I don’t know anything about swords, so I can’t tell you what they were, but they were a gift to Brown from “General” Lucius Bierce, Ambrose’s uncle, who had his own colorful history with the Ohio militia from a few decades prior.
One of his friends and neighbors in Akron was a wild-haired, cold-eyed fellow-Connecticut emigrant named John Brown. As an attorney, Lucius was well acquainted with the chronically litigious Brown, who also happened to be a coreligionist in the local Congregational church (although much more fervent–fanatical, really–than the increasingly skeptical Lucius). Following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 and the subsequent outbreak of violence in the affected territories, Brown determined to follow his erratic star and join the antislavery forces there. When he left Ohio, he took with him, compliments of Lucius Bierce, a wagonload of arms and ammunition somewhat questionably appropriated from a disbanded militia store in Tallmadge. Included in the haul were the broadswords carried by Lucius and his men in the Windsor campaign, the same broadswords that Brown and his henchmen would use to butcher a family of proslavery settlers on the banks of Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, a few months hence. If Lucius felt any complicity in the crime, he never let it bother him. When Brown was hanged in December 1859 for the bloody fiasco at Harpers Ferry, Lucius urged that Akron’s courts and businesses be closed, and mourning bells tolled for a solid hour across the town. At a rally that evening, he gave his old friend a rousing send-off, praising him as “the first martyr in the irrepressible conflict of liberty with slavery.” Said Lucius, “Thank God I furnished him with arms, and right good use did he make of them. Men like Brown may die, but their acts and principles will live forever.” Unlike, one might add, their victims.