New York - The Novel

work. If you hated England, you reckoned that hurting the South would damage the English cotton trade, which couldn’t be bad. And for those who dreamed of returning one day to avenge Ireland and drive the English out, this was useful military training, too.
    Above all, though, it was Irish pride.
    You might blame the English for the Famine, but once you arrived in the New World, there was no one to blame for anything. And even here, in the land of boundless opportunity, you might have to crowd your family into a tenement hovel; and when you went to look for work, find a sign on the door that said: “Irish Need Not Apply.” Humiliation, for the proud princes of Ireland.
    No wonder they loved Cardinal Hughes for building them a magnificent cathedral, and for championing Catholic schools. No wonder they flooded into the police and the fire brigade, which gave them authority and honor. No wonder they sought and gave protection in Tammany Hall. And now they had a chance to prove their American loyalty and valour in battle. No wonder they marched out proudly, under their Irish banners.
    But that was two years ago.
    They’d thought the war would be over soon. It wasn’t. Nor had anyone foreseen the horror of it. Perhaps they should have done. The increasing mechanization of war, the introduction of the rifle with its terrible range and penetration, not to mention the incompetence of some of the commanders, had taken a terrible toll. It was butchery. Not only that, the butchery was being photographed. Images were there in the newspapers for all to see. Soon Bellevue hospital was full of maimed and wounded. So was the Sisters of Charity hospital on Central Park. You saw the disfigured hobbling in the streets. And those were the lucky ones.
    For so many had not returned. The Garibaldi Guards were no more. The brave Irish Brigades had ceased to exist.
    And for those families with husbands or sons still at the front, where was the promised soldiers’ pay? Lincoln’s government had not paid some of them in almost a year. In other cases, their own officers had stolen the pay. The recruiting tent by City Hall had long since been folded. These days, you couldn’t get a single volunteer.
    So Lincoln had started the draft.
    That’s what the Irish had been talking about in the saloon, on Saturday night.

    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.