The Untold Story of Shields Green. Louis A. Decaro, Jr.
would have done the same. But the path he chose led him back down into Harper’s Ferry, to John Brown, and the gallows.
The raiders withstood a major siege on Monday afternoon and continued to exchange fire from the engine house until night fell. By all accounts, Green was courageous throughout the ordeal, although it was evident that Brown and his men were at an impasse. At first, the Old Man attempted to negotiate terms that would even out the odds of escape, but authorities had no intention of negotiating with one they considered a meddling abolitionist and insurrectionist. To Virginia, along with the rest of the South, the presence of armed abolitionists from the North was as outrageous as it was unprecedented, and Governor Henry Wise was determined to crush these insurgents with the support of President James Buchanan in Washington. The next morning, Tuesday, October 18, a contingent of marines arrived from the capital under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. When Brown refused Lee’s demand for unconditional surrender, the marines stormed the engine house, taking heavy fire, and finally broke through.
Along with their leader, four captured raiders including Emperor were given hasty trials and sentenced to death. Brown was the first to be executed, being hanged on Friday, December 2. On December 16, four of his men, John Cook, John Copeland, Edwin Coppic, and Shields Green, followed him to the gallows.2 Although the deaths of these four young men made news throughout the country, most of the nation’s attention was focused upon Brown’s martyrdom and its aftermath. Rescue plans had been discussed here and there by allies and sympathizers, but the abolitionist leader disdained any such notion, holding that his death would prove best for the antislavery cause. Shortly, the growing number of militia men stationed in Charlestown made any thought of rescue utterly impossible. While Governor Wise of Virginia rejected any notion of commuting Brown’s death sentence, some Northerners hoped that perhaps a measure of clemency would be shown to his young followers. After all, Virginia had slain the old lion. Surely, a people purportedly steeped in the Christian faith might have spared his whelps. But those who thought this way could not have understood the implacable spirit that possessed the South.
One man knew better, not only having experienced the depths of slavery’s depravity, but also the impact that “Old Brown” and his men had made upon the entirety of the South. “The efforts of John Brown and his brave associates,” wrote Frederick Douglass in 1860, “have done more to upset the logic and shake the security of slavery, than all other efforts in that direction for twenty years.” Furthermore, as Douglass recognized, throughout Brown’s occupation of Harper’s Ferry, he had not once acted with malice toward his opponents, but rather had shown uncommon concern for the feelings of the townsmen and had made every effort to shield his hostages. Yet this meant nothing to the Virginians, he concluded. “Slaveholders are as insensible to magnanimity as to justice, and the measure they mete out must be meted to them again.”3
While he suffered no wounds in the hour of defeat, perhaps Green was the most despised of Brown’s captured men, not only because he had proven bold in action and clever in defeat but also because he was the darkest man and thus the least sympathetic to whites. It was typical of reports and observations at the time to not only list whites and blacks separately, but also to distinguish light-skinned and “mulatto” from dark-skinned blacks. During the trials of Brown’s men, there was a slight amount of sympathy in the court for John Copeland, a light-skinned raider, but none for Emperor, who was typically described in terms of his dark skin color. Indeed, while Brown and his men were all rushed through the formalities of a slaveholders’ court and sentenced to death, the least covered and most easily overlooked by the press was Shields Green—“quite a black negro,” as one newspaper report described him. After the executions, some forlorn efforts were made to save the bodies of the black raiders, but more so in the case of Copeland, who had heartfelt support from family and friends in Oberlin, Ohio. Ultimately, neither of the black raiders’ remains were honorably interred. However, John Copeland’s surviving daguerreotype, correspondence, and legacy in Oberlin have at least sustained his memory in a manner unlike that of Emperor, whose identity and body have nearly been lost to history. What remains is only a skeleton-thin account, almost a legend of a black man who fled the South, was befriended by the abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass, and then was enlisted by the militant John Brown.
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Over the past few years, interest in the Harper’s Ferry raiders has been on the upswing among writers, although in this case, artistic interest preceded scholarly effort by two decades. In 1996 Shields Green and the Gospel of John Brown, a screenplay by Kevin Willmott, was purchased by filmmaker Chris Columbus, but the project failed in pre-production.4 Besides this disappointed effort, a number of other artistic ventures have been written for the stage and screen over the years about the black men who followed John Brown to Harper’s Ferry. More recently, the sculptor Woodrow Nash has been preparing busts of Brown and his five black raiders to be installed in the John Brown House in Akron, Ohio; and the visual artist Peter Cizmadia’s Invisibles exhibit at the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park featured twenty-four commemorative portraits of the men and women who supported John Brown, including his five black raiders.5 Leading up to and following the sesquicentennial of the Harper’s Ferry raid in 2009, a number of notable works about John Brown were published, but it was legal historian Steven Lubet who single-handedly produced two definitive biographies of Brown’s men—John Brown’s Spy (2012), the story of raider John Cook, and The “Colored Hero” of Harper’s Ferry (2015), the story of raider John Anthony Copeland. In 2018 Eugene L. Meyer’s Five for Freedom was published, a work exclusively focused upon the lives of Brown’s black raiders. In the same year it was announced that Mark Amin’s Sobini Films had once more taken up the story of Shields Green for the big screen in the film Emperor, based upon a screenplay co-written by Amin and Pat Charles and starring Dayo Okeniyi in the role of Green and James Cromwell as Brown. Shields Green also figures among Brown’s men in the SHOWTIME adaptation of James McBride’s historical fiction, The Good Lord Bird, featuring Ethan Hawke as John Brown and Quentin Plair as Emperor.6
After I heard news of Amin’s film project in late 2018, it occurred to me to search through my own files, simply to see what I might find about Emperor. Having studied John Brown the abolitionist for twenty years, I thought that perhaps I might even be able to write one of those “real story behind the movie” pieces. However, when I began to cull my sources, I started to find little bits and pieces that I had never noticed before, prompting me to revisit the short but conventional narrative of Shields Green that has been passed down by older authors. As I did, questions arose that prompted me to look for more evidence until I found myself doing research with the intention of writing something more than an article about this fascinating but somewhat mysterious figure.
Unfortunately, even after my own scratching and digging, it seems that what can be confidently stated about Emperor remains limited. Indeed, it seems that Emperor has all but slipped away from us, historically speaking, and even with research it seems that key questions may never be answered without some fortuitous discovery. When I made initial inquiries into Emperor’s background in South Carolina, a helpful researcher provided what she could unearth, concluding that it is a complicated thing, “trying to track down someone who likely didn’t want to be tracked down.” Perhaps this is the case with Shields Green, for it seems likely that he did not want to be found after he fled from the South. After all, he had escaped oppression and was all too aware that authorities in his day had the ability to reach to the very border of Canada and snatch him back into bondage and degradation. When he did go south with John Brown in 1859, Emperor was quite aware that he had placed himself, as he put it, back into “the eagle’s claw.”
On the other hand, I remain hopeful that some small trail into the past may yet be discerned, and that this work, despite its real limitations, may encourage someone else in the effort to further research the life of this Harper’s Ferry raider, so well-remembered yet so little-known. To be sure, preparing this work has been obstinate and challenging for me in a manner that I have not known in previous biographical projects. In the most obvious sense, there simply is not enough material to write a substantive biography of Shields Green, while yet the available fragments suggest that it may be possible to get beyond the mere record as it stands.
For this reason, this work is presented as a kind of narrative inquiry