Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool be Booted Cool Stuff. You're weekly reminder that where there's bad things, there's people fighting against the bad things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest this week is Bridget Todd.
Hi. Hi, so excited to be here.
Yeah, I'm like, the recordings always come after this. My work week is a saw wave where it just like builds and builds and builds, and then I record all of the episodes and then I collapse and then my brain turns into goo. And so I'm always like, right before I hit record, I'm like, I'm so tired, I can't have a thought, but instead I fall into sort of a manic state and record. I don't know why I'm telling you this or everyone who's listening this, but anyway, Bridget, that's a great guest.
You don't seem goo or manic brains to me.
Oh well, thanks thanks. Our producer is Sophie Hi, Sophie.
Hi Magpie, Hi, Bridget.
Hey, Sophie Hey, Anderson.
Hello Anderson named after this week's hero, and also Hi Rory, our audio engineer, Hi Rory, Hi.
Riory, Hi Roy Magpie.
Is there also a character in this episode named after my other dog.
No, oh, I'm sorry.
You gotta start doing Sophie's dog themed episodes.
All of them should get an episode. That's a good idea, Yeah, especially if we can find the duo.
Magpie apologized to Truman.
Truman, I'm so sorry. Usually when your namesake appears in these episodes, it's not positive.
People thought I named her after him.
It's like, no, she's named after Truman Burbank from The Truman Show.
Be so for real, Be so for real.
I'm not gonna name my dog after a president Jesus Christ.
So we are on part two of a two parter about the raiders of Harper's Ferry. And while John Brown has woven throughout, it is not the main character because he's the main character. Enough, nothing but love for that man, But he's not the main character today. That said, we're about to talk about him for a second because this is kind of the road to Harper's Ferry section, right, and most of the raiders, their road to Harper's Ferry takes them through Kansas. You ever heard of Bleeding Kansas?
I have not, which is a very metal There's so much metal stuff going on in here. There's so many swords involved in this story that you wouldn't expect there's going to be at least several sorts. Since eighteen twenty, there had been this Missouri Compromise where new states in the Union were either free or nightmare lands of slavery based on their latitude. I think that's how they phrased it.
But in eighteen fifty four, the Kansas Nebraska Act said basically that it's up to voters of each new state to decide whether or not you can just own people. So people on both sides of the issue would flood into states to help affect the electorate, which means that you had kind of a mini civil war that I'm hoping to cover at more length. One day, called Bleeding Kansas, John Brown, four of his sons and some other folks were like, well, I guess we're just slaver killing bandits.
Now.
I don't know that's how they would have phrased it, but it's what they did. They moved to Kansas and they started killing slavers. This is how he got famous as a zelot, because he would murder people who thought you could just capture people and turn them into property.
I mean what's more metal than that?
Well, they did the killing with swords.
That you did up the metal ante on that one.
Yeah, and also guns. And it's interesting I fell on this whole rabbit hole because for a while I spent a while trying to be like, can I get a John Brown replica sword or not? And the answer is not easily. But people would say that he had a broad sword, but that actually I think just meant it wasn't a curved sword like a cavalry saver, but instead it was more of a straight sword like the French artillery swords that were based on the Gladias. This is
not what the show is about. I just like swords. I have a lot of them on my walls. And this is also where John Brown earned his reputation as a skilled military commander. He successfully outmaneuvered forces many times stronger than his own. It's also how he lost the first of his sons to die in the cause of abolition. In August eighteen fifty six, Frederick Brown was killed by
a company of Missourian slavers. But what's funny is like this man had twenty kids with two different wives over his life, and nine of them didn't make it to adulthood, not because he had particularly bad luck. People completely misunderstand how high child mortality was before vaccines. Have you seen the like there's like right wing people right now posting like we made it this far without vaccines, and then people just have to respond to like with child mortality graphs.
Yeah, I can't believe people would say that with a straight face. It's like, wow, you really just like fuck, everything that happened before I got here today is the only thing I know about.
Yeah, I do wonder sometimes when I'm like, because I would have a hard time imagine being a mom and having kids join me in battle, right, because I would be too concerned about their survival. But I guess if you've like lost forty five percent of them already, Like I don't know, I don't know.
Yeah, I have to imagine people had big family and just simply did not expect a lot of them to survive, and that that colored all of their decision making as a parent.
Yeah, totally, Like, all right, go off and get on a ship and go find another continent, do whatever. You were going to die of tuberculosis anyway. So after Bleeding Kansas, they're like what's the next move? And he and a bunch of militant abolitionists show up and Chatham in Canada with a specific goal. They're going to sit down and hash out a provisional constitution for this black republic that they're going to set up in Appalachia. And they brought
like maps and shit with them. We're like, all right, well, this is where we can set up our bases in the mountains and raid plantations, and this is where we're going to like like they planned it. They were like, this is how we're going to wage this entire war
and how we're going to build a free republic. And Anderson the newspaper man was one of the secretaries to the secret convey which they referred to as a very quiet conference, which is a good word for when you're planning them a remarkably illegal thing.
Yeah. I like that as an ephemism.
Yeah.
And then the thing that they use is their cover, was that everyone was like, oh, we're just setting up a black Mason's lodge. Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman were invited to this. Frederick Douglass was like, no, I'm good. Harriet Tubman couldn't come because she was genuinely sick, but biggest l of the whole week. She was the only woman invited to the conference. It was all men. Yeah, they got together, they built up a constitution, they elected
provisional officers, they wrote a good preamble. That's like Slavery's bats were doing her own thing. Osborne Osborne Anderson was elected to the Congress of this new government. And maybe they planned the raid itself. Maybe they didn't. This was like litigated in court, and so a lot of the stuff of the history around here had to be kind of played with carefully, as people were like, well, I don't want to get hanged. You know, a black gunsmith, this isn't even the best name.
Man.
A black gunsmith was there and his name was Gunsmith.
Jack's out.
Yeah, uh, what do you do for work? Gunsmith?
Well, let me tell you.
That's like your name being Margaret podcast.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And he to be clear, this is like his name in quotes in the middle. It's like what everyone calls him, you know. But yeah, it wasn't pure, it wasn't nominative determinism. It was vice versa, you know. And he made a bunch of the firearms for the raid, which is cool as hell that a man named Gunsmith in a different country made you your firearms. It is possible that John Brown knew the raid was doomed. It is possible that the reason it was mostly white fighters was decided ahead
of time. Gunsmith said that John Brown believed that only if a bunch of white people die fighting slavery would white Northerners gather up the courage to actually fight. It's possible that John Brown set out to be a martyr, but they did make a specific plan, one that could have worked. I think that John Brown's plan A was to succeed, but he wanted to make sure that failure was also a success, so that this raid was win win, even if one of the wind conditions meant his own death.
Almost half of the black people who were at the conference to set up this new Republic later signed up to fight in the Civil War, which means that they left Safe Canada to go fight in the Union Army. But only one guy, one black man from that conference went on to the Harper's Ferry raid Osborne Anderson. As one source put it, the staff of the Provincial Freemen got together to be like well the newspaper, not the conference.
The newspaper's like, well, one of us should probably go down and like actually fight, right if we're gonna do this, And so they literally drew straws Osborne drew the short straw. He went without a fuss. He headed back to the US, and he went to the Kennedy farm in Maryland. And it gets presented as like mostly I've seen it presented as like, ah, the unlucky person draws the straw. It might have been that multiple people wanted to go and that it was like they could only really afford to
send one person. That's a between the lines reading that I might be incorrect about. Okay, the fifth Black Raider, he's the one with the coolest name. His name, which he picked for himself, was Shield's Green, but and actually is his original name. But his original name was because he was owned by a guy. I don't remember his first name, but it was brown, but that was the name of his owner or whatever. His name was Shields Green,
which he picked for himself. But then he picked his own nick name too, which was Emperor.
Okay, that is it. That is yeah, probably the coolest same we're going to hear in this episode.
No exactly.
Yes, Emperor is the one I've been waiting to talk about. He believed that he was descended from African royalty. We've run across this a couple times on the show, but it's also often true, right, because the whole thing is that people's past are being demolished, but a lot of people were descended from African royalty. Emperor was a self emancipated man, brave almost to a fault. He had been born into slavery in South Carolina. After his wife died,
he fled on a ship. Sadly, he did leave behind his six month old child, I don't know into whose care most likely. He then made his way to Canada, where he met Frederick Douglas. Emperor started working as a clothes cleaner for Frederick Douglass and kind of became Frederick Douglas's sort of right hand man for a while. Frederick Douglas wrote about him quote Shield's Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man
of few words and his speech was singularly broken. But his courage and self respect made him quite a dignified character, and so he wasn't literate, and he also like wasn't like just like Frankly, he wasn't very good at communicating, and he was also fucking amazing. In August eighteen fifty nine, a couple months before the raid, John Brown set up a meeting with Frederick Douglas, who was attended by Shields
Green for days. Brown tried to convince Douglas to join the raid, like it was like literally like a weekend long conference where he's like, this is my plan, I think you should come, And Douglas said that Brown was quote going into a perfect steel trap and that once in he would never get out alive.
Oh.
Douglas basically wished him luck, and then he said I think later he said that he wasn't sure whether his own refusal to go was discretion or cowardice, And that is fucking relatable. Yeah, And then Frederick Douglas turns to Emperor and is like, what do you want to do? And Emperor says, I believe I'll go with the old man, and he joined John Brown and headed to the Kennedy farm. There were a lot of other raiders who I'm not
going to cover in as much detail. Many of them had been with John Brown for years fighting with him and Bleeding Kansas. Many others, though, many of the people who had fought with him and Bleeding Kansas were like, this one's a suicide mission, this one's a steel trap and sat it out. Others joined the crew more recently, like Stuart Taylor, who was a wagon maker who attended the Chatham convention, who again was like a white Canadian dude who was like, yeah, all right, uh fucking shit's
gotta get done. If it's not me, who's going to do it?
You know?
I appreciate that attitude so much.
Yeah, totally. The Koppack brothers, Barclay and Edwin were Quakers and they were like, well I think the I think we gotta And many of John Brown's sons and one of his son in laws came with him. What a family to marry into. Initially, folks were going to do the raid right after Chatham, but there was a problem. One of the conspirators lost faith in the plan and
started talking about it to their various donors. So like one of the raiders was like, I don't feel good about this anymore, and he started going to the donors who were funding the whole thing. And were like, ah, like he didn't go snitch, right, but he just like went and was like, I don't know, I think John
Brown's it's not a good plan. And so the donation started drying up and this impacted their ability to do this plan because it involved arming a thousand people this plan, and John Brown learned what I hope that modern nonprofits learned, which is there's a really good way to get your donations back you have a flagging nonprofit. They were like,
let's prove that we know what we're doing. So over Christmas eighteen fifty eight, they raided three slave farms in Missouri, killing a slaver, freeing eleven people, robbing the slavers for all they were worth. And they did it really publicly. They like militarily escorted these freed people up to a ferry and said bye to them in front of a huge supportive crowd to get them to Canada. But John Brown was a lone wing nut. It wasn't supported by anybody.
Wait, is your advice to people who are running nonprofits? Like, maybe take a card from this playbook? Yeah, you know, just.
Prove you know how to do what you saying you're gonna do whatever it is that you do. You just prove you know how to do it, you know, and the crew's funding returned. The donors were like, Okay, John Brown knows what he's doing and most of his funding came from the Secret Six, which were six Northern rich abolitionists who funded all kinds of shit. So yeah, I
don't know. We never tell anyone what to do, but where we get are funding is through advertising, and they're not secret, but it might be they might be secretly down I don't know, or maybe one day they'll listen to the show and be like, why do we support I mean, we love our heads.
It's great here they are.
And we're back.
And Bridget, I think you have one more sponsor of this show.
Yes, this show is unofficially brought to you by a good comb. You might not think about it, but a good comb can be a game changer and it will last for a long time, and it's just a nice thing to have on your person, a good comb.
It's important to have a good comb. So the Raiders picked Harper's Ferry as the place raid for a bunch of reasons. It was a federal armory town where water mills powered machinery that built the weapons of war. It was also in a slave state. It was nestled in the mountains, and if you're going to have a rebellion, you need inhospitable terrain like swamps and mountains around you.
It helped that Western Virginia, now Best Virginia, leaned more abolitionists than elsewhere in Virginia, although the closest town, Charlestown, was staunchly pro slavery, which didn't help them when it came time for jurors. But there they weren't going to win their case. That was not a thing they expected to have happened. Their cover for investigating the area was that John Brown was a mining investor and that the
weapons he had shipped were mining tools. So there just like big crates of pike heads were coming in and they were like, oh, these are our mining tools for mining. Their base of operations was a little farmhouse they rented in Maryland, the Kennedy Farm. And this wasn't like owned by the Kennedys or whatever this is. It was a farm where the owner had died and it was sort of just in an estate. No one was living there, and so they rented it.
Fairly cheap.
During the day the raiders hit in the attic, so there weren't reports of lots of people around. One of the raiders, John Cook, he was this aristocratic guy, I think from Connecticut. He's from New England somewhere. He went and started living in Harper's Ferry for a year, living under cover prior to the raid, getting in with high society. I think undercover. I think he literally just used his name because he has an aristocratic name, and so he
joined high society. He started hanging out with the slavers in order to learn more about them. Most of the raiders assumed that the plan was going to be simple and similar to what they had done before, a hit and run. They show up, they steal guns, they free people, they get the fuck out. When John Brown was like, you know, they're all gathered in the farmhouse, and he's like, no, no, no, no. The plan is we're going to establish a gorilla camp and start a war and take over the entire South.
We are not going north, we are going south. Almost everyone there, including all three of his sons, were like, nah, we don't like that plan. That plan sounds like a bad idea. And this is like, this is that moment in the movie, you know, where they're all like, I think our plan is doomed. But they're like, but we have to rob the Mona Lisa. We can't not, you know. Yeah, And so John Brown was like, all right, if you won't follow my plan, I won't lead you in it,
and he like retired as their captain. But not like I don't even think this was like a passive aggressive move. I think he was just like, I'm not telling you what to do. I mean, he was militarily in charge during the operation, but slowly people found their courage and agreed to the plan. One version that I read, which I like, is that it was Osborne Anderson, the guy who'd drawn the short st all, who brought everyone around. And I like it because he was the guy who
was there because he drew the short straw. You know, they had a thousand pikes made and shipped. They shipped the heads of the pikes and then like they basically spent their time like putting pike heads on pikes. And they did this because a pike takes no training to use. You can put a pike in the hand of someone and make them dangerous. The plan was to seize the armory, free the local enslaved people, and take to the mountains, building up an army and destroying slavery.
In the South.
It sounds a bit fantastical, but the thing is this is what the Haitian Revolution started as successfully seventy years earlier. It is a model that was proven could work.
And it's like you were saying, it is kind of a wild idea, but it makes sense that if you arm people and you know, everybody starts killing enslavers, it can work.
Yeah, totally.
And the reason that people thought it was completely silly is everyone was like, oh, well, the black people here are happy with their lots and they would never do anything to risk their positions, you know, or they're all cowards or whatever. But like universally, they would meet people and they'd be like, yeah, okay, give me a gun, give me a pike, let's go.
You know. Yeah. Imagine being like the people that I enslave love me. They would never would never do anything to hurt me. Imagine thinking that right up until the moment that they turn on your Well.
What's wild is that they felt that way even after they had turned on them.
Just a spoil part of the end.
Later, a lot of the enslaved people who joined the raid at the end were like, oh, we got forced to be here. We like being enslaved, and it worked. They were just returned to where they came from, even though they just been holding people hostage at like gun and Pike Point with all a mix up, I know.
And then they got to like then.
Go on and like lead this other uprising where all the barns in the area started burning. All of the jurors who were like slavers who voted to convict them suddenly their barns burned in the middle of the night. And it took like a hundred years before historians were like, yeah, that was the enslaved people doing that, because they were like, oh, it must have been abolitionist sneaking in from Maryland or whatever.
You know.
Anyway, and so while they're in this farmhouse, they start spreading the word among the farms, like to all the enslaved people. And I believe that this was mostly Dangerfield Nubie doing that. The forty four year old who was trying to free his wife because he worked as a blacksmith and so he would leave the farm and go find work and use that to get a sense of what was going on and all of the plantations and things around there. So the enslaved people started getting ready
for this big attack on the twenty fourth of October. Unfortunately, a couple of them were and probably said, oh, we're getting ready for a rebellion. They didn't like out.
They weren't like.
John Brown's here on the twenty fourth were going right, but John Brown and his crew didn't know that, and so they were worried that the jig was up. Rather than be like, oh, the jig is up, we're not going to do it, they moved the raid up a week, but they didn't successfully get the word out to the enslaved people that they were hoping would join them. Hey,
the raid has been moved up a week. So this is like everyone who's sort of like armchair trying to figure out what could have happened if this is like maybe the big what could have happened if is if they hadn't moved their raid and they had like at least one hundred and fifty and some estimates of substantially more people who were like ready to go, you know, but.
They did it.
Anyway, they moved the raid up, and then they raided on October sixteenth. They ate a dinner together as per usual, and then they headed out into the misty night at eight pm and started on foot towards Harper's ferry. They marched, as Osborne Anderson put it, because he's the only one who survives to write about what happened. They marched as solemnly as a funeral procession. And then just because you're like, there have there's been enough swords in this story.
Lately, more swords.
Well, more swords are about to enter the picture. Six of them peeled off towards the estate of Lewis Washington. Lewis Washington was a slaver, and his last name wasn't a coincidence. He was the grand nephew of George Washington, the most famous slaver of all. Lewis had George Washington's sword in his possession, which had been given to George
Washington by the King of Prussia. And the reason that they knew he had this sword is that their spy, the aristocrat named Cook, had been hanging out at the guy's house. Right So, Cook and a bunch of other people, including Anderson are like, we're gonna go over there and we're gonna take this guy hostage and make him give George Washington's sword to Osborne Anderson, a black man.
I love the like petty symbolism of that. Like he's gonna hate it, I know, And you know what, he did hate it. Oh, surprise of rise. They showed up.
They took him and his family hostage, and they made him hand over the sword. As best as I can tell, I couldn't find out what happened to the sword later. I assume it God captured again. But Lewis Washington was like, I handled it bravely. All other accounts are like he just baled and begged and cried the whole time. And one of the people who did it, one of the people who took him hostage was the guy who'd been pretending to be his friend for a year. I love it so much.
God to be a fly on the wall when he was like, oh, my friend is turning on me.
Yeah.
They then stopped another estate and took more hostages. The idea was that they were going to take the rich people hostage, and then they actually took care of the before they went out They were like, we're only going to kill people on self defense. We're going to treat the hostage as well. They like set some ground rules down. They stopped at another state. I wouldn't have cared if they killed these people. I want to be really clear about that. But they didn't, and it was nice of them.
They get to Harper's ferry. The raiders cut the telegraph wires on both sides of the Potomac River to slow news getting out. They took the armory and the arsenal. What is the difference between an armory and arsenal. I don't know, and neither does Google. And they also took the rifle works, and I'm sure some listener knows the difference. And you know what, I'll actually be curious if you tell me. A great deal has been made by people like the Daughters of the Confederacy about the first person
to die in the raid. The first person to die in the raid was a free black man named Haywood Shepherd who worked on the trains. Raiders told him to stop, like the train stopped and he got off to be like what's going on? And they were like, hey, stop and he kept walking and they didn't know who he was. They didn't know what Racey was, and they shot him and they killed him. Ever since, people have been like, see,
the raiders don't care about black people specifically. There is a giant memorial to this man in Harper's Ferry today, built and maintained by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Next To it is a park service sign explaining how Heywood Shepherd has been used as a pro Confederacy and pro slavery martyr ever since. About the myth of the loyal slave even though he was a freeman who had died, makes me real sad.
I can see why your trip to Harper's Ferry was a weepy one.
Oh yeah, no, it was just it was yeah. Enslave people came out to help the insurrectionists and were handed pikes and left in charge of the hostages. No one quite seems to know exactly how many of them there were, between fifteen and fifty, probably in the twenty ish range, but maybe that's like whenever I see the numbers being bandied around, it kind of pick one.
That sounds reasonable to me. I don't know.
They were rather courteous to the prisoners. They let the hostages eat food delivered from hotels, and meet with their families like they set up visiting hours for their families. Local militia showed up to fight the raiders, and then the fighting began. The militia also stopped by to break into it. There's a bunch of racist violence. It's about to happen.
Uh.
The militia stopped by to break into a local jail and hang a random black prisoner, because racists never change. Dangerfield Nubi, the Blacksmith, the old the oldest raider besides John Brown. He opened fire as the militia approached. He killed an Irish grocer and a slaver who'd graduated West Point. Dangerfield and Emperor then ran for cover. I've read it's Dangerfield and Emperor, and I've read it's Dangerfield and another enslaved person who is there who's unnamed. I don't know which,
but I'm gonna use Emperor for this. Newby was shot by a sniper in the window. The oldest of the raiders besides John Brown, he was the first of them to die. Emperor then shot and took out that sniper A second later. Dangerfield was left to die in the street, and White towns. People before he was even dead, started cutting up his body to take pieces as souvenirs.
Ugh.
Yeah, uh really and truly, the US was like a nightmare world. It was like I've been saying this a while. It's just it's the solid movie.
Like a horror movie. Yeah, Like, oh, I got a piece of him? What, Like what did you even do with it? You know what I mean? Like why would you want to like a piece of something? Yeah, oh, give it to your kids. Like, just like, I'm the good guy, I'm cutting up people on the street. I'm the hero in this story. Yeah.
The fight turned against the raiders quickly. They were wildly outnumbered. The youngest raider was named William Lehman, and he was twenty years old. He'd actually I think he'd bleeding Kansas. He'd been with them since he was seventeen. He tried to surrender and a white militia guy shot him in the head. The raiders took refuge in the firehouse now called John Brown's Fort like it's it has been renamed that,
and they also took refuge in the rifle works. One of the raiders, William Thompson, went out with a white flag and one of the hostages to try and negotiate surrender. They captured him and tied him up and took him to the bridge and then were like, let's hang him, but then instead they threw him off the bridge and shot him on his way down.
Jesus.
Most of the raiders at this point were like, I want to get the fuck out of here. This didn't work.
I'm done.
The battle was lost. The rifle works was surrounded, and the raiders in it tried to escape out back across the river, including both Copeland and Leary, are friends from Oberlin. Both of them were wounded and captured. Leary died from his wounds after about ten hours, while Copeland survived to stand trial. Two raiders, including Anderson and this white man named Hazlitt, successfully made it across the river once they realized that everyone else was surrounded and there was nothing
more they could do. Some folks have tried to paint Anderson as like a coward and who like ran, because he later wrote he's the one who survived and wrote an account of all of this. He later wrote that basically he had left once John Brown had been captured, but that was the next morning. He had left the night before, but he left when it was when he was surrounded and failing at surrendering.
And the battle was lost.
I do not like, I don't think anyone alive has the right to call this man a coward. US Marines arrived on the scene by nightfall, under the command of none other than Robert E. Lee, later the Confederate General.
Famous man.
Everyone loves him, everyone tries to people try so hard to recuperate that man.
In particular, there was a high school named after him when I was growing up.
Yeah, yep uh, the man who arrested John Brown and led the Confederacy.
Hooray.
Brown tried to negotiate surrender twice but was denied. They offered him unconditional surrender, and he denied.
That as well. He still had hostages.
The Marines smashed down the door, and the raiders did not kill their hostages. They did kill one Marine and they were then captured. There was a bunch of enslaved people in the fort with them who were immediately were like, oh, no, we're totally we were talking about before. They were just like, ah, we were taking hostage too, Like oh, what's going on? Thanks for rescuing us.
They got your hair.
Yeah, and it worked because white Virginians were not very intelligent.
No, that is a commitment to not seeing yourself as the bad guy.
Like, yeah, totally. Obviously these people alike us, and so that saved their lives and it left them a chance to continue the fight, which they did and famously they won a few years later, Emperor tried to join them, but he was recognized. Only five of the Raiders survived to stand trial, John Brown, Emperor, Copeland, and one of the Quaker men Kopic. I believe the other Copic was three people had like stayed back at the farmhouse to guard all the extra weapons, and I think that guy survived,
but I'm not. I don't remember, honestly. And then Cook, the aristocrat who had worked as a spy. These are the only people alive left to stand trial. Letters start pouring in and support the raiders. Honestly, these remind me of like the Luigi letters that people see now. Many people who wrote these letters declared that they were going to assassinate Governor Wise, the governor who assigned their death warrants.
They were like long letters. They were like there's a thousand men being trained specifically to kill you in New York State.
It is kind of like the Luigi letters. I saw that. He was like, love the support, but how about we cap it at five photos being sent to me per person writing me a letter.
Okay, but everyone is against things like that. People aren't sick and dying anyway. One man from Indianapolis wrote a letter on December sixteenth, which was the day that the last of these people gets hanged, and the letter read, dear son of a Bitch and Southern Dog, my friends are probably in heaven while I pen these few lines by you Southern Dogs on the way to hell.
So wow, people.
Are pretty clear again, not a weird, isolated group that no one supported. Yes, a group that most people did not want to join directly because it was a suicide mission and everyone knew.
But there's a difference between like, oh, I don't support this and I don't personally feel the need to join up with them on this suicide mission.
Totally, and even like because people make a big deal out of like all Frederick Douglas said no, and you're like yeah, and then said I don't know whether it was because I was being smart or cowardly, you know, and like It's probably for the best that Frederick Douglas didn't go, yeah, because he went on to continue to do really important shit. John Brown, though, he gets to be the first person in US history executed for treason.
Really yeah, I was surprised by that. I looked at the like list of everyone accused of treason, and everyone else had been like pardoned at the last minute, and shit like that. No one was coming in to part in this man at the last minute. His execution on December second, eighteen fifty nine was public. They specifically wanted it public so that everyone could see him die, but the guards were ordered specifically to keep the crowds away far enough that they couldn't hear any life speech he
might want to give. But his last words were instead written on a piece of paper and passed to a guard. They said, I, John Brown am now certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away.
But with blood. He was correct.
Yeah, like very correct.
Yeah.
His actual last words were to the hangman, he said, don't keep me waiting. Just also goes hard. Meanwhile, the two black men who are tried, Emperor and Copeland, were convicted of every charge, but treason. Since they couldn't be citizens, they could not commit treason. The court decided. A black abolitionist in New York wrote, quote, it was the climax of tyranny to rob us the paltry privilege of being
traders to this devil inspired and god forsaken government. These people all had such a way with words, I know, I know, like everyone was a fucking poet when you had to handwrite everything, you know.
Yeah, like in old timey pen like yeah, really, like no, it's time for I guess like that is a great opportunity for a little flourish.
Yeah, totally. The night before their execution, the two white prisoners, Cook and Copic, tried to escape. They used a knife that Emperor had smuggled to them to dig a hole in the wall, and they got out of their cell and made it into the yard, but they didn't make it.
Over the wall. Before they were recaptured.
Copeland wrote letters from jail, like a ton of them. He offered courage to the Oberlin Anti Slavery Society, and on the morning of his death he wrote to his family, I'm gonna quote part of it. I have seen declining
behind me. 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 felon cell, dissipating the darkness and filtering it with the soft, pleasant light, which causes such thrills of joy to all those in circumstances With myself, I am well, both in body and in mind. And now, dear ones, I must bid you that last long sad farewell your son and brother in eternity.
I mean a poet, Yeah, I actually when there's people around me, I practice reading these parts so I can get the crying while reading out of the way.
Yeah, I mean, you really you voice them so beautifully as well, And I think thanks, you know, I just I really appreciate on the show that you really want to hear from people in their own words, because I think it's easy to see these people as pictures in a history book and not you know, really be taken into the emotional experience of the choices they were making in the consequences they were grappling with, Like it really, it really hits different.
Yeah, when you're like he had a family, he loved his family, and he made this decision.
You know, like.
His last words were, if I am dying for freedom, I could not die for a better cause. I'd rather die than be a slave. And he tried to give a speech from the gallows, but they put a hood.
Over his head. Fuckers.
Yeah, and of course they segregated the execution. The two black men were hanged and then later the two white men were hanged.
Yeah. I mean it just really shows the commitment of like, at this point, what difference does it make if you you know it, like you're killing them, Yeah, you have to do it separately.
Yeah, totally, like because their whole thing is they were fighting for, like, we shouldn't be separate, you motherfuckers, you know. And they're like, oh, oh you're separate. Yeah, different thing, very different thing. But before I talk about the two that escaped, we can't escape our obligations to our sponsors, who we love dearly, and in particular our sponsor French artillery swords, which were used in Bleeding Kansas, in particular, Oh, I'm going to get the years wrong. I don't have
it in front of me. There's an earlier model in which there's scales on the handle, a fish scale handle. It's a solid bronze handle, and that's the one that they used. Unfortunately, the only available replicas are the later revision from a couple decades later of the French artillery sword. But still it's a good sword, whatever the.
Model, Margaret, when are you going to get your spinoff sword cast?
I'm just gonna one day be like and now an episode on arms and armor of like, no, because I have to be more than one episode, because I'd have to be like because I can accidentally go on a rant about the difference between chain Mill and Western Europe and India, and it's a very important different but it's not the kind of.
Thing that I'm going to use.
Say right now, Well, here's the.
Ads and we're back. Welcome back to cool swords. Do cool stuff.
Are special enough? Listen to that green lit immediately? Yes's tracked this one.
Yes.
So the two folks who got away, who successfully swam across the river were Anderson and Haslt, and they fled across the river and they started the endless hike north. They first tried to be like, oh, we're gonna cut into town and they were like, oh, that's not safe, and so they kept going. They split up when Hazlet didn't have the energy to keep going. Basically, they were like, I can't walk another mile, and Anderson was like, I don't want to get caught.
I'm sorry, good luck.
Later has Lit returned home and he was captured and hanged in eighteen sixty. Anderson the only one of the raiders to sort of survive to tell the tale. The ones who hung out at the farmhouse also survived for a bit, and I feel bad kind of leaving them out, but they weren't in the fighting whatever. Anderson made it to York Pennsylvania. He fucking walked across Maryland into Pennsylvania, where he met up with someone from the Underground Railroad who got him on a train to Philly and several
changes of close, he tried to go home. His own father was like, no, get away from here, and I'll have you arrested if you return, which I don't like. So then he went to Ohio and he took probably a ferry to Canada. Anderson lived the rest of his life hard. By the time he made it to Canada, he was flat broke and had lost a lot of weight. He wrote a memoir of the whole thing, probably with the uncredited help of Mary Anne and his old newspaper publisher and his old boss. It was published in Boston
in eighteen sixty one. And this goes hard. He went to Boston as a fugitive to do a book tour does go hard, Like he's the one who's sort of like like people kind of try and pain him as a coward. Oh, he just his friend, and he's like he fucking again, no one can doubt this man's courage, who has not been tested by worse. And he wrote this and he went on tour as a fugitive, like publicly being like I wrote this book about my crime
that I'm on the run for. His goal was quote to save from oblivion the heroism of the colored men who so nobly seconded the efforts of the immortal John Brown, and to say that yes, enslaved black people joined the insurrection, like that's that's the thing that was getting written out of history. That he was like, that's not going to happen. He wanted to counter the slaves are happy nonsense that
the South kept pushing. He also wrote his manuscript before all the dust had settled, so he had an eye on security culture when he wrote it, which I think is like kind of neat every now and then I cover things that are like not fully resolved in court, and I never lie, but I have to be like, I can't talk about certain things because we don't know yet, because courts aren't done, you know. Yeah, and so he
did that, and it just makes me happy. He said, quote much has been given as true that never happened. Much has been omitted that should have been made known. Many things have been left unsaid because up to within a short time, but two could say them. One of them has been offered up. He's talking about it. I think he's talking about Haslet, who has now died. But one of them has been offered up a sacrifice to the Moloch slavery being the other one, I propose to
perform the duty. Yeah, way of words.
Yeah, And I really appreciate how committed he was to really correcting the narrative that I think, even today get so incorrect. Like when I was a little kid, I learned, you know, you learn like Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and yeah, totally it's such a like paternalistic incorrect idea, but it also strips black enslaved people of their agency, Like they were there, they were part of this, They
risked things. It's so cruel that, you know, that sacrifice and that work and that courage would be wiped away and whitewashed in favor of this, like oh, just one guy signed something and that.
Was that totally it.
Yeah, Like the more you read history books, you're like, no, black people won their freedom in this country, and you know what, I am glad that some white people helped, but like absolutely, yeah. When the Civil War kicked off, Anderson and mary Anne left the safety of Canada to become recruiters for the Union Black Army in eighteen sixty three. It is possible that Anderson fought in the war them himself,
but the evidence is mixed. This is where you might get into the myth making, like he might have been like, oh, I totally fought in the war, but you know what, he fucking fought in the war. He just did it before it was a war, you know. Yeah, like whatever. They stayed in the States, moving to d C.
After the war.
Mary Anne was a suffragette and she tried to vote in eighteen seventy one. Anderson worked as a messenger and was basically broke, I think, just staying with friends. He died of tuberculosis when he was forty two years old. A few days before he died, he and his friends went to visit Harper's Ferry one last time, and then he died in his friend's house on December tenth, eighteen seventy two. He was largely forgotten about before his death, but as soon as he died, people worked hard to
commemorate him. Frederick Douglas's paper had a eulogy with the headline Osborne p Anderson a hero. Mary Anne raised the money to pay for his funeral. His father, the one who had turned him away, came to the funeral. Louis Douglas, Frederick Douglas's son, one of one of his sons who fought in the Union Army, was one of his pallbearers.
His body, I believe, went into an unmarked grave, and then it certainly became unmarked when, along with tens of thousands of other black people, his grave was on earth to make room for a metro station in DC. It's now a parking lot. What station I don't know, and I'm annoyed.
Ooh, I'm gonna find that out. Yeah, I curious. Yeah, yeah, it.
Was the fifties or sixties they unearthed. I read one place seventeen thousand. I read another place like thirty five thousand, and those people were unearthed and then just sort of dumped unceremoniously into a National Harmony Memorial Park in Maryland in the year two thousand. Folks put a plaque up there for him, and I believe that one of his descendants was one.
Of the people who put the plaque up.
The plaque reads this dedicated and brave Christian traveled from Chatham, Canada to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia to fight beside John Brown in his quest to abolish slavery. He later served as a Union soldier in the Civil War. And then the Bible quote greater love hath no man than this, that a man laid down his life for his friends,
John fifteen thirteen. And propagandist historians have tried forever to say that the raid was a flash in a pan, a meaningless insurrection, but people are starting to accept the truth. It was the raid on Harper's Ferry that pushed the Southern States to announce that they would dissolve the Union to protect slavery. As Frederick Douglas said in eighteen eighty one quote, if John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he began the war that ended American
slavery and made this a free republic. But it wasn't just John Brown. It was a ragtag mix of free black men, self emancipated men, Quakers, Canadians, Oberlin students, a blacksmith trying to free his wife. And it was people who went happy to their graves because they knew that what they were doing was just.
That's it. Yeah, I mean, I know why I said this in the last episode, but I just feel like there's so much to learn today from that act of courage and organizing. And yeah, I mean, as we go into darker and darker times where things feel so lost, it feels good to have these things to look back on to cling to to find a little bit of hope.
Totally, and like every part of it, like the raid, absolutely, but also like all the jurors had their barns burned, you know, and like and the Oberlin students like black and white being like now our town is free, Like we genuinely don't care what the law is our town is free. That's the kind of energy that we need to never no one should ever do a crime.
Glad you added that we're not advocating crime people, but yeah, protect your communities, like you set the tone for your community. We keep each other safe.
All of that totally.
And this thing that's like, oh, we're gonna go free this guy. We're getting couple hundred people to go do it. It's a big deal, but it probably didn't feel like. They probably didn't go being like we are making history, you know, but they did like the stuff we do will echo into eternity. And I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it's still just true.
Totally.
Yeah.
Anyway, what I do is make a podcast. But I don't know, Bridget, how what do you You got anything you want to plug.
Other than a good comb keep one on your person at all times. Yeah, you could check out my podcast. There are no girls on the internet, and you can check me out on Instagram at Bridget Marie and DC. I live in DC, so weird times over here. If you want to follow along, feel free to check me out. And uh yeah, I'm on Blue Sky at Bridget Todd.
Hell yeah, uh, I have a Kickstarter. I already told you you probably did not listen to the first part. And I'm also on Blue Sky and I'm on Instagram, and I've used an app to delete everything I've ever posted to Twitter. I didn't delete my Twitter, but I deleted everything I've ever said.
On it.
Because I don't like that site anymore for some weird reason.
Wow.
Valid.
Anyway, Sophia, you got anything you want to plug?
Yeah?
I want to plug on our daily show. It could happen here. Every Friday, we are running a series called Executive Disorder White House Weekly, where we're just giving you this week's horrors in one episode, so follow on for that. It's just giving you a once a week update on where things are at, so that you're not thinking about it every five seconds, just once a week, which is still a lot, but not every five seconds.
Yeay.
It is important to both keep up with what's happening and also not get overwhelmed by what's happening, which is a balance that I don't think anyone is truly found.
Not yet. Oh, can I plug one more thing? Yeah, just want to give a quick shout for not sleeping with your phone in your bedroom to Sophie's point, don't doom scroll, be cautious with well how you absorb information. Leave your phone outside of your bedroom for a couple of days. You will sleep better. I promise you.
I aspire to that. I am not there yet. I'm good at keeping it on. Do not disturb, but and I'm working on reading a book instead of staring at my phone before bed. All right, well, next week we'll have more history instead of current events. Because history is completely unrelated to current events. There's no reason to develop pattern recognition or learn from our failures and successes in the past. It's just entertainment. See y'all next week.
Huzzah.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.