one bothered to record more than a few of his thoughts and words in prison. Green’s cellmate, John Copeland, received more favorable, if still racist, attention. David Strother thought the handsome, well-spoken Copeland “would make a very genteel dining-room servant.” The prosecutor Andrew Hunter later wrote that the “copper-colored” Copeland “behaved himself with as much firmness as any of them and with far more dignity.”
Hunter nonetheless confiscated some of the letters Copeland wrote from prison, evidently regarding them as incendiary. “I am so soon to stand and suffer death for doing what George Washington the so-called father of this great but slave-cursed country, was made a hero for doing,” Copeland wrote his brother. “Washington entered the field to fight for the freedom of the American people—not for the white man alone.”
On the day of his execution, he wrote his family: “Last night for the last time, I beheld the soft bright moon as it rose, casting its mellow light into my felons cell.” The twenty-five-year-old nonetheless felt at peace. “We shall meet in Heaven, where we shall not be parted by the demands of the cruel and unjust monster Slavery.”
At eleven A.M. on the raw, overcast morning of December 16, Copeland and Green followed Brown’s path to the gallows, riding aboard their coffins to the same hanging field at the edge of Charlestown. Troops guarded the gallows, as before, but this time a minister accompanied the condemned onto the scaffold and recited a long prayer. When the drop came, Green died quickly, his neck apparently broken. But “Copeland seemed to suffer very much, and his body writhed in violent contortions for some time,” the New York Tribune reported.
Before the hanging, Copeland’s father in Oberlin had sent repeated pleas to Governor Wise, asking permission to retrieve his son’s body. Wise’s eventual reply, just four days before the execution, was curt: “Yes. To your orders to some white citizen. You can’t come to this State yourself.”
This gave Copeland’s father little time to make the necessary arrangements; meanwhile, Wise notified a Virginia doctor that if “the Negro convicts are not demanded by the proper relatives,” they could be handed over to a medical college. Immediately after their hanging, Copeland and Green were buried in a field near the gallows. They lay there for only a few minutes before students disinterred the bodies and carried them off for dissection at the medical school in Winchester, where two of the insurgents killed at Harpers Ferry had earlier been taken.
When the Copelands’ agent, an Oberlin professor named James Monroe, arrived a few days later, he went to the medical school to try to recover the body. Faculty members agreed to turn Copeland over, but the students who had disinterred the body refused. As their representative told Monroe, “This nigger that you are trying to get don’t belong to the faculty.”
Even so, Monroe was given a tour of the college, including the dissecting room, where he was startled to see the body of Copeland’s compatriot Shields Green. “A fine athletic figure, he was lying on his back,” Monroe wrote, “the unclosed, wistful eyes staring wildly upward, as if seeking, in a better world, for some solution to the dark problems of horror and oppression so hard to be explained in this.”
COPELAND AND GREEN’S WHITE jail mates received much more respectful treatment. An hour after the black men were hanged, Cook and Coppoc were taken from the jail, looking “remarkably cheerful,” according to one reporter. Cook called out to those he recognized in the crowd outside, telling one, “Remember me to all my friends at the Ferry.” As they neared the gallows, Coppoc’s face assumed “a settled expression of despair” and tears streamed down Cook’s cheeks. But both men strode firmly up the scaffold steps and listened to a final prayer without a tremor.
After the nooses and hoods had been placed over them, Cook said, “Stop a minute; where is Edwin’s hand?” The jailer guided their hands together for a final shake. Cook “then waved his hand to the crowd around the gallows, and said, ‘Good-bye, all!’”
To avoid a repeat of Copeland’s slow strangling, the sheriff asked a doctor to carefully adjust the nooses “to expedite death.” Both men died without a struggle. The undertaker who had driven Cook and Coppoc to the gallows retrieved their bodies and transported their coffins to Harpers Ferry. Coppoc’s was collected by his uncle for burial at a Quaker graveyard in Ohio. Cook’s was shipped to the family members in New York who had earlier taken in his teenaged wife, Virginia, whom he’d married in Harpers Ferry just eight months before.
Contrary to John Brown’s stern instruction, Cook had told his wife before the Harpers Ferry attack about their plot to free slaves. Though she came from a proslavery family, Virginia later said she was “always at heart an Abolitionist” and she had kept her husband’s plans secret. After his death, she went to work for Brown’s abolitionist allies in Boston and later married a Union soldier. When a researcher tracked Virginia down fifty years after the attack, she said little about her brief marriage to Cook, except that he had “a great fondness for romance” and “would sit up for hours” telling her stories from the chivalric novels of Sir Walter Scott.
AFTER THE HANGINGS ON December 16, just two prisoners remained. Albert Hazlett, upon his capture in Pennsylvania, had claimed his name was Harrison and said he had no connection to Harpers Ferry. This fiction delayed his trial but isolated the semiliterate Hazlett from contact with friends and family outside prison. The trial of Aaron Stevens, Brown’s stoic lieutenant and former cellmate, was delayed on technical grounds; during the waiting period, he wrote many letters, some of which were published in the North, as Brown’s had been before.
“I had a very hard time of it,” he wrote Annie Brown, describing the six bullet wounds from which he had miraculously recovered, “but I am as well now as ever except my face is paralyzed on one side, which prevents me from laughing on that side, and my jaw bone was thrown out of place and my teeth do not meet as they did before.”
Reporters and other visitors to the jail also continued to describe Stevens as a darkly handsome Spartacus, a chained gladiator so majestic that even a lawyer gushed, “Such black and penetrating eyes! Such an expansive brow! Such a grand chest and limbs!” With the other jailed insurgents dead, apart from the obscure Hazlett, Stevens became a cause célèbre to Brown’s faithful in the North, particularly women.
“We feel an increased and intense interest in you,” wrote an Ohio woman, who signed herself, “Forever yours in sympathy & affection.” “I have looked at your likeness,” another Ohio stranger wrote, “and I admire you I love you.” Others yearned to mother him, most especially Rebecca Spring, the forty-eight-year-old New Jersey woman who had boldly gone to visit Brown in prison and had been smitten by his cellmate. She called Stevens a “regular young lion” and sent him apples, figs, and an evergreen bouquet, along with letters addressing him as “My dear little boy.”
Stevens appreciated the attention and answered Spring in kind, as “Your son in the bonds of love, truth, friendship and righteousness.” But his true passion was reserved for the one woman who seemed immune to his charms: Jennie Dunbar, the music teacher he had met in Ohio before emba
rking for the South.
“My love is very warm and there is no deceite about me, and I want a woman to love me, with all her soul,” he’d written her in one of several amorous letters from the Kennedy farm. Stevens carried a picture of her into battle in Harpers Ferry and kept writing her from prison, “hoping that I am not forgotten.”
He wasn’t alone in extolling Jennie Dunbar. Others described her as intelligent, extremely independent, and physically stunning. “A rare and delicate type,” one writer called her, “with great eyes full of pathos, with exquisite contours, with a glory of dark hair.” When Stevens showed her picture to his comrades at the Kennedy farm, they had hurried to send their regards.
Dunbar was sympathetic to the insurrectionists’ cause, and she was part of the close-knit abolitionist community in northeastern Ohio that had served as Brown’s main weapons depot and muster station in the lead-up to Harpers Ferry. She taught music to John Brown, Jr.’s, wife, translated John junior’s secret correspondence into numbered code, and often visited the farm family with whom Stevens boarded in the spring and summer of 1859.
Though Dunbar had enjoyed singing and playing music with Stevens, she was taken aback by his sudden professions of love from Maryland and Virginia. As a friend of Dunbar’s put it in a letter: “He did not seem to think anymore of her than any one else before he went away.” Dunbar didn’t respond to Stevens’s letters for months, and when she finally wrote him in prison in December, her words were mostly spiritual. “Be of good cheer as possible, believing that ‘all things work together for good, to those who serve the Lord.’” She also wished she could come “to cheer you with spoken words of affection and appreciation,” and closed: “With tenderest sympathy, I bid you Good-Bye. Jennie.”
Undeterred, Stevens wrote her back immediately, saying that her words were “pure spring water, to a thirsty soul.” But she didn’t reciprocate and left it to a mutual friend to explain her feelings. “She loves you as a brother for your noble principles,” wrote Julia Lindsley, the Ohio woman at whose home Stevens had stayed.
In February 1860, after four months in prison, Stevens and Hazlett went on trial; both were quickly convicted. Asked whether he had anything to say before sentencing, Stevens spoke of slavery: “When I think of my brothers slaughtered and my sisters outraged, my conscience does not reprove me for my actions. I shall meet my fate manfully.” He and Hazlett were sentenced to hang a month later, on March 16, 1860.
Stevens also followed Brown in refusing ministerial comfort. He was devoted to Spiritualism, a creed that questioned the authenticity of the Bible and the divinity of Christ. His personal “god and Savior,” he wrote, was “good actions” and “I expect to receive a free pass to the Spirit-World,” where he would be able to communicate with those he had known and loved.
To his uncle, Stevens wrote that he was soon “to dance on nothing. It is rather a queer way to leave this world, but if a person must die, because he loves man & justice, why I think it becomes one of the best of deaths.” He added: “I think now, from what I have seen, that the way we were trying to do away with Slavery is not the best way, but I had to get this experience before I knew it.” He expressed some regret to his brother as well: “I have a desire to live yet awhile for I am young yet and have just learnt how to live.”
Some of his supporters still hoped to save him. Thomas Wentworth Higginson assembled a band of armed men in southern Pennsylvania, but then abandoned the rescue mission when heavy snow and tight security made it too risky. The Ohio farm wife Julia Lindsley began a petition drive, urging Virginia’s governor to commute the death sentence. Many others had sent similar pleas, but the Ohioans decided to deliver theirs in person, and they prevailed on Jennie Dunbar to act as emissary.
Traveling alone, she reached Richmond just two days before the execution. Governor John Letcher, who had replaced Wise, received her cordially, “supposing her to be the affianced bride of Mr. Stevens,” a newspaper reported. But he told her Stevens was “the worst of John Brown’s men” and he would not commute the sentence.
“I left him, with what feelings, I cannot tell,” Dunbar later wrote. “Hope had not quite died till then.”
The next day she went to Charlestown, arriving on the afternoon before the execution—Stevens’s twenty-ninth birthday. His sister Lydia had arrived a few days before, prompting him to write their brother, “She is all nerve which is more than I can say of myself.” But when Lydia brought Jennie Dunbar to his cell, Stevens seemed transformed. In his last letter to her before the attack on Harpers Ferry, he had dreamed of living “to see thy lovly face wonce more.” Now, in a prison cell on the eve of his hanging, he had gotten his wish.
“Mr. Stevens rose from the side of the bed where he had been sitting, and came forward as well as he could for the chain around his ankles,” Dunbar wrote. “He did not speak and I could not have done so had I tried.”
Stevens’s composed sister broke the silence and “we all recovered ourselves pretty soon,” Dunbar went on. They shared the apples, maple sugar, and cheese she’d brought him from Ohio, and the mood turned incongruously cheerful. “The near approach of death seemed not to be thought of,” she wrote. Stevens sang with them, read aloud about Spiritualism, and performed a phrenological exam of his sister’s head. The two women ate supper at the jail and stayed until ten P.M. “He is in the best of spirits, talks, laughs and sings just as he used to do when life was bright before him,” Dunbar wrote Julia Lindsley late that night.
She and Lydia returned to the jail the next morning for a breakfast consisting mostly of oysters, which Stevens had requested for his final meal. “He was talking to us as if he were to meet us again soon,” Dunbar wrote. “He sent for a brush and polished his shoes, saying he ‘wished to look well when he ascended the scaffold.’”
This was too much for his sister, who ran from the room and “wept convulsively.” Lydia’s anguish, Dunbar wrote, “more even than grief for him, moved me, and the tears forced themselves to my eyes.”
But Stevens remained stoic, urging them not to grieve, and soon after their departure he and Hazlett climbed atop their coffins for the wagon ride to the gallows. “Both exhibited great firmness,” the New York Times reported, and “persisted in refusing all the kindly offices of the ministry in their last moments.”
Still, the man who had survived six bullet wounds was not easy to kill. When the drop came, “Hazlett seemed to die very easily,” a Baltimore paper reported, but Stevens “struggled for a considerable time, and appeared to suffer very much.”
Like Brown, Stevens had left a message before going to the gallows, though his was not in writing. In accordance with Stevens’s and Hazlett’s wishes to be buried in “a free land,” their coffins were shipped to the New Jersey home of Rebecca Spring, who had taken such an interest in the prisoners. Before the burial in a nearby cemetery, Stevens’s coffin was opened to cut a lock of his hair. “Attached to the button-hole of Stevens’ coat by red and blue ribbons was a plain black India rubber ring,” the New York Herald reported, “but for whom it was intended his friends were not informed.” A woman at the funeral wrote Higginson, “It apparently was a last thought, conceived too late for explanation.”
Jennie Dunbar was present at Stevens’s funeral and was described in news reports as his fiancée. Annie Brown believed this to be true. She had grown close to Stevens at the Kennedy farm, had corresponded with him in prison, and met Dunbar a few months after his hanging, at a ceremony for Brown and his men in North Elba. While there, Dunbar told Annie that she had broken her engagement to Stevens in prison, just hours before his execution. According to Annie, Dunbar knew that “as soon as he entered the spirit world,” he would know she didn’t love him, and “her conscience would not let her deceive him.”
But Stevens was a persistent suitor, and he evidently died in hope, carrying a ring with him to the gallows. Two months later, his friends in Ohio held a “circle” to communicate with his spirit. At one point, t
he medium “seemed to suffer about the throat,” wrote a woman present at the séance, and “beckoned to Jennie to take a seat by her side.” The medium held Dunbar’s hand as Stevens reported that “he died very hard but it did not injure the soul.” He then “addressed Jennie very kindly.”
As Stevens had told her in his letters, he would await her in the Spirit-Land, bearing “the love of Soul, who’s depth is to the end of time.”
EPILOGUE
Immortal Raiders
They all called him crazy then; who calls him crazy now?
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
“The Last Days of John Brown,” 1860
The hanging of Stevens and Hazlett on March 16, 1860, was greeted with relief by the Virginians whom Brown and his men had attacked exactly five months before. “The curtain has at last fallen upon the closing scene of the Harper’s Ferry tragedy,” a Charlestown paper observed, “and we will indulge the hope, that with it terminates forever all organized interference with the constitutional rights of the South.”
But the execution of the last jailed insurgents terminated little except their lives and the duties of their guards. Nationally, Harpers Ferry and its aftermath had exposed a gaping crevasse; nothing now seemed capable of bridging it. The “knell of the Union” that Jefferson had first heard forty years earlier, during the debate over Missouri, could no longer be hushed.
Abraham Lincoln, who was emerging that March as a contender for the presidency, labored to hold the Union together. But in his failure to do so, and in his eventual conversion to Brown’s cause, he personified the nation’s transformation between 1859 and 1865. At the time of the Harpers Ferry attack, Lincoln was a second-tier candidate for the Republican nomination, so lightly regarded that newspapers often rendered his first name as “Abram.” Like many in the North, he admired Brown’s courage and antislavery conviction but condemned his resort to violence. He also grasped the nation’s fear of disunion and war, and used Harpers Ferry to position himself as a safely moderate choice in the Republican field.