A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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By early November, their anger had grown and metastasized into the need for action. The murder of their beloved general coupled with the destruction of the Shenandoah Valley farms and Sherman’s burning of the city of Atlanta had given them plenty of motivation for revenge.
Now they would take that revenge. What they imagined was a mission that would express the South’s disgust with the Union’s wartime tactics, disrupt the reelection bid of President Abraham Lincoln, and strike terror in the hearts of Northern civilians all at the same time.
They reasoned that there was no better way to do all that than attack Northern towns and cities. First on the list would be a training mission on the little town of St. Albans, Vermont, just across the border from Canada. If that mission went well, there were other, much bigger targets that could be hit.
New York City was just 330 miles south of St. Albans. It was an easy train ride from Niagara Falls.
Chapter 1
“Decayed Is Here”
The city smelled. It actually stank as well it might with cabs and omnibuses pulled by hundreds of horses walking the streets every day. Those horses left behind tons of pungent manure baking in the sun for hours before street sweepers came to work each night. Besides the excrement on Broadway, an awful stench came from the meatpacking district where packers dumped offal from the daily slaughtering of ten thousand beeves into the Hudson River.
It was dangerous. At least Charles Dickens thought so in 1842 when he made a famous visit to Five Points in New York City, just northeast of city hall. Dickens returned to London to write, “Other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show: hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder: all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.”
The year 1863 had been a very deadly year for New Yorkers because of the July Draft Riots. Officials, mindful of the city’s image, set the official death toll at one hundred but that number may have been underestimated by ten times. Still, 1863 was an aberration. The most common crime that middle-and upper-class New Yorkers faced in 1864 was pickpocketing while strolling Broadway.
It was crowded. Most of the city’s 814,000 residents (one quarter of them Irish immigrants after the potato famine) lived below 26th Street. Lower-class families crowded into single rooms of fifteen thousand dark, dank, and poorly constructed tenant houses, commonly called tenements. So many of these tenements were clustered in the Lower East Side that the neighborhood was considered one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world. Apartment houses built to house twenty people held one hundred. And city building codes did not require fire escapes.
As crowded as the city was, its growth was accelerating at a pace that made even the most ardent boosters nervous. Twenty years earlier in 1844, newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant had said, “Commerce is devouring inch by inch the coast of the island, and if we would rescue any part of it for health and recreation it must be done now.”
Bryant’s plea was eventually heeded by the city’s Common Council. Central Park’s construction began in 1858 and continued during the war. The 800-acre construction site itself was a favorite destination for New Yorkers who marveled at the sheer size of the landscaping being undertaken in a city where neighborhood trees were often removed in favor of buildings.
But for all its faults, New York City, in those days consisting only of the population on Manhattan Island, was also the most important city in the United States.
It was larger than Philadelphia, the nation’s second largest city by more than 265,000 people. Brooklyn City, the nation’s third largest, had 266,000 people, fewer than a third of its neighbor across the East River.
New York had been one of the nation’s most active ports since Colonial days, but after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 linking the Hudson River with western New York State, the city became even more an export and import magnet. By 1860, more ships were entering and leaving New York’s harbor than all the other ports in the nation combined. The Hudson River docks attracted schooners while the East River docks attracted oceangoing ships heading worldwide.
Starting from the southern end, the city sprawled northward rather than growing upward. The tallest structure in 1864 was the top of the 284-foot spire of Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall Street. The spire’s tiny observation deck was an attraction out-of-town tourists climbed to when they wanted a bird’s-eye view of the city. Most buildings were no taller than eight stories, which was prudent since fire department ladders only reached four stories, and fire hoses threw water no higher than six. Contractors could not build taller buildings because each successive floor added weight to the first floor, increasing the chance of collapse.
Height restrictions on new buildings started to ease in 1848 with the introduction in the United States of cast iron as an architectural choice for commercial buildings. Architects now had the ability to construct structurally stable buildings as tall as people were willing to walk up because cast-iron walls could be bolted to deeply buried cast-iron footers. The city, locked into thirteen miles long by two miles wide Manhattan Island, could now grow up instead of out, though the word “skyscraper” was still years in the future.
Cast-iron buildings, which were fire resistant compared to wood buildings, were often falsely promoted as fireproof. In hot fires, iron melted, allowing flames to seep inside and set the interior wood walls ablaze. Still, cast iron was an improvement over brick and stone buildings as the mortar between bricks melted at much lower temperatures than iron.
The lifestyles that truly set New York City’s citizens apart from each other in the mid-nineteenth century were the building of private homes for the upper crust. The vast majority of the city’s citizens, even the middle class and wealthy, lived in rented, multifamily structures that could range from luxury-filled hotels to drafty, dangerous tenements.
Money was no object or deterrent to the city’s top social class who moved to the northern edge of the city starting in the mid-1830s to build huge houses along Fifth Avenue starting at Washington Square and heading north. Even mayors, who claimed to be just like the men who elected them, moved to the fashionable address of Fifth Avenue, even though the avenue was so far from the center of the city that it had not even been paved until the 1840s.
At all levels of social classes, residents of Manhattan had the best entertainment that could be found in North America. If a famed European singer or actor planned to tour the United States, the citizens of New York saw him or her first.
There was a range of entertainment options. There was the Academy of Music at 14th Street and Irving Place, the city’s first opera house, which was a huge 4,000-seat building that took more than two years to construct before opening in 1854. When the newest of the city’s wealthy found that the city’s old aristocracy would not sell them season tickets for the Academy, they started the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883.
In 1860, four thousand of the city’s socialites were invited to a party at the Academy to welcome Edward VII, the 19-year-old Prince of Wales on his first visit to the United States. Queen Victoria’s son danced with scores of New York’s most eligible young women until he slipped away to visit the city’s best-known brothels.
Theaters were a focal point of the city’s social life. Prominent New Yorkers packed theaters to see their favorite musicians performing in blackface. It was during such a minstrel show in 1859 that the “walk around” song of Dixie was premiered at Mechanics Hall at 442 Broadway by an Ohio banjo player named Daniel Decatur Emmett. Emmett’s band stayed booked in New York so long that it was weeks before Southerners even became aware of the song extolling the joy of living “in the land of cotton.”
More serious theatergoers visited Niblo’s Garden Theatre at Broadway and Prince Street and the even finer Winter Garden Theatre at Broadway and Bond Street. It was at the Winter Garden that famed actor Edwin Booth performed Julius Caesar each night for more than one hundred performances. On the night of November 25, 1864, Booth hit on an idea to raise money to erect a statue to William Shakespeare in Central Park. He convinced his brothers, Junius and John Wilkes, to appear