John Brown's Spy: The Adventurous Life and Tragic Confession of John E. Cook

A "compulsively readable" account of the fugitive who betrayed John Brown after the bloody abolitionist raid on Harper's Ferry (Booklist, starred review).

John Brown's Spy tells the nearly unknown story of John E. Cook, the person John Brown trusted most with the details of his plans to capture the Harper's Ferry armory in 1859. Cook was a poet, a marksman, a boaster, a dandy, a fighter, and a womanizer—as well as a spy. In a life of only thirty years, he studied law in Connecticut, fought b...