The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 23 (2012)

Continuing Skirmishes in Harpers Ferry:
Entangled Memories of Heyward Shepherd
and John Brown

Akiko OCHIAI*INTRODUCTION
Starting from the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 2009,
and culminating in the sesquicentennial of the Civil War (2011–15),
Americans are observing numerous ceremonies and events related to that
great national conﬂict. Among these are academic symposia, entertainment-type contests, and battle reenactments by committed history buffs.
This ﬂood of commemorations has inevitably revived debates about the
memories, interpretations, and meanings of the Civil War and their transmission to the next generation. This contemporary discussion cannot
ignore the vicissitudes of scholarship nor the spirits of the times over the
past 150 years.
In particular, the Lost Cause movement that romanticized the racial
and gender hierarchy of the antebellum South poses a dilemma to twentyﬁrst-century American society that ofﬁcially endorses multicultural
equality.1 Founded in the last decade of the nineteenth century, theUnited Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), in cooperation with theSons of the Confederate Veterans (SCV), concerted their efforts on propagating the Lost Cause version of their war memories. Proclaiming itself*Professor, Doshisha University

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the nurturer of the “true” history, the UDC led a movement to erect Confederate Memorials in prominent public locations such as courthousesquares throughout the South and beyond.2
Memory studies since the 1980s illustrate that creating and legitimating or consecrating a particular memory as a “public memory” is closely
related to political power and social control. Those with the power tocontrol society carve into their memorials not only the past that they idealize but also the social order that they envision for the future, while subsuming contested minor voices into silence or oblivion.3 These remnant
memorials of the Lost Cause still dominate the landscape of the South,
reminding us of its past “glory.”On the corner of the downtown main street of Harpers Ferry, West
Virginia, stands a plain granite Confederate Memorial dedicated in 1931
to Heyward Shepherd, a free black who became the ﬁrst casualty of John
Brown’s raid in 1859 (see ﬁg. 1).4 This memorial stands on the same plot
as it did eighty years ago, but since its erection, the physical landscapehas changed. Incorporated into the National Park Service in 1953,
Harpers Ferry underwent a major renovation, becoming an alluring

Figure 1

Shepherd Memorial with Plaque, 2010

CONTINUING SKIRMISHES IN HARPERS FERRY

9tourist town with its mid-nineteenth-century atmosphere.5 Meanwhile,
American society itself underwent tremendous changes, affecting theways people interpret and utilize their historical past and construct theirmemories.
There are three major academic studies on the Shepherd Memorial.
The ﬁrst one, conducted by Mary Johnson, places African Americans’protests over the erection of the Shepherd Memorial within a detailed
local history. Paul Shackel focuses more on the Lost Cause, explaining
the Shepherd Memorial controversy within that context. He also reviews
the contested history of memory from the 1930s to the 1990s, showing
the difﬁculties in constructing a broad collective memory of Shepherd
and its place in Civil War interpretation. Seeing the images of heroismand gender as central to the Shepherd Memorial controversy of the
1930s, Caroline E. Janney argues that conservative Southern whites pitted the emasculated docile image of an Old Negro (Shepherd) against
the fearlessly demanding image of the New Negro who would emerge
as a corollary of John Brown’s radical racial egalitarianism. Janney also
traces the reignition of the controversy in the 1990s.6
To advance beyond these previous studies’ discussion that waned in
the 1990s, I illuminate in this article not only the contested history of
memory construction relating to Shepherd and Brown but also the difﬁculty of presenting that history to the public with slim prospects of bridging those entangled memories. I review Brown’s historical raid in 1859
and the rise of a reconciliatory interpretation of the Civil War toward theturn of the century. Then I trace the development of the Shepherd Memorial project and the controversy over the memorial between conservative
Southern whites and African American activists, ﬁrst in the 1930s andthen in the 1990s and beyond. I especially contrast African American
understandings of the Shepherd Memorial with the memories that the
Lost Cause advocates inscribed on it. While the NAACP reafﬁrmed its
uncompromising opposition to those advocates in 2006, the post-9/11
debates on terrorism and social justice have revived public interest in
Brown’s use of violence, complicating the dilemma of dealing with theLost Cause legacy.
JOHN BROWN’S RAID AND HEYWARD SHEPHERD
By the 1850s, after nearly two decades of active engagement in theantislavery movement, John Brown had ﬁrmly come to believe that God

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had commissioned him to abolish slavery.7 To fulﬁll his mission of
opposing the aggressive stance of the Southern proslavery adherents, headvocated “righteous” direct action. In 1856, he and his two sons fought
advocates of slavery in Kansas, where he became famous in the North(infamous in the South) as the ﬁerce leader of the Pottawatomie (Creek)
Massacre, where ﬁve proslavery Southerners were mercilessly hacked
to death.
Over the next few years, Brown mapped out a plan to attack the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, hoping to instigate a slave insurrection thatwould establish an interracial state in the Appalachians and ultimately
deal a blow to Southern slavery. On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown
and eighteen followers (thirteen whites and ﬁve African Americans)snuck into the town of Harpers Ferry and quickly seized the arsenal,8 taking hostages into the engine house that became known as John Brown’sFort. While Brown was waiting for nearby slaves to rally to his cause,the next morning armed townsmen and local militia began shooting at
the fort. A company of U.S. Marines under the command of Col. Robert
E. Lee and Lt. J. E. B. Stuart arrived late that evening and apprehended
Brown the next morning, October 18. During the thirty-six-hour raid, ten
raiders, six civilians, and one Marine were killed. Severely wounded
himself, Brown was captured, tried, and sentenced to death in a weeklong trial for murder, inciting insurrection, and treason against the Stateof Virginia.
By the time John Brown was hung on December 2, he had transformed
himself into an oratorical martyr of abolitionism, and church bells
mourning his death pealed throughout the North. Conversely, his raid
sent a wave of alarm through the slave South, which consequently
heightened its defenses against Northern threats to its sovereignty andinstitutions. Since then, the signiﬁcance of Brown and his raid has beenﬁercely debated, differing dramatically according to one’s stance on
Brown, the Civil War, and ultimately on America’s pursuit of racialequality. However, most historians agree at least that Brown accelerated
the sectional crisis and the outbreak of the Civil War.9
One of the casualties of Brown’s raid was Heyward Shepherd, a baggage handler for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B & O), who wastrusted as “remarkably civil” by the town’s whites. He was shot in theback by one of Brown’s raiders when he went to the railroad bridge tolook for a railroad watchman who hadn’t returned. Soon after the raid,
one John D. Starry testiﬁed to a Senate investigating committee that the

CONTINUING SKIRMISHES IN HARPERS FERRY

11dying Shepherd had personally conﬁded that he had been shot because
he had ignored an order to halt. The local Virginia Free Press newspaper reported that Shepherd was shot because he refused to join the insurrection. It is difﬁcult to substantiate whether Shepherd actually knew theraiders’ motives and refused to join them, or indeed whether his assailant
even knew that Heyward was black. Both local militia groups and white
residents paid Shepherd deep respect, accompanying his funeral procession. In its report of the burial, the paper did not forget to mention
that Shepherd was the ﬁrst casualty of Brown’s raid, while belonging to
the race that Brown had hoped to liberate.10 However, the honor showedat his funeral didn’t last long; by the turn of the century, nobody could
identify where they had buried Shepherd’s body.11
Shepherd’s name appeared sporadically in the Virginia Free Press,
usually to counter Northern sentiment glorifying John Brown’s martyrdom or advancing Brown’s endorsement of “forcible liberation” forAfrican Americans. In 1881, Frederick Douglass eulogized Brown in his
commencement address at the local historically black institution, Storer
College: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did
at least begin the war that ended slavery.” The Virginia Free Press editor shot back, “The negro-worshippers may canonize John Brown asmuch as they please, but we don’t mean to let them forget that the ﬁrst
victim of the old murderer was an inoffensive, industrious and respectedcolored man, brutally shot down without provocation or excuse.”12 AfterJohn Brown’s Fort was removed in order to realign the B & O tracks in
1892, Douglass and other African Americans endorsed a plan to erect amonument for John Brown on the vacant lot that remained. Rather than
opposing the plan itself, the editor demanded to inscribe the monumentwith Shepherd’s name.13
THE RISE OF THE PLANTATION MYTH AND
THE SHEPHERD MEMORIAL PROJECTWith the demise of racial democracy at the end of Reconstruction
came a sectional reconciliation between the North and South that emphasized the valor of white soldiers, and state sovereignty (rather than slavery) as the cause of the war.14 John Brown’s (and African Americans’)contributions to the abolition of slavery did not suit this new deracialized interpretation of the Civil War. Moreover, in the 1880s, new testimony about the Pottawatomie Massacre in “Bleeding Kansas” showed

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that Brown’s activities had been far more atrocious than previously
thought, increasing concern even in the North over Brown’s psychotic
disorder and his violent impulses. As a result, by the early twentieth century, the public image of Brown had shifted from that of an abolitionist
martyr to that of a dangerous fanatic or dogmatic murderer who unnecessarily agitated the sectional conﬂict. Only a minority of African
Americans and liberal whites continued to preserve an emancipationist
memory of the war and to commemorate Brown’s abolitionist martyrdom.15
The reconciliationist sentiment between the North and South encouraged Lost Cause advocates to romanticize the paternalistic antebellum
plantation South, where benevolent white owners and docile slaves lived
happily together, reciprocally performing their own roles and duties.
This romanticism implied that white Southerners had been (and continued to be) good friends of the African Americans. In 1904, a UDC
member advanced in the Confederate Veteran, the monthly ofﬁcial publication of the various Confederate organizations, the ﬁrst proposal toerect a faithful slave monument. However, she couldn’t rally enoughsupport from her sister members, among whom were those who doubted
slaves’ wartime ﬁdelity and those who prioritized establishing Confederate widows’ asylums over war memorials.16
Micki McElya argues that the dramatically changing sociopolitical situation in the New South of the early twentieth century undergirded the
UDC’s growing “belief in the capacity of public sculpture to forge new
relationships of afﬁnity and power.” Woodrow Wilson’s presidency andhis segregation policy in the capital gave new impetus to the Lost Cause
advocates, culminating in their erection of the Arlington Confederate
Memorial in 1914. On the other hand, the continuing Great Migration of
African Americans to the North, their “Red Summer” counterattacks
against white rioters throughout U.S. cities after World War I, and the
NAACP’s growing organizational leadership and membership alarmed
Southern whites. As if to dispel their fears, the UDC sought to carve instone their image of “appropriate, safe, and appealing blackness.”17
Matthew Page Andrews, a Baltimore historian and an active memberof the SCV, took an interest in the Heyward Shepherd story. On his
suggestion, at the UDC’s annual convention in November 1920, President General May McKinney recommended erecting a memorial in
Harpers Ferry for the “faithful slave” Shepherd, “who stood between
Southern womanhood and a renegade adventurer.” The convention

CONTINUING SKIRMISHES IN HARPERS FERRY

13promptly agreed to erect the memorial in cooperation with the SCV,
assigning Andrews to write its inscription.18
The UDC’s optimistic plan to erect the memorial within a year turned
into a decade-long search for an appropriate site. In May 1922, they
sought permission from the B & O to use a plot across from the John
Brown Monument, which was built in 1895. Concerned about Andrews’s
inscription that condemned John Brown’s raid as a “bloody massacre,”
the B & O consulted the town council through its recorder, Henry McDonald,
the Northern white president of Storer College and an ardent fan of John
Brown. McDonald suggested the inscription might induce “unpleasantracial feeling” in the community, which in fact had a Ku Klux Klan marcha year later. On the council’s advice, the B & O denied permission.19
After several years of internal miscommunications and a fruitless
search for an alternate site, 1930 brought the UDC a breakthrough.
Determined to erect the Shepherd Memorial, the new president generalof the UDC, Elizabeth Bashinsky, persuaded Andrews to soften thewording of the inscription and so secured support from newly elected
town mayor James Ranson, the son of a Confederate veteran. Although
her negotiations with the B & O came to naught, a property owner offered
land just across from the originally planned plot.20 Taking the revised
inscription as a sign of “good will and better inter-racial feeling,”
McDonald assented. Historian Johnson speculates that Storer College’s
ﬁnancial situation affected McDonald’s conciliatory attitudes toward
Andrews and the UDC, but Janney and Shackel rather attribute it to his
mildly paternalistic racial views. In either case, with these favorable
changes, the UDC eventually managed to hold an unveiling ceremony
for the Shepherd Memorial in October 1931.21
THE UNVEILING OF AND CONTROVERSY OVER
THE SHEPHERD MEMORIAL
About three hundred whites and one hundred blacks gathered for the
ceremony that started with McDonald’s conciliatory address. However,the subsequent speeches by Lost Cause advocates revealed their antiBrown position. Andrews not only condemned Brown as a lawless rabble rouser but also reafﬁrmed Brown’s insanity, while praising Shepherd
as a representative of “a transplanted people” who conducted themselves
admirably during the Civil War. Bashinsky praised the benevolent whiteSoutherners who “civilized” heathen Africans well enough to save

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Harpers Ferry and the entire South from a devastating slave insurrection
such as Haiti had experienced in the 1790s. Probably thinking the emasculated Shepherd image inappropriate for the highly racialized Southern
sexual taboo, she spent the rest of her speech in glorifying the black
mammy, an asexual maternal ﬁgure symbolizing African American natural docility and attachment to the whites. From such remarks, we cansee that the emphasis of anti-Brown arguments had changed from theearlier articles in the Virginia Free Press. Encouraged by the sectional
reconciliation over the war, they emphasized Shepherd’s presumed
loyalty to the Confederacy over the tragedy of his innocent death and
Brown’s aberrant violence over his ideological mission, thus tactfully
downplaying slavery and the racial issues of the Civil War.22
Attending the ceremony as honored guests from the African Americanside, Reverend George Bragg, Shepherd’s descendent James Walker,
and B & O porter James Moton expressed their approval of the installation. They reasoned that people should just appreciate Shepherd’s integrity and ﬁdelity to his duty and take this as an opportunity for interracial
goodwill. However, African American newspapers and the NAACP vigorously protested, critiquing the symbolism of the UDC’s version ofShepherd. Calling the Shepherd Memorial the “Uncle Tom Monument,”
the Baltimore Afro-American listed the African American raiders whofought with Brown and suggested erecting a monument for them. In
another article, J. Max Barber challenged Shepherd’s loyalty to theConfederate cause, averring, “he did not know what John Brown’s men
came for.” Barber even vindicated John Brown’s armed uprising as “apassion for justice,” comparing him to George Washington in the Revolutionary War.23
The highlight of the ceremony for the African American protest (andan unexpected disgrace for the Lost Cause) was an impromptu speech
by Pearl Tatten, the African American music director at Storer College.
Before the chorus that McDonald had scheduled, she extemporized thather father volunteered to ﬁght for “the freedom of [her] people, for whichJohn Brown struck the ﬁrst blow,” and that her people would pursue “alarger freedom, not in the spirit of the black mammy but in the spirit of
new freedom and rising youth.” Although conservative Southern whites
did manage to erect the Shepherd Memorial, this episode shows how tenuous their dominance was. In other words, the memory they inscribed
was neither so solid nor immortal as they had envisaged for Harpers
Ferry, a geographical and cultural border between the North and South,

CONTINUING SKIRMISHES IN HARPERS FERRY

15

where conﬂicting memories of Brown and the Civil War are entangled
and contested.24
The African American protest against the Lost Cause resurfaced in
May 1932, when the NAACP sought permission from Storer College toinstall a tablet (hereafter, “the Brown Tablet”) on John Brown’s Fort,
which had been purchased by the college and relocated to its campus in1910. Composed by W. E. B. Du Bois, who inclined toward socialismand depicted Brown as a social revolutionary, the inscription is a radical extension of African American activists’ previous argument: “HereJohn Brown aimed at human slavery a blow that woke a guilty nation.
With him fought seven slaves and sons of slaves. Over his crucified
corpse marched 200,000 black soldiers and 4,000,000 freedmen. . .”25
McDonald and the board of trustees declined the request, judging it “notlikely to increase the better interracial relationship” unless the NAACP
would change the inscription to the more abstract “John Brown,
1859–His Soul Goes Marching On,” but the NAACP brusquely refused.
After this incident, African American newspapers accused McDonald ofselling out to the UDC and challenged his competency as college president, while some African American alumni of Storer College defended
McDonald. However, without further development, the controversy
gradually subsided.26
As Janney points out, the controversy over the Shepherd Memorial
and the Brown Tablet reveals the irony of conservative white approbation of a free black contrasting with radical black approbation of acontroversial white.27 Shepherd’s presumed faithful servitude not only
promoted the race relations that the Lost Cause advocates cherished but
also evoked the devastating image of Brown’s murderous violence.
Against this, the African American activists focused primarily on
Brown’s pursuit of racial equality, while at the same time they afﬁrmed
the image of African American masculine agency. In the absence of
reliable historical records, and inseparable from Brown’s legacy of violence, Shepherd became powerful ammunition indeed for the UDC to
downplay Brown’s martyrdom. Thus, Shepherd’s death posed African
Americans radicals a dilemma: how to commemorate the violent struggle for the destruction of slavery and racial oppression. Liberal Northernwhites like McDonald and moderate African Americans who basicallybelieved in Brown’s abolitionism but took a guarded stance on his violent means distanced themselves from the dilemma, giving a tacit nod to
the Lost Cause version of Shepherd’s story.

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THE MAKING OF THE NATIONAL PARK AND
THE CHALLENGE OF RELEVANCY
Neither the Shepherd Memorial nor the Brown Tablet surfaced in the
media for four decades after 1932, but in the same period, Harpers Ferryexperienced a transformation. Around the time McDonald refused theinstallation of the Brown Tablet on Storer College’s John Brown’s Fort,he was working with Representative Jennings Randolph, who introduced
a bill (HR 5849) to establish a national military park in the Harpers Ferryarea in 1935. McDonald’s ambition to establish the park might haveprompted his conciliatory attitude in the Shepherd Memorial controversy. However, this time, he directly confronted Andrews and the UDC
members who regarded the park as a pro-Brown commemoration. In
1944, Congress ﬁnally ratiﬁed Randolph’s bill (HR 3524). Land acquisition for the park took yet another decade, but in 1955, the Harpers Ferry
National Historical Park (HFNHP) ofﬁcially commenced operation.28
Reﬂecting sectional reconciliation as well as local whites’ ambivalence toward John Brown, the park toned down the Brown element, highlighting “Stonewall” Jackson’s charge at the 1862 Battle of Harpers
Ferry, as well as its surrounding natural beauty. The racial tensions of
the civil rights movement in the face of the excessive patriotism of theCold War discouraged open discussion of the racial questions that
Brown’s legacy would otherwise naturally evoke. So in 1959, the
HFNHP soft-pedaled its centennial celebration of Brown’s raid.29 The
1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education had ironically spelled the end of historically black Storer College, because theState of West Virginia terminated its subsidies to racially segregatedschools that were now declared “unconstitutional” by the decision. In
1962 the ﬁnancially collapsed college came under the jurisdiction of the
National Park Service and was turned into a training center, while John
Brown’s Fort was moved to Arsenal Square, opposite the Shepherd Memorial, in 1968.30
By the time the HFNHP got off the ground in the mid-1960s, radical
activists were embracing Brown’s racial egalitarianism and militancy,and America was moving in the direction of multiculturalism. As theShepherd Memorial became a headache for the HFNHP, they “quietly
turned the stone with its face to the wall,” but “restored it to its former
prominence” under pressure from a congressman, according to a letterto the Washington Post in August 1970. In the same year, HFNHP super-CONTINUING SKIRMISHES IN HARPERS FERRY

17intendent Joseph Prentice personally expressed his wish to remove thememorial. In 1976, with the permission of the UDC and SCV, the park
removed the memorial as part of its renovation of adjacent buildings, andit remained in storage for another ﬁve years.31
By the 1980s, the UDC and SCV were urging the park to display theShepherd Memorial once again. Newly arrived superintendent Donald
Campbell and park ofﬁcials patiently continued their negotiations withboth groups and with the NAACP in hopes of displaying it with an
explanatory plaque. Failing to ﬁnd common ground, the park reinstalled
the Shepherd Memorial to its original place without any plaque in 1981.
Shortly thereafter, rumors of possible vandalism caused them to cover itwith a plywood box—a decision breeding dissatisfaction among the
UDC and SCV. However, the memorial remained covered with plywood
for the next fourteen years.32
In the 1990s, the UDC and SCV increasingly pressured the HFNHPand the National Park Service, mobilizing support from grassroots
members and from Senator Jesse Helms, the conservative leader who
opposed multiculturalism in the escalating “culture wars.” In June 1995,
the HFNHP ﬁnally restored the Shepherd Memorial to its original place,
this time with a plaque. Mentioning only that Shepherd was shot during
Brown’s raid in 1859, the plaque brieﬂy explains the 1930s controversy
and adds Du Bois’s tribute to John Brown as “Another Perspective.” It
equivocally quotes the Lost Cause advocates’ allegation to “prove thatthe people of the South who owned slaves valued and respected their
good qualities as no one else ever did or so will do.” According to Superintendent Campbell, the “neutral” and “factual” information “invites thepark visitor to make their own judgment about the monument.”33
Restoration of the Shepherd Memorial aroused vigorous opposition
from both sides, illuminating half a century of controversy as well as thecontinuing fundamental discrepancies in their views (or deﬁnitions) of
history. Harriet Elizabeth Nichols Binkley, honorary president of theWest Virginia Division of the UDC, appreciated the memorial’s “longoverdue” redisplay to “bring out the true history.” G. Elliott Cummings,
Maryland commander of the SCV, held the plaque unnecessary, for “anymonument speaks for itself and doesn’t require interpretation.” Criticizing the HFNHP for bowing to the demands of “political correctness,” hesarcastically suggested adding a plaque to every memorial.34
For other reasons, the NAACP was not happy about the arrangement.
James A. Tolbert, president of the West Virginia NAACP, wanted the

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memorial to be removed and “taken to the Potomac River,” because evenwith the plaque, it was still an “insult” to his people that would mislead
tourists into thinking that African Americans willingly supported theConfederacy. Claiming, “It’s not history,” he attacked the white UDC’sand SCV’s continual denial of membership to African Americans, exposing their racism packaged and justiﬁed as “heritage.”35
Despite this crossﬁre from both sides, Superintendent Campbell stoodﬁrm in his position. While admitting that the plaque didn’t tell “thewhole story,” he maintained that “the Shepherd monument and its controversy . . . [are] history that happened at Harpers Ferry,” and that thepark should “respect the views of Americans to disagree over the monument’s meaning.”36 Both sides continued to express their disapprovalof the HFNHP’s decision, but after a few months Campbell reported thatpark visitors seemed to be satisﬁed with the plaque. The controversy had
subsided by 2000, when Janney interviewed an HFNHP interpreter.37
FRAGMENTED MEMORIES AND THE CHALLENGE OF
THEIR HISTORICAL PRESENTATION TO
THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PUBLIC
Intriguingly, each of the above three positions projects its own understandings on the word “history.” Though clumsily, the HFNHP exploredways to incorporate not only the historical facts known about the 1859
raid but also the historical facts known about the placement and interpretations of the Shepherd Memorial, in order to present them coherently
and historiographically to contemporary visitors. That was what Campbell
meant when he said that the memorial should be “presented as history.”38
However, the UDC and SCV insisted that the inscription on the Shepherd
Memorial were accurate, “true” history, reﬂecting what actually happened in the Civil War era, rather than reﬂecting the interpretations theirpredecessors had constructed in the early twentieth century. Despite losing their former dominant position even in the South, in the late-twentieth century, these conservative groups still glorify the Lost Cause under
the rubric of history and heritage, substantiating the insight of leading
memory studies scholar Edward Linenthal that “for many Southerners
over several generations, Confederate death could only be honorable ifslavery was not the cause of the war.”39
The NAACP criticized the Lost Cause advocates, exposing their ideological construction of so-called historical accuracy, both in the 1930s

CONTINUING SKIRMISHES IN HARPERS FERRY

19and in the 1990s. However, the NAACP’s very demand for the removalof the Shepherd Memorial not only downplayed Shepherd’s death but
also denied a part of their eighty-year-long historic contestation with conservative Southern whites over the memories of Shepherd and Brown.
The following episode illustrates the NAACP’s downplaying and denial.
In early preparation for their 2009 centennial celebration, the NAACP
got permission from the HFNHP to install their reproduction of the original Brown Tablet, which they now called “The Great Tablet” at the former campus of Storer College (see ﬁg. 2). Their intent was to “complete
Dr. Du Bois’ mission of 1932, to honor John Brown, to execute the
NAACP’s long documented role in honoring persons who ﬁght for justice and equality,” as Julian Bond, chair of the NAACP, told more thana hundred people gathered for its unveiling ceremony in July 2006.

Figure 2 John Brown Tablet Memorial, 2010

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According to the NAACP’s press release, Storer College (McDonald)
had refused the original Brown Tablet because they had thought Du
Bois’s inscription “too militant.” However, the NAACP alluded neither
to the Shepherd Memorial nor to the controversy it bred in the 1930s and1990s; without any explanatory plaque, viewers would assume that the
memorial were built in 1932, as the inscription implies.40
As if avoiding Shepherd-related memories were not enough, the
NAACP camouﬂaged Brown’s belief that “righteous” violence was necessary for overthrowing the violent slavery system, consequently toning
down the potential violence in revolutionary racial changes that Du Bois
had poignantly inscribed in the tablet in 1932. At the heartwarming ceremony of 2006, realizing their long-awaited dream, Julian Bond cautiously commented that the NAACP founders “condemned the violencebut celebrated the impulse. . . . They’re not celebrating the violence that
[Brown] perpetuated. They’re celebrating his commitment to racial justice.”41 True as that may be, it further circumvents the fundamental question that victims of violence such as Shepherd pose: whether noble ends
ever justify violent means.
In the late-twentieth century, John Brown’s use of violence to achieve
racial equality came to haunt Americans more than ever, as extreme
political groups both on the left and on the right, such as the Weather
Underground and abortion clinic bombers, began to appropriate Brown’s
revolutionary violence for their own causes. The September 11th terrorist attacks only escalated this intricate moral question, making people
more reticent to applaud Brown’s methods for obtaining social justice.
As the controversy over “just wars” extended to controversy over “justterrorism,” even scholars anguished over categorizing Brown as a“good” terrorist.42
Budding Brown scholar R. Blakeslee Gilpin regards Brown as “areminder of the irreconcilable fault lines in the nation’s relationship withviolence, equality, and change.”43 However, in the post-9/11 sociopolitical atmosphere, the NAACP avoided throwing itself into the middle ofthis hard challenge and took a rather contradictory position by installing
Du Bois’s radical inscription and toning down its implications and, atthe same time, sidestepping the long trajectory of the Shepherd Memorial
controversy. Even the HFNHP, which incorporated the controversy into
its exhibition, conﬁnes its debate on violence and morality to the Civil
War era, avoiding discussion of the violence that has riddled America’s
long struggle for freedom.44

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21

CONCLUSION
Emboldened by sectional reconciliation and Jim Crow segregation
after Reconstruction, Lost Cause advocates erected the Shepherd Memorial in 1931. They claimed that Shepherd’s death proved his opposition
to John Brown’s abolitionist raid and, by extension, symbolized African
Americans’ loyalty to the Confederacy. Outraged by this abuse of logic
if not of history, the NAACP and African American activists celebrated
Brown’s martyrdom in the cause of abolition, not only in the 1930s but
until the present day. Although the details in dispute have changed overtime, the chasm between conservative Southern whites’ memories andAfrican Americans’ memories is not easily bridged, because both sides
remain keenly aware that memorials are carved into stone to preserve
their visions of the past and future for ages immemorial.45
The long controversy over the Shepherd Memorial also illuminates
the challenges facing U.S. historical parks and museums to present
history in an allegedly multicultural public landscape. Through the civilrights movement and consequent social transformations, African
Americans gained a greater voice and political clout. As a result, local
governments and the national parks that supervise century-old Confederate Memorials face challenges from those who ﬁnd such memorials racially offensive and historically misleading. Cynthia Mills ﬁnds “nosystematic effort” to take down the Confederate Memorials so far, partly
because of communities’ desire to preserve their distinct local heritage.
However, three ways of coping with this challenge are emerging. First,
some kinds of explanation, usually plaques, are added to the memorials
to “neutralize” the engraved memories. Second, some memorials are
actually removed to less visible plots to avoid social friction. Third, newmemorials are constructed near the originals, embodying alternative
memories that the Lost Cause tended to ignore or downplay, in what
Mills calls “desegregation.” In doing so, the planners emphasize thatpublic space in a multicultural society is not for a particular people but
for all.46
After taking the Shepherd Memorial away from public view for about
two decades, in the 1990s the HFNHP attempted to “neutralize” the Lost
Cause memory with a plaque, to deconstruct the history interpreting
Brown and Shepherd, and to show visitors how people use and abuse
their historical past. As Linenthal pertinently observes, “those monumentsthat are most controversial are most in need of interpretive attention.”47

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However, both conservative Southern whites and African Americans
opposed the decision of the park, insisting that only their particular memories were “history.” Today, the Shepherd Memorial is located in thecentral area of the HFNHP, while the building behind the memorial isdedicated to the Brown exhibition. Largely ignored by tourist guides, theBrown Tablet Memorial reposes in a quiet yard of the former Storer
College, a half mile from the Shepherd Memorial. Those two memorials stand too far apart to call their parallel existence “desegregation.”
The Shepherd Memorial controversy is unique in its intensity andduration. Ironically, the NAACP’s denying of the racially biased interpretations of the Lost Cause downplays Shepherd’s death and fails tohistoricize more recent African American struggles contesting the memories of Shepherd and Brown. The post-9/11 U.S. sociopolitical atmosphere not only calls into question the justiﬁcation of Brown’s use ofviolence but also obscures the violent aspects of struggles against racial
oppression. Thus, even if the “desegregation” of the Shepherd Memorial
is geographically realized, the memories of Shepherd and Brown as wellas their critical historical presentation for the public will remain subjectsof continuing conﬂict.
NOTES
1
On the Lost Cause and subsequent sectional reconciliation between the North andSouth, see, for example, David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American
Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); Gaines M.
Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the
New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Nina Silber,
The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
2
Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and
the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,2003), 49–72; and John J. Winberry, “ ‘Lest We Forget’: The Confederate Monument
and the Southern Townscape,” Southeastern Geographer 23, no. 2 (1983): 107–21.
About 370 memorials were erected on Southern soil from 1866 to 1929, peaking between
1903 and 1914, which interestingly correlates with the peak of the UDC’s membership.
3
Paul A. Shackel, Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the PostBellum Landscape (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003), 11–19 (hereafter cited
as Memory B & W); and Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War,and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997), 3–5.
4
While most Confederate Memorials commemorate white male leaders and soldiers,
some few memorials erected after the 1890s were dedicated to “faithful slaves.” Savage,
Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 155–61.

CONTINUING SKIRMISHES IN HARPERS FERRY

23

5
On the history of Harpers Ferry, see Teresa S. Moyer and Paul A. Shackel, The
Making of Harpers Ferry National Historical Park: A Devil, Two Rivers, and a Dream(Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008)(hereafter cited as Making HFNHP).
6
Mary Johnson, “An ‘Ever Present Bone of Contention’: The Heyward Shepherd
Memorial,” West Virginia History 56 (1997), http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_
wvh/wvh56–1.html; Memory B & W, 77–112; and Caroline E. Janney, “Written in Stone:
Gender, Race, and the Heyward Shepherd Memorial,” Civil War History 52, no. 2(2006): 117–41.
7Some recent studies on John Brown and his Harpers Ferry raid: Robert E. McGlone,John Brown’s War against Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
and David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked
the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Knopf, 2005). Until recently, moststudies mentioned no slaves joining Brown’s band to seek freedom. However, somescholars document slaves’ involvement as well as their restlessness during and after theraid. See Hannah Geffert, “They Heard His Call: The Local Black Community’s Involvement in the Raid on Harpers Ferry,” in Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John
Brown, ed. Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005),
23–45.
8
The total number of raiders was twenty-one; Brown left three of them on guard in
outlying locations.
9
Even academics differ dramatically on the meaning of Brown’s cause and activities.
For example, see Merrill D. Peterson, John Brown: The Legend Revisited (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2002); Bruce A. Ronda, Reading the Old Man: John Brown
in American Culture (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008); and Russo and
Finkelman, Terrible Swift Sword.
10“Testimony of Lewis W. Washington” and “Testimony of John D. Starry,” both in
Select Committee of the Senate Appointed to Inquire into the Late Invasion and Seizureof Public Property at Harper’s Ferry, S. Rep. Com., no. 278, 36th Cong., 1st Sess., 1860,
23–24, 39; “Slave Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry,” Baltimore Sun, October 18, 1859;“Harpers Ferry, Great Excitement,” Virginia Free Press, October 20, 1859 (hereafter
cited as VFP); and “Harpers-Ferry Invasion,” VFP, October 27, 1859.
11
Henry McDonald strove in vain to identify Shepherd’s grave in the 1930s. See Henry
McDonald, letter to Governor Harry F. Byrd, January 11, 1932; and C. Vernon Eddy,
Letter to McDonald, January 18, 1932; both in McDonald Papers, Harpers Ferry
National Historical Park, West Virginia (HFNHP), ser. 3, box 4, folder 3 (hereafter citedas McDonald Papers).
12
Frederick Douglass, “John Brown: An Address at the Fourteenth Anniversary ofStorer College,” May 30, 1881, reprinted in Benjamin Quarles, ed., Blacks on John
Brown (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 65; VFP, June 18, 1881. Storer
College was established in Harpers Ferry by the Freewill Baptists of New England in
1867. Although opened for all regardless of race and gender, it functioned as a freedmen’s school during the Reconstruction era and developed into one of the few higher
educational institutions for African Americans in the South at the turn of the century.
For details, see Dawne Raines Burke, “Storer College: A Hope for Redemption in the
Shadow of Slavery, 1865–1955” (PhD diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University, 2004).
13
VFP, August 8, 1994. The John Brown Monument was actually installed in 1895.
14
See note 1.
15
Ronda, Reading the Old Man, 63–108; and Peterson, John Brown, 33–85.

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16
Mrs. Fred A. Olds, “A Monument to the Faithful Old Slaves,” Confederate Veterans
12, no. 9 (1904): 443 (hereafter cited as CV); Mrs. W. Carleton Adams, “Slave Monument Question,” CV 12, no. 11 (1904): 525; and “Monument to Faithful Slaves,” CV 13,
no. 3 (1905): 123–24.
17
Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 116–59; and Micki McElya,“Commemorating the Color Line: The National Mammy Monument Controversy of the
1920s,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern
Memory, ed. Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 2003), 203–18. The UDC’s most ambitious effort was lobbying the Congress for
the National Mammy Monument in Washington, D.C., between 1923 and 1924.
18
Johnson, “Ever Present Bone of Contention”; and Minutes of the Twenty-Seventh
Annual Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (Asheville, NC: United
Daughters of the Confederacy, November 9–13, 1920), 40, quoted in Johnson, “Ever
Present Bone of Contention.” Even after the UDC found that Heyward was not a slave,
they kept calling their committee “the faithful slave memorial committee.”
19
Memo, June 1, 1922; McDonald, Letter to President Daniel Willard, the B & O,
June 2, 1922; George H. Campbell, Letter to McDonald, June 23, 1923; all in McDonald
Papers; and Farmers Advocate, September 1, 1923. Andrews’s proposed inscription isreprinted in Janney, “Written in Stone,” 139–40.
20“The New President General, U.D.C.,” CV 36, no. 1 (1930): 4; “From the President
General,” CV 39, no. 7 (1931): 270; and Johnson, “Ever Present Bone of Contention.”
21
McDonald, Letter to Walter White, October 19, 1931, McDonald Papers; Johnson,“Ever Present Bone of Contention,” note 51; Janney, “Written in Stone,” 129–30n27;
and Memory B & W, 99–100. R. Blakeslee Gilpin contrasts vividly radical African
American views with moderate liberal Northern white views regarding Brown’s racialegalitarianism and his means to achieve it. R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives:
America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), esp. 79–105.
22
Matthew Page Andrews, Heyward Shepherd: Victim of Violence (Harpers Ferry,
WV: Heyward Memorial Association, 1931), esp. 7–8, 10–11, 25–28; “Heyward
Shepherd,” CV 37, no. 11 (1931): 411–14; “Speeches Made at Dedication of Uncle TomPappy Monument at Harpers Ferry,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 17, 1931 (hereafter cited as BAA); and Memory B & W, 85–86, 94–98.
23
James Walker, Letter to Pearl Tatten, n.d., HFNHP microﬁlm, reel 117, ﬂash 9;“Confederates to Dedicate ‘Uncle Tom’ Monument,” BAA, October 10, 1931; “John
Brown No Criminal as Rebel Daughters Infer,” “N.A.A.C.P. Raps Dedication of ‘Pappy’
Tablet,” and “Yankee Woman Steals Rebel Girls’ Show,” all in BAA, October 17, 1931;
and J. Max Barber, “Daughters of the Confederacy and John Brown,” Pittsburgh
Courier, October 24, 1931.
24“Yankee Woman Steals Rebel Girl’s Show”; and Janney, “Written in Stone,”
118–19, 132.
25
White, Letters to McDonald, March 23 and April 16, 1932, both in HFNHP microﬁlm, reel 123, ﬂash 9, emphasis added. Historians usually count only ﬁve of Brown’sraiders as African American, but Du Bois regarded two white raiders as mulatto and so
numbered them among the African Americans. On Du Bois’s stance on Brown’s use ofviolence, see William E. Cain, “Violence, Revolution, and the Cost of Freedom: John
Brown and W. E. B. DuBois,” boundary 2 17, no. 1 (Spring, 1990): 305–30; and Julie
Husband, “W. E. B. Du Bois’s John Brown: Placing Racial Justice at the Center of a

CONTINUING SKIRMISHES IN HARPERS FERRY

25

Socialist Politics,” in The Afterlife of John Brown, ed. Andrew Taylor and Eldred
Herrington (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 159–71.
26
White, Letters to McDonald, April 20 and May 2, 1932; and McDonald, Letters toWhite, April 19, April 25, and May 3, 1932; all in HFNHP microﬁlm, reel 123, ﬂash 9.
In those italicized words of Du Bois’s inscription, McDonald and trustees saw dangerous
revolutionary violence even against the nation. See also “College Refuses N.A.A.C.P.
Tablet to John Brown,” Atlanta Daily World, May 25, 1932; “Storer Prexy Away,” “AtStorer College,” and “Balked at Singing ‘America’ on John Brown Pilgrimage,” all in
BAA, May 28, 1932.
27
Janney, “Written in Stone,” 135.
28
Making HFNHP, 33–51. Until 1963, the park was called Harpers Ferry National
Monument. However, in this article I use the contemporary naming.
29
Ibid., 93–97; and Foster Hailey, “5 Experts Debate John Brown Raid,” New YorkTimes, October 17, 1959.
30
Burke, “Storer College,” 356–57; and Making HFNHP, 89, 158. Although Storer
College was a private institution, it was heavily dependent on state subsidies.
31
B. J. Layman, “Monumental Ambiguity at Harpers Ferry,” Washington Post, August
26, 1970; Joseph R. Prentice, Letter to Ben, August 28, 1970, quoted in Memory B &W, 103–4; and Memory B & W, 104.
32
Eugene L. Meyer, “As Civil War Monument Returns, So Does Controversy,”
Washington Post, July 10, 1995; and Memory B & W, 104–7.
33
Josef Federman, “Controversial Monument Back in Harpers Ferry,” Charleston
Gazette, July 15, 1995.
34
Greg Tasker, “Tribute to Victim of Brown’s Raid Still Controversial,” Baltimore
Sun, September 3, 1995, emphasis added; and Meyer, “As Civil War Monument
Returns.”
35
Eugene L. Meyer, “NAACP Calls for Memorial to Be Hidden,” Washington Post,
August 19, 1995; and Tasker, “Tribute to Victim of Brown’s Raid Still Controversial,”
emphasis added.
36
Meyer, “As Civil War Monument Returns”; and Meyer, “NAACP Calls for
Memorial to Be Hidden,” emphasis added.
37
Tasker, “Tribute to Victim of Brown’s Raid Still Controversial”; Jack Deutsch,“War of Words Erupts over Monument,” Charleston Daily Mail, November 28, 1995;
Rebecca Bailey, “Harpers Ferry Sign Angers Some,” Civil War News, August 1995,
22–23; and Janney, “Written in Stone,” 138n43.
38
Meyer, “NAACP Calls for Memorial to Be Hidden,” emphasis added.
39
Edward T. Linenthal, “Healing and History: The Dilemmas of Interpretation,” in
Rally on the High Ground: The National Park Service Symposium on the Civil War, ed.
Robert K. Sutton (Washington, DC: Eastern National Press, 2001), http://www.cr.nps.
gov/history/online_books/rthg/chap3b.htm.
40
Nakia Herring, “NAACP to Honor Abolitionist John Brown,” Baltimore Times, July20, 2006.
41
Brian White, “Organization to Honor John Brown,” Charleston Daily Mail, July 14,
2006.
42
Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives, 185–86. On terrorism and Brown, see for example,
David W. Blight, “John Brown: Triumphant Failure,” American Prospect, March 13,
2000, 44–45; Ken Chowder, “The Father of American Terrorism,” American Heritage51, no. 1 (2000): 81–90; Nicole Etcheson, “John Brown, Terrorist?” American Nineteenth Century History 10, no. 1 (2009): 29–48; and Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist,
500–506.

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Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives, 4.
The HFNHP Brown Museum also skirted the discussion of violence and racial justice in the contemporary context. John C. Spielvogel criticizes the exhibition for giving
viewers the impression that racism that Brown and later activists had struggled against
was ﬁnished in the past. John C. Spielvogel, “Interpreting ‘Sacred Ground’: The Rhetoricof National Park Service Civil War Historical Battleﬁelds and Parks” (PhD diss.,
Pennsylvania State University, 2003), 83–90.
45
Memory B & W, 111–12; and Janney, “Written in Stone,” 138–39.
46
Mills and Simpson, Monuments to the Lost Cause, xxv–xvii.
47
Linenthal, “Healing and History.”
43
44