Life
Leary's father, a freeborn African American of mixed race, was a harnessmaker. Lewis Leary was born at Fayetteville, North Carolina. His paternal grandparents were an Irishman, Jeremiah O'Leary, who fought in the American Revolution under General Nathanael Greene, and his mixed-race wife of African, European and Native American descent.
In 1857, Lewis Leary moved to Oberlin. There he married Mary Patterson, a mixed-race woman who was an Oberlin College graduate. Leary became involved with abolitionists in Oberlin, which had an active community. Later, he met John Brown in Cleveland, Ohio.
In 1858, Leary participated in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, when fugitive slave John Price was forcibly taken from the custody of a U.S. Marshal, to prevent his being returned to slavery in the South. Leary was not among the 37 men (12 of them free blacks) who were indicted and jailed for their actions. As a result of negotiations between state officials (who had arrested the US Marshal and his party) and federal officials, only Simon Bushnell and Charles Henry Langston were tried; both were convicted, and served light sentences, in part because of Langston's eloquent speech in their defense.
Leary may have been the first recruit from Oberlin to join Brown's army. He left Mary and their six-month-old daughter Louise at home. Accompanied by John A. Copeland, Leary went to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania to join Brown. Leary died eight days after the attack from wounds suffered in the conflict at Harper's Ferry. Copeland was captured, tried and later executed. After Leary's death, the abolitionists James Redpath (editor for the New York Tribune) and Wendell Phillips helped raise money for Mary and Louise Leary's support and the girl's education.
In 1869 the widow Mary Patterson Leary married again, to the Ohio abolitionist Charles Henry Langston. The family moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where they remained for the rest of their lives. In 1872 Charles and Mary's daughter Caroline Mercer Langston was born. She would become the mother of the renowned poet Langston Hughes.
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