He was hanged for helping slaves rebel. Now Connecticut officials are asking Virginia for a pardon

Waving a white flag of surrender after the failed raid on Harpers Ferry, Aaron Dwight Stevens was riddled with bullets to the face, neck and chest area. The handsome 28-year-old, who lost his baritone voice in the October 1859 crossfire, was hundreds of miles from home.

But he’d long deserted Norwich, Conn., as a teenager — a rebel with a quick temper and yearning to fight slavery. In “Bleeding Kansas,” Stevens would join forces with abolitionist John Brown, training an army of 22 men to free the slaves — and first storm a federal armory in Virginia (now West Virginia).

Stevens, convicted of conspiring with slaves to revolt, was hanged on March 16, 1860. Nearly 160 years after his death, Norwich-area officials and residents are requesting he be posthumously pardoned.

“Norwich has always been seen as the home of Benedict Arnold, but he was a traitor,” Tommy Coletti said of the Revolutionary War turncoat. “Here is a true American hero who is listed as a traitor also, but he wasn’t. He was doing work in the 1800s that you had continued in the 1900s with Martin Luther King.”

Coletti co-wrote a biography about Stevens, “A Journey to the Gallows,” which gradually sparked the idea of asking the Commonwealth of Virginia to vindicate the New Englander.

The premise of the pardon is that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments — passed after the Civil War — nullify Stevens’ slavery-related crimes.

“It is ironic that Stevens was actually convicted of the capital crime of inciting slaves to rebellion, which of course is no longer a capital crime. Slavery ended,” said Dale Plummer, the Norwich city historian.

Plummer said with the controversial removal of Confederate memorials throughout the South, it’s important to honor people who gave their lives to the anti-slavery movement.

In 2016, Route 138 in Lisbon, Conn., was designated the Aaron Dwight Stevens Memorial Highway. In Norwich, Plummer would like to see a bronze statue of Stevens erected on the city green — if the pardon is successful.

It may take more than a year to learn the outcome. The Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia has received the application and will review it before Gov. Ralph Northam makes a decision, a representative from the press office confirmed.

In the paperwork mailed last month, Vic Butsch attached photocopies of Stevens’ army enlistments, indictment and proof of death one day after his 29th birthday.

Butsch, the co-author of “A Journey to the Gallows” and lead researcher on Stevens, traversed the country for more than a decade to review original documents. He first learned about the “Indiana Jones” figure through a continuing education class taught by Plummer.

In the pre-Civil War period, both Stevens and Brown garnered national notoriety for their exploits.

“People in Virginia thought he was a lot more dangerous than Brown was, and they were right,” Butsch said. “Stevens was a trained Army guy — big and strong. He did have a temper that would get him into trouble sometimes, and it guided his life.”

Born in Lisbon on March 15, 1831, Stevens grew up in a Puritan household. His father was the choir director of the First Congregational Church in Norwich, elevating the prominence of the pacifistic family. “But Dwight was not the Puritan, stay-at-home person that his family was,” Butsch said. “He had an itch to go.”

Stevens was heavily influenced by Thomas Paine’s writings on spiritualism, Coletti said, and the concept that everything should be free. He joined the 1st Massachusetts Regiment at age 16 as the Mexican-American War was raging.

A 21-year-old Stevens would later enlist in the elite Dragoons cavalry, which took him to Pennsylvania and Missouri. When stationed in New Mexico, Stevens’ temper flared up. He tried to shoot his commanding officer.

“He got arrested and was sentenced to die,” Butsch said. “However, the secretary of war at the time, which was Jefferson Davis, commuted the sentence. He was placed in prison, but he escaped and joined the Kansas militia.”

There, as he fought the “border ruffians,” Stevens — using the alias “Charles Whipple” — met Brown. The two despised slavery and envisioned an all-out guerrilla war in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Yet the key step of the slave uprising, a raid of Harpers Ferry, was a failure.

State Sen. Cathy Osten, who signed the petition for Stevens’ pardon, said she wants to set the record straight and recognize his commitment to social justice issues.

“We have been so interested in … his [drive] to make sure slavery ended,” Osten said. “That’s the part that really fascinates me: Someone as young as him was able to stand up for something he felt was right.”

Kuznitz writes for the Hartford Courant.