While history often remembers John Brown’s assault on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, it forgets 5 Black Americans who joined him, including a man named Dangerfield Newby. Dangerfield Newby’s motivation for joining Brown was rooted in his love for his family,. His story is a powerful reminder of the enduring struggle for freedom by ordinary people. They are worthy of remembering.
The oldest of John Brown’s raiders, Dangerfield Newby was born around 1820 to a white father and an enslaved mother. It may seem incongruous, but Henry Newby and Elsey Pollard, of mixed Native American, African and European ancestry, lived together as husband and wife in Fauquier County, Virginia, now part of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
Many years into their union, Henry Newby was determined to free his enslaved wife and their 11 children from their owner, a man named John Fox. Lacking the funds to purchase them, Newby obtained Fox’s permission to move the family to Ohio, where a state court had ruled that slaves setting foot “upon our shore” (of the Ohio River) would be free.
So, in September 1858, the elder Newbys and their children moved to Bridgeport, in Belmont County, Ohio, across the river from Wheeling, West Virginia. There, most led prosaic lives, raising families and working as laborers, domestics, barbers, and miners. Dangerfield Newby, the eldest of the children, was a blacksmith and plied his trade throughout the state of Ohio.
When he was living in Virginia, Dangerfield had maintained union with an enslaved woman named Harriet, who belonged to a Dr. Lewis Jennings, in Brentsville, then the seat of Prince William County, Virginia. The pair had as many as 7 children. Even though Harriet remained enslaved, and thus unable to marry legally, she and Dangerfield regarded themselves as husband and wife. But it was a union without rights.
When Jennings faced financial setbacks, he decided to sell Harriet and the children south to the cotton plantations in Louisiana.
Life was much harsher for enslaved people on the labor-intensive plantations in the Deep South than it was in the Upper South, and demand was booming for enslaved workers there—Harriet and her children were seen as prime commodities who could fetch a handsome price.
Newby tried to head off the sale, offering to purchase his family from their owner. In 1858 & 1859, from his earnings as a blacksmith, he made three deposits to the Bank of Ohio totaling $742 (about $23,000 in today).
Jennings demanded more—$1,000,—and the deal fell through. As Jennings prepared to sell the family to the highest bidder, Harriet wrote 3 desperate letters to Newby, who was living in Ashtabula County in northeastern Ohio, an abolitionist stronghold.
Throughout this time, it was clear to Newby that negotiations with Jennings would not succeed. So in June Newby met with Captain John Brown, as the famous abolitionist came to be known, who sought to mobilize an army of escaped slaves to join him in a free republic that would be established in Appalachian Mountains and from where they would wage guerrilla wars on valley plantations, liberate more slaves, and, ultimately, end slavery.
Brown was attempting to recruit Black Americans for his planned raid, but when Newby approached him, he was skeptical, thinking Newby wanted money. But the blacksmith was motivated solely by his hope that by joining with Brown he could somehow liberate his enslaved family. Brown took him on.
When Brown and his supporters assembled at a farmhouse five miles from Harpers Ferry to prepare for their assault, Newby brought Harriet’s letters with him. Plaintively, he would ask Brown when he could respond to Harriet’s letters. “Soon, Dangerfield, soon,” Brown would tell him, probably because the group was living clandestinely in the farmhouse. That time never came.
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Image: John Brown, around the time of his 1859 raid.
Newby was quiet and sad, as Brown’s daughter, Annie, would recall years later. In his only known photo, Newby, in his thirties, appears well into middle age, with deep bags under his eyes, and his sad face speaks volumes.
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Image: Dangerfield Newby age in his 30s but looking much older.
On October 16, 1859, a damp and chilly Sunday evening, the raiders marched in double file down a dark country road leading to the ferry. Two men in front shouldered arms, while the rest followed a horse-drawn wagon carrying Brown. They marched in silence, as if in a funeral procession, Osborne Perry Anderson, the raid’s sole survivor and one of the five Black men, later recalled.
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Image of Osborn Perry Anderson, another black man who joined John Brown’s raid.
Crossing the Potomac River bridge, the men quickly seized the arsenal and occupied Harper’s Ferry. Resistance came the following morning, as local militias and armed arsenal workers converged on the scene. By then, Brown, along with several of his men and hostages, had holed up inside the arsenal’s fire engine house, a small brick building that became known as John Brown’s Fort.
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Image of the Harpers Ferry firehouse, where Brien and his men holed up.
Newby was deployed to guard the fort’s entrance to the Shenandoah River bridge to keep open a potential escape route and fend off a potential counterattack. When two men encroached on the perimeter, he fatally shot them both. Newby then tried to retreat to the relative security of the fire engine house, crossing an open area, when a sniper firing from the second floor of a nearby building cut him down.
Lacking bullets, the shooter had instead inserted a six-inch spike into his rifle barrel. This missile struck Newby in the neck and he fell, mortally wounded—the first of Brown’s men to die.
As Newby lay on the street, angry townspeople approached, poked sticks into his wounds and cut off his ears for souvenirs, along with his genitals. Then they left his mutilated body for the hogs. Animals rooted around in his remains, then scampered away.
Dangerfield Newby’s mutilated body stayed in the open for more than a day and a half before his remains were buried with those of seven other raiders in a shallow grave half a mile up the Shenandoah River.
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Contemporary sketch of the Robert E Lee’s forces attacking the firehouse.
Brown's rebellion concluded after 36 hours when 90 marines under Col. Robert E. Lee's command stormed the arsenal firehouse. Brown and four others, including two Black Americans, were captured, tried, convicted, and executed shortly afterward.
But Brown and his men would not die in vain. They eere only the first to go.
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Drawing of Lee’s soldiers battering the door down.
Despite the raid's failure, it had a profound impact, further dividing the nation over slavery and eventually leading to the Civil War, which resulted in an estimated 750,000 deaths and constitutional amendments abolishing slavery, establishing birthright citizenship, and guaranteeing due process and voting rights for formerly enslaved individuals.
Newby’s story embodies a poignant and enduring theme in American history: the relentless pursuit of freedom and justice in the face of overwhelming adversity. Newby's journey, marked by his selfless determination to liberate his enslaved family, reflects the profound sacrifices made by countless individuals during the era of slavery to challenge its horrors.
His tragic, but ultimately heroic, story, as one of John Brown's men in the ill-fated Harpers Ferry raid, illustrates the lengths to which ordinary people were willing to go in their struggle against oppression. Newby's story serves as a stark reminder of the enduring legacy of slavery, the resilience of those who sought to overcome it, and the complex web of human courage, love, and sacrifice that shapes America's tumultuous history.
Dangerfield Newby was not the final member of his family to make a profound sacrifice in the name of freedom. In the upcoming discussion, I will explore the destinies of his wife and four brothers. The Newby family's narrative exemplifies the genuine essence of honor and selflessness in their dedication to the well-being of their loved ones and their commitment to the betterment of humanity.
Thanks for pointing this out. I've always considered John Brown to be a heroic freedom fighter, but he wasn't by himself at Harper's Ferry. It's good to know about all the heroes who fought there.
@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon nomally I hate the american tradition of calling ones offspring after really ugly surnames, but I fully approve of dangerfield! The definition of a badass name
@Deglassco@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon Growing up in Northern Virginia, we took a field trip to Harper's Ferry and learned about John Brown entirely in relation to that location. Now, I live in Lawrence, KS, where, to this day, Brown is revered as hero. Here, I have learned about Bleeding Kansas, events that were omitted from my high school history classes. There seems to be a lot of selective history surrounding Brown, with different stories told. I appreciate you sharing Dangerfield's.
@coreyrayburnyung yes, he certainly was controversial then and somewhat now. He was a complex man. The motivations of the men who accompanied him were varied as well.
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