The “Colored Hero” of Harper’s Ferry: John Anthony Copeland and the War against Slavery will be released by Cambridge on Thursday, September 10. The book tells the story of John Copeland, of Oberlin, who was one of only five African-Americans who enlisted in John Brown’s attempt to free the slaves of Virginia in October 1859. (You can see a short video here.) Although he was only 25 years old, Copeland already had a significant history in the abolitionist movement. He had been a leader of the Oberlin-Wellington rescue the preceding year, and he had escorted a fugitive slave to freedom in Canada. In defense of another runaway, he had once clubbed a slave-hunting deputy marshal to the ground. Ten of Brown’s men were killed in the fighting, five escaped, and seven were captured, including Copeland and Brown himself.
Copeland was brought to trial in nearby Charlestown, on charges of murder, treason, and inciting servile insurrection. He was represented by an extraordinary Boston lawyer named George Sennott. All of the other attorneys in the Harper’s Ferry trials attempted to avoid challenging the legitimacy of slavery – including Brown’s counsel, although not Brown himself, whose speech at sentencing was a ringing condemnation – but Sennott confronted it head on. He boldly announced that it was an honor to represent a black man in Virginia, and he audaciously declared to the court that “the system of Slavery is illogical and absurd.” That claim caused outrage in every corner of the Old Dominion, where no such “Abolition harangue” had ever before been heard in a court of law.
Sennott’s trial tactics would soon cause even more uproar, which I cover at length in the book. After the jump, you can read about the background of this truly exceptional lawyer.
Sennott was an outsized character – in terms of height, girth, and personality – whose appearance at first occasioned outright ridicule in Charlestown. The local newspapers took turns deriding him. One reporter sneered that “George Sennott has come to us upon a mission of great bigness, and his size, so far as latitude is concerned, shows him fully up to the immortal standard of envoys extraordinaire.” “When he is out of Boston,” another journalist scoffed, “we presume lager beer has an opportunity to accumulate.” Sennott was indeed a man of large appetites, but he was also an outstanding lawyer. He was an anti-slavery Democrat – an identification that was vanishing in the north and nonexistent in the south – which may have contributed to the scorn he attracted in Charlestown.
Sennott had taken a circuitous route to abolitionism. Born in Vermont, he had come to Boston as a young man in order to read law in the office of Rufus Choate, who was widely regarded as the finest trial lawyer in New England. Through Choate, Sennott became acquainted with activists in what has sometimes been called the Moral Reform Movement, which encompassed an untidy array of causes including spiritualism, temperance, women’s rights, pacifism, the Cult of Domesticity, health food, and abolitionism, all of which more or less derived from “the principle of perfect and entire equality.” Many prominent abolitionists – including Lucy Stone and the Grimke sisters – were also active in Moral Reform, and Sennott embraced the movement with the same eclectic disposition that allowed him to reconcile his antislavery views with his Democratic party affiliation. In late June 1858, he was invited to give the keynote speech at a “Free Convention” in Rutland, Vermont, that attempted to unite the various strands of the movement.
Addressing an audience of over 3000, Sennott stressed the importance of abolitionism – condemning the “South-side view of slavery” as “a hell-side view of God” – while devoting the bulk of his remarks to “Woman’s Part in Reform.” He argued that no woman is free who “is taught from babyhood that all God made her for was to be an appendage to some man.” He argued that women should be allowed to vote, to serve on juries, to hold elective office, and to practice trades and professions including law.
The audience applauded enthusiastically, but proper Bostonians were soon appalled. As word spread among his clients and neighbors, Sennott was accused of shamefully advocating “Free Love,” which obliged him to publish a partial retraction in the Boston Courier. Sennott explained that his ideal of women’s independence could be realized only within a “true and natural marriage.” Nonetheless, he held to his other positions, including voting rights and jury service for women.
For the rest of his life, Sennott’s friends and colleagues would marvel at his “brilliant qualities,” while fretting that “his impulses often got the better of his judgment.” The reactions to Sennott’s controversial views in Boston, however, were nothing compared to what greeted him in Virginia, when he proved to be most outspoken on the subject of slavery.