I had believed, when I first agreed to write to you, that it was my task to tell Father's untold story, to fill out the historical record with my eye-witness account so as to revise once and for all the received truth about John Brown and his sons and followers...But now it seems that I am not so much revising history as making a confession of a crime, a terrible, secret crime which - if I had been able to keep to my original intentions - would have remained safely hidden. A crime still known by me alone.