e was shot. He spoke no word, but yielded calmly to his
fate. Watson was shot at ten o'clock Monday morning and died about three
o'clock Monday afternoon.... After we were taken prisoners he was placed
in the guardhouse with me. He complained of the hardness of the bench on
which he was lying. I begged hard for a bed for him, or even a blanket,
but could obtain none. I took off my coat and placed it under him and
held his head in my lap, in which position he died without a groan or
struggle."

In a letter to friends in Iowa, under date of November 22d, three weeks
before his execution, he wrote:

"Eleven of our little band are sleeping now in their bloody garments
with the cold earth above them. Braver men never lived; truer men to
their plighted word never banded together."

Rigidly true to their convictions were all these young heroes. Not one
showed the white feather in the last hour. Serenely and without a quiver
each of them met his cruel fate.

John Brown had trained up his men in the strictest discipline. Not a
drop of liquor was allowed in his camp. Tobacco was tabooed. Profane
language was forbidden.

These men were in deadly earnest and their asceticism attested their
single-hearted fidelity to their cause. They were profoundly convinced
that slavery was a national crime and that it was their patriotic duty,
at whatever cost, to wipe that insufferable stigma from the land.

And who shall say that they were not right; or that they forfeited their
brave lives in vain?

A few days before the gallows claimed him, John Brown wrote to his
family, "I feel no consciousness of guilt and I am perfectly certain
that very soon no member of the family will feel any possible
disposition to blush on my account."

The Coppock brothers were typical of all the brave young abolitionists
who banded together to strike a blow that rocked this nation as if
Jehovah in his wrath had laid hold on it. Quaker lads, "grave, quiet,
reserved, even rustic in their ways," they lived bravely up to their
convictions and sealed their devotion to the cause of freedom with their
precious young life blood.

The noble character of Edwin Coppock is revealed in the following
pathetic letter written to his uncle on the eve of his execution. There
is no bitterness in his heart at the last hour. Like the great Galilean
who also perished for sympathizing with the lowly and oppressed, he was
calm and resigned in the presence of his fate. Like al