Eugene L. Meyer, "Five For Freedom"

Eugene L. Meyer discusses his book, "Five For Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown's Army" at Politics and Prose on 6/2/18.

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.

Eugene L. Meyer is an award-winning journalist and author and a former longtime reporter and editor at the Washington Post whose work has also appeared in the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, and many other national and regional publications. He is a contributing editor for Bethesda magazine and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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Produced by Tom Warren