The Untold Story of Shields Green: The Life and Death of a Harper's Ferry Raider by Louis A. DeCaro Jr.

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Untold Story of Shields Green: The Life and Death of a Harper's Ferry Raider by Louis A. DeCaro Jr. J. Brent Morris The Untold Story of Shields Green: The Life and Death of a Harper's Ferry Raider. By Louis A. DeCaro Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 2020. Pp. xxii, 221. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-1-4798-1670-5; cloth, $28.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-0275-3.) When an author begins a book with "According to the conventional narrative," as does Louis A. DeCaro Jr. in his latest work, The Untold Story of Shields Green: The Life and Death of a Harper's Ferry Raider, readers might reasonably expect that most of the pages that follow will deviate from convention (p. xiii). Indeed, the conventional narrative has had very little to say about the subject of this biography. Few other than a small handful of specialists know much about Shields Green other than that he was one of the five African Americans enlisted by John Brown in his 1859 strike against Harpers Ferry and that he followed Brown to the gallows. Although Green was an actor in one of the most exciting dramas in American history, the documentary record provides only a "skeleton-thin account" of Green's life (p. xvi). DeCaro frankly admits that he has not identified enough source material to write a definitive, much less substantive, biography of the heroic man nicknamed Emperor and remembered by his friend Frederick Douglass in the same breath as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner as "glorious martyrs for the cause of the slave" ("Men of Color to Arms!," Douglass' Monthly, March 1863). However, the author's exhaustive research did suggest that the available record may be yet incomplete and that scholars may eventually be able to piece together more about the life of Shields Green. Thus, DeCaro offers The Untold Story of Shields Green "as a kind of narrative inquiry"; it is as full a sketch as he is able to draw from the known sources, with "dotted lines" in the direction of what merits follow-up and away from what does not (p. xviii). The author's first chapter considers traditional assumptions about Shields Green and, from the uneven sources, establishes his actual name, his status as a literate free man in antebellum Charleston (and residences elsewhere prior to 1859), and his age. Shields Green came to meet abolitionist John Brown through Frederick Douglass, and chapter 2 contains the most extensive account presented by any historian to date of Green's enlistment in John Brown's cause and Douglass's role in that process. In chapter 3, DeCaro paints a fascinating picture of the raiders' living environment in the Kennedy farmhouse, the base from which Brown's raiders staged the Harpers Ferry attack. Though this chapter is mostly speculative, the author's use of the limited source material brings out Green's experience very well. Chapter 4 shifts to the raid itself. Here, [End Page 389] DeCaro undertakes a close consideration of the often-overlooked narrative of the event by Osborne Perry Anderson, the only African American raider who lived to tell the tale and someone who vividly recalled Green as a brave freedom fighter. Chapter 5 recounts Green's emotional last days, from his capture at Harpers Ferry to his final moments on the Charlestown gallows. Chapter 6 represents DeCaro's quest to determine which of the few surviving images best represents Green, followed by a brief epilogue that traces the Emperor's place in the historical memory of the Harpers Ferry raid through Reconstruction and the late nineteenth century. DeCaro anticipates and even invites criticism that he knows will follow the publication of this book. It asks more questions than it answers and often leaves the reader wanting more—more details, more certainty, more direct connections than dotted lines. Yet DeCaro presents enough evidence about the life of Shields Green to convincingly place him "among the most radical vanguard of the black antislavery movement" (p. 22). This book shines as a narrative inquiry and will undoubtedly succeed in encouraging further research into the life of Shields Green, a most worthy...