Most accounts of John Brown’s October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry focus on Brown, his radical plan to spark an armed slave revolt, and his execution for treason. The fates of Brown’s eighteen accomplices are often overlooked. Meyer, a former longtime Washington Post reporter and editor, rectifies this with his detailed profile of the lives and deaths of the five African Americans among Brown’s raiders. Of the five, two, Dangerfield Newby, son of a white man and an enslaved mother, and Lewis Leary, a free black man, died at the scene. Two others, John Copeland and Shields Green, a fugitive slave, were executed. The fifth, Osborne Perry Anderson, a member of Brown’s provisional congress, escaped and published the single insider account of Brown’s raid, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry.
