Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/290

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280
JOHN BROWN

escaped are also unknown. This leaves the twenty-two men usually regarded as making the raid. They fall, of course, into two main groups, the Negroes and the whites. Six or seven of the twenty-two were Negroes.

First in importance came Osborne Perry Anderson, a free-born Pennsylvania mulatto, twenty-four years of age. He was a printer by trade, "well educated, a man of natural dignity, modest, simple in character and manners." He met John Brown in Canada. He wrote the most interesting and reliable account of the raid, and afterward fought in the Civil War.

Next came Shields Green, a full-blooded Negro from South Carolina, whence he had escaped from slavery, after his wife had died, leaving a living boy still in bondage. He was about twenty-four years old, small and active, uneducated but with natural ability and absolutely fearless. He met Brown at the home of Frederick Douglass, who says: "While at my house, John Brown made the acquaintance of a colored man who called himself by different names—sometimes 'Emperor,' at other times, 'Shields Green.' . . . He was a fugitive slave, who had made his escape from Charleston, S. C.; a state from which a slave found it no easy matter to run away. But Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character. John Brown saw at once what 'stuff'