Confederate Army of Manhattan

The Confederate Army of Manhattan was a group of eight Southern operatives who attempted to burn New York City on or after Evacuation Day, November 25, 1864, during the final stages of the American Civil War.

On Friday night, November 25, beginning around 8:45pm, the group attempted to simultaneously start fires in 19 hotels, a theater, and P. T. Barnum's American Museum.

Evidently a keen-witted, desperate man, he combines the cunning and the enthusiasm of a fanatic, with the lack of moral principle characteristic of many Southern Hotspurs, whose former college experiences, and most recent hotel-burning plots are somewhat familiar to our readers.

Kennedy is well connected at the South, is a relative, a nephew we believe, of Howell Cobb, and was educated at the expense of the United States, at West Point, where he remained two years, leaving at that partial period of study in consequence of mental or physical inability.

He was transported to Fort Lafayette to a military hearing chaired by General Fitz Henry Warren, while being represented by former West Point classmate Edwin Stoughton.