At the start of the novel, Flashman leaves Calcutta before the wrath of a cuckolded husband can find him. He proceeds to South Africa, where by a chance meeting he reunites with John Charity Spring (whom he had worked for as a slaver and seen shanghaied in earlier times). Spring uses his daughter, Miranda, and her feminine wiles to have Flashman drugged and sent to the United States, where charges against his old aliases still exist. Flashman manages to avoid the authorities, but Crixus (one of the chiefs of the Underground Railroad) finds him and tries to convince him to join John Brown's attempt to start a slave rebellion. One of Crixus' followers, a black man named Joe Simmons, actually works for the Kuklos, a possible forerunner of the Ku Klux Klan. They also want Flashman to help Brown, but in order to start a civil war. One last doublecross exists: the wife of the leader of the Kuklos works for Allan Pinkerton, who brings Flashman to meet William H. Seward. Seward, considered by many at that time to be the next President of the United States, also wants Flashman to join with Brown, but to slow him down and prevent the raid into the South from ever happening, and therefore prevent civil war. Of course Flashman fails at this, and he becomes an eyewitness to the whole event.