The Man Who Tried to Burn New York

In a desperate attempt to bring the North to the bargaining table and end what was to the South a losing war, Confederate spies in Canada launch a plot to burn New York City on the day after Thanksgiving in 1864. A group of rebel officers...all escapees from Union prison camps who had fled to neutral Canada for safety...reach the city by train and, in disguise, take rooms in various hotels in downtown New York. They fail but only because, unknowingly, they use a chemical mixture that requires oxygen.

Smoke from the incipient fires they set is quickly discovered and the fires put out. In the dramatic search for the conspirators that follows, only one of them is caught, Robert Cobb Kennedy, a captain from Louisiana. He is tried, convicted and hanged...the last rebel executed by the North before the end of the war.

Nat Brandt is a veteran journalist who began his career with CBS News as a senior newswriter, then turned to print journalism. He was a reporter on several newspapers in Connecticut and New Jersey before joining The New York Times as an editor, working primarily on the National News Desk. Subsequently, he was Managing Editor of American Heritage magazine and Editor-in-Chief of Publishers Weekly. He is a past president of the nation's oldest journalists' organization, Society of the Silurians. Brandt has lectured on both the East and West Coasts on Civil War subjects, and at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., on both the Civil War and the Harlem not of World War II. He is currently the co-creator of the television series, "Crucible of the Millennium," which will be broadcast by PBS in the fall of 2000.