Judicial Circuit Court of Virginia, Jefferson County, to wit: The Jurors of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in find for the body of the County of Jefferson, duly impaneled, and attending upon the Circuit Court of said county, upon their oaths do present that John Brown, Aaron C. Stevens …, and Edwin Coppoc, white men, and Shields Green and John Copland, free negroes, together with divers other evil-minded and traitorous persons to the Jurors unknown, not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the false and malignant counsel of other evil and traitorous persons and the instigations of the devil, did, severally, on the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth day of October, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty-nine, and on divers other days before that time, within the Commonwealth of Virginia and the County of Jefferson aforesaid, and within the jurisdiction of this Court, with other confederates to the Jurors unknown, feloniously and traitorously make rebellion and levy war against the said Commonwealth of Virginia …”
On droned the court clerk while the tall, bearded old man and his four confederates stood before the judge’s bench. Few men, according to one reporter, could look John Brown in the eye more than a moment. But Judge Richard Parker, third in a judicial family that reached back to the American Revolution, was equally stern of eye and strong of jaw. Grimly he asked Brown how he pleaded to the grand jury’s accusations of treason, servile insurrection, and murder. The gaunt old man replied, “Not guilty.” Whereupon John Brown lay down on a crude cot, drew a blanket up to his chin, and closed his eyes; the bailiffs led Stevens, with five bullets in his body, and the others back to jail. The trial that would inflame a nation had begun.
The setting was a country courtroom with whitewashed walls smeared with haphazard fingerprints, the floor littered with peanut and chestnut shells, two wood stoves with ugly black pipes crooking their way to the ceiling, and high, dirty, curtainless windows. The benches on three sides of the judicial arena were crammed with five to six hundred spectators. Outside in the streets of Charlestown, Virginia, were several thousand more people, held at bay by lines of militiamen before the pillared courthouse.
