A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
New York City’s government had savagely put down a slave revolt years before they staged any revolt in any Southern slave-holding colony.
In the mid-nineteenth century, New York City was the center of the slave-ship-outfitting industry. Slave ships owned by city residents openly operated out of New York harbor until the American Civil War was halfway over.
The Emerald City, the city’s nickname long before the Big Apple, became an economic powerhouse in the first half of the nineteenth century because Southern cotton literally and figuratively flowed through its port. The city’s merchants believed what was good for the South was good for New York. That included the preservation of slavery in the South.
President Abraham Lincoln, praised by so many as the best president the nation has ever had, did not win over the city’s voters in either 1860 or 1864. In fact, he lost the city by more than two to one both times.
With all that historical background, one would think Southerners would love Manhattan. But Southerners just could not get past the fact that forty cents of every dollar of cotton sold went into the pockets of New Yorkers. Southerners did not like the fancy-pants New York bankers coming south to loan money at exorbitant rates. They did not like four hundred thousand young men in uniform from New York State invading the South.
New York City and the South had made each other prosperous for the first half of the nineteenth century. But by 1864 that did not matter. New York was the largest city in the Union. Since the South was suffering at the hands of that Union, it was only natural that the South picked on the largest target to be found when it came time for a retaliatory strike.
This is the story of how two best friends, the slave-holding South and slave-trading New York City, fell out of love with each other. It the story of how and why the Confederacy targeted Manhattan because of the devastation the South had suffered at the hands of the Union between 1861 and 1864.
Prologue
“A Born Gentleman to the Tips of His Fingers”
In the early morning of September 4, 1864, just days after the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Confederate general John Hunt Morgan lay dead in a gooseberry bush in the garden of a house in Greeneville, Tennessee.
The boldest of the Confederacy’s cavalry leaders did not die on a battlefield with a saber in one hand, a pistol in the other, and his horse’s reins in his teeth. He died facedown in a bush clad in a nightshirt, trousers, and boots. He was unarmed, shot down by several Union cavalrymen who never called to him to surrender. They then hoisted his body facedown across a saddle and paraded him around to show what they had done to one of the most famous Confederates of the war.
Morgan the man had nothing to do with the Confederate Secret Service, Copperheads (Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War), Canadian commissioners, planned attacks on Northern prison camps, or the burning of the nation’s largest cities.
Morgan the legend had everything to do with such things.
Morgan the man trained the Confederate officers who would carry out the attacks on Union cities behind their lines. Morgan the legend inspired the men to undertake such dangerous, seemingly impossible missions.
John Hunt Morgan was born the eldest of ten children in 1825 in Huntsville, Alabama, to a pharmacist whose shop failed while John was still a small child. The family moved to Lexington, Kentucky, so that the senior Morgan could find work managing the farm of a wealthy relative.
Life in Kentucky was good for the growing Morgan. He had fine, strong, thoroughbred horses to ride, wide expanses of neighbors’ property on which to ride them, and fences to jump. As he grew out of his teenage years, his family was finally restored to a measure of wealth so that Morgan could go to college.
Just being accepted into prestigious Transylvania College, founded in 1780 in his adopted hometown of Lexington, proved that the 17-year-old Morgan was an intelligent youth. The college at the time was considered on the educational par with Harvard and Yale with luminaries such as Senator Henry Clay serving as a law professor and a member of the board of trustees.
It was at Transylvania that the young Morgan first established the reputation he would retain for the rest of his life for rebelling against authority. To the disappointment of his family, Morgan often skipped classes and fell in with the wrong kind of crowd with whom he practiced the unsavory habit of swearing at passersby on campus. On at least one occasion, he fought a duel with one other member of his college fraternity. That was enough misbehavior for the college dean. The dean suspended him for the rest of the term, and he never returned to college.
In 1846, the 21-year-old got his first taste of military life when he and one brother volunteered for a cavalry regiment forming to join the regular U.S. Army fighting the Mexican War. He fought in only one battle, Buena Vista, where he and his brother acquitted themselves well, according to their commanding officers.
By 1849, Morgan, having found that a nation at peace had little use for self-trained army officers, was growing and processing hemp for the manufacture of rope, paper, and other goods. So in 1854, bored with keeping track of the weather and sales, Morgan founded his own company of militia called the Lexington Rifles.
Morgan’s wife, Becky, was continually sick after delivering a stillborn child and developed a blood clot that resulted in the amputation of one of her legs. Rather than watch as his once young, vivacious wife wasted away, Morgan spent much of his free time drilling his men.
Morgan’s seemingly insatiable need for adventure and military life was finally fulfilled in July 1861 when his wife of thirteen years died. The 36-year-old businessman who had always wanted a military career was now free to become the adventurer he had always wanted to be. He started his career with the Confederacy, showing the guile that would be his trademark. On the night of September 20, 1861, Morgan and fifty men absconded with the rifles that the Union governor of Kentucky had ordered turned over to federal authorities.
Morgan had seemingly complied with the governor’s order by loading the rifles onto wagons. But instead of sending the wagons north toward the capital, Morgan sent them south. He diverted attention from the wagons by noisily drilling his men inside the armory to give the impression that the Lexington Rifles would cast their lot with the Union. Late at night, after the drill had been finished, he and the Lexington Rifles rode south and caught up with the wagons. The rifles from the Lexington arsenal were delivered to the Confederacy.
Over the next several months while awaiting orders or a fight, Morgan amused himself by dressing in Union uniforms and regularly crossing into Union-held territory to spy on his new enemy. He was developing tactics and techniques that would come in handy both for military operations and for the spy network he was unintentionally creating.
Morgan seemed born to be a Confederate cavalier, an adventurer who could attract other adventurers to his side. One contemporary described him as standing six feet tall and 185 pounds. Balding at 36, Morgan made up for the lack of hair on his head by growing a luxuriant goatee and mustache that he always kept closely trimmed. On his head, he wore an elegant hat that he pinned up on one side.
In trying to describe him in print, some contemporaries sounded like Sir Walter Scott, the writer of Ivanhoe, which was a book Southerners relished as a description of how heroes should act and look. One man who knew Morgan described him as “a born gentleman to the tips of his fingers and to the ends of his eyelashes. He was blue-blooded, romantic and chivalry incarnate.” Another described him with:
His personal appearance and carriage were striking and graceful. His features were eminently handsome and he wore a pleasing expression. His eyes were small, of a grayish blue color, and their glances keen and thoughtful…. His constitution seemed impervious to the effects of privation and exposure, and it was scarcely possible to conceive that he suffered from fatigue or lack of sleep.
Morgan was also loquacious. He composed a broadside in July 1862 when he was looking for recruits: I come to liberate you from the despotism of a tyrannical faction and to rescue my native State from the hand of your oppressors. Everywhere the cowardly foe has fled from my avenging arms. My brave