HEYWARD SHEPHERD & CONTESTED MEMORY
Heyward Shepherd, a free black from Winchester, Virginia, who worked in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (present-day West Virginia), as a baggage porter for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, became the first casualty of John Brown’s raid.[1] While Shepherd walked toward the bridge spanning the Potomac River at 1:25 a.m. on October 17, 1859, in search of William Williams, the bridge watchman, two of Brown’s men ordered Shepherd to halt. When Shepherd refused and turned to head back to the depot one of Brown’s men fired at Shepherd. A bullet struck Shepherd in the back, just below his heart.[2] Dr. John D. Starry, who lived nearby and cared for Shepherd, informed a special United States Senate committee charged with investigating Brown’s attack that Shepherd “turned to go back to the office, and as he turned they shot him in the back.”[3]
In the aftermath of Brown’s raid those who supported slavery lauded Shepherd as a hero, willing to stand up to Brown and his band of abolitionists. For instance, two weeks after Brown’s raid the Shepherdstown Register portrayed Shepherd as an advocate of slavery, murdered because he refused to join Brown’s army, not because he failed to comply with an order to halt. “Hayward Shepherd was shot by the insurrectionists… because he would not join them,” the Register boasted.[4]
Through embellishment and manipulation of historic reality, in the immediate aftermath of the raid, Shepherd was lauded by slavery’s advocates as an example of one of many Black people who spurned Brown’s efforts. That exploitation continued in the Civil War’s aftermath as advocates of the Lost Cause utilized Shepherd’s story to tout the loyalty of Black people to the Confederacy.[5]
On October 10, 1931, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument to Heyward Shepherd in Harpers Ferry. The documents in this section explore events surrounding the Shepherd monument and the varied responses to it.
Notes:
[1] Jonathan A. Noyalas, Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2021), 35.
[2] Dennis E. Frye and Catherine Magi Oliver, Confluence: Harpers Ferry as Destiny (Harpers Ferry, WV: Harpers Ferry Park Association, 2019), 10.
[3] “Report, the Select Committee of the Senate Appointed to Inquire into the Late Invasion and Seizure of Public Property at Harper’s Ferry,” 36th Congress, 1st Session, Report Committee No. 278, “Invasion at Harper’s Ferry,” 5.
[4] Shepherdstown Register (Shepherdstown, WV), October 29, 1859.
[5] For the best analysis of this see Caroline E. Janney, “Written in Stone: Gender, Race, and the Heyward Shepherd Memorial,” Civil War History 52 (June 2006): 117-141.
*Contributed by Jonathan A. Noyalas