Cook, John Edwin

Life Span
to
    Full name
    John Edwin Cook
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Estimated
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    Family
    Mary V. Kennedy (wife)
    Education
    Yale
    Occupation
    Educator
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Other Affiliations
    Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)

    John Edwin Cook (Villard, 1910)

    Scholarship
    John E. Cook, who could successfully have escaped had he not, against the advice of his comrades, been reckless in his search for food, was born in the summer of 1830, in Haddam, Connecticut. He was of a well-to-do family, and studied law in Brooklyn and New York. He went to Kansas in 1855. His movements from the time of his first meeting with Brown, just after the battle of Black Jack, in June, 1856, until after his capture, are set forth in his "Confession" made while in jail (published at Charlestown as a pamphlet in the middle of November, 1859, for the benefit of Samuel C. Young, who was crippled for life in the fighting at Harper's Ferry). For this confession Cook was severely censured at the time by the friends of Brown; he was even called the "Judas" of the raid. But the document, when examined to-day, obviously contains only facts which are of great historical value, and whose promulgation at the time in no wise injured the case of his fellow raiders. Had it not been made, the result of the trial would have been the same. Cook preceded John Brown to the Harper's Ferry neighborhood by more than a year, there sometimes teaching school, and again living as a lock-tender, while in the registration of his marriage to a lock-tender, while in the registration of his marriage to Mary V. Kennedy, of Harper's Ferry, April 18, 1859, he was described as a book-agent. He was captured eight miles from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, October 25, 1859, and hanged on December 16. He was a remarkably fine shot, and had seen much fighting in Kansas. He was reckless, impulsive, indiscreet, but genial, generous and brave.
    Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 680-681.
    How to Cite This Page: "Cook, John Edwin," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5462.