Radical 'army' had its Tar Heels

Thomas Jefferson never saw Yosemite or Yellowstone, but he did see Harpers Ferry. After marveling at the gorge where the Shenandoah River feeds into the Potomac, Jefferson pronounced it "perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature."

"In the moment of their junction they rush together against the mountain, rend it asunder and pass off to the sea," he wrote of the two rivers in "Notes on the State of Virginia."

Yes, the high spot where he stood on Oct. 25, 1783 -- Jefferson Rock remains a popular vantage point -- was then part of Virginia. But go to the town of Harpers Ferry today, and you'll find yourself at the easternmost tip of West Virginia. It all had something to do with a war between North and South -- a war that had a bloody little prelude right there in Harpers Ferry.

Two days ago fell the 150th anniversary of the event that inscribed Harpers Ferry in the history books. On the night of Oct. 16, 1859, raiders led by the radical abolitionist John Brown attacked a U.S. government arsenal in the town. They hoped that their capture of weapons from the arsenal would spark an uprising among enslaved blacks in the region, and that the rebellion would spread throughout the South.

It was a half-baked plan, besides being the kind of armed insurrection that our political system cannot tolerate, and it failed miserably. Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee, dispatched by President James Buchanan in command of troops whose mission was to suppress the insurgents, saw to that.

Brown's resort to violence earned him labels such as the one applied to him by Abraham Lincoln -- "misguided fanatic." But among his party were people who had experienced the hideous injustices inflicted upon African-Americans of that era.

As Joshua B. Howard of the N.C. Division of Archives and History recounts in a current essay, two among the 22 raiders were native Tar Heels, both men of color. The stories of Lewis S. Leary and John A. Copeland Jr. help illustrate the lengths that extreme anti-slavery advocates were willing to go as national tensions over slavery approached a boil. They knew they were risking their lives.

Michael Hill, research branch supervisor at Archives and History, kindly passed along a copy of Howard's essay, which contributes to North Carolina's upcoming observances of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. The thrust of the John Brown saga is familiar, but to explore the role of Leary and Copeland is to gain a new perspective.

Old Brown, veteran of the vicious frontier conflict between abolitionists and slavery partisans, may have been half-crazy to think that the Harpers Ferry raid could lead to slavery's downfall. He recruited men to join him in what had all the earmarks of a fiasco. But Leary and Copeland saw themselves as freedom fighters. Given that it would take the great Civil War bloodletting before slavery could be ended, perhaps it's fair to regard them as among that war's first casualties.

Neither of the two Tar Heel raiders had been slaves themselves. Both were born to parents who were free blacks -- Leary in Fayetteville and Copeland in Raleigh. North Carolina tightened discriminatory laws against African-Americans following Nat Turner's violent slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, and Copeland's family in 1843 moved north. They eventually settled in Oberlin, Ohio, a center of progressive racial views and a main stop on the Underground Railroad. From 1854 to 1855, Copeland attended Oberlin College.

Leary, who had two grandfathers who were Revolutionary War veterans, one white and one black, also made his way to Oberlin, following some other family members. He arrived in 1856. Both Leary, who'd been trained by his father as a saddlemaker, and Copeland joined the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society.

Brown in early 1859 had come to Ohio from "Bleeding Kansas," bringing with him several fugitive slaves and looking to recruit more followers. By the first week in October, Leary and Copeland had left Oberlin for Cleveland, meeting up with Brown's "army." The raiders, following through with Brown's notion of stirring up a slave revolt in the Virginia mountains, made their way to an outpost near Harpers Ferry. Barely 24 hours later, they struck.

The two North Carolinians and a third man were assigned to overrun a rifle works. Although they reached their objective, it was in vain. During an escape attempt across the Shenandoah, Copeland was captured and Leary mortally wounded.

After a trial, Copeland went to the gallows, as did Brown and a handful of other raiders who had been taken alive. By Howard's account, Copeland gave a final declaration, reportedly saying: "If I am dying for freedom, I could not die for a better cause -- I had rather die than be a slave!" Thomas Jefferson, who articulated the right of all Americans to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, might have understood what brought those two sons of North Carolina to that place of beauty and bloodshed 150 years ago.

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