Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

by Tony Horwitz

“I have discovered the existence of a secret association, having for its object the liberation of the slaves at the South by a general insurrection. The leader of the movement is ‘old John Brown,’ late of Kansas.” The letter stated that small companies of men would “pass down through Pennsylvania and Maryland, and enter Virginia at Harper’s Ferry.” It also warned of a mountain rendezvous in Virginia and a spy placed at an armory in Maryland. The letter reached the secretary of war in late August 1859, when Floyd had fled the Washington summer for Red Sweet Springs, a mountain spa in Virginia. He knew there was no armory in Maryland, and this small mistake in the letter led him to regard it as a hoax. “Besides, I was satisfied in my own mind that a scheme of such wickedness and outrage could not be entertained by any citizens of the United States,” Floyd later stated, in testimony before a Senate committee. “I put the letter away, and thought no more of it.”