The Heroic Dangerfield Newby
While history often remembers John Brown’s assault on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, as a catalyst for the Civil War, it tends to overshadow the stories of the five Black Americans who joined him, including a man named Dangerfield Newby. Dangerfield Newby’s motivation, rooted in his love for his family, led him on a unique journey, and his tragic yet heroic narrative serves as a powerful reminder of the enduring struggle against racism and discrimination that ordinary people undertook during this foundational period in American history. They too are worthy of remembering.
There is no more tragic and poignant story than that of Dangerfield Newby, who joined the John Brown ‘s raid to secure freedom for, and be reunited with, his enslaved wife and their children. The oldest of Brown’s raiders, 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, Newby had maintained an enduring 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 seven children. Even though Harriet remained enslaved, and thus unable to marry legally, she and Newby regarded themselves as husband and wife. But it was a union without rights—and 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 and 1859, from his earnings as a blacksmith, he made three deposits to the Bank of Ohio totaling $742 (about $23,000 in today’s dollars).
Jennings demanded more—$1,000, by one account—and the deal fell through. As Jennings prepared to sell the family to the highest bidder, Harriet wrote three increasingly desperate letters to Newby, who was then living in Ashtabula County in northeastern Ohio, an abolitionist stronghold.
The letters, addressed to “Dear Husband” and signed “Your affectionate wife,” were dated April 11, April 22 and August 16, 1859. Newby was, Harriet wrote repeatedly, her “one bright hope.” In the first letter, Harriet reported that “Mrs. gennings,” her master’s wife, had been sick after giving birth to a baby girl, and Harriet had stayed with her “day and night.” Their own children were all well, she wrote, adding, “I want to see you very much … Oh, Dear Dangerfield, come this fall without fail, money or no money. I want to see you so much. That is one bright hope I have before me.”
Harriett received a letter back on April 22 and responded the same day.
“I wrote in my last letter that Miss Virginia had a baby—a little girl. I had to narse her day and night. Dear Dangerfield, you cannot imagine how much I want to see you. Com as soon as you can, for nothing would give more pleasure than to see you. It is the grates Comfort I have is thinking of the promist time when you will be here. Oh, that bless hour when I shall see you once more.”
Finally, on August 16, again just after hearing from Newby, Harriett wrote again:
“It is said Master is in want of money. If so, I know not what time he may sell me, an then all my bright hops of the futer are blasted, for their has ben one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you, for if I thought I should never see you, this earth would have no charms for me.”
Do all you Can for me, witch I have no doubt you will. I want to see you so much.” And with added urgency, she wrote: “I want you to buy me as soon as possible, for if you do not get me some body else will … their has ben one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles that is to be with you.”
Throughout this time, it was increasingly 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 Virginia and from where they would wage guerilla wars on valley plantations, liberate more slaves, and, ultimately, end slavery.
Brown was attempting to recruit African 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, and 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. 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.
Their own children were all well, Harriet wrote, adding, “I want to see you very much … Oh, Dear Dangerfield, come this fall without fail, money or no money. I want to see you so much. That is one bright hope I have before me.”
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 African Americans, later recalled. A funeral procession is, in fact, what it was.
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.
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 he 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.
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 African Americans, were captured, tried, convicted, and executed shortly afterward.
But Brown and his men would not die in vain. They were only the first to go.
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.
Books
Bordewich, Ferguson. Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. New York: Amistad/Harper Collins.
DeCaro, Louis A. John Brown: The Cost of Freedom. New York: International Publishers.
DuBois, William Edward Burghardt. John Brown. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Company.
Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. Vintage.
Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Harvard University Press.
Website Resources
https://web.archive.org/web/20200811104337/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2941.html
https://www.biography.com/activists/john-brown-frederick-douglass-friendship
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2020/06/hearing-frederick-douglass-his-speech-on-john-brown/
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2011/spring/brown.html
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3285