CHAPTER XLVII
Havinglost one son in the war and expecting to hear at any moment that her other boy was gone, Patty was bitter now against the mothers who kept their sons at home, as she had tried to keep hers.
The fear grew that the war, which had already cost her so dear, might be lost for lack of men to reinforce the Federal troops. Those whom the first thrill had not swept off their feet, found self-control easier and easier when they were besought to fill the gaps left by the sick, the crippled and the dead in the successless armies.
Their apathy woke to action, however, when the hateful word Conscription was uttered by the desperate administration. The draft law was passed, and it woke a battle ardor in those who cling to peace whenever their country is at war. For there has always been about the same proportion of citizens who are inevitably against the government, whatever it does. Sometimes they prate of loyalty to a divinely commissioned monarch or a mother country, as in Washington’s day; sometimes they love the foreigner so well that they denounce a war of conquest, as in the Mexican war; sometimes they praise the soft answer and the disarming appeal of friendly counsel, as in this war with the fierce South.
Now, when the draft lowered, the New York pacifists mobilized, set the draft-wheels on fire and burned the offices and such other buildings as annoyed them. They abused Lincoln as a gawky Nero, and, to prove their hatred of war, they formed in mobs and made gibbets of the lamp-posts where they set aswing such negroes as they could run down.
They killed or trampled to death policemen and soldiers, insulted and abused black women and children, and, in afinal sublimity of enthusiasm, grew bold enough to charge upon the Negro Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue near the Reservoir. Somebody led the two hundred pickaninnies there to safety through the back door while the mob stormed the front, and burned the place to ashes.
For three days the city was a monstrous madhouse with the maniacs in control. Thousands descended on the central police station and would have destroyed it if a few hundred police had not flanked them with simultaneous charges down side streets, and clubbed them into a stampede.
Editors who supported the government would have joined the black fruit ripening on the lamp-posts if Mr. Raymond’sTimeshad not mounted revolving cannon in its defense and Mr. Greeley’sTribunehad not thrust long troughs out of its upper windows as channels for bombshells to drop into the rabble.
Troops came hurrying to the city’s rescue and sprinkled canister upon certain patriots to disperse them. Then and only then the war-hating wolves became lambs again. The Seventh was recalled too late to defend the city from itself, but Keith did not come home with it. He had been commissioned to another regiment. A thousand lives had been lost in the Draft Riots, but the rioters were unashamed.
The Governor had called them “my friends” and promised them relief; the draft had been suspended and the city council had voted two millions and a half, so that those who were too poor to afford substitutes could have them bought by the city ready-made at six hundred dollars apiece.
In Westchester County rails had been torn up, wires cut, and drafting lists set ablaze, and mobs had gone wandering looking for Republicans.
But fatigue brought order and the sale of volunteers began. A Lasher boy of sixteen earned a fortune by going as a substitute. The war was already a war of boys on both sides. The hatred of Lincoln, however, was so keen that Westchester County gave two thousand majority to General McClellan in his campaign for the Presidency against Lincoln. That harried and harrowing politician barely carried thestate, and served only a month of his new term before he was shot dead. He looked very majestic in his coffin and those who had laughed at him wept with remorse. In his death he won to the lofty glory his good homeliness had earned, though it brought him contempt while he lived. But that apotheosis was as yet months away, and unsuspected.
Toward the last of the war, RoBards had noted that Patty was forever holding one hand to her heart. He assumed that it was because a canker of terror was always gnawing there on account of Keith, always wandering somewhere through the shell-torn fields where bullets whistled, or the devils of disease spread their gins and springes.
This pain was never absent, but there was another ache that she hardly dared confess to herself. She thought it petty selfishness to have a distress when so many thousands were lying with broken bodies and rended nerves in the countless hospitals.
She put off troubling the doctors. Few of them were left in the city or the country and they were overworked with the torn soldiers invalided home.
Finally the heartache grew into a palpable something, and now and then it was as if a zigzag of lightning shot from her breast to her back. And once when she was reading to her husband about the unending siege of Petersburg where the last famished, barefoot heroes of the South were being slowly brayed to dust, a little shriek broke from her.
“What’s that?” cried RoBards.
“Nothing! Nothing much!” she gasped, but when he knelt by her side she drooped across his shoulder, broken with the terrible power of sympathy, and sobbed:
“Mist’ RoBards, I’m afraid!”