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The Heywood Shepherd Memorial: a personal reflection
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When my wife and I visited Harpers Ferry with our daughter and son-in-law earlier this month, we stumbled upon the Heywood Shepherd Memorial tablet, on Potomac Street, just across from the obelisk that marks the original site of John Brown’s fort.
That evening there was a wreath next to the monument, presumably placed there by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Kathleen, my wife, was incensed. “I’d like to go back and steal that wreath,” she said later. She was upset because the Heyward Shepherd Memorial, ostensibly a monument to the first victim of John Brown’s 1859 raid, was really an attempt to justify slavery.
Heyward Shepherd, a porter and sometime ticket clerk for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, was a free black man who had been shot by one of Brown’s men who was holding the railroad bridge over the Potomac. Shepherd, according to his dying testimony, had gone out on the Potomac River bridge looking for the bridge watchman. Met by two of Brown’s men, who told him to halt, Shepherd turned around to go back to the station. One of the men shot and mortally wounded him.
I’m a railroader. If you stop in at my station in South Bend, I can sell you a ticket to Harpers Ferry. So I have a lot of sympathy for Shepherd, a fellow railroader. I’m sorry that his memory has been used by the UDC.
Maybe Kathleen should have stolen that wreath. I’m sure it wasn’t for Heywood Shepherd.
For further information, please read "An 'Ever Present Bone of Contention': The Heyward Shepherd Memorial," by Mary Johnson, in West Virginia History, vol. 56 (1997), which has been the main source for this article.
Alfred Brophy's post in "The Academy Speaks," was also very informative, especially about W.E.B. Du Bois' response to the memorial
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