Green 'was made of,' and confided to him his plans and purposes. Green easily believed in Brown, and promised to go with him whenever he should be ready to move."[1]
Dangerfield New by was a free mulatto from the neighborhood of Harper's Ferry. He was thirty years of age, tall and well built, with a pleasant face and manner; he had a wife and seven children in slavery about thirty miles south of Harper's Ferry. The wife was about to be sold south at this time, and was sold immediately after the raid. Newby was the spy who gave general information to the party, and lived out in the community until the night of the attack.
John A. Copeland was born of free Negro parents in North Carolina, reared in Oberlin and educated at Oberlin College. He was a straight-haired mulatto, twenty-two years old, of medium size, and a carpenter by trade. Hunter, the prosecuting attorney of Virginia, says: "From my intercourse with him I regarded him as one of the most respectable prisoners that we had. . . . He was a copper-colored Negro, behaved himself with as much firmness as any of them, and with far more dignity. If it had been possible to recommend a pardon for any of them, it would have been for this man Copeland, as I regretted as much, if not more, at seeing him executed than any other one of the party."[2]
- ↑ Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, p. 387.
- ↑ Hunter, John Brown's Raid, republished in the Publications of the Southern History Association, Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 188.
