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On November 24, the day before the attack, Headley picked up the chemical concoction from a Southern sympathizer and carried it in his suitcase on a streetcar up the Bowery:

I soon began to smell a peculiar odour—a little like rotten eggs—and I noticed the passengers were conscious of the same presence. But I sat unconcerned until my getting off place was reached, when I took up the valise and went out. I heard a passenger say as I alighted, “there must be something dead in that valise.”5

Only six of the original eight took part in the plot on the twenty-fifth, two having lost their nerve. Each man put ten bottles of the Greek fire in a satchel and spread out through the city. They visited nineteen hotels in all, as well as two theaters and Barnum’s Museum. But the Confederates had ignored the basic rule of arson—that fire requires oxygen to burn—and had planted the Greek fire in locked bedrooms and closed cupboards, causing the flames to peter out of their own accord.

One of the hotels set on fire, the Lafarge, was adjacent to the Winter Garden Theatre at Broadway and Thirty-first, where the three Booth brothers, Edwin, Junius Brutus, and John Wilkes, were playing together for the first and last time in their careers, giving a charity performance of Julius Caesar to raise money for the Shakespeare statue fund for Central Park; John Wilkes Booth was playing Mark Antony, and his more famous brother Edwin was Brutus. John Wilkes, a member of the Sons of Liberty, was already deep into his own plot, although at this time the scheme was limited to kidnapping Lincoln and forcing the release of all Confederate prisoners in exchange for his freedom. Booth had been meeting Confederate agents in Canada, but the fragmented structure of their operations meant that he knew nothing about the New York conspiracy, and the arsonists were unaware of whose life they were risking when they set fire to the Lafarge. As news rippled across the auditorium that the hotel next door was burning, there were screams from the audience and people began to rise from their seats. “The panic was such for a few moments that it seemed as if all the audience believed the entire building in flames,” reported The New York Times. But in that split second between calm and a stampede, Edwin Booth stepped forward and reassured the audience that the theater was not itself on fire: “In addition … Judge McCunn rose in the dress circle, and in a few timely remarks admonished them all to remain quietly in their places, and at the same time tried to show them the danger which would attend a pell-mell rush for the doors, and especially the uselessness of it.”6

The fires caused mass panic throughout the city, but no recorded deaths. By the following evening, newspapers were carrying full descriptions of the six suspects, who all decided to leave for Toronto on the eleven o’clock train. They slipped into their berths and waited, fully dressed and armed, in case detectives boarded in pursuit. Much to their surprise, they reached Canada without being recognized. U.S. detectives came looking for them but returned to New York empty-handed.35.2 General Dix announced that “such persons engaged in secret acts of hostility” would be caught, tried, and executed “without the delay of a single day.”8 The treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, thought the arson attempt proved “that the South is thoroughly rotten, and the Confederacy a mere shell.”9 Such was the fear in the city that several newspapers called for Southern citizens to be rounded up and expelled, and Dix ordered all Southern refugees to register their names with the police department.

In the midst of the public outpouring of anger against the South (and at the British for harboring the conspirators in Canada), Mary Sophia Hill turned up without warning at the New York consulate to request Archibald’s assistance. She had come to complain about her trial and banishment from New Orleans,