John Brown's raiders
Salmon Brown, though he had been with his father and brothers in Kansas, did not want to participate in the Harpers Ferry raid and remained in North Elba, running the farm.
[1] He died in 1889 John E. Cook, 29, reformer and former soldier, attended Oberlin College, he initially escaped capture, but was found and hanged[19] 16 December 1859.
[7] Buried Green-wood Cemetery, Brooklyn New York Albert Hazlett, 23, fought in Kansas, escaped following the raid, but was captured and hanged.
He is buried unknown grave National Harmony Cemetery Park Cemetery, Hyattsville Maryland ‡ Watson Brown, 24, son of John Brown, mortally wounded during the raid[26] Watson was mortally wounded outside the engine house while carrying a white flag to negotiate with the opposing militia.
He returned to Iowa in 1860 where he was allowed to escape to Canada due to Governor Samuel Kirkwood delaying Virginia's attempt to extradite him.
Buried Hope Cemetery, Salem, Columbiana County Ohio ¶ Shields Green, about 23, escaped slavery, captured and hanged on 16 December 1859.
He was given permission to move to Ohio along with his mother and siblings, but when he tried to gain freedom for his wife and children, their owner refused to sell them even after Newby had earned and saved the agreed-upon price.
Brown's daughter and daughter-in-law, Anne (Annie) and Martha, Oliver's wife, prepared food and kept the house for the men from August and throughout the month of September.
[42] Besides their domestic activities, Anne, who was 15, and Martha, 17, "kept discreet watch over the prattling conspirators in the house and hustled them out of sight on occasion, and who turned aside local suspicion by their sweet and honest ways.
Three men—Owen Brown, Barclay Coppock, Meriam—remained at the Kennedy Farm in Maryland, "to guard the arms and ammunition stored on the premises, until it should be time to move them.
Brown's party held out until Tuesday morning, when a company of Marines, led by Col. Robert E. Lee, quickly broke down the doors to the engine house and took the surviving raiders captive.
The seven survivors, including John Brown himself, were quickly tried for treason, murder, and inciting a slave revolt, and were convicted and executed by hanging, in the Jefferson County seat of Charles Town.
"[51]: 362 Historians frequently credit the raid not for starting the Civil War, but for providing the spark that lit the waiting bomb, or as Brown would have put it, causing "the volcano beneath the snow" to erupt.
The remainder, which no local cemetery would accept, were dragged into a "gruesome pile", boxed, and dumped in an unmarked pit on the far side of the Shenandoah.
Ten were ultimately buried in 1899 in a single coffin on the John Brown Farm in North Elba, New York, according to a plaque there.
Unwelcome in local cemeteries, they were thrown into two "store boxes", and two Black men, for $5.00 each, buried them, without ceremony, clergy, or marker, on the far side of the Shenandoah (in Clarke County).
With those 8, in the same coffin and ceremony, were the remains of Hazlitt and Stevens, who had been executed, and whose bodies had been buried at the Eagleswood Military Academy in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.
It was preserved by a medical school professor and made into an anatomical exhibit, labeled expressing the Virginians' attitude toward abolitionists, and toward John Brown in particular.
[102] A Charles Town grand jury in February 1860 indicted them, along with Jeremiah Anderson [sic], for "conspiring with slaves to create insurrection".
[111]: 191 ) Brown said many times that he had expected a large number of enslaved black people of Jefferson County to flee their owners and assist him in the raid and afterwards.
As a party who had an intimate knowledge of the conduct of the colored men engaged, I am prepared to make an emphatic denial of the gross imputation against them.
[114]: 557 According to a local newspaper, "the slaves for miles around Harper's Ferry, though well kept and kindly treated, were well informed as to John Brown's movement, and prepared to take part in the insurrection."
[118] A correspondent from the Cincinnati Commercial, in Charles Town for the execution, reported: "As to the negroes round about Harper's Ferry and Charlestown there can be no doubt but they were deeply interested in the events that have recently taken place, and that many of them looked upon the outbreak, as the lifting of the dark cloud of slavery from their race.
It may be here remarked that, so far as I knew or learned from any quarter, not a single one of the slaves in the county of Jefferson or in Maryland, adjacent, ever did join him in his raid, except by coercion, and then they escaped as soon as they could and went back to their homes.
[123]: 222 These "faithful slaves" who allegedly refused to help Brown at Harpers Ferry became a key element in the "Lost Cause" myth of happy Antebellum Southern life.
However, we know positively, said a newspaper story, that some 25 enslaved black people, out of 200 acquainted to some degree with Brown's project, helped the raiders; they all claimed to have been impressed (forced).
One was Jim, "a young coachman hired by Lewis Washington from an owner in Winchester";[123]: 296–297 he drowned attempting to flee by crossing the river.
He died in the Charles Town jail of "pneumonia and fright", along with his mother Ary, also owned by Allstadt, who had come to nurse him.
[25]: 60 According to Louis DeCaro, at the peak there were 20 to 30 local slaves involved, who quickly and quietly went back to their masters' when it became clear the raid was failing.
There is a long list of fires set in Jefferson County during the final months of 1859, including those at the farms of men who had been on the jury that convicted Brown.
