Читать книгу A Vast and Fiendish Plot: - Clint Johnson - Страница 8

Researching history is great fun for the writer when he puts down on paper facts that may surprise readers. That is the way it was writing “A Vast and Fiendish Plot”: The Confederate Attack on New York City.

To understand why the city became a target of eight Confederate officers in November 1864, one must understand that New York City was not always the socially liberal place we know in the twenty-first century.

In the seventeenth century New York City was one of the first colonies to accept Africans as slaves at the same time that Jamestown, Virginia, was treating Africans as indentured servants who would one day be free.

In the early eighteenth century, 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.