Clint JohnsonReseñas

Unabashed Confederate hagiography. I wouldn’t mind so much if the book included more about military affairs and battles, but there aren’t any detailed battle site tours; instead it’s grave sites of Confederate generals, houses where famous Confederates lived, and museums of Confederate memorabilia. I suppose there are people, not necessarily Lost Cause zealots, who might want to see where Stonewall Jackson’s arm is buried or the house of J.E.B. Stuart’s widow. But author Clint Johnson makes it pretty clear where his sympathies lie; we learn, for example, that the Confederate army included blacks – as servants and musicians – and thus was more “integrated” than the Union army.

The book departs from the Civil War theme to provide a tour of the Nat Turner rebellion area; Johnson claims that the fear of slave rebellions was one of the motivators of the Confederacy.

One surprising thing I did learn is John Singleton Mosby – the famous/infamous “Gray Ghost” partisan (see Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders) became “reconstructed”, becoming a personal friend of U.S. Grant and a Republican. Johnson describes this as a “mistake” and notes “an angry Virginian” shot at Mosby as a result.

As mentioned, not much in the way of battle descriptions. If you’re interested in automobile tours of Civil War country I’d recommend the Civil War Explorer series by Jim Miles (mostly out of print, alas). Miles is also a Southerner but his books are more balanced and less Confederate apologetics than this one.
No foot or endnotes. Lots of black and white pictures of houses, statues and gravestones. A bibliography; a good index.

A quick but quite thorough review of destroyer operations in WW 1 & 2. They did not win these wars but their part should be noted. These essential but often overlooked ships of the USN are appropriately portrayed in most of their many guises as escorts, submarine hunters and rarely but often effective attack ships. Clint Johnson has skimmed the cream from the thousands of Destroyer Operations to create this lively and interesting narrative.½

Have read only bits of this volume, finding locations mentioned in personal narrative of a Vermont soldier in the Army of the Potomac. Photos with captions, maps, and anecdotes explain the importance of each place. Haven't tried the driving directions, but inclusion of route numbers, road names, and landmarks sound very helpful. Good reference book.

I found this book interesting yet a tough read to get through. This was interesting because it was a bit if micro-history that I was not aware of before. This is something they just don't teach in school. I typically love these kind of accounts as it gets to the heart of individuals involved and in this case I speculate how this event, if successful, would have changed the path of the Civil War. This was a tough read however, as there was just too much background information before we get to the actual plot. While this background is probably essential and necessary to get a true picture of the 'whys' and 'hows' of the plot, for someone like me who is not a historian, but just someone with an interest in historical events like this, it just was too much. For a professional historian, this may have been an awesome book, but for someone who is not, this just was too hard to get into.

This is a very interesting book on the Confederacy Secret Service, its members and reasonings. It talks much more about the people and events leading up the attack on New York city that the attack itself which leaves you to wonder if it had gone as planned would things after that point in the war be any different.

Anecdotal micro-histories can be the most helpful windows on larger historical events, and many recent Civil War histories are great examples. In his book A Vast and Fiendish Plot, Clint Johnson recounts the tale of the Confederate secret service attempt to set Manhattan ablaze on the night of November 25, 1864. The attempt was ultimately a failure due to the agents' lack of experience with the methods and materials they were using.

Though well-researched and competently recounted, Johnson's narrative is long on details and short on interpretation. For example, the first part of the book sets out to make the case that Southern hostility was directed particularly at New York City, but the connection to the actual plot seems thin. Other interpretation he does offer, setting the events in the context of the war's increasing brutality and the South's desperate thirst for retaliation, is colored by what comes across as a mild Southern apologetic. This is not to say that Johnson is not entitled to his perspective, but it does leave the reader wondering if there are other implications that were overlooked.

Finally, history readers who prefer elegant prose will be put off by Johnson's choppy journalistic style. Johnson's editors haven't done him any favors either. Nevertheless, the Johnson's contribution is valuable if for no other reason than that it gives a credible account of an under-told Civil War episode.½

A little disappointed in this book. Very slow going just to get to the main story. Background is necessary but when the book becomes more about the background than the story, I lose interest. Had it not been an early reviewer book, I most likely would not have finished reading it.½

Clint Johnson has written a book about a Confederate espionage operation in 1864 that sent eight saboteurs to New York City with the goal of burning large swaths of the city to the ground. Obviously, the attack failed -- largely due to the complete incompetence of the saboteurs -- and I had never even heard of the attempt.

The book takes a while – more than half its length – to get to the actual Confederate plot. The first half is devoted to background information on New York City and its relationship with both slavery as an institution and the South, with whom it was the major cotton trading partner. This is occasionally engaging material (particularly the information regarding New York City’s relationship with the South), but I found myself wishing the author would begin discussing the Confederate operation long before he did. There’s easily an extra hundred pages of fluff n the first half of the book that should have been trimmed, because we’ve read it all before, and frankly, it’s not that interesting. This will put off many readers, I suspect. Unfortunately, it comes off largely as filler material to pad out the account to book length.

The final 40% or so of the book is about the sabotage attempt itself, the background of the saboteurs, the aftermath of the attack, and, oddly, a long laundry list with descriptions of all the hotels targeted. The final chapter or so adopts an odd tone -- just short of the kind of pro-Confederate bias I find annoying in many Civil War accounts (and I say this as a Southerner) -- and discusses the specific tactics the author believes the saboteurs should have taken to destroy New York City. Not entirely sure that analysis was necessary. A dramatis personae would also have helped keep the large cast of characters straight, as I was constantly asking myself who X or Y was. I’d also have liked some analysis of what the chemical compound the Confederates called “Greek Fire” might have been. It was some kind of substance they procured from a sympathetic chemist in the city, and it certainly wasn’t the same substance as the original Greek Fire.

This is a work of popular history, not a scholarly work, and that’s perfectly fine for most readers. This is not to say that it is bad history, just that it is not written as a work of academic history, and its sources are almost all secondary, with some contemporaneous newspaper articles the only exception. Citations are sparse and are not noted in-line; this is a particular pet peeve of mine. (Note to publishers: please don’t do this! The occasional superscript at the end of a sentence really doesn’t scare off readers of history, I promise you.) It is particularly galling on the occasions when the author states “There is hard evidence to suggest that X is true” with no citations for what this evidence might be. That’s a significant weakness, and the reason why good academic histories emphasize transparency of sources so the reader can evaluate them for himself. Not so here.

I don’t recommend this one, as much of it seems like general Civil War filler material and worst of all, it’s just not that interesting. The heart of this book would have made a great magazine or journal article, or a single chapter in a larger work on Confederate espionage and sabotage operations.

Full disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review. This has not influenced my review in any way.

Review copyright 2010 J. Andrew Byers½

I’m always glad to discover something new. In this case, I discovered I actually could be bored by a book on the Civil War. This book by a Civil War aficionado ultimately concerns the actions of the Confederate Secret Service and the attempt by some of its agents to bring down the Union by burning New York. But it takes a meandering and dilatory path to get to that point.

Johnson begins by cataloging all the ways in which antebellum New York City was actually the South’s best friend; certainly, as Johnson avers, “the city had grown wealthy trading Southern cotton and financing Southern slave purchases.” Additionally, Northern textile mills made use of more than 80 percent of the cotton shipped to New York; New York benefited as the intermediary for all these transactions. Thus, many in New York City was opposed to abolition, insofar as it was so interdependent on the South and the slave system for its wealth.

But in spite of New York’s support prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, the Confederate agents mobilizing in Canada could think of no better target for their planned terrorist action. (Indeed, the appeal to terrorists trying to win glory by attacking New York hasn’t changed over the centuries.)

Thus, a plot was hatched to ignite fires in hotel rooms across the city. The plan fizzled out however without much damage because of the ineptitude of the saboteurs. Johnson does not go so far to claim to be disappointed, but the book has a bit of a “the romantic South” bias, and the author does end with a detailed discussion on what factors the Confederates should have taken into account in order for their mission to have succeeded. His last two chapters end in sort of breathless, excited italics: “Fire would have consumed New York City.” and “New York City would have burned down.”

My recommendation? Skip this one.

I read about a quarter of the book before stopping out of boredom. It reads like a term paper. The author's idea of making the story engaging is to throw in a surprising bit of trivia now and then. But mostly I was bored because, 78 pages in, the book was still not about "the Confederate attack on New York City," as the subtitle promises. It talks about New York's economics and politics as they relate to the South, which I'm sure is good background information for the promised subject, and probably many people might find it interesting. If it was a reasonably well-written book, I might have gotten through that part (presumably it does get around to the "vast and fiendish plot" eventually). But it's not well-written; it's essentially a list of facts and statistics. And I just don't care.½

Received via LibraryThing Early Reviewers

The struggles of Lee and Grant on the battlefields of the Civil War are familiar to many people, but author Clint Johnson brings to light a much less well-known aspect of the war between the states: the activities of the Confederate Secret Service, and especially its “vast and fiendish plot” to destroy the city of New York by burning it to the ground.

Don’t expect brilliant writing -- the poetry of David McCullough or the plumbing of psychological depths of Annette Gordon-Reed. This is meat and potatoes history, marshaling facts and dates in a straightforward narrative that recounts the who, what, when, where, and how (and to be fair, a good dose of the why) of past events.

Johnson sets the stage for the plot to burn New York with a meticulous, and sometimes surprising, examination of the relationship between the great commercial metropolis of the North and the cotton-producing South. That New York would be an ardent supporter of the South – and staunchly anti-Lincoln -- seems incongruous to a modern reader. But there were slaves in New York before Jamestown, and the Northern port grew very rich indeed off cotton: nearly 40 cents of every dollar made in the cotton trade went into the pockets of New Yorkers. Reading of New York’s complicity in slavery is unsettling and challenges any complacent belief that the North has always been a bastion of progressive thought.

Johnson uses a mass of detail (you don’t actually get to the plan to destroy New York until well into the book), to make the case for why Confederate agents would feel justified in trying to wipe New York off the map. While the destruction of civilian farms and towns so they can't supply the enemy doesn't surprise us today, the Confederates thought it dastardly and called for revenge.

When Johnson finally gets to the plot to burn New York, he makes clear just how inept the conspirators were. They used “Greek Fire,” a liquid that ignites when exposed to air, to set fires in hotel rooms across the city – but didn’t experiment with how to use the flammable liquid before hand. They ignored locations that would have burned readily and caused mass destruction – a gas factory, warehouses packed with combustibles, a turpentine distillery -- in favor of hotels filled with people who could detect a fire before it raged out of control. They set their fires in the early evening when the whole city was awake, rather than the wee hours of the morning when response would have been much more slow. As a result, most of the fires petered out on their own or were quenched before they did much damage. But if the agents had been more strategic, New York might have suffered tremendous damage.

Throughout the book Johnson stops just short of being an apologist for the South, but he makes clear how true the old adage is: history is written by the winners. You’re likely to think a bit differently about the North, and the South, after reading A Vast and Fiendish Plot. And changing our sense of the world is just what good history should do.

BAYAA