Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

by Tony Horwitz

A Full Fountain of Bedlam On November 10, 1859, as Brown wrote Mary about collecting his body, four other inmates were learning their fate in the courthouse across from the Charleston jail. Since their capture, not all of them had displayed Brown’s passion for martyrdom. Edwin Coppoc said he had been misled about his leader’s intentions and thought the attack was meant only to “run off slaves into a Free State.” John Copeland made the same claim. Copeland’s lawyer also argued that he and the other black defendant, Shields Green, couldn’t be charged with treason because the Supreme Court, in its notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857, had ruled that blacks were “beings of an inferior order” who possessed “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Blacks, slave or free, were effectively noncitizens, and as such had no government to betray. The prosecution acknowledged the logic of this argument and dropped the treason charge against the black men. But this victory by the defense