The Untold Story of Shields Green. Louis A. Decaro, Jr.
the biographer’s effort to distinguish what merits further consideration from what should be dismissed. Most biographers encounter moments in the narratives of their subjects when questions are left unanswered and insufficient evidence leads to some degree of guesswork—the dotted lines that we draw when we can no longer draw solid lines. The problem with writing about Emperor is that there are fewer solid lines than in most biographical studies, and therefore a greater need to draw out the dotted lines of the story. Understandably, then, some may not be pleased with this work, reasonably questioning whether such an undertaking is worth the effort. My first response is that readers should be assured that there is neither presumption nor insistence on my part that this book is definitive. Indeed, as history goes, this work is provisional in that it is intended as a kind of narrative restart, and therefore both criticism and further research are invited—particularly because my goal is not to present a conclusive narrative as much as it is to push through the fragments of the past and rediscover the man known in antebellum newspapers as “Shields Green, alias Emperor.” Nevertheless, one might simply ask whether what we already know about him is enough. Are there not many other figures in African American history who merit our attention? Furthermore, John Brown had a small army of followers, and some of them have yet to receive biographical treatment even though it may be easier to locate them in the historical record. Why labor further in such a sparsely sown field? In response, I would argue that there are yet compelling reasons to look more closely at Shields Green.
First, he is deeply embedded in the narrative of the Harper’s Ferry raid because he is uniquely connected to and dependent upon both Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Often, when Douglass spoke of Brown, he also spoke of Shields Green. Second, Emperor was the only one of the Harper’s Ferry raiders who understood flight from the South. The other raiders were either white men or free black men living in the North, even if they had been in some way carried or transported from the South in youth. Green had fled from the South and made a life for himself in the free states and in Canada. His alliance with John Brown in some sense closed the loop of his own story by means of a perilous trek back into the South in 1859. Finally, Emperor is something of a paradox in the story of the Harper’s Ferry raid: he has only the slightest biographical profile and yet occupies some of the most dramatic moments of the story; his sketched visage is familiar to students of the raid although he is the only one of John Brown’s raiders not to have left a daguerreotype image of himself; and within the conventional record he is both the son of an unidentified father and the father of an unidentified son. Strangely, digging deeper into the record has added slight insight to both Green’s parentage and his son, and yet their identities still remain unknown. However, if there is a final reason—even a personal mandate—for my taking on this project, it has been in some sense to restore the life of Shields Green the man who lived, to represent an embodiment of the man whose actual body was stolen by the same racist society that tried to steal his labor, his freedom, and his humanity, and which ultimately stole his life and remains. I think Emperor is owed this much, and whether I have succeeded or failed, in so doing I have tried to follow Old Brown’s advice: “Everything worthy of being done at all is worthy of being done in good earnest, & in the best possible manner.”7
In the first chapter, before proceeding with his story, then, I thought it best to address some traditional assumptions about Shields Green, raising questions and suggesting possibilities where evidence permits. Readers who are familiar with the story may be surprised, for instance, to discover that Emperor may not have been a “runaway slave” in the conventional sense. In chapter 2, Green’s enlistment in John Brown’s cause is examined and a closer look is taken at the story that is singly preserved in Frederick Douglass’s familiar account, where Emperor famously told the abolitionist orator that he would “go wid de ole man.” At some points, however, there is little actual material about Emperor, and in such cases I have made an effort to provide a framework for the setting and context of which he was a part. This is especially the case in chapter 3, which discusses the circumstances in which Emperor and the other raiders lived together under John Brown’s roof in Maryland prior to the raid, and again in chapter 4, which includes consideration of a narrative of the Harper’s Ferry raid by Green’s black colleague, Osborne Perry Anderson. Chapter 5 recalls Emperor’s last days, from the Harper’s Ferry engine house to the gallows at Charlestown, and chapter 6 closes out this narrative inquiry by reflecting upon the surviving images of Emperor, particularly my effort to discern which of them best represents the man who lived. The epilogue thus reflects upon the absent body of Shields Green and the way in which he somehow pushed back into the realities of the post-Reconstruction era, and the legend of Emperor so bequeathed to us all. Finally, by way of style, the reader should note that in keeping with his own preferred self-designation, I refer to the subject throughout either as Shields Green or as Emperor.
In 1886, looking back at this antebellum drama, an aged Frederick Douglass declared that John Brown of Harper’s Ferry was “like all men born before their time, whose bleeding footsteps show us the cost of all reforms.”8 But Brown did not walk alone to Harper’s Ferry, nor were the gallows solely his penalty. Those who followed him shared in his suffering, some falling first at Harper’s Ferry and others being tried and hanged at Charlestown. Afterward, some who had escaped went on to risk their lives once more in opposing slavery during the Civil War—two of them even dying in the conflict.
It is my contention that the Harper’s Ferry raiders were among the best men that this nation could offer in the antebellum era. Indeed, they still represent something that should be admirable for every generation—particularly in their concern for overturning injustice and liberating the oppressed. A just and progressive reading of our nation’s history will not permit the Harper’s Ferry raid to be trivialized as a prequel to modern terrorism, nor restrict Brown and his young freedom fighters to the margins of our national narrative. John Brown’s raiders must be remembered, including Emperor, whose footsteps in history may be the hardest to trace among his brethren. Still, the path of freedom that he followed is certain and his sacrifice is without question. His soul, too, goes marching on.
1
Emperor Mysterious
To Find the Man Who Lived
Materials from which to furnish a sketch of this courageous Martyr for Freedom are meagre indeed.
Pine and Palm, 1861
The quest to learn about Shields Green is frustrating, especially because the pursuit of evidence seems to raise new questions beyond those that originally were asked by historians. For instance, there is no doubt that his early life and upbringing took place in Charleston, South Carolina. “He had been brought up in the city,” recalled Owen Brown, his traveling companion.1 This means that Green does not conform to the stereotype of the agrarian slave that is most familiar in popular thinking. In a real sense, Green was far more an urban figure than even Frederick Douglass, who knew both the agrarian and urban experience in slavery. But neither was Green unusual in this regard, since, as will be shown below, he was among a significant number of African Americans in the Lower South, half of whom lived in urban centers in the mid-nineteenth century.2 Yet the particulars of his early life in Charleston remain out of reach.
There is no reason to doubt the tradition that Shields Green had been a married man with a young son prior to his flight from the South. In this tradition we rely upon the testimony of Anne Brown Adams, the daughter of John Brown, who stayed for a time with her father and the raiders prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid.3 Based upon what Green told her, Anne wrote that he had escaped from Charleston in a “sailing vessel loaded with cotton” bound for New York City, where he was “stowed away by one of the hands” and “aided by friends upon arrival.” She said that Green told her that he had left a young son behind when he fled, and that his wife had died prior to his escape.4 These few details are priceless, but they also raise questions. Benjamin Quarles suggested that the death of Green’s wife had “spurred on” his escape.5 This is dramatic, but nothing in the record suggests that her death had anything to do with his decision to flee from South Carolina.
As to his family life in the South, we do not know, for instance, whether Green’s wife was enslaved or free. Free and enslaved blacks “commonly joined together as man and wife.”6 However,