A Confederate Operative In The Deaborn Arsenal

The History of the Twenty-Fourth Michigan of the Iron Brigade included the following nugget of information:

War had come and found the nation unprepared for it. For many months the South had been preparing for the conflict. Nearly all the war material had been shipped from Northern arsenals to the South. At the Dearborn Arsenal eight miles west of Detroit in the summer of 1860, a few boxes of guns were auctioned off at one dollar apiece and the balance sold for a small sum to some mysterious stranger, an agent of the embryo Southern Confederacy.