Cover image for "A vast and fiendish plot" : the Confederate attack on New York City
"A vast and fiendish plot" : the Confederate attack on New York City
Title:
"A vast and fiendish plot" : the Confederate attack on New York City
Author:
Johnson, Clint, 1953-
Personal Author:
Publication Information:
New York : Citadel Press, [2010]

©2010
Physical Description:
xii, 308 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, map ; 23 cm
Summary:
One of the Civil War's more alarming might-have-beens is reconstructed in this history that recounts the attempt by Confederate secret agents to burn down Manhattan on the night of November 25, 1864, using what they called Greek fire, an incendiary concoction that ignited spontaneously on contact with air. The fires, set in rooms at various hotels around the city, fizzled from lack of oxygen because the arsonists left the windows closed, but the author's meticulous study of Manhattan's 19th-century flammability shows how easily it could have launched a citywide inferno. Johnson sets the incident in the context of the Union Army's burnings of rebel cities and farms, the bumbling efforts of Confederate agents in Canada to foment insurrection in the North, and the pro-Southern sympathies of prominent New Yorkers who connived at the arson plot. Johnson's comprehensive account of this usually footnoted episode shows how close it came to becoming a major tragedy.
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780806531311
Format :
Book