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 The troops had by now been withdrawn, and the city which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.
