Daily Ohio statesman. [volume] (Columbus, Ohio) 1855-1870, 1864-12-05
Lincoln. Mcclellan
Counties.
The Grent Plot.

hlC ~ECNh AOse
Notwithstanding the notvery valiant no.
tion of The Times, that our only safety from
plots and conspiracies is in the fears OF
all those who might possibly be drawn into
plotting and conspiring against us, the sober
sense and spirit of this great city under
stand that our real security resides in our
own force.
All rational men now see that the pr0mp-
titude and energy with which our police
and our fire department were brought to
bear on the threatening aspect of affairs on
Friday night last, afford US ample guaran-
I tees against the success of any similar
scheme of metropolitan arson, were that
scheme thrice as we'll organized, and its ex-
ecutfon thrice as resolutely attempted, as
+ before.
With the sense Of safety, all our other
benses come back to us. Presence OF mind
Is really only absence of alarm. And now
that we find our houses standing safely
above us, men begin to ask one another
who these disappointed incendiaries can
have been, where they came from, what
they can have been after in planning so
L vast crime, and how they came to let ~
dare not" wait SO ludicrously upon 81
|, would"
When one of our most conspicuous Off
| GERS of police was asked by distinguished
Federal military man the other day, whether
he thought the incendiaries "were rebels or
thieves" he instantly replied, with some in
dignation i'm his tone, "Rebels, of course!
Do you suppose our New York thieves
would have bungled the business so stupid
ly?"
Thieves or rebels, however-and In either
case evident bunglers at arson-the crimi-
nails seem at least to have been clever
enough to escape detection down to this
day. This is the more remarkable, that
their crime was attempted between 8 and
IL o'clock p. NJ, so that, in order to leave
the city Immediately afterwards, they were
limited to a very small choice OF trains
With the whole night in which to work up
the case, with the telegraphs at their COM
mand. with the hotel registers Offering the
names, and the hotel clerks freshly impress
ed by the faces of all the persons concern
ed, it is certainly most remarkable cir
cumstance that neither by the Federal au-
thorities nor the police have any persons
yet been arrested and held to answer for
this crime.
That the crime should have been attempt
ed by Southerners resident in the city is
grossly improbable. A moments reflec-
ton shows us that these people, necessari-
ly exposed as they are to particular obser-
vation in the circles in which they respec-
lively move, are little likely to have been
selected as the agents of such an enterprise.
1t is not much more rational to suppose
them its projectors, since men do not
commonly saw off the boughs of tree in
which they have sought refuge from bear.
If the actors in this strange and abortive
villainy were really rebels, they must have
7 come into the city expressly to execute 1t,
and escaped from the city at once after its
failure And this circumstance, we repeat,
makes their non-arrest down to this day
matter of great amazement.
But how, if, being neither skillful thieves
nor rebels swift to elope, the perpetrators
of this dramatic coup de main, which, by
missing the sublime Of tragedy, fell sonear-
ly into the ridiculous of farce were politi-
cal desperadoes of the Wetmore type, COM
bining the far-reaching audacity of Gould
with the butter-fingered incapacity of a
Walbridge?
MANY Circumstances, It must be confess
ed, conspire to favor this hypothesis, strange
and startling as it is. In the first place, all
the arrangements of the incendiaries, while
revealing an intimate acquaintance, not on
" with the city, but with the peculiar char
acteristics of the leading hotels, seem to
have been made with the express object of
not setting fire to more than one or two
rooms, at the furthest, in each house.
While the popular caravanserais through
which q tide of transient visitors daily
flows were, almost without an exception,
marked for mischief, the family hotels,
those in which women and children espe-
cially congregate and live, were spared. The
New York Hotel, the Clarendon, the Bre-
WORT, the Albemarle. the Everett, the Spin
gler. the Bancroft, the Union Place, were un-
touched.
The avoidance of the family hotels in con-
junction with the else inexplicable absur-
dity Of setting the fire, as was in all cases
done, so early IN the evening as almost to
insure its being discovered and extinguish-
ed, indicates, we must say, more care for
human life than anxiety for the destruction
of property. People who wished to see
che city "more frightened than hurt" Ger
tainly would not have acted differently
Nay, in their tenderness about grilling their
fellow-creatures, these extraordinary in
cendiaries seem to have invariably closed
the windows Of the rooms In which they
lit their fires, thereby making draft i'm
possible. This aversion to draft may be
perhaps interpreted as "coppsrhead" trait
But we think our own inference from 1t the
more reasonable of the two.
The indifference and inadequacy with
which the special organs OF the Admins
tration chronicled the fearful story on Sat-
urday morning, when contrasted with their
furious eagerness to convert General Dix's
quiet orders on the subjectinto proclama-
tion of martial law, is another noteworthy
and, it must be added, suspicious feature of
this memorable affair.
Look at it in what light we may, one Of
two conclusions would seem to be inevita-
BILE. Either this great plot was rebel de-
vice, upon which Richmond had expended
all its wit and skill-and in that case it
must be pronounced the most stupendous
fasco in the history OF human ill-intentions
or it is the echo in the East of the Loyal
League contrivance In the West for putting
great communities at the mercy OF small
factions, and in that case the malignity of
the conception is only equalled by the clum-
siness of the execution.
The escape of the two persons wearing
United States uniforms, who alone were ac-
tually found at work in the heart of the
business, and one of whom was actually ar
rested, but set at liberty on his declaring
himself an officer of colored troops, has, per-
haps, forever blocked our hopes of reaching
full and adequate explanation of this
happily uneventful, but most strange and
most mysterious history.-N. Y. World,