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Terrorism and the Civil War
The short, middle-aged American doctor walked slowly through the thatched hallway that served as a hospital, along the rows of the fevered, the dead and the dying. A yellow fever epidemic was raging in Bermuda, and Dr. Luke Blackburn, a doctor well known for treating the deadly disease in the American South, had come to help. There was no need, he told grateful Bermuda physicians, to pay him for his services. Making his rounds on a warm night in April 1864, Blackburn sometimes wiped sweat from men’s brows with a soft white cloth or poured lemonade and bits of ice through parched lips. He held patients in his arms, cradling their heads as they vomited black bile, a sure sign the end was near.
On this night, he asked a nurse to help him take new woolen shirts from a trunk to cover the patients. Later, she remembered him saying that their rough warmth would aid “sweating.” After the dead were carried away, the nurse saw the doctor collect a pile of dirty bedding and shirts as well as perspiration-stained white cloths. He neatly packed them in trunks along with brand-new clothing fit for a fine gentleman, such as a president. An odd act, but the nurse did not question the doctor, who slipped out of Bermuda with his trunks the next day. Blackburn’s destination was Toronto. His aim was nothing less than a deadly bioterror attack on Washington and President Abraham Lincoln.
Both sides in the Civil War contemplated acts beyond traditional warfare. Artillery shells filled with chlorine for use on the battlefield were proposed by a New York school teacher early in the war. Lincoln refused to consider such chemical weapons, viewing them as being outside the rules of war. Sure that the Confederacy would quickly win the war, President Jefferson Davis initially rejected such measures as well.
But as the conflict continued from months to years, and the casualties mounted from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands, the South’s desperation led to a largely untold story: a series of terrorist plots against Washington and New York.
Hatched by politicians, rogue scientists, rebels and foot soldiers fanatically loyal to the Confederacy, the plans included spreading yellow fever to Washington and the White House; burning New York City to the ground; poisoning New York’s water supply; and attacking Northern ports with a newly developed chemical weapon. There was even a scheme in the war’s last days to blow up the White House, though Lincoln refused to take it seriously.
While most of the plots failed, their intent was clear. Then as now, they were designed to kill, terrify and demoralize civilians. Many of the plots against Washington and New York were dreamed up in Canada, a haven for Confederate agents throughout the Civil War who considered — and embraced — all kinds of acts of terrorism. Their schemes took on even greater urgency after a one-legged colonel named Ulric Dahlgren led a Union force on a mission to take Richmond, the Confederate capital, in the winter of 1864. When Dahlgren was ambushed and killed just outside the city, papers found on his body included detailed instructions for the assassination of President Davis and his cabinet. The failed raid shocked Richmond, increasing its resolve to use whatever means necessary to destroy the North. Increasingly, Confederate funds flowed north to plotters in Toronto.
Dr. Blackburn, from Kentucky, was too old to fight and too fired up not to, and thus hatched a plan to inflict a yellow fever epidemic on the North. The deadly disease had long been a problem in the South, where Blackburn had treated and saved many victims. Known as “yellow jack,” “bronze John” and “black vomit,” the disease includes symptoms such as fever, headache, vomiting, jaundice, bleeding, delirium, seizures and, finally, coma. With a 30 percent fatality rate and no known cure, any outbreak of yellow fever caused panic and despair.
By the spring of 1864, yellow fever was taking hundreds of lives in Bermuda. Blackburn set off for the island, promising his fellow Confederates that the trip would yield “a fool-proof plan against the Northern people solely to create death.”
When he returned from Bermuda, Dr. Blackburn was carrying several suitcases that he believed were filled with disease. He handed them over to his assistant, Godfrey Hyams, a poor Englishman who had lived in the American South for nine years. For a promised payment of $100,000, Mr. Hyams had agreed to smuggle the suitcases into Washington and other northern cities. A special suitcase packed with fancy dress shirts and infected rags was to be delivered directly to President Lincoln.
Knowing that yellow fever was safely on its way to the North, Blackburn returned to Toronto. Soon he was at work on a deadly, new plot: figuring out how much arsenic and strychnine would be needed to poison New York’s water supply.
Eight operatives, led by Confederate officer John Headly, left Toronto for Manhattan in late fall of 1864 to carry out the boldest terrorist attack of the Civil War: the effort to torch New York. Headley eventually published a book that gave details about the plot. The book described how he and his companions were “ready to create a sensation in New York” with “Greek fire,” a clear destructive liquid made of phosphorus in a bisulphite of carbon.
The fires would be ignited “so as to do the greatest damage in the business district on Broadway.” The men set off on their mission on the evening of November 25, 1864, with bottles of Greek fire wrapped in paper and stuffed in their coat pockets.
“I reached the Astor House at 7:20 o’clock, got my key and went to my room,” Headley wrote. “I opened a bottle carefully and quickly and spilled it on the pile of rubbish. It blazed up instantly . . . I locked the door and walked down the hall and stairway to the office, which was fairly crowded with people. I left the key at the office as usual.”
The seven other men apparently did the same in other locations, pouring bottles of Greek fire on mattresses and hallways, lobbing them against doors and hurling them against wooden docks. Fire alarms began to sound. Before the night was over, fifteen hotels and the Barnum Museum, which housed a jumble of animals, freaks and frauds, had been set ablaze. Fire brigades tore through the streets and eventually put out the blazes, which caused much damage but no deaths. Within days, New York papers called the plot an act of evil.
Meanwhile, Richard McCulloh, a chemistry professor, had filled a small Richmond laboratory with cats. Early in 1865, as a group of Confederates watched through a small glass window in the door, McCulloh dropped a handkerchief soaked with liquid into the room. Within a minute, the cats began to gasp for breath. Seconds later, they suffocated as the handkerchief burst into flames.
McCulloh’s new chemical weapon had performed perfectly. Supporters excitedly reported the results to President Jefferson Davis in February of 1865. McCulloh had spent a year hunkered in his secret laboratory, trying to perfect his formula for the Confederacy. Its contents were — and remain to this day — a mystery. Before it could be put to use, however, Richmond fell on April 3, 1865. McCulloh’s laboratory was abandoned as he fled. He was captured two months later off the coast of Florida and served nearly two years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement in the Virginia State Penitentiary.
As for Dr. Blackburn, he abandoned his scheme to poison New York’s Croton Reservoir and — just five months after his first visit — returned to Bermuda, which in September 1864 was battling a new and even more terrible yellow fever epidemic. Once again, Blackburn collected infected clothing and packed it in trunks. A hotel keeper in Bermuda agreed to store the trunks until final shipping arrangements could be made.
However, by the time Blackburn had returned to the U.S., his assistant, Mr.Hyams (the Englishman who had smuggled Blackburns first set of suitcases), had gone to the authorities with a terrible tale to tell. Angry that Blackburn had never paid him, Hyams made a lengthy statement to the authorities about Blackburn’s efforts at bioterrorism. He acknowledged delivering several suitcases to Northern cities, although he stated that he never delivered any of the suitcases to President Lincoln.
On April 14, the day Lincoln was assassinated, a Confederate agent appeared at the hotels office in Bermuda and repeated many of the allegations made by Hyams. A bombshell discovery followed – three infected suitcases were found in the Bermuda hotel. They were quarantined immediately and, according to one of the agents, contained “dirty flannel pants and shirts . . . taken from the sick and dying . . . ”
Blackburn was arrested in Montreal on May 25, 1865. The New York Times trumpeted news of “The Yellow Fever Fiend,” also known as “Dr. Black Vomit.” He was called “a hideous devil” responsible for “one of the most fiendish plots ever concocted by the wickedness of man” and blamed for outbreaks of yellow fever.
But though yellow fever epidemics occurred regularly during the Civil War, they owed nothing to Blackburn’s efforts. He and others were mistaken in thinking that soiled clothing could spread the disease. It is now known that yellow fever is spread by the bite of a mosquito.

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