A Vast and Fiendish Plot
One of the Civil War's more alarming might-have-beens is reconstructed in this absorbing if padded history. Johnson (Civil War Blunders) recounts the attempt by Confederate secret agents to burn down Manhattan on the night of November 25, 1864, using what they called Greek fire—an incendiary concoction that ignited spontaneously on contact with air. The conspiracy went up in a puff of ineptitude—the fires, set in rooms at various hotels around the city, fizzled from lack of oxygen because the arsonists left the windows closed—but the author's meticulous study of Manhattan's 19th-century flammability shows how easily it could have launched a citywide inferno. Johnson makes the incident an index of the war's soaring intensity, setting it in the context of the Union Army's burnings of rebel cities and farms, the bumbling efforts of Confederate agents in Canada to foment insurrection in the North, and the pro-Southern sympathies of prominent New Yorkers who connived at the arson plot. The laxly edited narrative also shovels in extraneous material, including a flashback to Pickett's Charge, to make the story hotter still. Johnson's comprehensive account of this usually footnoted episode shows how close it came to becoming a major tragedy. Photos.(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.