…at Harpers Ferry.

The February calendar at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park is blank.  No events scheduled.  Until this Jan. 4, every Sunday featured an hour-long history talk (“The Story Behind the Scenery”) given by a Park Ranger recounting the significant role of the former federal arsenal town in the fight to end slavery. Notably, the Park Service also annually had held a mid-October weekend of events commemorating John Brown’s Oct. 16-18, 1859 raid, in which he and a small band of 18, including five African Americans, seized the town and attempted to incite a slave insurrection to topple the hated institution of slavery.

But that event (“Sacrifices & Circumstances: 165th Anniversary of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry“) had been “CANCELED,” according to the official Park Service website. Welcome to the Trump’s Orwellian revisionist history, in which America’s sins are either sanitized or completely erased from public view.

The times they are a changing–and not for the better. Yet, history lives on, in often surprising ways.

Descendants of Dangerfield Newby, the first of John Brown‘s raiders to fall at the Ferry, have been telling the story in fictionalized accounts that evoke the past and resonate in the present, at a time when the fight for freedom remains more urgent than ever. It’s a complicated story to tell, but let’s begin.

At 39, Dangerfield Newby was the oldest of the five African Americans with Brown. He was a man of mixed race–his mother Elsie Pollard was enslaved, his father Henry Newby was a white slaveholder in Culpeper County, Virginia.  Elsie’s owner was another man, John Fox.  Still, Henry and Elsie lived as husband and wife and had 12 children, of whom Dangerfield was the oldest. A blacksmith by trade, Dangerfield established a relationship with a slave named Harriet owned by a Dr. Jennings in Brentsville, in adjoining Prince William County, and they had as many as seven children.

Then, with permission from Fox, Henry Newby moved his family to the free state of Ohio. There Dangerfield sought to raise money to purchase Harriet and their children, an effort that became more urgent when he learned that Jennings planned to sell Harriet and their children south, where conditions were much worse for the enslaved.

Desperate to raise money to buy his family, Dangerfield plied his blacksmith skills throughout Ohio, but Jennings kept raising the price. Then Dangerfield met John Brown and joined his raid on Harper’s Ferry in a quixotic attempt to free his children and Harriet, who wrote that he was her “one bright hope.”  That, of course, did not happen. After Dangerfield’s grisly death, Harriet and the children were sold south to a Louisiana plantation owner. She remarried, to a member of the U.S. Colored Troops from Berkeley County (now West Virginia). They had three more children, and she died in 1884 in the Mount Vernon area.

But her descendants survived.

Their story comprises an essential part of my non-fiction book Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army  and led to a state highway plaque being placed in May 2021 in northwestern Culpeper County, near Dangerfield’s birthplace.

In my research, I met descendants Sherrie Carter, who ran a crafts shop in Warrenton, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Ashton Robinson 3d, who lives in tiny Cannonville, Utah.

And then, in March 2025, I met Brianna Wheeler, from Portland, Oregon, at Harper’s Ferry, where we both spoke to a receptive audience about the events of 1859 and their aftermath.  More recently, I became acquainted with Terry Newby, a lawyer who lives in Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Terry has written a roman a clef based on his own family history entitled Dangerfield’s Promise.

Both authors, according to family lore, are descended from Dangerfield and Harriet Newby, and both have published books based on what they were told is their legacy — and their ties to the man, Dangerfield Newby, who gave his life to free his family from slavery. The journeys of both authors began with stories handed down by their grandmothers. Brianna’s book, Altogether Different, as she writes, is a “unique blend of memoir, creative nonfiction and illustration.”

For the protagonist in Terry’s book, a Dr. Thomas Turner, based loosely on himself, “there’s a modern thread to this story,” he told me.  “The theme is the past isn’t the past, not even over. We’re living all this stuff right now. What’s going on here in Minnesota with ICE is insane. I live in a suburb, and ICE has been in our city. I’m an African-American man, and I know what it’s like to be profiled by the police. ICE is going after mostly white women and detaining them. These are white people standing up aga9inst an injustice, the same as John Brown did. Look what happened to Dangerfield in John Brown’s raid fighting against the institution of slavery. He felt he had no choice but to take action against an unjust government institution. People protesting ICE are doing the same thing.”

Newby is currently working on a sequel, to be called Dangerfields’ Progress, based on what happened to Harriet and their children after the Civil War.

I urge you to buy and read both books, and I also invite you to buy Five for Freedom, for the full story of the five African Americans who went with John Brown to Harper’s Ferry in October 1859, the world into which they were born and raised, their lives and deaths and the aftermath right down to the present day. It is a story from the past that is now more relevant than ever, as malevolent forces seek to erase our history on the eve of our country’s 250th anniversary. For those who prefer not to buy from Amazon, Five for Freedom is also available for purchase from Bookshop.org.

P.S. I am now also posting on Substack. Some overlap but mostly new and different. I invite you to subscribe. Find me here.