New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [237]
It took Sean an hour to check all the inventory. By that time, Hudson was ready to leave. The day barman would be arriving shortly, so Sean went upstairs to ask his wife to let the barman in. Then he set out with Hudson.
It was only a mile or so up to Prince Street, where the Shiloh Presbyterian Church was to be found. As they walked up Broadway, past City Hall, Sean glanced across to the spot where the recruiting tent had stood. He didn’t say it to Hudson, of course, but it did strike him as ironic. Here were his fellow Irishmen in the saloon, complaining about the draft. Yet when the free black men in the city had started drilling, so they could volunteer to fight, Police Commissioner Kennedy had told them: “For your own safety, stop at once, or the working men of this city are going to stop you.” Not that Sean had been surprised. If he’d heard it once in his saloon, he’d heard it a hundred times: “Never give a nigger a gun.” Later, when no less than three black regiments had volunteered, the Governor of New York had refused to take them.
What did Hudson make of it all? Sean wondered. The men in the saloon treated him well enough. To them, Hudson was part of the furniture. He seemed to know his place, and gave no trouble. But he couldn’t have failed to hear the things they said. Did he secretly seethe with rage and humiliation, just as Irishmen had done when they were treated with contempt? Maybe. Sean wasn’t going to ask. No doubt Hudson found strength and comfort among the black congregation of the Shiloh Church.
“You know what the preachers tell them in those black churches?” an indignant longshoreman had told him once. “They don’t teach them Christian humility and obedience at all. They tell ’em that in the afterlife, God is going to punish us, the white men, for our cruelty and wickedness.” Who knows, O’Donnell thought wryly, the black preachers might turn out to be right.
The trouble was, tempers had been running higher against the city Negroes lately. There had been strikes down in the Brooklyn docks not long ago, and the companies had brought in cheap black labor to break them. Hardly the fault of the black men, who wouldn’t have been welcome in the strikers’ unions anyway. But of course they’d been blamed.
But that was nothing to the effect of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
“Free the damn niggers in the South, so they can come up here and steal our jobs?” the laboring men of New York protested. “Dammit, there’s four million of them.” The fact that Lincoln had not actually freed a single slave was overlooked. But then politics was seldom about reality. “Our boys are fighting and dying so that their own kith and kin can be destroyed? No more they ain’t.”
Lincoln’s war had been anathema for many months now, in the Saturday-night saloon.
And now, the tall, gawky president and his Republicans, with their rich abolitionist friends, were going to force them to fight for these damn niggers, whether they liked it or not.
“We, the working men, will be the cannon fodder. But not the sons of the rich abolitionists. Oh no. They’ll send a poor man to die for them, or pay a fee to stay home and play. That’s Lincoln’s deal.”
Yesterday it had come to a head. More than a thousand names had been chosen in the lottery that day. During the process, it had been quiet enough, but by the evening, people had had a chance to compare names and take stock of the process. In the saloon last night, everyone seemed to know at least three or four of them.
“My nephew Conal,” cried one man, in a fury, “that was due to be married next week … Shameful!”
“Little Michael Casey, that couldn’t shoot a rabbit at five yards? He won’t last a week,” joined in his neighbor.
Some men were cursing, others were in a sullen rage. At the end of the evening, when he came upstairs to bed, Sean delivered his verdict to his wife.
“I could save the Prince of Wales,” he said, “but I tell you, if Abraham Lincoln had come into the saloon tonight, I couldn’t have done a thing. They’d have strung him