Attempted burning of Manhattan, 1864
Robert Cobb Kennedy was a Georgia-born Louisianan who had attended the United States Military Academy before drinking his way out after two years. While there he befriended Joseph Wheeler, later a Confederate General, and Kennedy served on Wheeler’s staff after a wound sustained at the Battle of Shiloh left him with a permanent limp. Kennedy was captured by Union troops while carrying dispatches and sent to the Union Prison Camp on Johnson’s Island, in Lake Erie near Sandusky, Ohio.
Kennedy escaped from the prison, and rather than find his way home through hostile country opted to flee instead to Canada, where he sought out Jacob Thompson, head of the Confederate Secret Services under the cover of a diplomatic mission there. Thompson and Kennedy created a plan to burn numerous buildings in New York City, overwhelming the fire-fighting services there, as an act of retaliation for the destruction wrought by Union forces in the South.
The plan called for the burning of P T Barnum’s popular American Museum, several hotels, and at least one theater, all to be started simultaneously on the night of November 25. With several other operatives recruited by Thompson, the plan was executed but none of the fires were sufficiently built and all were rapidly extinguished. The would-be arsonists escaped back to Canada, although several were identified by witnesses.
Kennedy returned twice more to American soil, the first in an attempt to hijack an American train which was carrying Confederate prisoners to confinement, which failed. The second time he attempted to return to Confederate territory but was identified by officers in Detroit while waiting for a train and apprehended. He was charged with several crimes, pilloried in the press as a “terrorist” and despite a noted lack of evidence, convicted of crimes which “violated the laws of war.”
Despite efforts to have his sentence commuted, Kennedy was hanged in March of 1865, just two weeks before Lee surrendered at Appomattox in Virginia. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, much speculation regarding John Wilkes Booth and the New York Conspirators was prevalent, but no evidence of Booth’s involvement in the plot has surfaced.