The September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center towers left New Yorkers stunned and bloodied, but unbowed. It was not the first attempt against the buildings; in 1993 terrorists exploded a car bomb in the basement of one of the towers. At that time, Thomas McLarty, then President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, said, ‘To my memory, we had never really experienced anything like this on American soil.’ In reality, terrorists had struck at Manhattan more than a century earlier.

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In 1864 New York was the nation’s largest city and a world unto itself. When the Southern states seceded from the Union in 1861, some even called for New York City to follow suit and set itself up as a city-state, though it soon elected to stick with the North. At the time more than 814,000 people were crammed onto Manhattan Island, many of them living in near poverty around the slum of Five Points. A few small communities sprinkled the wilderness above 42nd Street, though far-sighted city fathers had purchased the land for Central Park back in 1856, and construction began as a relief project during the panic and depression of the following year. The water of the Hudson and East Rivers was clean enough that people could still swim in it, and they did.

Nevertheless, some things never change. ‘The greatest characteristic of New York is din and excitement,’ said The Stranger’s Guide to New York, a contemporary travel book. ‘Everything is done in a hurry, for all is intense anxiety. It is especially noticeable in the leading thoroughfare of Broadway, where the noise and confusion caused by the incessant passing and re-passing of some 18,000 vehicles a day render it a Babel scene.’ Broadway was indeed the city’s leading avenue. Large hotels stood on nearly every corner, and it was the street where legendary showman Phineas T. Barnum had purchased the old five-story Scudder’s Museum and renamed it Barnum’s American Museum. Here the master showman operated a spectacular place where people of all ages could marvel at his collection of the weird and wonderful or attended entertainments in the Lecture Room. ‘Three Mammoth Fat Girls, Weighing One Ton!’ Barnum’s notice in the New York Times for November 25, 1864, promised, as well as ‘Three Giants, Two Dwarfs, Indian Warriors, French Automatons, &c. Dramatic Entertainments Morning, Afternoon, and Evening.’

New York was also a city torn asunder by divergent politics. For three days in July 1863 it had erupted in protest against the draft, with lynch mobs running wild in the streets and rioters burning houses and businesses. Although the initial reports of more than 1,200 deaths proved exaggerated, as many as 118 people may have been killed before exhausted Union troops, marching straight from their victory at Gettysburg, put down the riot. In the aftermath, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Major General John Dix to oversee the military control of the city.

However, all that was in the past, and November 25, 1864, promised to be a day of celebration. For more than 80 years the date had been remembered as Evacuation Day, the day when the British abandoned New York City during the Revolutionary War. And this year it marked the first time the three famous acting brothers, Edwin Booth, Junius Booth, Jr., and John Wilkes Booth, had performed together. They were putting aside their own political differences to appear at the Winter Garden Theatre in Shakespeare’s play about an assassination, Julius Caesar. The production was a benefit to raise funds for a fine bronze statue of Shakespeare for Central Park.

Yet this Evacuation Day would be remembered for another reason. That evening Confederate agents planned to set New York City aflame. The plot had been concocted a few months earlier by Robert Martin, a former colonel under Confederate cavalry commander John Hunt Morgan (see ‘The Great Escape,’ February 2000). In 1864 Martin traveled to Canada to take part in the Confederate espionage operations being planned there. Like most acts of terrorism, the Confederacy hatched the New York operation as an act of retribution, a way to seek revenge for the Union’s ravaging of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, the breadbasket of the Confederacy. The plot was a simple one. Colonel Martin and seven other agents, dressed as civilians, would cross the Canadian border to aid in an uprising by Copperheads-Northerners who sympathized with the South-on Election Day, November 8. At a predetermined time, the agents would set fire to several of the hotels along Broadway, and the Copperheads would begin an uprising similar to the Draft Riots. Once they had captured General Dix and placed him in irons, they would raise the Confederate flag over the city and declare it an independent entity.

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