The “Colored Hero” of Harper's Ferry: John Anthony Copeland and the War against Slavery

Abstract

John Anthony Copeland was one of five black men who joined John Brown in his famous armed attack at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Despite the numerous studies on Brown and the raid, Copeland has remained an obscure figure, due primarily to a lack of sources. Only a handful of his letters have survived, and contemporary news accounts tended to ignore the five black men. Thus, Steven Lubet faced a daunting task in writing this biography. To understand the brief life and motivations of this young man—Copeland was just twenty-five years old when the state of Virginia executed him on charges of murder and conspiracy to steal slaves—Lubet closely examined the places where Copeland lived and the people that he encountered. Born free in North Carolina in 1834, Copeland moved at the age of nine with his family to Oberlin, Ohio, a well-known abolitionist stronghold. There, he crossed paths with a number of important antislavery individuals connected to the national movement. In 1858, when federal officials began to search aggressively for fugitive slaves in Oberlin, Copeland responded by beating up a deputy federal marshal. Later, when slave hunters captured John Price, a fugitive slave and Oberlin resident, Copeland joined a mob to rescue him. In fact, Copeland stormed a building, with a group of black men, where Price was holed up, and freed him from his captors. Copeland then personally escorted Price to Canada and probably to Chatham, where Brown had recently held his abolition convention.