A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ could not put on his gray uniform and strap on his pistols. From this point in the war forward, he would be wearing civilian clothes. He had been ordered to Canada. Hines told Morgan that he had been asked by Jefferson Davis to join Jacob Thompson and Clement Clay, Commissioners in the Confederate Secret Service, in the effort to convince the Copperheads in Illinois and Indiana to throw off the yoke of Union domination.

      Morgan may have envied the adventure Hines was undertaking. Morgan himself never regained the old vigor that he had early in the war. When his brother-in-law Duke, who had been exchanged for some Union officers, saw him in early September 1864 for the first time in nearly a year, Duke was shocked at Morgan’s appearance: “He was greatly changed. His face wore a weary, care-worn expression, and his manner was totally destitute of its former ardor and enthusiasm.”

      Several days later, in Greeneville, Tennessee, Morgan’s sentries were surprised by Union calvarymen in the predawn darkness as the sentries waited for daylight to clean their weapons of the moisture from the rain that had been steadily falling all night long. When Morgan rushed from the house where he had been sleeping, he was shot down by several Union cavalrymen who had been tipped to his presence by a young slave boy who had heard of the Union patrol.

      Once Morgan was shot down, one Union cavalryman shouted, “I’ve killed the horse thief!” He then jumped down from his horse, retrieved Morgan’s body, threw it across the neck of his horse, and paraded it before his commander. The Union commander reprimanded his soldier and had him leave the general’s body in Greeneville so that it could be properly buried. Morgan’s death shocked the few remaining survivors of the regiments he had formed in the fall of 1861.

      “Any one of us—all of us—would gladly have died in his defense, and each one would have envied the man who lost his life defending him. So much was he trusted that his men never dreamed of failing him in anything that he attempted. In all engagements he was our guiding star and hero,” wrote Lieutenant Kelio Peddicord.

      Hines must have grieved over the senseless murder of his former commander at the hands of jubilant Union cavalrymen who could have easily taken an unarmed man prisoner. But in September 1864, Hines had a mission to complete, so he had no time to consider the death of his friend. Before Election Day in November, Hines wanted to free his old friends from the Second Kentucky Cavalry who were then imprisoned along with seven thousand other Confederates at Camp Douglas, outside of Chicago. In Hines’s mind, that would be the best revenge for Morgan’s murder: the release of battle-hardened, angry, hungry soldiers into the streets of Chicago.

      Up in Canada, other officers who had ridden with Morgan were regularly gathering in their hotel rooms winnowing down the number of Confederate volunteers who were willing to go back into the United States for behind-the-lines missions. 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.

I

      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 СКАЧАТЬ