Fire!

On November 26, 1864, eight militant Confederate supporters set fire to several New York City hotels as part of what the New York Times called a “diabolical plot to burn the city of New York.” This round of arson was an arm of a coordinated national attack on several Northern cities intended to turn the tables on an inevitable Union victory. It was sponsored by the government of Jefferson Davis, secretly supported by many Northern politicians, and conducted under the command of combat officer Colonel Robert Martin. The fires were intended to serve as distractions in each city as Confederates concurrently raided local treasuries and sprang inmates from nearby prisons.

That night, the Winter Garden in Lower Manhattan was hosting a special benefit performance of Julius Caesar. The play featured the three Booth Brothers onstage together for the first time: Edwin, Junius Brutus Jr., and John Wilkes, the last of whom would soon commit his own egregious act of pro-Confederacy vigilantism. An alarm rang out next door in the burning Lafarge House during the performance.

The Times reported, “The excitement became very intense among the closely packed mass of human beings,” and “the panic was such for a few moments that it seemed as if all the audience believed the entire building in flames, and just ready to fall upon their devoted heads.” The coolheaded Edwin Booth, who was watching the ensuing mania from the stage, broke character and instructed the two-thousand-person audience to remain calm.

Across the street at Barnum’s American Museum, 2,500 spectators had gathered to watch a performance. Edwin Booth was unaware that one of the Confederate vigilantes, the “Southern Hotspur” Colonel Robert Cobb Kennedy (who got drunk and went rogue, abandoning the hotel plan), had exploded a bottle of a combustible substance in the hall. The stairway caught fire, and the crowd panicked...

...Building fires, and specifically theater fires, have always been a serious risk to urban spaces. On June 29, 1613, for example, the firing of an onstage cannon during a performance of Henry V set fire to the roof of the Globe Theatre, burning it to the ground. The Gilded Age’s rampantly poor building maintenance and serious overcrowding made structures particularly susceptible to fire and dangerous, however. William Paul Gerhard, an engineer with the British Fire Prevention Committee, stated in a report that by May 1897 there had been 1,115 recorded theater fires in Europe and America (since records had been kept); there were 460 theater fires across America and Europe just from 1800 to 1877. Gerhard claimed that the average life of a theater in the United States was only about thirteen years due to fire.

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