The Untold Story of Shields Green. Louis A. Decaro, Jr.
although Anne Brown Adams claimed that Green’s wife had died prior to his flight from the South, we do not know the year of his departure. If, for example, his escape from Charleston took place between 1854 and 1855, then his wife might be one of three black women listed as having died just before this period. Of the three, one was enslaved and two were free.7 Without any certainty as to the identity of Green’s wife or the date of her death, it seems impossible to date his flight from the South. Evidence of his presence in the North may put us closer to an estimate of his departure from South Carolina, although even here it remains inconclusive.
According to the Rochester Democrat in 1859, Green made his first appearance in Rochester, New York, about three years prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid, after which he went to Canada, and then returned to the city in the spring or summer of 1858.8 This would set Green’s first appearance in Rochester at about 1856, although this is not adequate to determine the date of his escape, since he may have wandered elsewhere through the Northern states prior to his first arrival in Rochester.
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Frederick Douglass wrote that Shields Green “called himself by different names,” including “Emperor.”9 However, since the 1970s, frequently it has been reported by historians that his real name was Esau Brown. The contemporary source of this claim is the invaluable study Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (1974) by the eminent African American scholar Benjamin Quarles. However, the claim has not been sufficiently examined over the past half century, particularly given the fact that the citation actually was omitted from the book, through an oversight by either Quarles or his editor.
In preparing Allies for Freedom, Quarles clearly uses Anne Brown Adams as a source, along with an article in the Rochester Democrat, dated October 21, 1859, and its republication in the New York Daily Tribune on the following day.10 While these sources are vital, neither makes reference to Green’s real name having been Esau Brown. Most recently, journalist Eugene Meyer has extended this assumption in his narrative, Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army (2018). Relying on the assumption as conveyed by scholars since the time of Quarles, Meyer goes so far as to venture that Green’s former master may have been a Charleston slaveholder named Alexander H. Brown.11 While this is a reasonable conjecture, the question remains whether there is sufficient evidence that Esau Brown was Green’s actual name.
As it turns out, the original source for the claim—and likely the one that Quarles omitted from his manuscript—was an article in the Pine and Palm published in 1861. The Pine and Palm was the undertaking of the zealous abolitionist James Redpath, who knew John Brown and had published his official biography the year before. John McKivigan, Redpath’s biographer, says the Scotsman purchased the Weekly Anglo-African early in 1861, renamed it the Pine and Palm, and placed it under the charge of a nominal black editor named George Lawrence in New York City. As a measure of control, Redpath “dispatched his old friend Richard J. Hinton to work with Lawrence.” Primarily, the Pine and Palm functioned as a means for Redpath, who was based in Boston, to advocate for immediate emancipation and black emigration to Haiti, and he maintained a strong control of the paper in advancing his agenda.12
The Esau Brown claim is found in an unsigned article entitled “Shields Green,” which provides both trustworthy and questionable information.13 The article was based upon information provided to Redpath by the abolitionist William C. Nell, who admitted that he did not know the raiders but had gathered the information from “friends with some materials.” Nell’s “friends” with “materials” are unknown, and the article itself is probably edited heavily or actually written by Redpath based upon his notes.14 The Pine and Palm piece states that in Charleston, South Carolina, Green “was there known as Esau Brown, but on reaching the North he assumed the name of Shield Emperor.” It also claims that Green had fled from South Carolina early in the year 1859—this error afterward having been picked up by Frederick Douglass, who told a Massachusetts audience in 1873 that Green was “only a year from slavery in South Carolina” when he had joined John Brown. Fortunately, Douglass did not continue to repeat this error in later speeches or in his autobiography.15 In 1859 the Rochester Democrat stated that Green had been in the vicinity of Rochester (including Canada) for a few years. The Pine and Palm article itself provides a full transcription of Green’s Rochester business card with a date well over a year before the Harper’s Ferry raid:
Clothes Cleaning
The undersigned would respectfully announce that he is prepared to do clothes cleaning in a manner to suit the most fastidious, and on cheaper terms than any one else.
Orders left at my establishment, No. 2 Spring Street, first door west of Exchange Street, will be promptly attended to.
I make no promises that I am unable to perform.
All kinds of Cloths, Silks, Satins, &c., can be cleaned at this establishment. SHIELD EMPEROR.
Rochester, July 22d, 1858.16
The Pine and Palm article certainly raises important questions pertaining to Green’s story, such as the claim that he had made friends in Philadelphia, and whether he had first heard of John Brown through Douglass in Rochester or while he was in Canada. Primarily, however, one must ask, if Green’s actual name was Esau Brown, why does every contemporary source refer to him as either Shields Green or Emperor? Whatever Redpath’s basis was for the Esau Brown notion, it seems dubious, perhaps little more than hearsay. Although Redpath served history well by preserving Green’s business card in the Pine and Palm, his article otherwise is more a homage than a well-substantiated record.
To no surprise, the only other place where Green is referred to as Esau Brown is in a piece that probably was based upon the one in the Pine and Palm. In a 1907 article in the Washington Bee, the alleged real name of Shields Green is mentioned in the context of a dinner meeting of the Pen and Pencil Club in Washington, a private social organization of journalists. The article describes a gathering dedicated to the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Frederick Douglass, who had died twelve years before. Among the toasts to be given at the affair was one by the abolitionist’s own son, sixty-six-year-old Lewis Douglass. His toast reportedly was entitled, “Esau Brown, martyr, one of John Brown’s men.” Unfortunately, Lewis was sick that evening and could not present his toast in person, and so it was submitted in writing and apparently read by someone else before the meeting. The reporter who covered the event for the Bee stated only that all the speeches were well received but provided no further description of the Douglass toast.17 In retrospect, however, the younger Douglass was merely echoing Redpath’s speculation, even appropriating his martyr title from the 1861 Pine and Palm article.
In his last memoir, Frederick Douglass described Green as “a colored man who called himself by different names.”18 However, “Shield Emperor,” the name he used on his business card in Rochester, seems only a variation of his real name, Shields Green. Douglass himself makes no mention of Esau Brown, instead referring to him—in all of his speeches over many years and in his autobiography—as Shields Green. Indeed, in all of the reportage from the time of the raid, Green never was identified as Esau Brown and never was quoted as referring to himself by this name. Furthermore, none of his recorded Harper’s Ferry associates, including Anne Brown Adams, ever referred to Shields Green as Esau Brown. Finally, none of the most detailed researchers of John Brown ever seem to have found evidence for the Esau Brown notion. Katherine Mayo, whose expansive research made it possible for Oswald Garrison Villard to publish his magisterial biography of Brown in 1910, never mentions Esau Brown in her field notes and interviews. Neither, apparently, did Boyd Stutler, the “godfather” of John Brown researchers in the later twentieth century. Considering the absence of any other reference besides the Pine and Palm article and its probable reiteration in 1907, it is doubtful that Esau Brown was Green’s real name. Perhaps this was one of his traveling names, although its apparent absence from the record makes even this possibility uncertain.
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Although the popular narrative does not provide a detailed physical description of Shields Green, it correctly describes him as a strapping black man. Green evidenced no “mixed” family