The Plot to Burn Manhattan
A Novel of the 1864 Confederate Conspiracy

About this book:

October 1864. The Confederacy is bleeding out in the trenches of Petersburg, but in a locked room above Richmond's muddy streets, a colder war is being planned. Eight escaped officers—men with nothing left to lose and pockets heavy with British gold—are slipping north through the autumn rain. Their target: Manhattan. Their weapon: a chemical nightmare called Greek Fire that burns through water and steel alike. Their goal: to turn the financial heart of the Union into an inferno on the eve of Lincoln's re-election, shattering Northern resolve in a single night of flame.

Major Andrew Townsend of the Union's Secret Service Bureau knows the signs. He's tracked the gold moving through Montreal, watched the rendezvous points in Toronto, and read the ciphered dispatches hinting at November 8th. But Washington is distracted by election politics, General Ben Butler is marching five thousand troops into a city that already hates him, and the Metropolitan Police want nothing to do with federal spies. As the conspirators fan out across Broadway's grand hotels and crowded theaters, Townsend races through a labyrinth of Copperhead sympathizers, double agents, and jurisdictional knives—hunting ghosts who carry the means to incinerate a city in their carpetbags.

From the soot-choked offices of Richmond's Signal Bureau to the gaslit corridors of the St. Nicholas Hotel, *The Plot to Burn Manhattan* reconstructs the most audacious terrorist plot of the Civil War with the pacing of a thriller and the texture of lived history. Here are the burnt-out cavalrymen who swam frozen lakes to escape prison, the detectives who play chess with telegraph wires and human lives, and a city balanced on a knife-edge between democracy and chaos. Based on the real 1864 Confederate conspiracy that has haunted the margins of history, this is the story of the night New York was supposed to burn—and the men who walked its shadows with matches in their hands.