The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired With John Brown

Rating:
Summary: Meticulous research, splendid narrative prose
Review: No one has done more than Renehan to explore and explain the Byzantine tale of abolitionist John Brown and his idealistic but confused (and sometimes absurd) northeastern bankers. This is a splendid story that, by polishing with his customary narrative excellence, Renehan has turned into a real gem.

Rating:
Summary: A tangled web revealed
Review: THE SECRET SIX does a wonderful job of revealing the tangled web of intrigue that lay behind John Brown's 1859 incursion at Harpers Ferry. This is stunning stuff: six affluent northeasterners, one of them the husband of poetess Julia Ward Howe and another the leading Unitarian minister of his day, financing terrorism in slave states -- and going about it methodically, calmly, and deliberately. What a story. And so well told.

Rating:
Summary: First-Rate Abolitionist History
Review: THE SECRET SIX paints a vivid portrait of the northeastern aristocrats who financed John Brown's infamous 1859 misadventure at Harpers Ferry. Renehan's elegant, complelling treatment of true historical facts reads like a novel. All the members of the Six -- Franklin Sanborn, Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns and New York's Gerrit Smith -- are brilliantly sketched by Renehan, who also does a first-rate job rendering the unpredictable and unstable John Brown. Most importantly, Renehan proves expert in unscrambling the many Byzantine intrigues that combine to make up the story of Brown and his often-perplexed benefactors.