As soon as an Ohio foundry can cast it and dignitaries can dedicate it, a state historical marker in Culpeper will tell the intriguing story of Dangerfield and Harriet Newby.
Last week, Virginia’s State Board of Historic Resources approved the marker to honor the African American blacksmith and his wife—an idea born from a Black History Month contest sponsored by Gov. Ralph Northam.
Three students from Kings Glen Elementary School in Springfield nominated the Newbys, and their entry was one of five winners statewide.
Some of the couple’s descendants still live in Virginia.
Born into slavery in the Culpeper area, Dangerfield Newby died during John Brown’s Oct. 16-17, 1859, raid on Harper’s Ferry while trying to free his wife and children from bondage.
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The well-built, 6-foot-2 Virginian was the first of Brown’s men to die in the fighting as Brown tried to seize rifles and muskets from the U.S. Armory and equip a runaway-slave army and wage a holy war on what the fiery abolitionist termed the “great sin against God”—slavery.
The marker to Dangerfield and Newby is proposed to be set where State Route 211 and Route 229 meet. It will read: “Dangerfield and Harriet Newby: Dangerfield Newby (ca. 1820-1859), born enslaved, grew up about nine miles southwest of here. He became free in 1858 when his white father and enslaved mother took their children to Ohio. Working as a blacksmith, Newby saved money to buy his wife, Harriet (d. 1884), and their children, who remained enslaved in Virginia and were in danger of being sold to the Deep South. When negotiations for the purchase failed, he joined the abolitionist John Brown in planning an attack designed to incite a slave revolt. During the raid on Harpers Ferry in Oct. 1859, Newby was the first of the raiders to be killed. Harriet and the children were sold to Louisiana but returned to Virginia after the Civil War.”
The unsuccessful raid on Harpers Ferry, then a part of Virginia, was a portent of—and a catalyst for—the American Civil War, which erupted little more than a year later. Ultimately, America’s deadliest conflict freed 4 million enslaved men and women, and led to passage of three civil-rights amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Brown, one of history’s most controversial figures, died a hero to the abolitionist cause. But since then, African American soldiers were all but forgotten.
Newby was one of five Black men among Brown’s 22 fighters and, at 39, the oldest. The others were John Copeland, who was a student at Oberlin College, Shields Green, Lewis Leary and Osborne Perry Anderson, a Fauquier man’s son who later wrote the only insider account of the raid, “A Voice From Harper’s Ferry.” Four of the five were free men; Green had fled slavery in Charleston, S.C.
They are the principal figures in “Five for Freedom,” a recent book by former Washington Post journalist Eugene L. Meyer, who says that their “lives and deaths have long been overshadowed by their martyred leader and who, even today, are little remembered.”
Soon, when the state marker is unveiled in Culpeper, a little less so.
Born enslaved in Fauquier County in 1815, Newby was the son of white Culpeper County slaveowner Henry Newby, a Scottish immigrant, and Elsey (or Ailsey) Pollard, an enslaved Black woman owned by Fauquier landowner John Fox. Henry and Elsey lived as man and wife, though interracial marriage was illegal. Dangerfield was the first of their 11 children.
In the early 1840s, Dangerfield Newby married Harriet Jennings, a woman enslaved by Dr. Lewis A. Jennings of Warrenton. Jennings also owned a Warrenton house, a farm in Brentsville in Prince William County, and property along the Rappahannock River below Fauquier Springs, according to Fauquier historian John Toler.
A blacksmith, Newby was hired out to work on the Rappahannock River Canal, Toler wrote in Piedmont Lifestyle magazine.
The author of “John Brown’s Men: The Lives of Those Killed at Harper’s Ferry,” published in 1899, described Newby as “a quiet man, upright, quick-tempered, and devoted to his family.”
To liberate his family, Henry Newby moved to the free state of Ohio in 1859. Though this move secured Dangerfield’s freedom, his wife and their seven children remained enslaved in Warrenton.
Strapped for money, Jennings determined to sell Harriett south to cotton plantations in Louisiana, where she and her children would fetch a premium price. Life was much harsher for enslaved people in the Deep South.
Dangerfield and Harriet were both literate, and Harriet wrote repeatedly to him, while he was living in Ashtabula County in northeastern Ohio, an abolitionist seat. Increasingly desperate, Harriet implored him to do all he could to free her before she could be sold South.
She addressed her letters to “Dear Husband” and signed them “Your affectionate Wife.”
Harriet was well aware that Jennings was “in want of money,” she told her husband.
“I know not what time he may sell me and then all my bright hops of the futer are blasted,” she wrote Dangerfield. “... if I thought I should never see you, this earth would have no charms fo me. Do all you can for me, which I have no doubt you will.”
On April 22, 1859, Harriet wrote: “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.”
Newby made three deposits in the Bank of Ohio—totaling $742—for that purpose, Meyer wrote.
But Jennings upped the price, by $1,000, according to one account.
Soon after receiving that blow, Newby joined Brown in planning his raid on Harpers Ferry. He died with Harriet’s letters in his pocket.
The raid was a bust. When local residents realized Brown’s small force had attacked the armory, they called up militias and a wild gun battle ensued. The federal government sent 100 Marines—led by Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart—to capture Brown, who holed up with 10 hostages in the arsenal’s brick fire-engine house. Ten of Brown’s men were killed.
According to raider O.P. Anderson, a local citizen shot Dangerfield Newby from a store window on the morning of Oct. 17, when the Virginian was with other raiders on the town’s streets.
Accounts differ as to what happened next.
Popular lore holds that after the raid, the people of Harper’s Ferry took Newby’s body, stabbed it several times, and amputated his limbs. They left his body in an alley to be eaten by hogs.
Today, Hog Alley off High Street in Harpers Ferry is said to have gotten its name from that scene.
But an eyewitness account contradicts that tale, saying hogs uprooted the raiders’ bodies after they were buried on the bank of the Shenandoah River.
In 1899, on the raid’s 40th anniversary—when Reconstruction was over and Jim Crow laws were taking grip—people reburied the remains of Newby and nine other raiders in a common coffin beside the bodies of Brown and his son Watson, on their farm in North Elba, N.Y.
The late Tony Horwitz ended his magisterial book “Midnight Rising: John Brown and the raid that sparked the Civil War” with mention of Harriet and Dangerfield and other raiders.
Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Loudoun County resident, wrote of the celebrated poet Langston Hughes, a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance who was the grandson of Brown raider Lewis Leary.
In old age, Hughes’ grandmother Mary raised him. She’d wrap him in a bullet-riddled shawl she said Leary had worn during the Harpers Ferry fight, Horwitz wrote. He never forgot her stories of Leary, “who went off to die with John Brown,” Hughes recounted.
“My grandmother held me on her lap and told me long, beautiful stories about people who wanted to make the Negroes free,” Hughes recalled.
In 1931, he wrote “October the Sixteenth,” a poem addressed to Black Americans. Its title derives from the date when the raiders began their night march into Harpers Ferry.
Hughes wrote, in part:
“...Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghosts today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town—
Perhaps, You will recall
John Brown...”