November 25, 1864---Overthrowing The Union: The Confederate Army of New York

NOVEMBER 25, 1864:      

The Confederate Army of New York: 

Just as he had authorized the members of “The Camp Douglas Conspiracy” to disrupt Election Day in Chicago (a plan which ultimately failed),  Jacob Thompson, the Confederacy’s Toronto-based Director of Terror Operations likewise authorized  the “Confederate Army of New York”  (all eight of them) to do the same in Manhattan. Their Election Day plot had been foiled by the Union’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, who had dispatched thousands of Federal troops to the city to keep order in the face of inchoate threats of trouble. The troops had by now been withdrawn, and the city which never sleeps was nevertheless drowsing comfortably in the aftermath of the Union’s recent military victories.  

The terrorists had not left the city. Instead, having been frustrated on Election Day, they cast about for options, finally deciding to strike on the Union’s Thanksgiving Day. And this is where one of the weirdest and least-known stories of the Civil War begins. 

Just as the Camp Davis Conspiracy was meant to break the Union apart by stimulating the creation of a “Northwestern Confederacy,” the task of the Confederate Army of New York was to inspire the Copperheads of the North’s largest city to take the metropolis out of the Union. C.S. President Jefferson Davis was convinced that 490,000 pro-Confederate New Yorkers would flock to the South’s banner if given the chance. The plot was to raise the Confederate flag over City Hall after the attack and lead 25,000 (mysteriously appearing and readily armed) Copperheads on a raid of the city’s arsenal.

Needless to say, there was no Confederate Silent Majority, either in the Midwest or in New York City. Davis’ delusion, if real, would have meant that virtually every New Yorker was hiding a Bonnie Blue Flag in the garret. 

Davis was beginning to lose his grip on reality, a process that had begun with the discovery a year earlier of the Dahlgren Letter authorizing his assassination. The process of Davis’ decompensation would not end with the end of the war.

“New York is worth twenty Richmonds” opined one Southern editor who was foolish enough to let slip in the pages of his paper plans for the Confederacy’s reign of terror in the North.

Just as with the Camp Douglas conspirators, Thompson had to settle for what he could get. In Chicago, the task of seizing the city ultimately fell to a gang of 25 pickpockets and road agents. In New York, Thompson had sense at least to dispatch dedicated Confederates (whose accents immediately marked them out as Southerners) to do the job, but he could only find eight willing men, all of whom had ridden with John Hunt Morgan (a plus) but all of whom had a penchant for the bottle (a big minus). 

On Thanksgiving Day, one of the Confederates was evicted from his hotel for drunkenly haranguing the hotel’s Thanksgiving Day dinner guests about the morality of secession --- in his Alabama accent. As he was tossed outside, he drew more attention to himself by making threats about seeing the place in ashes. Since all of the Good Ole Boys had been giving thanks too vociferously (to whom and for what?) on Thursday, the deadly attack was postponed until Friday.  

The eight men were like babes in the woods. Choosing effective targets did not seem to matter. None of the Confederates had ever visited New York before and were hopelessly confused by the hustle and bustle and varied neighborhoods. 

The weapon of choice for the eight men consisted of 144 incendiary vials of so-called “Greek fire,” a chemical compound obtained from a Confederate sympathizer living on Washington Square.

The men spent no time trying to find the most inflammable areas of the city (Five Points and Hell’s Kitchen probably would have gone up like tinder, and an explosion at the Manhattan Gas Works would have rocked the whole of lower Manhattan).  Instead, they visited the city’s barrooms and bawdy houses, excellent places all to suffer inflammations of a type.

Not one of the group knew a thing about working with incendiaries. They never even bothered to train themselves to handle the explosives (except for a dry run at midday in the midst of Central Park which resulted in a small grass fire, hurriedly stamped out as it attracted a curious crowd). At that point they were more dangerous to themselves than to others.

The fact that Friday, November 25th was a windless night impressed them not in the least. Instead of waiting for more propitious wind conditions that would have turned any fair-sized fire into a conflagration, the men just set 20 small fires more or less at random.

Their targets were businesses and hotels along Broadway clustered around City Hall. The Confederates started their terror attack by setting fires in their hotel rooms using their own clothes as fuel.

All of the hotel room fires either fizzled out on their own or were discovered by hotel staff and quickly put out.  What the conspirators did not grasp was basic physics --- that the vials needed a sustained air flow to catch and burn. Instead, by trying to be secretive, they ended up placing the vials in odd corners and under tables and desks where the lack of fresh air succeeded in smothering any flames. P.T. Barnum’s Museum and some of the hotels did become smoky. Shouts of “Fire!” disrupted the performance of Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden Theatre. It was the first time the famed acting family of the Booth brothers, Junius, Edwin and John Wilkes had ever been on stage in the same play.

Had the night been windier or the targets better chosen, or the handling of the explosives more professional, the Confederate Army of Manhattan just might have destroyed New York City. 

As it was, with typical New York disdain, the denizens of Gotham laughed it all off as a job badly done. The New York Times correctly called it A Rebel Plot. The New York Herald with a touch of hyperbole called it A Vast and Fiendish Conspiracy. When asked how they could be so certain that Southerners were behind the setting of the fires, the editors of the New York World retorted in print:  “Come now! Would New Yorkers ever be so stupid?”

Although all eight men escaped back to Canada, one, Robert Cobb Kennedy (a relation of General Howell Cobb C.S.A.) was caught sneaking back into the United States at Niagara Falls. Tried for the plot, he claimed that it had been “a reckless joke.” Kennedy himself was the butt of a good old- fashioned New York City-type reckless joke when he was hanged at Fort LaFayette in New York Harbor on March 25, 1865.