New York-Toronto route was staging ground for 'fiendish' acts of terrorism
150 years before alleged VIA Rail plot
Almost 150 years before the rail corridor between Toronto and New York City
became the centrepiece to an alleged plot by Islamic terrorists to derail a
VIA Rail train, it was the staging ground to terrorism of a different kind:
An 1864 hatched-in-Canada conspiracy to burn down Manhattan and change the
course of the American Civil War.
But it would not be sharp-eyed Mounties or an alert Imam that would thwart
this 19th century bid at cross-border sabotage - but the "bungling manner"
of the Toronto-based men tasked with carrying it out.
It was among "the most fiendish and inhuman acts known in modern times,"
declared The New York Times on Nov. 27, 1864, two days after the attack.
Six men, all young Southern officers handpicked by Confederate authorities
in Richmond, Va., had hopped a train from Toronto to New York armed with
matches and bottles of "Greek Fire," an unstable, explosive liquid.
The most fiendish and inhuman acts known in modern times
Striking hotels and landmarks, the saboteurs had peppered the metropolis
with fire. And then, as New Yorkers took stock of the damage, they slipped
aboard trains back to their Canadian hideout.
Canada (then British North America), for all its reputation as a bastion of
anti-slavery during the Civil War, was a well-known haunt for agents of the
slave-holding South.
In 1864, delegates at the Charlottetown Conference were in the midst of
hashing out the first terms of Canadian confederation when they were
interrupted by news that a band of Southern raiders had used Quebec as a
base to loot the bank vaults of St. Albans, Vt. Even the actor John Wilkes
Booth, in the months before he fired a single derringer shot into the head
of Abraham Lincoln, was stalking the streets of Montreal.
Toronto, in particular, had been selected by Confederate authorities to be
the headquarters of its guerilla operations against the Union. Operating
quite openly out of Toronto's Queen's Hotel, seasoned Confederate officers
sent out cross-border spy missions and drew up plans to spring Southern
prisoners of war from Union custody, launch raids against Great Lakes
shipping, inspire Southern sympathizers into armed insurrection or even
poison the New York City water supply.
Related
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country that offered safe harbour
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train terror plot: reports
In the fall of 1864, conspirators set their sights on mass arson. Led by
Colonel Robert Martin, agents would take a train to New York, book rooms in
the city's most famous hotels, stack up the room's furniture, douse it in
flame and then calmly walk away as the building became engulfed in fire.
Needless to say, there were few military gains to lighting up a string of
New York hotels. The objective was pure terror: Break the morale of a
war-weary public and inspire a quick, negotiated end to the War Between the
States.
In the plotters' wildest dreams, they imagined their tiny arson spree would
provide such a distraction that they would be able to spring a few thousand
nearby Confederate prisoners of war, raid a few federal arsenals and then
stage a full-fledged attack in the centre of the Union heartland.
Most of all, the men were likely motivated by revenge. As Union armies
chewed up the cities of the South in a final push to victory, Southerners
wanted to "bring the war" to New York.
We wanted the people of the North to understand there are two sides to
this war
"We wanted the people of the North to understand there are two sides to this
war and they can't be rolling in wealth and comfort while we in the South
are bearing all the hardships," later wrote one of the plotters, Robert
Kennedy, as he faced a hangman's noose after later being captured by the
Union.
The original plan was to strike on Election Day, but the saboteurs arrived
to find that the city had been flooded with troops and gunboats in
anticipation of violence.
It was only the previous year that the city had been seized in the
devastating New York City draft riots, and U.S. authorities had already
received word from a double agent of a "great conspiracy afoot" in the
"British provinces" to set fire to border cities on Election Day.
So, after two weeks of lounging around Manhattan on the Confederacy's dime,
taking in the sights of a city they intended to destroy ("it was a period of
enjoyment . in most respects," one would report later), the saboteurs sprung
into action on the night of November 25.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThe assassination of the 16th President of the
United States, Abraham Lincoln by actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre,
Washington DC.
Nineteen hotels were struck, as well as a hay barge, a stairwell at P.T.
Barnum's American Museum and a theatre next door to where John Wilkes Booth
and his two brothers were delivering a charity performance of Julius Caesar.
Amazingly, in an era before sprinklers and fireproofing, the fires were
tamped out almost immediately, resulting in total damages no larger than a
few thousand dollars. "There was no panic. There was no uprising," reads an
official CIA account of the attack.
"So far as we could learn the programme had been carried out, but it
appeared that all had made a failure," concluded conspirator John Headley in
his 1906 memoirs. "It seemed to us that there was something wrong with our
Greek fire."
As they would do in the wake of the various anarchist, Islamist and leftist
terrorist attacks that would strike the city in the next century and a half,
New Yorkers reveled in their ability to rise above the attack - although
local media could not resist a bit of doomsaying.
These Yankees will learn what it is to incur the Enmity of a proud and
chivalric People
Harper's Weekly ran an illustrated account of the attack. One of its most
notable images is a bearded Southern gentleman, cloaked in shadows, grinning
as he draws a match towards a pile of hotel furniture. "These Yankees will
learn what it is to incur the Enmity of a proud and chivalric People," he
says in a caption.
Had the conspirators simply lit all their fires at same time, concluded The
New York Times, "the fire would probably have gained so great a headway that
before assistance could have been obtained, the best portion of the city
would have been laid in ashes."
In December of 1864, mere months before the Civil War's end, the United
States saw its last act of attempted sabotage to emerge out of what would
soon be Canada.
In a plot echoed by recent terror allegations, Confederate naval officer
John Yates Beall was caught trying to derail trains outside of Buffalo.
"I protest against this execution," he said just before his February, 1865
hanging in New York City.
For Canada's part, four years of living next to a nation torn apart by civil
strife would forever shape the country's future.
For one, it got most delegates on board with Canada's eventual model of
tight federal authority - a counterpoint to the loosely knit model of
"state's rights" that inaugural Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had pegged
as America's "great source of weakness."
A staid lesson, perhaps, but as Macdonald prophesied, it may well have been
the lynchpin that prevented any Canadian eruptions of "unhappy war."
National Post
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