Fri, Nov 20 2009
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Published October 18, 2009 12:08 am - 150 years ago this month, John Brown and a small volunteer army attempted to overthrow the government and free the slaves with a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The weapons they used that night had beenThe mid-morning sky over northern Trumbull County is hazy and livid, a typical July day for this neck of the woods. stored in a Wayne Township barn until — Insurrection at Harpers Ferry: The Ashtabula County connection 150 years ago this month, John Brown and a small volunteer army attempted to overthrow the government and free the slaves with a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The weapons they used that night had been stored in a Wayne Township barn until — By CARL E. FEATHER - Staff Writer - cfeather@starbeacon.com Star Beacon The mid-morning sky over northern Trumbull County is hazy and livid, a typical July day for this neck of the woods. Cornstalks, intensely green and broad-leafed, seem taller than my subcompact car; a thunderstorm rumbles in the distance, toward the Pennsylvania line.
It is July 22, 2009, an inconsequential date, as far as I know. Yet, once I start poring over the photocopies spread across the table in the dining room of the Linda and Henry Lipps home, the date jumps at out at me like discovering your birthday is that of a famous person. “On the evening of July 22, 1859, four men from Wayne, with four teams, moved the supplies in boxes marked ‘fence castings’ to the canal at Hartstown, Pa., to be shipped to Chambersburg. From there, they went to the Kennedy farm in Maryland, a few miles from Harper’s Ferry.” I pause from my reading long enough to comment to my guests on the timing and coincidence of choosing this date, 150 years later, to visit the barn from whence those “castings” were removed — then I return to my readings in Chet Lampson’s “John Brown and Ashtabula County.” The book is one of several in Lipps’ collection about Brown, the famous abolitionist who attempted to launch a national insurrection against slavery at the Virginia (now West Virginia) crossroads of Harpers Ferry, Oct. 16, 1859, 150 years ago this past week. This confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers is some 300 miles from Ashtabula County, but northeast Ohio’s connection to the raid is well documented by historians. This is that story. Connections In the Oct. 27, 1859, Ashtabula Sentinel, the newspaper began its account of the Harpers Ferry incident with words that belied the fierce local interest in the incident: “We noticed last week a Negro insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, which later accounts show to have been neither an insurrection nor a riot.” Ashtabula County was a stronghold of abolitionist activity and a terminus on the Underground Railroad. No fugitive slave was ever recaptured in Ashtabula County, whose sympathetic residents risked property and their own freedom in their work to help the fugitives escape to Canada. The news from Harpers Ferry, was, therefore, of significant political interest in the broad national debate about slavery. Brown’s attempt to take the arsenal and thereby equip the South’s slaves with the means to obtain their freedom, is considered by many historians as the first spark of the Civil War — setting aside Brown’s guerilla warfare and massacre of slave-owning males in Kansas three years earlier. The days of talk, it appeared, were over — the hour of bloodshed was drawing near. Beyond that, there were local, personal connections to the story, as well. Thirteen of John Brown’s 21 recruits who assisted in the raid had lived and worked in the area of Cherry Valley, Andover, Wayne and Williamsfield in the months leading up to the raid. Among them was Aaron Stevens, who had a romantic relationship with Jennie Dunbar of West Andover. Stevens was wounded during the raid and later hanged. Other Caucasian raiders with a connection to the county were Edwin Coppic, also spelled Coppoc, who was hanged; Oliver Brown, one of John’s sons, who was killed during the attempt; Watson Brown, another son, hanged; Albert Hazlett, killed; Stuart Taylor, killed; Charles P. Kidd, killed; William and Adolph Thompson, killed; John Kagy, a Trumbull County native, killed; Jeremiah Anderson, killed; and John E. Cook, hanged. Louis Leary, a black man from Oberlin, was killed in the raid, as was a free mulatto, Dangerfield Newby, who worked as a blacksmith for Smith Edwards on what was known as the Jefferson-Dorset Road. Newby was born a slave but had been freed by his Scottish father. At 44, Newby was the eldest member of the raiding party, excepting John Brown Sr. Newby saw the use of force as his only hope for obtaining freedom for his wife and several children, still in bondage. A worn letter from his wife kept him motivated: “Buy me and the baby, that has just commenced to crawl, as soon as possible, for if you do not get me, somebody else will,” she wrote. 
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