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

More than a decade ago Tony Horwitz published Confederates in the Attic, a sprawling travelogue about present-day America's continuing obsession with the Civil War. With Midnight Rising, Horwitz goes back in time and writes an event that helped catalyze the war: John Brown's failed slave 1859 rebellion.

A 59 year old man John Brown who may or may not have been a lunatic led an almost unbelievably improbable attack on the U.S. Armory in Harpers Ferry, at the junction of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. An intelligent but rootless man who had wandered innumerable times between the Northeast and Midwest, Brown believed that he had been put on earth to lead America’s slaves to freedom. After considering any number of ways in which to initiate that process, he fixed on Harpers Ferry, which was then still in Virginia, as West Virginia was not created until 1863, when Union loyalists broke away from Virginia because he believed that an attack there would inspire slaves in Northern Virginia to rise against their masters.