Manhattan Burning
October 03, 2024 at 03:30PM
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Betsy Golden Kellem | The Atavist Magazine | September 2024 | 2,055 words (8 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 155, “City on Fire.”
The first fire bell rang out at the St. James Hotel at a quarter to nine in the evening. A guest had noticed smoke curling under the door of the room next to his and rushed to the front desk to report it. Upon entering the room, hotel staff found flames spreading across the bedding, which reeked of turpentine. Matchsticks littered the floor alongside a black satchel holding a small glass bottle of liquid. The fire, which was still small, was quickly put out. The man who was staying in the room, who had given his name as John School, was nowhere to be found.
Ten minutes later, a similar discovery was made nearly two miles away at the St. Nicholas Hotel. A bystander claimed to have seen two mysterious men hurrying out of the lobby. Soon after, a fire was discovered on an upper floor of the nearby Lafarge House hotel.
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It was November 25, 1864, a clear, cool Friday just after Thanksgiving, and New York City was thick with crowds of people headed out for the night or just enjoying a downtown stroll. The jovial mood shifted sharply as the sounds of alarms erupted in the streets of Manhattan. Frantic guests and staff found rooms aflame at hotel after hotel, including the Metropolitan, the Belmont, Lovejoy’s, Tammany Hall, and the Fifth Avenue. At most of these establishments the particulars were largely the same: sheets, blankets, and furniture piled atop mattresses in a tinder heap; apothecary vials left behind at the scene; guestbook listings indicating that a young man with a generic name had checked into the room.
Disinclined to lose paying customers to the mounting terror outside its walls, the management at Niblo’s Garden, a theater next to the Metropolitan Hotel, sent a young boy onstage with a sign hastily painted with “NO FIRE” in large letters. Nearby, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum wasn’t so lucky. Around 9 p.m., someone broke open a vial of flammable liquid in the museum’s fifth-floor stairwell, and a fire instantly ignited. Thousands of people had gathered for Barnum’s promise of extra performances on Evacuation Day, the anniversary of British troops’ departure from Manhattan after the American Revolution. Among other offerings, Barnum had lined up “three mammoth fat girls,” a collection of French automata, Native tribespeople, and live capybaras and kangaroos. Staff were able to extinguish the flames in the stairwell before any real damage was done. Still, a cry of “Fire!” sent Barnum’s audience running for the exits.
Over at the Winter Garden theater on Broadway, the house was full for a one-night-only performance of Julius Caesar, a benefit intended to raise money to purchase a statue of William Shakespeare to be placed in Central Park. The play’s cast featured the three thespian sons of the legendary Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth: Junius Jr., Edwin, and John Wilkes, on stage together for the first (and only) time. The Great Booth Benefit was the hot ticket of the season; orchestra seats, normally less than a dollar, went for five.
The crowd of 2,000 roared when the brothers made their entrance in the first act. The audience may not have noticed the distant sound of fire-engine bells at the start of act two, but soon enough the din was overwhelming. Someone saw firefighters outside the theater’s windows, near the Lafarge House next door. A man in the dress circle registered his assumption out loud. “The theater is on fire!” he shouted. He was wrong, but it was enough for alarm to spread through the house. Theatergoers abruptly stood, scanning their surroundings for flames and a path to the nearest exit. Edwin Booth stepped to the front of the stage to calm the audience, assuring them in his trademark low tone, “There is no danger.”
The performance resumed, and the New York Herald’s reviewer later dubbed it an example of the “high standard of our public entertainments”—no other theater scene, the reviewer said, could purport to offer “three tragedians, or even one, comparable to any one of the Booths.” Still, a lot more had transpired outside the theater than the audience at the Winter Garden suspected: While the Booth brothers played out Caesar’s untimely end on stage, Confederate arsonists were attempting to burn New York City to the ground.
The next morning’s New York Times reported that the city had been “startled last evening by the loud and simultaneous clanging of fire-bells in every direction, and the alarming report soon spread from street to street that a preconcerted attempt was being made by rebel emissaries … to burn New-York and other Northern cities, in retaliation for the devastation of rebel territory by Union armies.” Coverage suggested that the as yet unidentified arsonists’ plan had been to set fire to various buildings filled with people, divide the authorities’ attention, and then sow further chaos with additional fires, including at the city’s harbor.
The Booth brothers bickered over the news during breakfast the next morning at Edwin’s home in Manhattan. Junius offered that in San Francisco, vigilante groups would have dragged the arsonists into the street and hanged them by now. Abraham Lincoln had only just been reelected for a second term as president, and Edwin, who had cast his ballot for Lincoln, proudly stated that his vote was surely for the Union and an end to the Civil War, now in its fourth terrible year. At this, John Wilkes could not keep silent. His brothers had no idea that, in the weeks leading up to their benefit performance, he had met with Confederate operatives to devise a plan to kidnap the president and hold him hostage. Now John Wilkes spat angrily that Lincoln would make himself king of America, and that the fires were fair retribution for Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s recent campaign in the Shenandoah Valley.
Edwin goaded his brother, asking, “Why don’t you join the Confederate army?” John replied bitterly, “I promised mother I would keep out of the quarrel, if possible, and I am sorry that I said so.”
At that, Edwin kicked him out of the house.
As with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the lead-up to the arson campaign on November 25, 1864, was long, ugly, and both actively and tacitly encouraged by powerful men.
It is easy to think of Civil War politics dividing neatly along the Mason-Dixon line, and to assume that New York City, jewel of the North, was a Union stronghold immune even to the suggestion of Confederate agitation. This was not the case. The city was turbulent, the site of sometimes violent clashes over issues of class, race, and national allegiance. Some of these events would echo through time: As with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, for instance, the lead-up to the arson campaign on November 25, 1864, was long, ugly, and both actively and tacitly encouraged by powerful men.
By the mid-19th century, the Era of Good Feelings was in America’s rearview mirror, and nowhere was this more apparent than in New York. Financial speculation, unstable commodities pricing, and both British and U.S. monetary policies led to the Panic of 1837 and a period of economic depression during which the city saw mass unemployment levels and riots over the price of flour. The elite were too far ahead in white-glove excess to offer any sort of attainable example of prosperity—nor would they wish to—and explosive growth in immigration made it harder for people in New York’s tenements to compete for available jobs. White working-class New Yorkers increasingly felt not only alienated but also motived to express their dissatisfaction.
City politicians manipulated communities and their loyalties to this end. Chief among these individuals was mayor Fernando Wood, described by his own biographer as “almost dictatorial.” Wood was not above using the largely Irish Dead Rabbits gang for his own muscle, even as his political sympathies lay with the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party. His municipal police were so corrupt that the state authorities put the city’s law enforcement under their control. Three years later, speaking in Syracuse at a gathering to select New York’s delegates for the Democratic National Convention, Wood boomed with pride that “not one man in this delegation has ever been tainted with free-soil heresies or abolition proclivities,” and that the best course of action was clear: “Let the South alone.” The same year, Wood purchased the New York Daily News (a now defunct paper, not to be confused with the current publication of the same name) and installed his brother Benjamin as its head, assuring himself a friendly mouthpiece throughout the war.
By January 1861, when South Carolina had formally seceded, Wood’s message grew bolder. He recommended that New York secede as well, so that, “as a free city, [it] may shed the only light and hope of a future reconstruction of our once blessed Confederacy.” In language eerily similar to that used by right-wing policy architects in 2024, Wood warned, “We are in the midst of a revolution bloodless as yet.” That November, Wood spoke before constituents at the Volks Garten, a German beer hall on the Bowery. A huge bonfire raged outside the building, clogging the air with thick smoke. Inside, members of the German Democratic Club made sure that the press table was well stocked with frothy mugs of lager and wine by the bottle, and a band played “I Wish I Was in Dixie.” Wood whipped up the crowd with a speech in which he claimed that the Union government had far exceeded its authority, interfering with daily liberties and subsuming citizens under tyranny.
Wood’s bravado was typical of Northern dissenters against the Union. The movement was not especially uniform: Some advocates called themselves Peace Democrats, others Copperheads. Still others considered themselves Sons of Liberty, in the vein of their Revolutionary forebears. They included Southern transplants, states’ rights enthusiasts, businessmen who depended on the South’s cotton crops, and racist opponents of the “Black Republican” party, as they called it. What this wide-ranging bunch shared was deep dissatisfaction over Union policy. They made Lincoln the common target of their rage, and in New York they were powerful: The city twice snubbed Lincoln at the presidential ballot box, even as the rest of the state gave him the votes needed for electoral victory.
In 1863, after two years of war, the federal government instituted a draft for the Union army. Not only was this unappealing to many New Yorkers who opposed the war or supported the Confederacy, but draftees were allowed to pay $300 to avoid service, and much of the public was furious that wealthy residents would be able to buy their way out of the army. There were riots for the better part of a week—“a saturnalia of pillage and violence,” as one paper put it—during which white mobs killed at least 12 Black residents and terrorized thousands more.
Public opinion about the war was also shaped by covert operations. The Union and the Confederacy each engaged in secretive maneuvers, and every time an incident rose to the level of media attention, readers became livid. In March 1864, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren was shot dead in a failed undercover Union attack on Richmond. At first glance Dahlgren, only 21 at the time, may have seemed too young to be leading a secret raid. The leg he had left behind at Gettysburg spoke to greater steel and experience. Papers purportedly found on Dahlgren’s corpse detailed his mission. “The men must keep together and well in hand,” read Dahlgren’s orders, “and once in the city it must be destroyed and Jeff. Davis and Cabinet killed.” Questions soon arose about the papers’ authenticity. Still, the documents stirred outrage among supporters of the Confederacy. Reports that Dahlgren’s body was displayed at the rail station in Richmond in turn incensed Unionists.
By the fall of 1864, when Sherman had taken Atlanta and General Philip Henry Sheridan was running rampant over the Shenandoah Valley, Confederate sympathizers were angrier than ever. If the Union meant to play dirty, they felt, retribution was all but necessary. The Richmond Whig suggested burning Union cities, and claimed that support for the Confederacy was sufficiently strong north of the Mason-Dixon that one need only walk the streets of New York or Philadelphia and offer to pay recruits to assist in the covert task. And if that seemed too risky, there were plenty of “daring men” in Canada who were willing to help.
Robert Cobb Kennedy was one of those men.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/03/new-york-city-arson-violence-1864/
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