Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool be Booted Cool Stuff. You're
Speaker 2: weekly reminder that where there's bad things, there's people fighting
Speaker 2: against the bad things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and
Speaker 2: my guest this week is Bridget Todd.
Speaker 3: Hi. Hi, so excited to be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm like, the recordings always come after this. My
Speaker 2: work week is a saw wave where it just like
Speaker 2: builds and builds and builds, and then I record all
Speaker 2: of the episodes and then I collapse and then my
Speaker 2: brain turns into goo. And so I'm always like, right
Speaker 2: before I hit record, I'm like, I'm so tired, I
Speaker 2: can't have a thought, but instead I fall into sort
Speaker 2: of a manic state and record. I don't know why
Speaker 2: I'm telling you this or everyone who's listening this, but anyway, Bridget,
Speaker 2: that's a great guest.
Speaker 3: You don't seem goo or manic brains to me.
Speaker 2: Oh well, thanks thanks. Our producer is Sophie Hi, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Hi Magpie, Hi, Bridget.
Speaker 3: Hey, Sophie Hey, Anderson.
Speaker 2: Hello Anderson named after this week's hero, and also Hi Rory,
Speaker 2: our audio engineer, Hi Rory, Hi.
Speaker 3: Riory, Hi Roy Magpie.
Speaker 1: Is there also a character in this episode named after
Speaker 1: my other dog.
Speaker 4: No, oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: You gotta start doing Sophie's dog themed episodes.
Speaker 2: All of them should get an episode. That's a good idea, Yeah,
Speaker 2: especially if we can find the duo.
Speaker 1: Magpie apologized to Truman.
Speaker 2: Truman, I'm so sorry. Usually when your namesake appears in
Speaker 2: these episodes, it's not positive.
Speaker 1: People thought I named her after him.
Speaker 5: It's like, no, she's named after Truman Burbank from The
Speaker 5: Truman Show.
Speaker 3: Be so for real, Be so for real.
Speaker 5: I'm not gonna name my dog after a president Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: So we are on part two of a two parter
Speaker 2: about the raiders of Harper's Ferry. And while John Brown
Speaker 2: has woven throughout, it is not the main character because
Speaker 2: he's the main character. Enough, nothing but love for that man,
Speaker 2: But he's not the main character today. That said, we're
Speaker 2: about to talk about him for a second because this
Speaker 2: is kind of the road to Harper's Ferry section, right,
Speaker 2: and most of the raiders, their road to Harper's Ferry
Speaker 2: takes them through Kansas. You ever heard of Bleeding Kansas?
Speaker 2: I have not, which is a very metal There's so
Speaker 2: much metal stuff going on in here. There's so many
Speaker 2: swords involved in this story that you wouldn't expect there's
Speaker 2: going to be at least several sorts. Since eighteen twenty,
Speaker 2: there had been this Missouri Compromise where new states in
Speaker 2: the Union were either free or nightmare lands of slavery
Speaker 2: based on their latitude. I think that's how they phrased it.
Speaker 2: But in eighteen fifty four, the Kansas Nebraska Act said
Speaker 2: basically that it's up to voters of each new state
Speaker 2: to decide whether or not you can just own people.
Speaker 2: So people on both sides of the issue would flood
Speaker 2: into states to help affect the electorate, which means that
Speaker 2: you had kind of a mini civil war that I'm
Speaker 2: hoping to cover at more length. One day, called Bleeding Kansas,
Speaker 2: John Brown, four of his sons and some other folks
Speaker 2: were like, well, I guess we're just slaver killing bandits.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: I don't know that's how they would have phrased it,
Speaker 2: but it's what they did. They moved to Kansas and
Speaker 2: they started killing slavers. This is how he got famous
Speaker 2: as a zelot, because he would murder people who thought
Speaker 2: you could just capture people and turn them into property.
Speaker 3: I mean what's more metal than that?
Speaker 2: Well, they did the killing with swords.
Speaker 3: That you did up the metal ante on that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also guns. And it's interesting I fell on
Speaker 2: this whole rabbit hole because for a while I spent
Speaker 2: a while trying to be like, can I get a
Speaker 2: John Brown replica sword or not? And the answer is
Speaker 2: not easily. But people would say that he had a
Speaker 2: broad sword, but that actually I think just meant it
Speaker 2: wasn't a curved sword like a cavalry saver, but instead
Speaker 2: it was more of a straight sword like the French
Speaker 2: artillery swords that were based on the Gladias. This is
Speaker 2: not what the show is about. I just like swords.
Speaker 2: I have a lot of them on my walls. And
Speaker 2: this is also where John Brown earned his reputation as
Speaker 2: a skilled military commander. He successfully outmaneuvered forces many times
Speaker 2: stronger than his own. It's also how he lost the
Speaker 2: first of his sons to die in the cause of abolition.
Speaker 2: In August eighteen fifty six, Frederick Brown was killed by
Speaker 2: a company of Missourian slavers. But what's funny is like
Speaker 2: this man had twenty kids with two different wives over
Speaker 2: his life, and nine of them didn't make it to adulthood,
Speaker 2: not because he had particularly bad luck. People completely misunderstand
Speaker 2: how high child mortality was before vaccines. Have you seen
Speaker 2: the like there's like right wing people right now posting
Speaker 2: like we made it this far without vaccines, and then
Speaker 2: people just have to respond to like with child mortality graphs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't believe people would say that with a
Speaker 3: straight face. It's like, wow, you really just like fuck,
Speaker 3: everything that happened before I got here today is the
Speaker 3: only thing I know about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do wonder sometimes when I'm like, because I
Speaker 2: would have a hard time imagine being a mom and
Speaker 2: having kids join me in battle, right, because I would
Speaker 2: be too concerned about their survival. But I guess if
Speaker 2: you've like lost forty five percent of them already, Like
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have to imagine people had big family and
Speaker 3: just simply did not expect a lot of them to survive,
Speaker 3: and that that colored all of their decision making as
Speaker 3: a parent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, Like, all right, go off and get on
Speaker 2: a ship and go find another continent, do whatever. You
Speaker 2: were going to die of tuberculosis anyway. So after Bleeding Kansas,
Speaker 2: they're like what's the next move? And he and a
Speaker 2: bunch of militant abolitionists show up and Chatham in Canada
Speaker 2: with a specific goal. They're going to sit down and
Speaker 2: hash out a provisional constitution for this black republic that
Speaker 2: they're going to set up in Appalachia. And they brought
Speaker 2: like maps and shit with them. We're like, all right, well,
Speaker 2: this is where we can set up our bases in
Speaker 2: the mountains and raid plantations, and this is where we're
Speaker 2: going to like like they planned it. They were like,
Speaker 2: this is how we're going to wage this entire war
Speaker 2: and how we're going to build a free republic. And
Speaker 2: Anderson the newspaper man was one of the secretaries to
Speaker 2: the secret convey which they referred to as a very
Speaker 2: quiet conference, which is a good word for when you're
Speaker 2: planning them a remarkably illegal thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I like that as an ephemism.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then the thing that they use is their cover,
Speaker 2: was that everyone was like, oh, we're just setting up
Speaker 2: a black Mason's lodge. Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman were
Speaker 2: invited to this. Frederick Douglass was like, no, I'm good.
Speaker 2: Harriet Tubman couldn't come because she was genuinely sick, but
Speaker 2: biggest l of the whole week. She was the only
Speaker 2: woman invited to the conference. It was all men. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they got together, they built up a constitution, they elected
Speaker 2: provisional officers, they wrote a good preamble. That's like Slavery's
Speaker 2: bats were doing her own thing. Osborne Osborne Anderson was
Speaker 2: elected to the Congress of this new government. And maybe
Speaker 2: they planned the raid itself. Maybe they didn't. This was
Speaker 2: like litigated in court, and so a lot of the
Speaker 2: stuff of the history around here had to be kind
Speaker 2: of played with carefully, as people were like, well, I
Speaker 2: don't want to get hanged. You know, a black gunsmith,
Speaker 2: this isn't even the best name.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 2: A black gunsmith was there and his name was Gunsmith.
Speaker 3: Jack's out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, uh, what do you do for work? Gunsmith?
Speaker 2: Well, let me tell you.
Speaker 3: That's like your name being Margaret podcast.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2: And he to be clear, this is like his name
Speaker 2: in quotes in the middle. It's like what everyone calls him,
Speaker 2: you know. But yeah, it wasn't pure, it wasn't nominative determinism.
Speaker 2: It was vice versa, you know. And he made a
Speaker 2: bunch of the firearms for the raid, which is cool
Speaker 2: as hell that a man named Gunsmith in a different
Speaker 2: country made you your firearms. It is possible that John
Speaker 2: Brown knew the raid was doomed. It is possible that
Speaker 2: the reason it was mostly white fighters was decided ahead
Speaker 2: of time. Gunsmith said that John Brown believed that only
Speaker 2: if a bunch of white people die fighting slavery would
Speaker 2: white Northerners gather up the courage to actually fight. It's
Speaker 2: possible that John Brown set out to be a martyr,
Speaker 2: but they did make a specific plan, one that could
Speaker 2: have worked. I think that John Brown's plan A was
Speaker 2: to succeed, but he wanted to make sure that failure
Speaker 2: was also a success, so that this raid was win win,
Speaker 2: even if one of the wind conditions meant his own death.
Speaker 2: Almost half of the black people who were at the
Speaker 2: conference to set up this new Republic later signed up
Speaker 2: to fight in the Civil War, which means that they
Speaker 2: left Safe Canada to go fight in the Union Army.
Speaker 2: But only one guy, one black man from that conference
Speaker 2: went on to the Harper's Ferry raid Osborne Anderson. As
Speaker 2: one source put it, the staff of the Provincial Freemen
Speaker 2: got together to be like well the newspaper, not the conference.
Speaker 2: The newspaper's like, well, one of us should probably go
Speaker 2: down and like actually fight, right if we're gonna do this,
Speaker 2: And so they literally drew straws Osborne drew the short straw.
Speaker 2: He went without a fuss. He headed back to the US,
Speaker 2: and he went to the Kennedy farm in Maryland. And
Speaker 2: it gets presented as like mostly I've seen it presented
Speaker 2: as like, ah, the unlucky person draws the straw. It
Speaker 2: might have been that multiple people wanted to go and
Speaker 2: that it was like they could only really afford to
Speaker 2: send one person. That's a between the lines reading that
Speaker 2: I might be incorrect about. Okay, the fifth Black Raider,
Speaker 2: he's the one with the coolest name. His name, which
Speaker 2: he picked for himself, was Shield's Green, but and actually
Speaker 2: is his original name. But his original name was because
Speaker 2: he was owned by a guy. I don't remember his
Speaker 2: first name, but it was brown, but that was the
Speaker 2: name of his owner or whatever. His name was Shields Green,
Speaker 2: which he picked for himself. But then he picked his
Speaker 2: own nick name too, which was Emperor.
Speaker 3: Okay, that is it. That is yeah, probably the coolest
Speaker 3: same we're going to hear in this episode.
Speaker 4: No exactly.
Speaker 2: Yes, Emperor is the one I've been waiting to talk about.
Speaker 2: He believed that he was descended from African royalty. We've
Speaker 2: run across this a couple times on the show, but
Speaker 2: it's also often true, right, because the whole thing is
Speaker 2: that people's past are being demolished, but a lot of
Speaker 2: people were descended from African royalty. Emperor was a self
Speaker 2: emancipated man, brave almost to a fault. He had been
Speaker 2: born into slavery in South Carolina. After his wife died,
Speaker 2: he fled on a ship. Sadly, he did leave behind
Speaker 2: his six month old child, I don't know into whose
Speaker 2: care most likely. He then made his way to Canada,
Speaker 2: where he met Frederick Douglas. Emperor started working as a
Speaker 2: clothes cleaner for Frederick Douglass and kind of became Frederick
Speaker 2: Douglas's sort of right hand man for a while. Frederick
Speaker 2: Douglas wrote about him quote Shield's Green was not one
Speaker 2: to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man
Speaker 2: of few words and his speech was singularly broken. But
Speaker 2: his courage and self respect made him quite a dignified character,
Speaker 2: and so he wasn't literate, and he also like wasn't
Speaker 2: like just like Frankly, he wasn't very good at communicating,
Speaker 2: and he was also fucking amazing. In August eighteen fifty nine,
Speaker 2: a couple months before the raid, John Brown set up
Speaker 2: a meeting with Frederick Douglas, who was attended by Shields
Speaker 2: Green for days. Brown tried to convince Douglas to join
Speaker 2: the raid, like it was like literally like a weekend
Speaker 2: long conference where he's like, this is my plan, I
Speaker 2: think you should come, And Douglas said that Brown was
Speaker 2: quote going into a perfect steel trap and that once
Speaker 2: in he would never get out alive.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 2: Douglas basically wished him luck, and then he said I
Speaker 2: think later he said that he wasn't sure whether his
Speaker 2: own refusal to go was discretion or cowardice, And that
Speaker 2: is fucking relatable. Yeah, And then Frederick Douglas turns to
Speaker 2: Emperor and is like, what do you want to do?
Speaker 2: And Emperor says, I believe I'll go with the old man,
Speaker 2: and he joined John Brown and headed to the Kennedy farm.
Speaker 2: There were a lot of other raiders who I'm not
Speaker 2: going to cover in as much detail. Many of them
Speaker 2: had been with John Brown for years fighting with him
Speaker 2: and Bleeding Kansas. Many others, though, many of the people
Speaker 2: who had fought with him and Bleeding Kansas were like,
Speaker 2: this one's a suicide mission, this one's a steel trap
Speaker 2: and sat it out. Others joined the crew more recently,
Speaker 2: like Stuart Taylor, who was a wagon maker who attended
Speaker 2: the Chatham convention, who again was like a white Canadian
Speaker 2: dude who was like, yeah, all right, uh fucking shit's
Speaker 2: gotta get done. If it's not me, who's going to
Speaker 2: do it?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: I appreciate that attitude so much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. The Koppack brothers, Barclay and Edwin were Quakers
Speaker 2: and they were like, well I think the I think
Speaker 2: we gotta And many of John Brown's sons and one
Speaker 2: of his son in laws came with him. What a
Speaker 2: family to marry into. Initially, folks were going to do
Speaker 2: the raid right after Chatham, but there was a problem.
Speaker 2: One of the conspirators lost faith in the plan and
Speaker 2: started talking about it to their various donors. So like
Speaker 2: one of the raiders was like, I don't feel good
Speaker 2: about this anymore, and he started going to the donors
Speaker 2: who were funding the whole thing. And were like, ah,
Speaker 2: like he didn't go snitch, right, but he just like
Speaker 2: went and was like, I don't know, I think John
Speaker 2: Brown's it's not a good plan. And so the donation
Speaker 2: started drying up and this impacted their ability to do
Speaker 2: this plan because it involved arming a thousand people this plan,
Speaker 2: and John Brown learned what I hope that modern nonprofits learned,
Speaker 2: which is there's a really good way to get your
Speaker 2: donations back you have a flagging nonprofit. They were like,
Speaker 2: let's prove that we know what we're doing. So over
Speaker 2: Christmas eighteen fifty eight, they raided three slave farms in Missouri,
Speaker 2: killing a slaver, freeing eleven people, robbing the slavers for
Speaker 2: all they were worth. And they did it really publicly.
Speaker 2: They like militarily escorted these freed people up to a
Speaker 2: ferry and said bye to them in front of a
Speaker 2: huge supportive crowd to get them to Canada. But John
Speaker 2: Brown was a lone wing nut. It wasn't supported by anybody.
Speaker 3: Wait, is your advice to people who are running nonprofits? Like,
Speaker 3: maybe take a card from this playbook? Yeah, you know, just.
Speaker 2: Prove you know how to do what you saying you're
Speaker 2: gonna do whatever it is that you do. You just
Speaker 2: prove you know how to do it, you know, and
Speaker 2: the crew's funding returned. The donors were like, Okay, John
Speaker 2: Brown knows what he's doing and most of his funding
Speaker 2: came from the Secret Six, which were six Northern rich
Speaker 2: abolitionists who funded all kinds of shit. So yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't know. We never tell anyone what to do, but
Speaker 2: where we get are funding is through advertising, and they're
Speaker 2: not secret, but it might be they might be secretly
Speaker 2: down I don't know, or maybe one day they'll listen
Speaker 2: to the show and be like, why do we support
Speaker 2: I mean, we love our heads.
Speaker 3: It's great here they are.
Speaker 4: And we're back.
Speaker 2: And Bridget, I think you have one more sponsor of
Speaker 2: this show.
Speaker 3: Yes, this show is unofficially brought to you by a
Speaker 3: good comb. You might not think about it, but a
Speaker 3: good comb can be a game changer and it will
Speaker 3: last for a long time, and it's just a nice
Speaker 3: thing to have on your person, a good comb.
Speaker 2: It's important to have a good comb. So the Raiders
Speaker 2: picked Harper's Ferry as the place raid for a bunch
Speaker 2: of reasons. It was a federal armory town where water
Speaker 2: mills powered machinery that built the weapons of war. It
Speaker 2: was also in a slave state. It was nestled in
Speaker 2: the mountains, and if you're going to have a rebellion,
Speaker 2: you need inhospitable terrain like swamps and mountains around you.
Speaker 2: It helped that Western Virginia, now Best Virginia, leaned more
Speaker 2: abolitionists than elsewhere in Virginia, although the closest town, Charlestown,
Speaker 2: was staunchly pro slavery, which didn't help them when it
Speaker 2: came time for jurors. But there they weren't going to
Speaker 2: win their case. That was not a thing they expected
Speaker 2: to have happened. Their cover for investigating the area was
Speaker 2: that John Brown was a mining investor and that the
Speaker 2: weapons he had shipped were mining tools. So there just
Speaker 2: like big crates of pike heads were coming in and
Speaker 2: they were like, oh, these are our mining tools for mining.
Speaker 2: Their base of operations was a little farmhouse they rented
Speaker 2: in Maryland, the Kennedy Farm. And this wasn't like owned
Speaker 2: by the Kennedys or whatever this is. It was a
Speaker 2: farm where the owner had died and it was sort
Speaker 2: of just in an estate. No one was living there,
Speaker 2: and so they rented it.
Speaker 4: Fairly cheap.
Speaker 2: During the day the raiders hit in the attic, so
Speaker 2: there weren't reports of lots of people around. One of
Speaker 2: the raiders, John Cook, he was this aristocratic guy, I
Speaker 2: think from Connecticut. He's from New England somewhere. He went
Speaker 2: and started living in Harper's Ferry for a year, living
Speaker 2: under cover prior to the raid, getting in with high society.
Speaker 2: I think undercover. I think he literally just used his
Speaker 2: name because he has an aristocratic name, and so he
Speaker 2: joined high society. He started hanging out with the slavers
Speaker 2: in order to learn more about them. Most of the
Speaker 2: raiders assumed that the plan was going to be simple
Speaker 2: and similar to what they had done before, a hit
Speaker 2: and run. They show up, they steal guns, they free people,
Speaker 2: they get the fuck out. When John Brown was like,
Speaker 2: you know, they're all gathered in the farmhouse, and he's like, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 2: The plan is we're going to establish a gorilla camp
Speaker 2: and start a war and take over the entire South.
Speaker 2: We are not going north, we are going south. Almost
Speaker 2: everyone there, including all three of his sons, were like, nah,
Speaker 2: we don't like that plan. That plan sounds like a
Speaker 2: bad idea. And this is like, this is that moment
Speaker 2: in the movie, you know, where they're all like, I
Speaker 2: think our plan is doomed. But they're like, but we
Speaker 2: have to rob the Mona Lisa. We can't not, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And so John Brown was like, all right, if you
Speaker 2: won't follow my plan, I won't lead you in it,
Speaker 2: and he like retired as their captain. But not like
Speaker 2: I don't even think this was like a passive aggressive move.
Speaker 2: I think he was just like, I'm not telling you
Speaker 2: what to do. I mean, he was militarily in charge
Speaker 2: during the operation, but slowly people found their courage and
Speaker 2: agreed to the plan. One version that I read, which
Speaker 2: I like, is that it was Osborne Anderson, the guy
Speaker 2: who'd drawn the short st all, who brought everyone around.
Speaker 2: And I like it because he was the guy who
Speaker 2: was there because he drew the short straw. You know,
Speaker 2: they had a thousand pikes made and shipped. They shipped
Speaker 2: the heads of the pikes and then like they basically
Speaker 2: spent their time like putting pike heads on pikes. And
Speaker 2: they did this because a pike takes no training to use.
Speaker 2: You can put a pike in the hand of someone
Speaker 2: and make them dangerous. The plan was to seize the armory,
Speaker 2: free the local enslaved people, and take to the mountains,
Speaker 2: building up an army and destroying slavery.
Speaker 4: In the South.
Speaker 2: It sounds a bit fantastical, but the thing is this
Speaker 2: is what the Haitian Revolution started as successfully seventy years earlier.
Speaker 2: It is a model that was proven could work.
Speaker 3: And it's like you were saying, it is kind of
Speaker 3: a wild idea, but it makes sense that if you
Speaker 3: arm people and you know, everybody starts killing enslavers, it
Speaker 3: can work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: And the reason that people thought it was completely silly
Speaker 2: is everyone was like, oh, well, the black people here
Speaker 2: are happy with their lots and they would never do
Speaker 2: anything to risk their positions, you know, or they're all
Speaker 2: cowards or whatever. But like universally, they would meet people
Speaker 2: and they'd be like, yeah, okay, give me a gun,
Speaker 2: give me a pike, let's go.
Speaker 3: You know. Yeah. Imagine being like the people that I
Speaker 3: enslave love me. They would never would never do anything
Speaker 3: to hurt me. Imagine thinking that right up until the
Speaker 3: moment that they turn on your Well.
Speaker 2: What's wild is that they felt that way even after
Speaker 2: they had turned on them.
Speaker 4: Just a spoil part of the end.
Speaker 2: Later, a lot of the enslaved people who joined the
Speaker 2: raid at the end were like, oh, we got forced
Speaker 2: to be here. We like being enslaved, and it worked.
Speaker 2: They were just returned to where they came from, even
Speaker 2: though they just been holding people hostage at like gun
Speaker 2: and Pike Point with all a mix up, I know.
Speaker 3: And then they got to like then.
Speaker 2: Go on and like lead this other uprising where all
Speaker 2: the barns in the area started burning. All of the
Speaker 2: jurors who were like slavers who voted to convict them
Speaker 2: suddenly their barns burned in the middle of the night.
Speaker 2: And it took like a hundred years before historians were like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that was the enslaved people doing that, because they were like, oh,
Speaker 2: it must have been abolitionist sneaking in from Maryland or whatever.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: Anyway, and so while they're in this farmhouse, they start
Speaker 2: spreading the word among the farms, like to all the
Speaker 2: enslaved people. And I believe that this was mostly Dangerfield
Speaker 2: Nubie doing that. The forty four year old who was
Speaker 2: trying to free his wife because he worked as a
Speaker 2: blacksmith and so he would leave the farm and go
Speaker 2: find work and use that to get a sense of
Speaker 2: what was going on and all of the plantations and
Speaker 2: things around there. So the enslaved people started getting ready
Speaker 2: for this big attack on the twenty fourth of October. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: a couple of them were and probably said, oh, we're
Speaker 2: getting ready for a rebellion. They didn't like out.
Speaker 4: They weren't like.
Speaker 2: John Brown's here on the twenty fourth were going right,
Speaker 2: but John Brown and his crew didn't know that, and
Speaker 2: so they were worried that the jig was up. Rather
Speaker 2: than be like, oh, the jig is up, we're not
Speaker 2: going to do it, they moved the raid up a week,
Speaker 2: but they didn't successfully get the word out to the
Speaker 2: enslaved people that they were hoping would join them. Hey,
Speaker 2: the raid has been moved up a week. So this
Speaker 2: is like everyone who's sort of like armchair trying to
Speaker 2: figure out what could have happened if this is like
Speaker 2: maybe the big what could have happened if is if
Speaker 2: they hadn't moved their raid and they had like at
Speaker 2: least one hundred and fifty and some estimates of substantially
Speaker 2: more people who were like ready to go, you know, but.
Speaker 4: They did it.
Speaker 2: Anyway, they moved the raid up, and then they raided
Speaker 2: on October sixteenth. They ate a dinner together as per usual,
Speaker 2: and then they headed out into the misty night at
Speaker 2: eight pm and started on foot towards Harper's ferry. They marched,
Speaker 2: as Osborne Anderson put it, because he's the only one
Speaker 2: who survives to write about what happened. They marched as
Speaker 2: solemnly as a funeral procession. And then just because you're like,
Speaker 2: there have there's been enough swords in this story.
Speaker 3: Lately, more swords.
Speaker 2: Well, more swords are about to enter the picture. Six
Speaker 2: of them peeled off towards the estate of Lewis Washington.
Speaker 2: Lewis Washington was a slaver, and his last name wasn't
Speaker 2: a coincidence. He was the grand nephew of George Washington,
Speaker 2: the most famous slaver of all. Lewis had George Washington's
Speaker 2: sword in his possession, which had been given to George
Speaker 2: Washington by the King of Prussia. And the reason that
Speaker 2: they knew he had this sword is that their spy,
Speaker 2: the aristocrat named Cook, had been hanging out at the
Speaker 2: guy's house. Right So, Cook and a bunch of other people,
Speaker 2: including Anderson are like, we're gonna go over there and
Speaker 2: we're gonna take this guy hostage and make him give
Speaker 2: George Washington's sword to Osborne Anderson, a black man.
Speaker 3: I love the like petty symbolism of that. Like he's
Speaker 3: gonna hate it, I know, And you know what, he
Speaker 3: did hate it. Oh, surprise of rise. They showed up.
Speaker 2: They took him and his family hostage, and they made
Speaker 2: him hand over the sword. As best as I can tell,
Speaker 2: I couldn't find out what happened to the sword later.
Speaker 2: I assume it God captured again. But Lewis Washington was like,
Speaker 2: I handled it bravely. All other accounts are like he
Speaker 2: just baled and begged and cried the whole time. And
Speaker 2: one of the people who did it, one of the
Speaker 2: people who took him hostage was the guy who'd been
Speaker 2: pretending to be his friend for a year. I love
Speaker 2: it so much.
Speaker 3: God to be a fly on the wall when he
Speaker 3: was like, oh, my friend is turning on me.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They then stopped another estate and took more hostages. The
Speaker 2: idea was that they were going to take the rich
Speaker 2: people hostage, and then they actually took care of the
Speaker 2: before they went out They were like, we're only going
Speaker 2: to kill people on self defense. We're going to treat
Speaker 2: the hostage as well. They like set some ground rules down.
Speaker 2: They stopped at another state. I wouldn't have cared if
Speaker 2: they killed these people. I want to be really clear
Speaker 2: about that. But they didn't, and it was nice of them.
Speaker 2: They get to Harper's ferry. The raiders cut the telegraph
Speaker 2: wires on both sides of the Potomac River to slow
Speaker 2: news getting out. They took the armory and the arsenal.
Speaker 2: What is the difference between an armory and arsenal. I
Speaker 2: don't know, and neither does Google. And they also took
Speaker 2: the rifle works, and I'm sure some listener knows the difference.
Speaker 2: And you know what, I'll actually be curious if you
Speaker 2: tell me. A great deal has been made by people
Speaker 2: like the Daughters of the Confederacy about the first person
Speaker 2: to die in the raid. The first person to die
Speaker 2: in the raid was a free black man named Haywood
Speaker 2: Shepherd who worked on the trains. Raiders told him to stop,
Speaker 2: like the train stopped and he got off to be
Speaker 2: like what's going on? And they were like, hey, stop
Speaker 2: and he kept walking and they didn't know who he was.
Speaker 2: They didn't know what Racey was, and they shot him
Speaker 2: and they killed him. Ever since, people have been like, see,
Speaker 2: the raiders don't care about black people specifically. There is
Speaker 2: a giant memorial to this man in Harper's Ferry today,
Speaker 2: built and maintained by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Next
Speaker 2: To it is a park service sign explaining how Heywood
Speaker 2: Shepherd has been used as a pro Confederacy and pro
Speaker 2: slavery martyr ever since. About the myth of the loyal
Speaker 2: slave even though he was a freeman who had died,
Speaker 2: makes me real sad.
Speaker 3: I can see why your trip to Harper's Ferry was
Speaker 3: a weepy one.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, it was just it was yeah. Enslave
Speaker 2: people came out to help the insurrectionists and were handed
Speaker 2: pikes and left in charge of the hostages. No one
Speaker 2: quite seems to know exactly how many of them there were,
Speaker 2: between fifteen and fifty, probably in the twenty ish range,
Speaker 2: but maybe that's like whenever I see the numbers being
Speaker 2: bandied around, it kind of pick one.
Speaker 4: That sounds reasonable to me. I don't know.
Speaker 2: They were rather courteous to the prisoners. They let the
Speaker 2: hostages eat food delivered from hotels, and meet with their
Speaker 2: families like they set up visiting hours for their families.
Speaker 2: Local militia showed up to fight the raiders, and then
Speaker 2: the fighting began. The militia also stopped by to break
Speaker 2: into it. There's a bunch of racist violence. It's about
Speaker 2: to happen.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: The militia stopped by to break into a local jail
Speaker 2: and hang a random black prisoner, because racists never change.
Speaker 2: Dangerfield Nubi, the Blacksmith, the old the oldest raider besides
Speaker 2: John Brown. He opened fire as the militia approached. He
Speaker 2: killed an Irish grocer and a slaver who'd graduated West Point.
Speaker 2: Dangerfield and Emperor then ran for cover. I've read it's
Speaker 2: Dangerfield and Emperor, and I've read it's Dangerfield and another
Speaker 2: enslaved person who is there who's unnamed. I don't know which,
Speaker 2: but I'm gonna use Emperor for this. Newby was shot
Speaker 2: by a sniper in the window. The oldest of the
Speaker 2: raiders besides John Brown, he was the first of them
Speaker 2: to die. Emperor then shot and took out that sniper
Speaker 2: A second later. Dangerfield was left to die in the street,
Speaker 2: and White towns. People before he was even dead, started
Speaker 2: cutting up his body to take pieces as souvenirs.
Speaker 4: Ugh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, uh really and truly, the US was like a
Speaker 2: nightmare world. It was like I've been saying this a while.
Speaker 2: It's just it's the solid movie.
Speaker 3: Like a horror movie. Yeah, Like, oh, I got a
Speaker 3: piece of him? What, Like what did you even do
Speaker 3: with it? You know what I mean? Like why would
Speaker 3: you want to like a piece of something? Yeah, oh,
Speaker 3: give it to your kids. Like, just like, I'm the
Speaker 3: good guy, I'm cutting up people on the street. I'm
Speaker 3: the hero in this story. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The fight turned against the raiders quickly. They were wildly outnumbered.
Speaker 2: The youngest raider was named William Lehman, and he was
Speaker 2: twenty years old. He'd actually I think he'd bleeding Kansas.
Speaker 2: He'd been with them since he was seventeen. He tried
Speaker 2: to surrender and a white militia guy shot him in
Speaker 2: the head. The raiders took refuge in the firehouse now
Speaker 2: called John Brown's Fort like it's it has been renamed that,
Speaker 2: and they also took refuge in the rifle works. One
Speaker 2: of the raiders, William Thompson, went out with a white
Speaker 2: flag and one of the hostages to try and negotiate surrender.
Speaker 2: They captured him and tied him up and took him
Speaker 2: to the bridge and then were like, let's hang him,
Speaker 2: but then instead they threw him off the bridge and
Speaker 2: shot him on his way down.
Speaker 4: Jesus.
Speaker 2: Most of the raiders at this point were like, I
Speaker 2: want to get the fuck out of here. This didn't work.
Speaker 4: I'm done.
Speaker 2: The battle was lost. The rifle works was surrounded, and
Speaker 2: the raiders in it tried to escape out back across
Speaker 2: the river, including both Copeland and Leary, are friends from Oberlin.
Speaker 2: Both of them were wounded and captured. Leary died from
Speaker 2: his wounds after about ten hours, while Copeland survived to
Speaker 2: stand trial. Two raiders, including Anderson and this white man
Speaker 2: named Hazlitt, successfully made it across the river once they
Speaker 2: realized that everyone else was surrounded and there was nothing
Speaker 2: more they could do. Some folks have tried to paint
Speaker 2: Anderson as like a coward and who like ran, because
Speaker 2: he later wrote he's the one who survived and wrote
Speaker 2: an account of all of this. He later wrote that
Speaker 2: basically he had left once John Brown had been captured,
Speaker 2: but that was the next morning. He had left the
Speaker 2: night before, but he left when it was when he
Speaker 2: was surrounded and failing at surrendering.
Speaker 4: And the battle was lost.
Speaker 2: I do not like, I don't think anyone alive has
Speaker 2: the right to call this man a coward. US Marines
Speaker 2: arrived on the scene by nightfall, under the command of
Speaker 2: none other than Robert E. Lee, later the Confederate General.
Speaker 4: Famous man.
Speaker 2: Everyone loves him, everyone tries to people try so hard
Speaker 2: to recuperate that man.
Speaker 3: In particular, there was a high school named after him
Speaker 3: when I was growing up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep uh, the man who arrested John Brown and
Speaker 2: led the Confederacy.
Speaker 4: Hooray.
Speaker 2: Brown tried to negotiate surrender twice but was denied. They
Speaker 2: offered him unconditional surrender, and he denied.
Speaker 4: That as well. He still had hostages.
Speaker 2: The Marines smashed down the door, and the raiders did
Speaker 2: not kill their hostages. They did kill one Marine and
Speaker 2: they were then captured. There was a bunch of enslaved
Speaker 2: people in the fort with them who were immediately were like, oh, no,
Speaker 2: we're totally we were talking about before. They were just like, ah,
Speaker 2: we were taking hostage too, Like oh, what's going on?
Speaker 2: Thanks for rescuing us.
Speaker 3: They got your hair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it worked because white Virginians were not very intelligent.
Speaker 3: No, that is a commitment to not seeing yourself as
Speaker 3: the bad guy.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, totally. Obviously these people alike us, and so
Speaker 2: that saved their lives and it left them a chance
Speaker 2: to continue the fight, which they did and famously they
Speaker 2: won a few years later, Emperor tried to join them,
Speaker 2: but he was recognized. Only five of the Raiders survived
Speaker 2: to stand trial, John Brown, Emperor, Copeland, and one of
Speaker 2: the Quaker men Kopic. I believe the other Copic was
Speaker 2: three people had like stayed back at the farmhouse to
Speaker 2: guard all the extra weapons, and I think that guy survived,
Speaker 2: but I'm not. I don't remember, honestly. And then Cook,
Speaker 2: the aristocrat who had worked as a spy. These are
Speaker 2: the only people alive left to stand trial. Letters start
Speaker 2: pouring in and support the raiders. Honestly, these remind me
Speaker 2: of like the Luigi letters that people see now. Many
Speaker 2: people who wrote these letters declared that they were going
Speaker 2: to assassinate Governor Wise, the governor who assigned their death warrants.
Speaker 2: They were like long letters. They were like there's a
Speaker 2: thousand men being trained specifically to kill you in New
Speaker 2: York State.
Speaker 3: It is kind of like the Luigi letters. I saw that.
Speaker 3: He was like, love the support, but how about we
Speaker 3: cap it at five photos being sent to me per
Speaker 3: person writing me a letter.
Speaker 2: Okay, but everyone is against things like that. People aren't
Speaker 2: sick and dying anyway. One man from Indianapolis wrote a
Speaker 2: letter on December sixteenth, which was the day that the
Speaker 2: last of these people gets hanged, and the letter read,
Speaker 2: dear son of a Bitch and Southern Dog, my friends
Speaker 2: are probably in heaven while I pen these few lines
Speaker 2: by you Southern Dogs on the way to hell.
Speaker 4: So wow, people.
Speaker 2: Are pretty clear again, not a weird, isolated group that
Speaker 2: no one supported. Yes, a group that most people did
Speaker 2: not want to join directly because it was a suicide
Speaker 2: mission and everyone knew.
Speaker 3: But there's a difference between like, oh, I don't support
Speaker 3: this and I don't personally feel the need to join
Speaker 3: up with them on this suicide mission.
Speaker 2: Totally, and even like because people make a big deal
Speaker 2: out of like all Frederick Douglas said no, and you're
Speaker 2: like yeah, and then said I don't know whether it
Speaker 2: was because I was being smart or cowardly, you know,
Speaker 2: and like It's probably for the best that Frederick Douglas
Speaker 2: didn't go, yeah, because he went on to continue to
Speaker 2: do really important shit. John Brown, though, he gets to
Speaker 2: be the first person in US history executed for treason.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, I was surprised by that. I looked at
Speaker 2: the like list of everyone accused of treason, and everyone
Speaker 2: else had been like pardoned at the last minute, and
Speaker 2: shit like that. No one was coming in to part
Speaker 2: in this man at the last minute. His execution on
Speaker 2: December second, eighteen fifty nine was public. They specifically wanted
Speaker 2: it public so that everyone could see him die, but
Speaker 2: the guards were ordered specifically to keep the crowds away
Speaker 2: far enough that they couldn't hear any life speech he
Speaker 2: might want to give. But his last words were instead
Speaker 2: written on a piece of paper and passed to a guard.
Speaker 2: They said, I, John Brown am now certain that the
Speaker 2: crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away.
Speaker 4: But with blood. He was correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like very correct.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: His actual last words were to the hangman, he said,
Speaker 2: don't keep me waiting. Just also goes hard. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 2: two black men who are tried, Emperor and Copeland, were
Speaker 2: convicted of every charge, but treason. Since they couldn't be citizens,
Speaker 2: they could not commit treason. The court decided. A black
Speaker 2: abolitionist in New York wrote, quote, it was the climax
Speaker 2: of tyranny to rob us the paltry privilege of being
Speaker 2: traders to this devil inspired and god forsaken government. These
Speaker 2: people all had such a way with words, I know,
Speaker 2: I know, like everyone was a fucking poet when you
Speaker 2: had to handwrite everything, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like in old timey pen like yeah, really, like no,
Speaker 3: it's time for I guess like that is a great
Speaker 3: opportunity for a little flourish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. The night before their execution, the two white prisoners,
Speaker 2: Cook and Copic, tried to escape. They used a knife
Speaker 2: that Emperor had smuggled to them to dig a hole
Speaker 2: in the wall, and they got out of their cell
Speaker 2: and made it into the yard, but they didn't make it.
Speaker 4: Over the wall. Before they were recaptured.
Speaker 2: Copeland wrote letters from jail, like a ton of them.
Speaker 2: He offered courage to the Oberlin Anti Slavery Society, and
Speaker 2: on the morning of his death he wrote to his family,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna quote part of it. I have seen declining
Speaker 2: behind me. The Western mountains for the last time. Last night,
Speaker 2: for the last time, I beheld the soft bright moon
Speaker 2: as it rose, casting its mellow light into my felon cell,
Speaker 2: dissipating the darkness and filtering it with the soft, pleasant light,
Speaker 2: which causes such thrills of joy to all those in
Speaker 2: circumstances With myself, I am well, both in body and
Speaker 2: in mind. And now, dear ones, I must bid you
Speaker 2: that last long sad farewell your son and brother in eternity.
Speaker 2: I mean a poet, Yeah, I actually when there's people
Speaker 2: around me, I practice reading these parts so I can
Speaker 2: get the crying while reading out of the way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you really you voice them so beautifully
Speaker 3: as well, And I think thanks, you know, I just
Speaker 3: I really appreciate on the show that you really want
Speaker 3: to hear from people in their own words, because I
Speaker 3: think it's easy to see these people as pictures in
Speaker 3: a history book and not you know, really be taken
Speaker 3: into the emotional experience of the choices they were making
Speaker 3: in the consequences they were grappling with, Like it really,
Speaker 3: it really hits different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you're like he had a family, he loved
Speaker 2: his family, and he made this decision.
Speaker 4: You know, like.
Speaker 2: His last words were, if I am dying for freedom,
Speaker 2: I could not die for a better cause. I'd rather
Speaker 2: die than be a slave. And he tried to give
Speaker 2: a speech from the gallows, but they put a hood.
Speaker 4: Over his head. Fuckers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course they segregated the execution. The two
Speaker 2: black men were hanged and then later the two white
Speaker 2: men were hanged.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean it just really shows the commitment of like,
Speaker 3: at this point, what difference does it make if you
Speaker 3: you know it, like you're killing them, Yeah, you have
Speaker 3: to do it separately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, like because their whole thing is they were
Speaker 2: fighting for, like, we shouldn't be separate, you motherfuckers, you know.
Speaker 2: And they're like, oh, oh you're separate. Yeah, different thing,
Speaker 2: very different thing. But before I talk about the two
Speaker 2: that escaped, we can't escape our obligations to our sponsors,
Speaker 2: who we love dearly, and in particular our sponsor French
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Speaker 3: Model, Margaret, when are you going to get your spinoff
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Speaker 2: I'm just gonna one day be like and now an
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Speaker 2: So the two folks who got away, who successfully swam
Speaker 2: across the river were Anderson and Haslt, and they fled
Speaker 2: across the river and they started the endless hike north.
Speaker 2: They first tried to be like, oh, we're gonna cut
Speaker 2: into town and they were like, oh, that's not safe,
Speaker 2: and so they kept going. They split up when Hazlet
Speaker 2: didn't have the energy to keep going. Basically, they were like,
Speaker 2: I can't walk another mile, and Anderson was like, I
Speaker 2: don't want to get caught.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, good luck.
Speaker 2: Later has Lit returned home and he was captured and
Speaker 2: hanged in eighteen sixty. Anderson the only one of the
Speaker 2: raiders to sort of survive to tell the tale. The
Speaker 2: ones who hung out at the farmhouse also survived for
Speaker 2: a bit, and I feel bad kind of leaving them out,
Speaker 2: but they weren't in the fighting whatever. Anderson made it
Speaker 2: to York Pennsylvania. He fucking walked across Maryland into Pennsylvania,
Speaker 2: where he met up with someone from the Underground Railroad
Speaker 2: who got him on a train to Philly and several
Speaker 2: changes of close, he tried to go home. His own
Speaker 2: father was like, no, get away from here, and I'll
Speaker 2: have you arrested if you return, which I don't like.
Speaker 2: So then he went to Ohio and he took probably
Speaker 2: a ferry to Canada. Anderson lived the rest of his
Speaker 2: life hard. By the time he made it to Canada,
Speaker 2: he was flat broke and had lost a lot of weight.
Speaker 2: He wrote a memoir of the whole thing, probably with
Speaker 2: the uncredited help of Mary Anne and his old newspaper
Speaker 2: publisher and his old boss. It was published in Boston
Speaker 2: in eighteen sixty one. And this goes hard. He went
Speaker 2: to Boston as a fugitive to do a book tour
Speaker 2: does go hard, Like he's the one who's sort of
Speaker 2: like like people kind of try and pain him as
Speaker 2: a coward. Oh, he just his friend, and he's like
Speaker 2: he fucking again, no one can doubt this man's courage,
Speaker 2: who has not been tested by worse. And he wrote
Speaker 2: this and he went on tour as a fugitive, like
Speaker 2: publicly being like I wrote this book about my crime
Speaker 2: that I'm on the run for. His goal was quote
Speaker 2: to save from oblivion the heroism of the colored men
Speaker 2: who so nobly seconded the efforts of the immortal John Brown,
Speaker 2: and to say that yes, enslaved black people joined the insurrection,
Speaker 2: like that's that's the thing that was getting written out
Speaker 2: of history. That he was like, that's not going to happen.
Speaker 2: He wanted to counter the slaves are happy nonsense that
Speaker 2: the South kept pushing. He also wrote his manuscript before
Speaker 2: all the dust had settled, so he had an eye
Speaker 2: on security culture when he wrote it, which I think
Speaker 2: is like kind of neat every now and then I
Speaker 2: cover things that are like not fully resolved in court,
Speaker 2: and I never lie, but I have to be like,
Speaker 2: I can't talk about certain things because we don't know yet,
Speaker 2: because courts aren't done, you know. Yeah, and so he
Speaker 2: did that, and it just makes me happy. He said,
Speaker 2: quote much has been given as true that never happened.
Speaker 2: Much has been omitted that should have been made known.
Speaker 2: Many things have been left unsaid because up to within
Speaker 2: a short time, but two could say them. One of
Speaker 2: them has been offered up. He's talking about it. I
Speaker 2: think he's talking about Haslet, who has now died. But
Speaker 2: one of them has been offered up a sacrifice to
Speaker 2: the Moloch slavery being the other one, I propose to
Speaker 2: perform the duty. Yeah, way of words.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I really appreciate how committed he was to
Speaker 3: really correcting the narrative that I think, even today get
Speaker 3: so incorrect. Like when I was a little kid, I learned,
Speaker 3: you know, you learn like Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves,
Speaker 3: and yeah, totally it's such a like paternalistic incorrect idea,
Speaker 3: but it also strips black enslaved people of their agency,
Speaker 3: Like they were there, they were part of this, They
Speaker 3: risked things. It's so cruel that, you know, that sacrifice
Speaker 3: and that work and that courage would be wiped away
Speaker 3: and whitewashed in favor of this, like oh, just one
Speaker 3: guy signed something and that.
Speaker 4: Was that totally it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like the more you read history books, you're like, no,
Speaker 2: black people won their freedom in this country, and you
Speaker 2: know what, I am glad that some white people helped,
Speaker 2: but like absolutely, yeah. When the Civil War kicked off,
Speaker 2: Anderson and mary Anne left the safety of Canada to
Speaker 2: become recruiters for the Union Black Army in eighteen sixty three.
Speaker 2: It is possible that Anderson fought in the war them himself,
Speaker 2: but the evidence is mixed. This is where you might
Speaker 2: get into the myth making, like he might have been like, oh,
Speaker 2: I totally fought in the war, but you know what,
Speaker 2: he fucking fought in the war. He just did it
Speaker 2: before it was a war, you know. Yeah, like whatever.
Speaker 2: They stayed in the States, moving to d C.
Speaker 4: After the war.
Speaker 2: Mary Anne was a suffragette and she tried to vote
Speaker 2: in eighteen seventy one. Anderson worked as a messenger and
Speaker 2: was basically broke, I think, just staying with friends. He
Speaker 2: died of tuberculosis when he was forty two years old.
Speaker 2: A few days before he died, he and his friends
Speaker 2: went to visit Harper's Ferry one last time, and then
Speaker 2: he died in his friend's house on December tenth, eighteen
Speaker 2: seventy two. He was largely forgotten about before his death,
Speaker 2: but as soon as he died, people worked hard to
Speaker 2: commemorate him. Frederick Douglas's paper had a eulogy with the
Speaker 2: headline Osborne p Anderson a hero. Mary Anne raised the
Speaker 2: money to pay for his funeral. His father, the one
Speaker 2: who had turned him away, came to the funeral. Louis Douglas,
Speaker 2: Frederick Douglas's son, one of one of his sons who
Speaker 2: fought in the Union Army, was one of his pallbearers.
Speaker 2: His body, I believe, went into an unmarked grave, and
Speaker 2: then it certainly became unmarked when, along with tens of
Speaker 2: thousands of other black people, his grave was on earth
Speaker 2: to make room for a metro station in DC. It's
Speaker 2: now a parking lot. What station I don't know, and
Speaker 2: I'm annoyed.
Speaker 3: Ooh, I'm gonna find that out. Yeah, I curious. Yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 2: Was the fifties or sixties they unearthed. I read one
Speaker 2: place seventeen thousand. I read another place like thirty five thousand,
Speaker 2: and those people were unearthed and then just sort of
Speaker 2: dumped unceremoniously into a National Harmony Memorial Park in Maryland
Speaker 2: in the year two thousand. Folks put a plaque up
Speaker 2: there for him, and I believe that one of his
Speaker 2: descendants was one.
Speaker 4: Of the people who put the plaque up.
Speaker 2: The plaque reads this dedicated and brave Christian traveled from Chatham,
Speaker 2: Canada to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia to fight beside John
Speaker 2: Brown in his quest to abolish slavery. He later served
Speaker 2: as a Union soldier in the Civil War. And then
Speaker 2: the Bible quote greater love hath no man than this,
Speaker 2: that a man laid down his life for his friends,
Speaker 2: John fifteen thirteen. And propagandist historians have tried forever to
Speaker 2: say that the raid was a flash in a pan,
Speaker 2: a meaningless insurrection, but people are starting to accept the truth.
Speaker 2: It was the raid on Harper's Ferry that pushed the
Speaker 2: Southern States to announce that they would dissolve the Union
Speaker 2: to protect slavery. As Frederick Douglas said in eighteen eighty
Speaker 2: one quote, if John Brown did not end the war
Speaker 2: that ended slavery, he began the war that ended American
Speaker 2: slavery and made this a free republic. But it wasn't
Speaker 2: just John Brown. It was a ragtag mix of free
Speaker 2: black men, self emancipated men, Quakers, Canadians, Oberlin students, a
Speaker 2: blacksmith trying to free his wife. And it was people
Speaker 2: who went happy to their graves because they knew that
Speaker 2: what they were doing was just.
Speaker 3: That's it. Yeah, I mean, I know why I said
Speaker 3: this in the last episode, but I just feel like
Speaker 3: there's so much to learn today from that act of
Speaker 3: courage and organizing. And yeah, I mean, as we go
Speaker 3: into darker and darker times where things feel so lost,
Speaker 3: it feels good to have these things to look back
Speaker 3: on to cling to to find a little bit of hope.
Speaker 2: Totally, and like every part of it, like the raid, absolutely,
Speaker 2: but also like all the jurors had their barns burned,
Speaker 2: you know, and like and the Oberlin students like black
Speaker 2: and white being like now our town is free, Like
Speaker 2: we genuinely don't care what the law is our town
Speaker 2: is free. That's the kind of energy that we need
Speaker 2: to never no one should ever do a crime.
Speaker 3: Glad you added that we're not advocating crime people, but yeah,
Speaker 3: protect your communities, like you set the tone for your community.
Speaker 3: We keep each other safe.
Speaker 4: All of that totally.
Speaker 2: And this thing that's like, oh, we're gonna go free
Speaker 2: this guy. We're getting couple hundred people to go do it.
Speaker 2: It's a big deal, but it probably didn't feel like.
Speaker 2: They probably didn't go being like we are making history,
Speaker 2: you know, but they did like the stuff we do
Speaker 2: will echo into eternity. And I know that sounds hyperbolic,
Speaker 2: but it's still just true.
Speaker 1: Totally.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, what I do is make a podcast. But I
Speaker 2: don't know, Bridget, how what do you You got anything
Speaker 2: you want to plug.
Speaker 3: Other than a good comb keep one on your person
Speaker 3: at all times. Yeah, you could check out my podcast.
Speaker 3: There are no girls on the internet, and you can
Speaker 3: check me out on Instagram at Bridget Marie and DC.
Speaker 3: I live in DC, so weird times over here. If
Speaker 3: you want to follow along, feel free to check me out.
Speaker 3: And uh yeah, I'm on Blue Sky at Bridget Todd.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, uh, I have a Kickstarter. I already told
Speaker 2: you you probably did not listen to the first part.
Speaker 2: And I'm also on Blue Sky and I'm on Instagram,
Speaker 2: and I've used an app to delete everything I've ever
Speaker 2: posted to Twitter. I didn't delete my Twitter, but I
Speaker 2: deleted everything I've ever said.
Speaker 4: On it.
Speaker 2: Because I don't like that site anymore for some weird reason.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: Valid.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Sophia, you got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I want to plug on our daily show. It could
Speaker 1: happen here. Every Friday, we are running a series called
Speaker 1: Executive Disorder White House Weekly, where we're just giving you
Speaker 1: this week's horrors in one episode, so follow on for that.
Speaker 1: It's just giving you a once a week update on
Speaker 1: where things are at, so that you're not thinking about
Speaker 1: it every five seconds, just once a week, which is
Speaker 1: still a lot, but not every five seconds.
Speaker 4: Yeay.
Speaker 2: It is important to both keep up with what's happening
Speaker 2: and also not get overwhelmed by what's happening, which is
Speaker 2: a balance that I don't think anyone is truly found.
Speaker 3: Not yet. Oh, can I plug one more thing? Yeah,
Speaker 3: just want to give a quick shout for not sleeping
Speaker 3: with your phone in your bedroom to Sophie's point, don't
Speaker 3: doom scroll, be cautious with well how you absorb information.
Speaker 3: Leave your phone outside of your bedroom for a couple
Speaker 3: of days. You will sleep better. I promise you.
Speaker 2: I aspire to that. I am not there yet. I'm
Speaker 2: good at keeping it on. Do not disturb, but and
Speaker 2: I'm working on reading a book instead of staring at
Speaker 2: my phone before bed. All right, well, next week we'll
Speaker 2: have more history instead of current events. Because history is
Speaker 2: completely unrelated to current events. There's no reason to develop
Speaker 2: pattern recognition or learn from our failures and successes in
Speaker 2: the past. It's just entertainment. See y'all next week.
Speaker 4: Huzzah.
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Speaker 1: your podcasts.