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John Copeland: A Hero of Harper's Ferry

DCB as James Monroe- It was a sad sight. I was sorry I had come to the building; and yet, who was I, that I should be spared a view of what my fellow-creatures had to suffer? A fine, athletic figure, he was lying on his back--the unclosed, wistful eyes staring wildly upward, as if seeking, in a better world, for some solution of the dark problems of horror and oppression so hard to be explained in this...

Karen Schaefer- On a chilly, fall morning in October of 1859, a force of 21 desperate men approached the U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. They were led by John Brown, a rabid anti-slavery campaigner who just three years before had murdered five white slave-holders in Kansas. With him were three young black men from Oberlin, among them John A. Copeland.

The object was to capture guns and ammunition for use in midnight border raids to free Southern slaves. But arrayed against Brown's forces were local farmers, militia, and a troop of U.S. Marines led by none other than Robert E. Lee. Within 36 hours ten of Brown's men were dead. The rest - including Brown himself - were captured and held for trial. Along with Brown, John Anthony Copeland was found of guilty of treason. Brown was hung on December 2nd. Copeland was executed two weeks later.

It was to be many years - and many bloody battles - before the slaves were finally freed by President Abraham Lincoln. Nor was slavery the primary issue in the War Between the States. But in the 1840's and '50's, the voices of those opposed to slavery rang loudly in a nation teetering on the brink of Civil War.

Nancy Hendrickson- The Copelands came to Oberlin in 1843. John and Delilah and their children were at that point free blacks outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. They felt discriminated against, even though they were free.

KS- Nancy Hendrickson and her husband Ron now own the Copeland farmhouse that still stands on Hamilton Road just outside of Oberlin. After they bought the property in 1986, the Hendrickson's became intrigued by the stories they heard about the farm's original owners. Drawing on historical documents and texts in the Oberlin College Archives, Nancy Hendrickson began to piece together the history of the Copeland family. She discovered that the notorious black laws of the 1830's drove thousands of free blacks out of North Carolina to seek safe haven in the North.

NH- They ended up on the Ohio River. They'd heard stories that the slave catchers were in the area, that they had to be very careful. Their children and their families would be abducted and taken back. They were afraid. They went to a house where there was an abolitionist meeting was going on. John said that he was afraid to sit in the middle of the room for fear that he wouldn't be able to escape.

KS- The Copelands and their eight children were typical of free black families in the Antebellum South. With their tall stature, light skins and hazel eyes, mixed-race individuals like the Copelands could - and often did - pass for white. But after the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831 - the last and bloodiest of the Southern slave revolts - even free blacks were no longer safe from persecution and enslavement. Nancy Hendrickson says John Copeland, Sr. met a man who told him about Oberlin.

NH- He said that they would come to this town called Oberlin, where they would be treated in a much more respectful manner and they would be truly free. They got about twenty miles outside of Oberlin, they asked directions and they were told that no such town existed, that it had sunk. And they said they believed they would go and look into the chasm. And they got to Oberlin on a Sunday and the townspeople saw that they were strangers. One of his first remembrances is seeing a black man and a white man walking side by side on the street.