Part 83 (1/2)
Half the block was in flames before the firemen could break through and reach the burning buildings.
Down the Avenue, the maddened mob swept with resistless impulse, jelling, cursing, shouting its defiance.
”Down with the Abolitionists!”
”Hang Horace Greeley on a sour apple tree!”
”To the _Tribune_ Office!”
Howard, a reporter of the _Tribune_, was recognized:
”Kill him!”
”Hang him!”
The mob seized the reporter, dragged him to a lamp post and were about to put the rope around his neck when a blow from a cobblestone felled him to the sidewalk, the blood trickling down his neck.
A man bending over his body, shouted to the crowd:
”He's dead--we'll take the body away!”
A friend helped and they carried him into a store and saved his life.
For three days and nights this mob burned and killed at will and fought every officer of the law until the streets ran red with blood. They burned the Negro Orphan Asylum, beat, killed or hanged every negro who showed his face, sacked the home of Mayor Opd.y.k.e, at 79 Fifth Avenue, and attempted to burn it. They smashed in the _Tribune_ building, gutted part of it and would have reduced it to ashes but for the brave defense put up by some of its men.
On the third day the announcement was made that the draft was suspended.
Five thousand troops reached the city and partly succeeded in restoring order.
More than a thousand men had been killed and three thousand wounded--among them many women.
The Democratic papers now boldly demanded that the draft should be officially suspended until its const.i.tutionality could be tested by the courts. The State and Munic.i.p.al authorities of New York appealed to the President to suspend the draft.
He answered:
”If I suspend the draft there can be no army to continue the war and the days of the Republic are numbered. The life of the Nation is at stake.”
They begged for time, and he hesitated for a day. The victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg were forgotten in the grim shadow of a possible repet.i.tion of the French Revolution on a vast scale throughout the North. The mob had already sacked the office of the _Times_ in Troy, broken out in Boston, and threatened Cincinnati.
The President gave the Governor of New York his final answer by sending an army of ten thousand veterans into the city. He planted his artillery to sweep the streets with grape and cannister, and ordered the draft to be immediately enforced.
The new wheel was set up, and turned with bayonets. The mobs were overawed and the ranks of the army were refilled.
CHAPTER x.x.xI
BETWEEN THE LINES
Betty Winter found to her sorrow that the memory of a dead love could be a troublesome thing. Ned Vaughan's tender and compelling pa.s.sion had been resistless in the moonlight beneath a fragrant apple tree with the old mill wheel splas.h.i.+ng its music at their feet. She had returned to her cot in the hospital that night in a glow of quiet, peaceful joy.
Life's problem had been solved at last in the sweet peace of a tender and beautiful spiritual love--the only love that could be real.