New York - The Novel

thirty-seven children given the chance of a decent life.
    If Madame Restell, or her husband, or anyone else wanted to know what Lincoln was fighting for, she thought, let them come to the orphanage on Fifth, and see the children there.

    She did not see the mob until it was upon her. They came from the side streets and swept down the avenue. Men and women alike, they were carrying bricks, clubs, knives, anything they had picked up along the way. As they continued to stream into the avenue, there seemed to be hundreds of them.
    They did not pause to smash windows. They did not even look at her. A single object was their sole intent. They were making for the orphanage.
    As they drew close, a loud voice cried out: “Kill the nigger children!” At which the whole crowd let out a mighty roar.
    And Hetty, forgetting even her dear husband for a moment, watched in horror. She couldn’t just leave. She had to do something.

    Frank Master stood beside his son in front of the big picture of Niagara Falls in the dining room. Then he turned and went to the window, and stared out.
    “I don’t know what to do,” he said.
    The truth was, he was beside himself. He had cursed himself until he was worn out, and the impotent frustration was almost more than he could bear. He just wanted to take action, fight somebody, anything.
    Tom had been gone so long he’d thought something must have happened to him, too. But when he finally got back, he’d explained.
    “The counting house was locked when I got there. The place was deserted. I criss-crossed every street I could think of on the way back, Pa. That’s why I took so long. But there isn’t a sign of her. Nothing.”
    He’d only been back a few minutes when a great roar from the direction of the armory had caused Frank to go out into the street. The crowd had finally begun their assault. The building was catching fire. He couldsee figures appearing in the upper windows and on the roof of the building. It looked as if they’d be burned. Not that there was a damn thing he could do about it. The heat from the building combined with the suffocating heat of the day was awful. He hurried back to the house.
    The assault on the armory had one effect: it seemed to be drawing all the mobs in the area to the scene. Gramercy Park was temporarily deserted. Cautiously, he opened one of the dining-room window shutters. Ten more minutes passed. The flames rising from the armory were sending flashes into the sky.
    But now, suddenly, a boy came running up the steps to the front door, and was hammering on the door. The parlormaid appeared to ask what to do. He told her not to open.
    “It may be a trap.” Some fellow with a brick or a firebrand might be lurking out there to hurl his missile in as soon as the door was open. He pulled the shutter closed and went into the hall.
    “What if it’s a message from Mother?” said Tom.
    “I thought of that.” Signaling Tom to stand behind him, he went to the door, picking up a walking stick with a head like a cudgel on the way, slipped the bolts, and opened the door an inch. “Well?”
    “You Mr. Master?”
    “What if I am?”
    “Your wife’s up on Fifth by the orphanage in a heap of trouble.”
    “Who are you?”
    “Billie, mister. I work for Madame Restell. She brought me. She’s in her carriage over on Lexington. Says she ain’t coming any closer. You’d better come quick, mister.”
    What the devil the infamous Madame Restell would want with Hetty he couldn’t imagine. But Frank didn’t hesitate.
    “Guard the house, Tom,” he called, and with the stick in one hand, and the boy’s arm in a vice-like grip in the other, he let the boy lead him quickly to Lexington Avenue. “If you’re lying,” he told the boy quietly, “I will beat you to a pulp.”

    Hetty hadn’t much experience of crowds. She did not know that, caught at the right moment, in the right mood, a crowd can be made to do anything, or will of its own accord.
    The crowd wanted to kill the children, because they were coloredblack. It wanted to destroy the building, because it was a temple of the rich Protestant abolitionists. The rich white Protestants who were sending honest Catholic boys to die so that four million freed slaves could come north and steal their jobs. For the crowd was mostly Irish Catholic. Not all, but mostly.
    And the crowd meant to loot the building because the black children in there had food, and beds, and blankets, and sheets that they