Remembering Heyward Shepherd

This monument in Harpers Ferry tells the story of Heyward Shepherd, a free Black man who became the first person killed during John Brown’s raid on October 16, 1859.  Shepherd worked as a baggage master for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and was also described as a respected member of the local community. On the night Brown and his men entered Harpers Ferry, Shepherd encountered the raiders near the railroad bridge. When ordered to stop, he continued away from them and was shot. Mortally wounded, he died the following day.

There is a tragic irony to Shepherd’s death. John Brown had come to Harpers Ferry intending to strike a blow against slavery and hoped his seizure of the federal armory would inspire enslaved people to join an uprising. Yet the first person to die during the raid was a free Black man.

The monument itself adds another layer to the story. It was erected in 1931 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, more than seventy years after Shepherd’s death. The inscription praises Shepherd while presenting him as evidence of the “faithfulness” of Black people who, it claims, resisted attempts to turn them against slaveholders. That language reflects the Lost Cause interpretation of history promoted by Confederate memorial organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For that reason, the monument tells us about two different periods of American history. It commemorates an actual man who lost his life during the raid of 1859, but the words chosen to remember him reveal how the Civil War and slavery were being interpreted in 1931.

Heyward Shepherd deserves to be remembered separately from the political purpose later attached to his death. He was a free man, a railroad employee, and a member of the Harpers Ferry community whose life unexpectedly became entangled with one of the pivotal events leading toward the Civil War.

This is what makes monuments like this so interesting to examine closely. They can tell us something about the event being commemorated, but they can also tell us a great deal about the people who erected them and the time in which they chose to remember the past.