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HISTORICAL ANNOTATION 839

causes ranging from Fourierism to the abolition of capital punishment, the Tribune
under Greeley became the leading editorial voice of the Republican party during the
1850s. Openly hostile to abolitionism during the early 1840s, Greeley grew steadily
more radical on the slavery issue, but his racial attitudes mirrored the ambivalence of
many northern free-labor spokesmen. Greeley felt that blacks deserved legal equality
and a fair chance to compete in the marketplace, but he doubted that African
Americans as a group were capable of taking full advantage of such opportunities.
Thus, during the 1840s and 1850s Greeley worked to extend equal suffrage to New
York blacks while simultaneously accepting that they were an "indolent, improvident,
servile, and licentious" race incapable of achieving social equality with whites. In his
Recollections Greeley claims to have rejected colonization during the mid-1830s, but
in fact he gave periodic support to emigrationist schemes throughout the antebellum
era, and clashed repeatedly with Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and other
black leaders over the issue. Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York,
1868); Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley: Nineteenth-Century Crusader
(Philadelphia, 1953); Ralph Ray Fahrney, Horace Greeley and the "Tribune" in the
Civil War (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1936); Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,
262-63, 297-300; DAB, 7:528-34.

248.18 "Shields Green."] Born Esau Brown (c. 1834-59), Shields Green had
escaped by boat from slavery in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1856. Green stopped
briefly in Rochester before crossing over to Canada, where he worked for two years
as a waiter and house servant. In 1858 Green returned to Rochester to conduct a
clothes cleaning business and there was introduced by Frederick Douglass to John
Brown. When Brown invited Douglass to confer with him in Chambersburg, he spe-cifically requested that Green also be present. Unlike Douglass, Green decided to join
Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. He played an active role in the fighting but was
accused of cowardice by his captors for attempting to escape at the very end by pre-tending to be one of the captured slaves. Green was tried for murder and for foment-
ing slave insurrection and executed on 19 December 1859. Despite abolitionist efforts
to obtain his body, students at the Winchester Medical College dissected it. Quarles,
Allies for Freedom, 76-78, 85-86, 101, 105, 109-10, 137; Oates, To Purge This Land,
224, 282-83, 327-28, 338.

248.18 "stuff" Green "was made of."] Paraphrases The Tempest, sc. 8, lines
1612-13.

248.24 Chambersburg, Penn.] Chambersburg is a market town in southern
Pennsylvania in the Cumberland Valley. It is located nearly sixty miles north of
Harpers Ferry. Seltzer, Gazetteer of the World, 366.

248.24 Kagi] Son of a blacksmith in Bristolville, Ohio, John Henri Kagi (1835-
59) had witnessed slavery at first hand while a schoolteacher in Hawkinstown,
Virginia. Dismissed from that post for expressing antislavery sentiments, Kagi trav-
eled to Nebraska in 1855 and on to Kansas in 1856, where he worked irregularly as a
newspaper reporter. He joined free-state militia units in Kansas and fought under

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