A monument to Harper’s Ferry combatants

This monument in Oberlin, Ohio, honors the three Black town residents who fought with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. The accompanying plaque explains:

“This marble cenotaph, erected by the citizens of Oberlin in 1860 in Westwood Cemetery, was moved to this site [Martin Luther King Memorial Park] by the Neighborhood Youth Corps. in 1971. The original inscription [now partially worn away] reads: “‘These Colored Citizens of Oberlin, the Heroic Associates of the immortal John Brown, gave their lives for the slave. Et nunc servitudo etiam mortua est, laus Deo. S. Green, died at Charleston, Va., Dec. 16, 1859, age 23 years. J.A. Copeland, died at Charleston, Va., Dec. 16, 1859. L.S.  Leary, died at Harper’s Ferry, Va., Oct. 20, 1859, 24 years.’ ” Shields Green, also called “Emperor,” escaped slavery in Virginia and was living in Oberlin leading up to the Harper’s Ferry raid. His first meeting with John Brown was in 1858 in the Rochester, N.Y., home of Frederick Douglass. Douglass said later, “Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words ... but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character.”

John A. Copeland Jr. was the son of prominent Oberlin abolitionists John A.  Copeland Sr. and Delilah Evans Copeland.  He was recruited to Brown’s army by his uncle, Lewis Sheridan Leary. Both Leary and Copeland had participated in the “Oberlin-Wellington Rescue”—the freeing of escaped slave John Price from a hotel in Wellington, Ohio, where he was held captive by slave catchers in 1858.

Leary was wounded in battle and died eight hours later. Green and Copeland were hanged two weeks after the hanging of John Brown. An abolitionist minister, James Monroe, failed in his attempt to recover their bodies so their families could give them a proper burial. White medical students insisted the bodies were theirs for dissection purposes.

Leary’s widow, Mary Leary, later married another prominent Oberlin abolitionist, John Mercer Langston. One of the couple’s grandsons was the renowned poet Langston Hughes.

Ohio has other strong connections to the heroes of Harper’s Ferry. A white abolitionist from Salem, Edwin Coppock, was hanged for his participation in the raid on the same day that Green and Copeland were executed. Brown himself lived in Ohio on and off for a total of 35 years.  Six days before his execution, Copeland wrote in a letter to his brother: “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 [principle] 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?”