After the October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia tried John Brown for treason against a state of which he was not a citizen, murder, and inciting slave insurrection — a proceeding conducted in six days while Brown lay wounded on a cot in the courtroom. His conduct in prison and his speech to the court transformed a failed raid into the era's defining political trial; he was hanged at Charlestown on December 2, 1859, with church bells tolling across the North.
Six of his men followed him to the gallows: John Copeland and Shields Green, the raid's Black prisoners, and Edwin Coppoc and John Cook in December 1859, then Aaron Stevens and Albert Hazlett in March 1860. Copeland's letters from jail — "I am dying for freedom, I could not die for a better cause" — circulated as widely as Brown's own. The executions, mourned in the North and celebrated in the South, hardened both sections; within eighteen months the questions the Charlestown jail had contained were being settled by armies.