* * *
—
Rain drowns the fires and tempers the heat. Rosalie hears it through her open windows, a calming, tranquil tapping, clearing the air and, she thinks, also the streets. Surely the worst is over. She loves the way rain smells. She has no trouble going to sleep.
But she has a vivid and frightening dream. She’s on a train, the sound of the storm becoming wheels and engines. She’s on her way home, through unfamiliar scenery, thick trees crowding close to the tracks and then suddenly, a man’s grinning face is right next to hers, just the window glass between them. In her fright, she turns to the other passengers, only to realize that they are all dead. She’s been riding in a car full of corpses.
She wakes from this in the still dark, her heart going fast. The rain has stopped and the streets are silent. She falls back asleep and in the morning, the events of the day before and the dream occupy the same space in her mind. Neither feels real.
John goes looking for ice and is back in short order. According to his assessment, the sober German immigrants have left the streets and only the Dead Rabbits, a rabid Irish gang, remain. He’s just seen a group of boys—boys!—behaving with a cruelty he won’t describe. “We have to hide Randall,” he says. “They’re going house by house now, forcing their way in, looking for soldiers and Negroes. And here we sit with both.”
Randall is moved to the basement along with anything that identifies Adam as a Union soldier, though nothing can be done about his incriminating accent and wound. John and Edwin will take over his care. Randall’s not to move.
Rosalie’s fright was well managed yesterday. Today, her chest locks around her heart every time she hears a noise from the street. She watches from the upstairs window. No one is there. No rioters, but also no carriages, no deliveries, no pedestrians. One black dog passes the house. That’s all she sees in an entire morning. She waits in a panic for John to come home with his report and then panics even more wondering what’s happening while he’s at home. Her flask is empty. Her hands shake.
She tries to help Marie with Edwina, reading books, building towers of blocks, pretending all is well. The day passes slowly in a strange mix of terror and tedium.
* * *
—
Randall and Adam have the worst of it—Randall unable to leave the basement and Adam unable to leave his bed. Adam is acutely aware that he’s brought danger to the household and also that he’s in no condition to help defend it. A man named O’Brien, a soldier much like him, has been killed by a gang of women and they took six hours to do the job. A girl who protested was beaten and her boardinghouse destroyed. A druggist who offered the dying soldier a drink of water was beaten and his store destroyed.
John continues his forays outside though Mother begs him not to. “I’m careful,” he says. He tells her that a loyalty test is being administered on the street. All he has to do is say he’s for the South and he can walk unmolested. Nothing is easier for John than to say he hates the president.
He scavenges for food and information. He gives the first to Mother and Rosalie, but has become miserly with the second. Now he shuts himself up with Adam and Edwin whenever he returns. Rosalie only knows that the police have been overwhelmed; there’s no militia in the city as they’ve been sent to distant battles, and so, if the mob chooses murder and arson, which they do, there’s no one to stop them. That there are details beyond that, details worse than what John has already shared, details so dreadful no woman can hear them—well, that’s the most frightening part of all. She takes Randall his meals, both of them frustrated by the vagueness of her information, frightened that there is no better place to hide him.
By Wednesday the gangs have moved towards the wharfs, attacking the brothels and shaking down the bars and groceries for drinking money. In the afternoon, they are back, close enough to hear their voices again, only two blocks away, John says, but they turn north and the shouting fades. Still forcing their way into homes in the Gramercy Park area on Thursday, though John says the military has arrived at last. He says that a howitzer and an artillery unit just returned from Gettysburg now occupy the park. The tide is turning at last.
The riots end on Friday. Colonel Thaddeus Mott clears the Upper East Side and follows the retreat to the tenements, where his soldiers force their way in with the points of their bayonets. One group of rioters, driven to the roof, choose to jump to their deaths. By the day’s end, the barricades and bodies are being removed and the streets are secure. There is no reliable estimate as to how many have died.
* * *
—
Adam and Randall leave under army escort for the safety of a friend’s house in Rhode Island. “I’ll always be grateful,” Adam tells the Booths, “for the way you stood by me. I’ll never forget it.”
* * *
—
Edwin’s salons resume, his friends emerging from their holes, shocked and traumatized. It’s over, Rosalie tells herself, but what she hears makes her wonder if such a thing can ever truly end. So many buildings burned and looted, so many women molested in their houses, so many people murdered cruelly and capriciously, especially the Negroes, hunted like animals, shot down, hanged, burned alive, tortured, and mutilated with no one daring to help. Black families are leaving the city as fast as they can.
She’s unsurprised to learn that the old familiar gangs from Baltimore, the Plug Uglies and the Blood Tubs, as well as the Schuylkill Rangers from Philadelphia, had raced in to take their share of the spoils. Were the riots a criminal enterprise, a secessionist attack, a racial massacre? Or something else, something more formless and ancient? People, stripped of restraint and consequence, to be what they really are. The Town is taken by its rats, Herman Melville will write.
The abolitionists believe that the governor, a Southern sympathizer, deliberately emptied the city of all military units prior to the draft. These soldiers then had to return, including some four thousand troops from Gettysburg that might otherwise have pursued General Lee’s retreating army. A complete victory for the South, is the conclusion of most of Edwin’s friends.
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
* * *
—
The riots have roused Edwin from his catatonic grief. He buys a brownstone on 19th Street. He tells Mother to furnish it as she pleases; he has the money for comfort and taste. They can’t match the magnificence and history of the Putnam home, but somehow the riots have spoiled Rosalie’s pleasure in that. There may be such a thing as too rich. She would never feel completely safe in that house again.
In small and larger ways, Rosalie is changed. At the same time that Edwin is finding his faith, Rosalie is deciding it might be easier not to believe. Her relationship with God has always been transactional. She thinks now that God would be a fool to love us, rotted as we are, and she is too proud to believe in a foolish God.
Asia
vii
Years later, when Asia feels quite desperate to hear someone, anyone, say something nice about John, she’ll discover a newspaper article in which Adam Badeau’s been asked about this time with the Booths, and about John in particular. John saved my life, Adam will say. He treated me with great gentleness. He gave no indication of deep Southern sympathies.