Biography
John Edwin Cook was a Yale-educated abolitionist who served as Brown's principal advance scout, living in Harpers Ferry under cover for more than a year before the raid. He escaped in the immediate aftermath but was captured in Pennsylvania, returned to Virginia, and hanged on December 16, 1859.
On October 16-18, 1859, the abolitionist John Brown led 21 men in an attempted raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), aiming to arm enslaved people and ignite a general uprising against slavery. The raid was suppressed within 36 hours by U.S. Marines under Robert E. Lee. Ten raiders were killed, seven were captured, and five escaped. The captured raiders were tried by the Commonwealth of Virginia for treason against the state, murder, and conspiring with slaves to rebel — all crimes for which they were sentenced to death by hanging at Charles Town. Their executions made them, in the months before the Civil War, the most consequential political prisoners in American history.
