New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  When it did come, in the fall of 1864, the Confederate plot against New York would mainly be the work of outsiders. During the last year of the war, a cadre of Southern agents led by a Mississippian, Jacob Thompson, used Toronto, Canada, as a base for a series of audacious assaults against the North. Most of their schemes, such as an attempt to get Midwestern Copperheads to rise in armed insurrection, failed miserably. But in September, when Union general Philip Sheridan’s troops ravaged the farms of the Shenandoah Valley, Thompson’s operatives meditated revenge. One of them, Dr. Luke Blackburn, proposed poisoning New York City’s water supply in the Croton Reservoir on Fifth Avenue. Instead, Thompson’s group settled on an idea broached in the Richmond Whig, which in October declared, “New York is worth twenty Richmonds. . . . They chose to substitute the torch for the sword. We may so use their own weapon as to make them repent, literally in sackcloth and ashes, that they ever adopted it.”57

  Under the Confederate plan, a group of saboteurs would infiltrate New York from Toronto, and on Election Day, November 8, they would set fires and foment an uprising by Copperheads, who would turn the city against the Union war effort. On October 26, eight men, including two Kentuckians, Colonel Robert Martin and Lieutenant John Headley, and a Louisianan, Captain Robert Cobb Kennedy, boarded a train in Toronto bound for New York. Fearing trouble on Election Day, however, Secretary of War Stanton made sure that General Benjamin Butler and 3,500 Union troops were present. With Butler’s troops circling Manhattan on ferries and gunboats, New Yorkers registered their protest with ballots rather than weapons, giving Lincoln’s Democratic challenger, George McClellan, a thirty-seven-thousand-vote lead in the city. The presence of troops daunted the Confederate agents. They bided their time, meeting in boardinghouses and hotel rooms, until Butler’s soldiers left on November 15.58

  On the evening of November 25, New Yorkers who ordinarily ignored the tolling of the bell in the City Hall cupola took heed as the doleful sound echoed from fire towers and church steeples throughout the city. Dark smoke poured forth from one and then another of the city’s hotels—from the St. James at Broadway and Twenty-Sixth Street, the Fifth Avenue, the Astor House, and nine others. As word spread through the Winter Garden Theatre that the Lafarge House next door was on fire, one theatergoer noted that “the wildest confusion, amounting to a panic, pervaded the vast audience.” During the night, blazes also erupted on a barge along the Hudson River, in a West Side lumberyard, and in P. T. Barnum’s famous museum on lower Broadway.59

  Pedestrians, hotel guests, and streetcar riders quickly realized the fires were not accidents. As firemen and police converged on the various hotels and put out the flames, they congratulated themselves on their luck: the arsonists had saturated furniture and drapery in “greek fire”—a spontaneously combustible mixture of phosphorus in a bi-sulfide of carbon—but had closed room windows and doors when they fled, depriving the flames of oxygen. Most of the fires merely smoldered and were easily quenched. No one was killed or seriously hurt in the fires, although the St. Nicholas Hotel sustained $10,000 in damage. But the newspapers warned of what might have been: Manhattan would be “in flames at this moment,” the Tribune averred, had the plotters properly ignited the fires. Meanwhile, the arsonists eluded a police dragnet around the Hudson River Railroad terminal at Thirtieth Street and Tenth Avenue, boarded a train for Albany, and were back in Toronto on November 28.60

  City and federal officials looked northward, well aware from the reports of informers and Union spies that Toronto had become a Confederate base. The Metropolitan Police dispatched six detectives to Detroit and Toronto, where leads paid off. When Robert Cobb Kennedy tried to slip into Detroit on his way back to the Confederacy in late December, two detectives were waiting for him. “These are badges of honor!” Kennedy shouted to fellow passengers on a New York–bound train as he brandished his handcuffs at them. “I am a Southern gentleman!”61

  A military commission appointed by Major General Dix convicted Kennedy as an enemy spy. At the last moment, as he faced the hangman’s noose, Kennedy penned a confession: “We wanted to let the people of the North understand . . . that they can’t be rolling in wealth & comfort, while we at the South are bearing all the hardship & privations. . . . We desired to destroy property, not the lives of women & children although that would of course have followed in its train.” On the afternoon of March 25, 1865, Robert Cobb Kennedy was hanged in the courtyard of Fort Lafayette, the only man ever convicted in the arson plot and the last Confederate soldier executed by the Union during the Civil War. “Think of me as if I had fallen in battle,” he wrote in his last letter to his mother.62

  The question of Copperhead complicity in the plot remained a murky one. The police arrested and then released a number of Confederate sympathizers, including Gus McDonald, a Broadway piano dealer who had stored the arsonists’ luggage. A mysterious Washington Place chemist who allegedly provided the agents with “greek fire” was never apprehended. Decades later, Kennedy’s fellow conspirator John Headley, who had become Kentucky’s secretary of state, charged that John McMaster, one of the city’s bitterest anti-Lincoln newspaper editors, had promised the plotters an uprising by twenty thousand Manhattan sympathizers to coincide with the fires. Although impossible to disprove (McMaster was long dead), Headley’s allegations against him and other New York Democrats seem implausible, and not only because Headley had various ulterior motives for making his claims. Why, after all, would New Yorkers—even ardent friends of the South—want their homes and businesses to burn down?

  In the end, the plot had served to “give the people a scare,” in Kennedy’s words, but it smacked more of Ruffin’s and Mallory’s fantasies than of any realistic strategy for Southern independence. True, if the fires had ignited and spread, New Yorkers might have had a formidable act of terrorism to contend with. But the fires merely sputtered, and for a city that sixteen months earlier had endured what the Times called “the Reign of the Rabble,” the arson plot seemed paltry, the last gasp of a dying cause.63

  A diabolical Confederate agent prepares to torch a Manhattan hotel room, as pictured in Harper’s Weekly. Detail from engraving by unidentified artist, Adjoining Rooms in a Hotel in New York, in Harper’s Weekly, December 17, 1864. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.

  “Never before did I hear cheering that came straight from the heart,” George Templeton Strong wrote of the scene in Wall Street on April 3, 1865, as news of the Union army’s entry into Richmond spread through the city. “Men embraced and hugged each other, kissed each other, retreated into doorways to dry their eyes and came out again to flourish their hats and hurrah. There will be many sore throats in New York tomorrow.” Seven days later, the joyous news of Lee’s surrender to Grant arrived; only a rainstorm kept the city from an uproarious celebration outdoors. But then, on the morning of April 15, New Yorkers awoke to the news of Lincoln’s assassination. Throughout the war years, few New Yorkers had responded to the president with unbridled enthusiasm. War Democrats like Maria Lydig Daly had derided him as “Uncle Ape . . . a clever hypocrite,” and even Strong had considered Lincoln “far below the first grade.” Now, in the wake of the assassination, Strong changed his view. “I am stunned, as by a fearsome personal calamity . . . ,” he wrote. “We shall appreciate him at last.”64

  In many ways, New Yorkers put the war behind them quickly, finding new ways to make money after the war contracts dried up. Never again would cotton loom so large in the city’s economy; businessmen and investors looked elsewhere for profit, to railroad securities, industrial expansion, and maritime trade. Workmen largely eschewed rioting for a growing trade union movement—albeit one that sustained the spirit of the Draft Riot by rigidly excluding African Americans. The city’s battles were now fought in newspaper columns, courtrooms, and polling places as reformers sought to dethrone “Boss” Tweed and to limit the power of the Tammany voters Strong called “ignorant emigrant gorillas.” New Yorkers felt themselves to be living in a new and differ
ent era. Looking over a scrapbook of five-year-old newspaper clippings in May 1865, Strong observed that “it seemed like reading the records of some remote age and of a people wholly unlike our own.”65

  Yet the war’s legacies—and its wounds—lingered. Racism remained the common currency of the New York Democrats, and the war was hardly over before the city’s Democratic leaders resumed their overtly cordial ties with the South’s former slaveholders. Both upstate and downstate, New York’s electorate voted down a state measure that would have given black men equal suffrage rights in 1869; that right was only obtained through the federal Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. In the presidential election that spelled the end to Reconstruction in 1877, Manhattan lawyer Samuel Tilden, the Democratic nominee, repeatedly avowed the cause of white supremacy and black subservience. Many of the city’s Republicans also turned their backs on African Americans, weary of the issues that had torn the nation and city apart. By 1874, George Templeton Strong, who a decade earlier had stood in Union Square stirred by the sight of black soldiers, found little to choose between New York’s Democratic “Celtocracy” and those reconstructed Southern states allegedly dominated by a “Niggerocracy.”66

  The fissures of class, ethnicity, and politics never fully subsided in postwar New York but continued as immigration brought hundreds of thousands of newcomers to the city’s slums and sweatshops. Reformers who launched postwar inquests into housing and health conditions pointed over their shoulders to the Draft Riot, warning that the city’s poverty could again incubate violence, perhaps even revolution. Their efforts to improve daily life for what some were coming to call the urban “proletaire” could not put to rest fears about potential enemies within the gate—enemies who might speak not with an Irish brogue or a Southern twang, but in other, guttural accents.67

  CHAPTER 7

  Huns Within Our Gates

  World War I, 1914–1918

  On the evening of March 8, 1902, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, brother of the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, rose to address 1,300 American dignitaries who had gathered to fete him in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Fifth Avenue. “The measure of confidence placed by two great nations in each other has grown and expanded,” the prince, speaking in his native tongue, told his hosts. Enthusiastic applause greeted his comments from the men at the banquet tables and from the jewel-bedecked ladies seated in the ballroom’s balcony boxes. Among the most conspicuous guests were New Yorkers of German birth or ancestry who had worked their way to success and distinction in the city, men like publisher Hermann Ridder, brewer Jacob Ruppert, real estate tycoon Henry Morgenthau, and banker Jacob Schiff.1

  The prince had arrived two weeks earlier to take formal possession of the schooner Meteor, commissioned as a royal yacht by the kaiser from a shipyard on Shooter’s Island in New York harbor. On February 25, President Theodore Roosevelt chatted affably with the prince at the yacht’s ceremonial launching there. But the prince’s goodwill tour had a larger diplomatic purpose. At the end of the brief American war with Spain in 1898 (a war in which Roosevelt and other New Yorkers figured prominently), the American and German Pacific fleets had almost come to blows in the waters off the Philippines. The episode seemed to presage further clashes between two industrial nations aspiring to world power, and German-American relations had been tense ever since. The prince, a polite man who also happened to be an admiral in the German navy, managed to defuse the tension. In New York he received the “Freedom of the City” from Mayor Low and stated how “inspiring” he found New Yorkers. In their faces, he told reporters, he saw “activity and ambition not dulled by too much contentment, yet not marred by discontent. Is not this the balance,” he asked, “that makes your people so happy and so powerful?”2

  No one was happier with all this than New York’s vast German American enclave of 750,000, more than a fifth of the city’s total population. The New York Times described a “spectacular” torchlight parade honoring the prince, in which over 8,000 members of 320 local German societies marched down Park Avenue. New York was, after all, the world’s third largest German-speaking city after Berlin and Vienna. Decades of immigration had created an entire city within a city, proud of its own newspapers, churches, orchestras, choral groups, beer halls, and clubs, even as many German newcomers and their American-born children entered the city’s English-speaking mainstream. Most of them cherished American freedoms while simultaneously expressing an exuberant pride in their German roots. Few people suggested that their dual affections should lay German New Yorkers open to the charge of disloyalty. Most observers, including those who viewed the rising tide of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe with dismay, regarded German Americans as the ideal immigrant group: staid, responsible, upwardly mobile.3

  What Prince Heinrich knew at the time, and Americans (including German Americans) did not, was that the kaiser and his naval high command nursed an abiding hostility toward the United States, which had come to shape imperial planning. In the German race to overtake Britain as the world’s foremost power, Wilhelm II perceived a threat in the increasingly global ambitions of the United States, especially in American encroachment on territories, markets, and potential naval bases in the Pacific and Caribbean. “A war to the death” between the two powers was inevitable, the kaiser told his advisors.4

  Accordingly, between 1897 and 1903, German admiralty staff officers and army strategists developed secret plans for the invasion of the American East Coast as the decisive blow that would knock America out of world competition. Naval officers proposed the seizure of Puerto Rico or Haiti as a staging area for attacking New York and New England, which they judged to be America’s industrial and commercial heart. The planners foresaw one hundred thousand troops landing at Provincetown on Cape Cod and using it as a base for an attack on Boston and the New England coast. The invasion fleet would also prepare for “a joint advance by land and sea against Brooklyn and New York.” After defeating the American navy off the coast, a quick, decisive thrust against New York City and Boston was imperative and far more crucial than the conquest of the mere political capital of Washington, DC.

  By 1899 the German military attaché in Washington, Count von Gotzen, had provided the admiralty staff with detailed information on the forts guarding New York harbor. While some officers argued that the harbor’s forts might foil the attack, Lieutenant (later Admiral) Eberhard von Mantey, the plan’s mastermind, predicted that “in New York large-scale panic will result from just the mention of a possible bombardment,” impeding defensive preparations and leading to American capitulation in the face of Germany’s lightning-swift attack.5

  It remains unclear whether Germany’s plans for seizing New York represented a serious contingency or a mere academic exercise. At the very least, the plans reveal a vision in which New York and the entire Northeast, sources and symbols of American impudence, would be vanquished by German might. Resentment of the growing power of New York City and its business titans was widely shared. A popular German magazine warned in 1899 that in the new century, “much of Europe will go into the private ownership of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.” In any event, by 1906 the admiralty had shelved its plans, to be forgotten as the army general staff persuaded Wilhelm that a swift land war against France and Russia could bestow the continental domination that Germany deserved. Revenge against American insolence would have to wait. By the time that occurred, some fifteen years after Heinrich’s visit, fears and doubts about the loyalty of German Americans—and of other New Yorkers, as well—would shape how the nation’s largest city experienced a world war. That war’s battlefields remained three thousand miles away, but its passions and allegiances would be urgently local.6

  The outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 caught New York and the rest of the country off guard. A month after the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb nationalists, the major European powers put into motion the grand offensives they had been planning for
years. The armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) and of France, Britain, and Russia (the Allies) battled each other in Europe and soon also in Africa and the Middle East. As Wall Street’s markets slumped in response to the turmoil, and the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading for four months, President Woodrow Wilson counseled Americans to remain calm and to avoid taking sides in a deplorable conflict that was none of their business. “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action,” he told his countrymen.7