This audacious plot quickly fell apart. Union forces, tipped off by an informer, discovered the scheme, and troops under General Benjamin Butler marched into the city to maintain order. The quick action, plus the demoralizing news from Georgia that General William T. Sherman had captured Atlanta, deflated the Copperheads' ambitious plans.

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Nevertheless, the eight Confederates assigned to torch the city remained determined to complete their task. One by one, they made their way into New York City and registered under assumed names at various hotels, all of them along Broadway. John W. Headley, Martin's second in command, contacted a local chemist from whom the Confederates had arranged to obtain 12 dozen bottles of a mixture that contemporary reports said was phosphorus. Other reports called it 'Greek Fire,' an incendiary mixture of sulfur, naphtha, and quicklime that bursts into flame when exposed to air. The mixture had a long history. The Ancient Greeks had invented it, and the Byzantines used it to destroy a Saracen fleet in the seventh century. For setting things ablaze, this was clearly the right stuff to use.

Headley found the chemist 'in a basement on the west side of Washington Place.' The old man handed him a heavy valise, and Headley lugged it onto a street car and took it with him to a rendezvous point. There he divided the bottles up among the other would-be arsonists, who put them in cheap black satchels. 'We were now ready to create a sensation in New York,' Headley declared.

The saboteurs struck on the evening of Friday, November 25. The first hotel they hit was the St. James on 26th and Broadway, where around 8:45 a guest saw smoke coming from a room that had been rented to a man calling himself John School. The locked door was broken down and the fire was put out in seconds. The room was empty, save for an empty bottle of Greek Fire in a black satchel.

The next hotel to report a blaze was the United States. A young man with a carpetbag had arrived that afternoon and asked for a room on a lower floor. The only one available was on the fifth floor, however, and the man agreed to take it 'with great reluctance,' reported the Times. The young man's odd behavior, as well as his wig and fake whiskers, aroused the proprietor's suspicions, or so he later said. But he rented the man a room anyway. At 8:45 someone discovered flames coming from the room, and the occupant had disappeared. Again, the fire was quickly extinguished.

A permanent resident of the St. Nicholas, a three-building hotel, noticed two men behaving suspiciously as they left the hotel. 'It's all right,' one reassured the other before they both disappeared into the night. At 8:55 fires broke out in Rooms 128, 129, 130, and 174, but the house fire department kept the blazes under control and restricted damage to those four rooms. Then shortly after 9:00 an employee of Barnum's Museum noticed a flash of fire on the fifth-floor staircase. His cry of fire 'ran through the Lecture Room, startling everyone and causing the most intense excitement,' said the New York Herald. 'Almost before any of those in the Lecture Room could get out the fire had been extinguished, but this did not seem to allay the excitement . . . . The giantess became so alarmed that she ran down the main stairs into the street, and took refuge in Powers' Hotel.'

At 9:20 a blaze erupted in a third-floor room of the Lafarge House, but guests and staff quickly extinguished it. The room's occupant, one J.B. Richardson of Camden, New Jersey, was nowhere to be found. 'When the alarm of fire was given at the Lafarge, the excitement became very intense among the closely-packed mass of human beings in the Winter Garden Theatre adjoining the Lafarge,' said the Times. Edwin Booth, a police inspector, and a local judge helped calm the anxious audience.

The fires continued. A room at the Belmont Hotel was set ablaze around 10:00, and a room at Tammany Hall around the same time. The man who checked into the latter room, who gave his name as C.E. Morse of Rochester, had disappeared, but his handwriting resembled that of the man who had checked into one of the rooms of the St. Nicholas Hotel that had been set alight. Both blazes were quickly extinguished. Also at 10:00, residents of the Metropolitan discovered a fire on the upper floor, but hotel workers put it out. Around 10:30 someone opened the door to a fourth-floor bedroom on the northeast wing of Lovejoy's Hotel and discovered a flaming mattress, but rapid action doused the blaze. At 11:00 in the New-England House, a man calling himself George Morse took a room on the second floor. 'In a few minutes he came down stairs and went out, saying he would return,' reported the Times. 'Soon afterward the room which he occupied was found to be on fire.' Here, too, the flames were doused quickly. Then at Lovejoy's Hotel another room was discovered on fire, this time on the southeast wing. It was rapidly extinguished.

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