to be a Canadian mulatto."[1] He was descended from Virginia slaveholders who had moved north and was born in Indiana. He was twenty-six years old.
Of the white men there were, first of all, John Brown and his family, consisting of three sons, and two brothers of his eldest daughter's husband, William and Dauphin Thompson.
Oliver Brown was a boy not yet twenty-one, though tall and muscular, and had just been married. Watson was a man of twenty-five, tall and athletic; while Owen was a large, red-haired prematurely aged man of thirty-five, partially crippled, good-tempered and cynical. The Thompsons were neighbors of John Brown and part of a brood of twenty children. The Brown family and theirs intermarried and Anne Brown says that William, who was twenty-six years of age, was "kind, generous-hearted, and helpful to others." Dauphin, a boy of twenty-two, was, she writes, "very quiet, with a fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes. He always seemed like a very good girl."[2]
The three notable characters of the band were Kagi, Stevens and Cook, the reformer, the soldier and the poet. Kagi's family came from the Shenandoah Valley. He was twenty-four, had a good English education and was a newspaper reporter in Kansas, where he earnestly helped the free state
