Paradise Alley (80 page)

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Everything in black.

The black mourning ribbons, wrapped around the arms of the men, and the shiny new hats of their officers. The black rosettes pinned to the curtains in a hundred thousand homes, great and humble. Black crepe everywhere, tacked up right over the red, white, and blue bunting just hung out for the great victory celebrations of the past two weeks.

Oh, false City! Is your heart black, too?

The barge moves across the river like a ghost. The men silent, the oars muffled, moving swiftly and implacably out of the morning gloom. We hold our breath to see it, the whole crowd along the wharf hushed now, waiting until the boat draws up into the ferry slip with a barely audible bump.

A choir from some German society steps forward, and begins to sing a lugubrious old Lutheran hymn, then a favorite camp song of the army.

Weeping, sad and lonely,

Hopes and fears how vain!

When this cruel war is over,

Praying that we meet again—

There is a drum roll, and the soldiers lift the coffin from its barge. They salute and pivot, whirl and lock arms, and load the casket into a huge, glass-sided hearse. It is pulled by eight splendid greys, each of them caparisoned in black blankets, and black plumes, and black bridles. The President's honor guard will march out in front, with the men from the City's Seventh Regiment, and after the hearse will come carriages for those of us in the press, various notables.

Behind even us—black men. Frederick Douglass at their front, looking as proud and fierce as a lion. Some ministers from the African Methodist Episcopal Church with him. The rest not quite so bold as Douglass but marching with their heads held high—no doubt keeping their eyes open for brickbats. The City fathers refused to so much as even let them march at first, were persuaded to it only by enough threats from the Union League, and Secretary Stanton growling down in Washington.

I see the minister from the Bethel Church, the man who told me during the riot that the only hope for his people was in the next world. He is still here, though, still in the City. He marches with his head held up, too—signifying hope, demonstrating hope, even if he has none left.

There are fewer of his race than ever among us now. Their old streets, their old houses burned out, or occupied by whites who look at you uncomprehendingly, or with absolute malice, if you ask them who used to live there.

Still, just over a year ago, they commissioned the first Negro regiment from New York—the 20th Colored Infantry. They formed in the park at Union Square before leaving for the war. Standing at attention while the wives of the Union League stepped forward to present them with their regimental flags, and press laurels on their brows—“
as an emblem of love and honor from the daughters of this great metropolis to her brave champions.
”

There was much disgust and resistance to this idea from the usual quarters, of course. Governor Seymour refused to have anything to do with the black regiments, while Mr. Bennett raged in the
Herald:
“
This is a pretty fair start for miscegenation. Why, the phrase ‘love and honor' needs only the little word ‘obey' to become the equivalent of a marriage ceremony.
”

I doubt that he even saw the ceremony. The troops parading crisply
into the square, dark faces in dark blue uniforms. The lead standard-bearer for the regiment a tall, strikingly handsome sergeant—coal black, with just the faintest sheen of Indies red in his skin. He was an older man, at least in his late thirties, with a grave and almost fierce-looking face. He gripped the banner with beautiful, craftsman's hands, leaning down so the short white society woman in front of him could place the laurel on his head.

It might have seemed ludicrous, save for the solemn and powerful expression the man maintained throughout. He stood carefully back up, the evergreen bough balancing precariously over his infantryman's cap. Then he snapped a salute, and the rest of the black troops fell into line, behind their white officers. Marching down to the Battery quietly—the Seventh Regiment refused to lend their band for the occasion—but with a dignity and order all the more befitting the occasion. A small crowd along the sidewalks to see them off, most of them also men and women of color. Waving handkerchiefs and weeping just like all the others had as they passed, directly to the ships, and on to the war.

How we would have preserved the Union without them, I do not know. In the wake of the riot, The Forty Thieves voted with alacrity to pay the three hundred dollars to buy a substitute for any man who wanted out of the draft.
At last, the poor man and the rich man have finally been given equal standing!
Now both can feel free to shirk their civic duty.

After the riot most of our white troops were drawn from the worst dregs of the City. Felons or drunkards, most of them so depraved they had to be shipped South in chains so that they would not desert and sign up again, under another name, to get the enlistment bonus all over again.

So much for John Hughes's insistence that his parishioners urge the government to draft them. Two days after the army broke the back of the mob, it was announced that the Archbishop would speak to the draft. Greeley and the other Republican papers had been castigating him for not saying anything sooner, but who cared what they thought? Some five thousand of his flock came out to hear Dagger John. Traveling all the way up to Thirty-sixth Street and the Madison Avenue, where he was staying with friends.

They had to carry him out to the balcony. Too ill now to make it
back to his pulpit, or even to stand, but still determined to show himself before his enemies. Glaring out like a wounded eagle at the journalists whom he knew were there to mock him.

The speech itself was a disappointment, a rambling address that went on for more than an hour. The man who once had held the best Protestant lawyers in the town at bay now had trouble reading his words off a piece of paper. Calling blandly for peace, and order. Lifting his head, his eyes murky behind his reading spectacles, as he cried out to the crowd—

“They tell me you are rioters. I cannot see a rioter's face among you!”

Greeley and the others roasted him for that—but of course he was right. Nearly the whole crowd was made up of peaceable, aspiring middle-class Irish and Bavarians, from the upper wards. Craftsmen and mechanics, the backbone of the aspiring, rising Union—most of them as alarmed by the riot as George Strong had been.

Who else would come out to hear such a speech?
They listened dutifully, straining to catch their Archbishop's words. Yet even here, near the end of his address, some rude
b'hoys
at the edge of the crowd start to cry out, “
Stop the draft!
” Dagger John was thrown off his text again, left to peer, in confusion, out into the sea of his people.

He died soon after the new year, his great dream, his new cathedral, still moldering along the Fifth Avenue. At the funeral I met Father Knapp, still as modest as ever in his simple black cassock. I was almost too ashamed to talk to him by then, after the last time I had seen him—watching while the mob murdered poor Colonel O'Brien. To hide my embarrassment, I asked him if he had returned to his parish, now that the Archbishop had passed. He told me that he had—but that he had already received permission to go West, to the frontier, and minister to the Irish farmers and miners of Colorado, and the road gangs throwing the railroad across the continent, even in the midst of this war.

Stunned, I was bold enough to ask him if he had lost faith in his people here, in the City, after all we saw that day. But he only shook his head, impatient that I still did not understand.

“They're no better or worse than anyone else,” he insisted. “It's me that's failed
them.
I should have taught them to be something more—something better than what they were. That is why I should go.”

Yet many of his flock seem to be going as well. Soon after I spoke to him, I saw the boy again—the same one from that first day of the riot, wiping his bloody hand across his face—

Smiling up at me, while the blood in the gutter slowly folded up his little boat—

Now he was seated happily atop his parents' wagon, over in the Eighth Ward, as they stuffed it full of their possessions. On their way to points west, I imagined, to Colorado, or Kansas, or the Arizona Territory. Or just out to Brooklyn, or up to Yonkers. But away, at least—anywhere away from these close streets of the City, where boys daub their faces with blood like so many savages.

The funeral procession crawls east down Canal Street, then it cuts uptown, looping its way around Union Square and heading back to City Hall, where the President will lie in state. In Nineteenth Street, the procession stalls for a few moments, and I glimpse two young boys, up in a brownstone window, wearing beautiful little suits—gawking down at the grand parade, the caissons and bands and cavalry, that is halted so fortuitously by their home. One of them, evidently nearsighted, peers earnestly down through large round glasses, as if trying to commit the entire scene to memory.

The coachman whips up again, the procession jerking forward. Moving slowly past the reviewing stand now, the wooden benches sagging under the collective girth of our City fathers.

I spy Greeley sitting up there, looking distracted. His mind no doubt preoccupied with his own unending dreams of electoral glory.
How he can bend the Republicans to his will, now that Lincoln is gone—

Like every other editor, he has been eulogizing the great man for days now, in print. (Lincoln has become one for our pages.) Yet just last summer, panicking again over Grant's losses, Horace tried to force some impossible peace settlement on the administration. Negotiating with his own mysterious rebel emissaries in Niagara Falls.

Lincoln had broken with him once and for all then, comparing him to an old shoe. Pinning him, as always, with the perfect phrase—“
He is not truthful. The stitches all tear out.
”

Next to Greeley on the reviewing stand sit our elected leaders and financial magnates. Many of these, too, fled the City after the riot—for a little while. August Belmont and Fernando Wood took ship to
Europe for a season. Other Copperhead aldermen and street commissioners hightailing it up to Connecticut, or Saratoga.

They were all back in time for the next election, though, carrying the City for that popinjay, McClellan. Holding their usual monster rallies, trying to exploit all the renewed slaughter down in Virginia. Running under the banner “
Union as It Was, and Constitution as It Is,
” words more ignorant than even the usual political slogans.

Was it just sheer demagoguery? Or did they not understand—nothing could ever be just as it was, ever again.
Not after three years of war. Not after the fighting in this very City, so many dead. The South would not surrender, and the slaves could not be unfreed. It could end in nothing else by now, save blood.

Yet perhaps theirs is the greater reality. The Republicans were able to save the national election, and carry the state, thank God. But in the wards it was still business as usual, under the same masters. Finn McCool got his brother elected to the assembly—winning at the same time an infinitely more powerful seat for himself, as a Tammany committeeman. When I saw him soon after, he actually had the audacity to speak to me, as if he had never tried to set a mob on me in the streets.

“You're a cool enough fellow!” I cried. “I should see you hanged!”

“That's as may be,” he said with a shrug. “But then if they hanged every man who deserved it in this town, they would run out of lampposts.”

“You scoundrel! Is that the best you can say for yourself? You nearly burned the City to the ground, you and your friends!”

“Ah, but that was the City then, an' now it's a very different thing,” he replied, as insolent as ever. Running an adoring hand down his fancy new suit, his diamond stickpin.