THE ENCOUNTER AT THE RIFLE FACTORY.
As stated in a previous chapter, the command of the rifle factory was
given to Captain Kagi. Under him were John Copeland, Sherrard Lewis
Leary, and three colored men from the neighborhood. At an early hour,
Kagi saw from his position the danger in remaining, with our small
company, until assistance could come to the inhabitants. Hence his
suggestion to Captain Brown, through Jeremiah Anderson, to leave. His
position being more isolated than the others, was the first to invite
an organized attack with success; the Virginians first investing the
factory with their hordes, before the final success at the engine
house. From the prisoner taken by us who had participated in the
assault upon Kagi’s position, we received the sad details of the
slaughter of our brave companions. Seven different times during the
day they were fired upon, while they occupied the interior part of
the building, the insurgents defending themselves with great courage,
killing and wounding with fatal precision. At last, overwhelming
numbers, as many as five hundred, our informant told us, blocked up
the front of the building, battered the doors down, and forced their
way into the interior. The insurgents were then forced to retreat the
back way, fighting, however, all the time. They were pursued, when
they took to the river, and it being so shallow, they waded out to a
rock, mid-way, and there made a stand, being completely hemmed in,
front and rear. Some four or five hundred shots, said our prisoner,
were fired at them before they were conquered. They would not surrender
into the hands of the enemy, but kept on fighting until every one was
killed, except John Copeland. Seeing he could do no more, and that
all his associates were murdered, he suffered himself to be captured.
The party at the rifle factory fought desperately till the last, from
their perch on the rock. Slave and free, black and white, carried out
the special injunction of the brave old Captain, to make sure work of
it. The unfortunate targets for so many bullets from the enemy, some
of them received two or three balls. There fell poor Kagi, the friend
and adviser of Captain Brown in his most trying positions, and the
cleverest man in the party; and there also fell Sherrard Lewis Leary,
generous-hearted and companionable as he was, and in that and other
difficult positions, brave to desperation. There fought John Copeland,
who met his fate like a man. But they were all “honorable men,” noble,
noble fellows, who fought and died for the most holy principles. John
Copeland was taken to the guard-house, where the other prisoners
afterwards were, and thence to Charlestown jail. His subsequent mockery
of a trial, sentence and execution, with his companion Shields Green,
on the 16th of December--are they not part of the dark deeds of this
era, which will assign their perpetrators to infamy, and cause after
generations to blush at the remembrance?