"what's good about this new book, I think, is that it's not just about the atrocities. It's about the history that's been lost to us of people who resisted, that there was a movement in this country of armed resistance. John Brown was financed by a black woman-she gave him thirty thousand dollars in gold to buy fifteen thousand rifles, which he did. At the Chatham convention where Harper's Ferry was being planned, the majority of people there were black and they came up with a constitution which demanded a black state within the United States. There was a really complicated revolutionary movement prior to the Civil War. What has come down to us is this notion of John Brown, this flaming, crazy, white man who was patriarchal and patronizing-and that's not the historical case at all. When he was leading the raid on Harper's Ferry, Mary Ellen Pleasant was down south dressed as a man trying to organize slaves to tell them there was going to be an insurrection and they were supposed to rise up."