son, and Thompson went down beneath the thrusts of sabers and bayonets. Edwin Coppoc fired the last shot and he and Green alone were left unhurt to surrender. The fight was ended. Ten of the little band were slain. Brown and Stevens were desperately wounded and with Coppoc, Green and Copeland, were prisoners. William Thompson and W. H. Leeman, who had before surrendered, were butchered in cold blood by the Virginia “chivalry.” Harper’s Ferry had been held fifty-eight hours by seventeen men against the assaults of from five hundred to 1,500 armed citizens and militia from Maryland and Virginia.*
Nowhere in modern warfare is there recorded such an unequal contest of similar duration. Of the immortal seventeen three were Iowa boys under twenty-four years of age. On the 22d of November Edwin Coppoc wrote home an account of the battle in which he says:
On the 19th Edwin Coppoc, Green and Copeland were taken to Charleston jail, which was guarded by State militia with two cannon trained on it. Edwin’s trial began on the afternoon of November 1st and ended the fol-
* Hinton gives the loss of life as follows: Of Brown’s band, ten were killed and seven more executed; of the liberated slaves, seventeen were slain; of the citizens and soldiers, eight were killed and nine wounded. Total killed, forty-two.