Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “Extraction?”

  “Quite.”

  “Or ‘eviction,’ more like.”

  Ford pointed at him. “Doubly true, sir. Doubly true. Yes. And your Irishman, having shed his own troubles, is loath, you see, to shoulder those of the nigger slave. Especially when the freed niggers are pouring north and taking all the hod-carrying jobs at any wage.”

  “Ah! You mean the war is not popular here—the Union cause is not popular?”

  “Indeed—and this draft is detested, sir. Detested. Especially since any man with three hundred loose dollars may buy himself immunity from the draft. So it will be the poor who will be coerced into uniform. And the poor are the Irish.” He sighed. “No sir! I would not be a nigger in this town, not for all the money between here and Charlestown pier.”

  “Here” was the corner of Wall Street and Broadway.

  “Nor,” Caspar said, “by implication, an English aristocrat?”

  Ford smiled impishly. “For all the money in Wall Street? I might. I just might at that!”

  Caspar laughed. “Well, Mr. Ford, you are very encouraging. But, surely, New York is a big city? There must be room.”

  “Big?” Ford was surprised. “You come from London and you call this ‘big’—New York? Why, it’s but a village by comparison.”

  Caspar assumed the man was just showing a polite modesty; he did not yet understand how rare a commodity that was. “Surely,” he said, “I have a map of the city—avenues nearly thirteen miles long, streets over two miles, numbered up to two hundred or more…”

  He petered out as he saw the smile on Ford’s face.

  “You’ll pardon me, sir, but maps of this city have looked like that since my grandfather’s time. I think the first thing you’ve got to do is climb”—he took Caspar to the window and pointed to it—“Trinity steeple. Over three hundred feet, I believe. The tallest building in the city. And from there you may have a bird’s-eye view of the entire built-upon area. An hour’s stroll north of here there are cows in green fields!”

  At first Caspar was disappointed but then he reflected that even an area five miles by two was a lot of stone and mortar; there must still be room for the founding home of America’s greatest weapons manufacturer-to-be.

  Ford, rightly sensing that Caspar did not yet want to discuss his business, left the matter of his bank’s help vague—vague but positive. In parting he told Caspar of the Mercantile Library up in Astor Place, where he might glean a great deal of useful commercial information. Caspar thanked him and said he felt sure he would be back for more than the mere business of drawing out his weekly expenses.

  ***

  For some reason the view from the top of Trinity steeple put him in mind of the tower at Thorpe Old Manor. He could not think why, for, physically, there was not one single point of similarity. Perhaps it was that both were places from which to survey the empires of fantasy. From Thorpe tower he had (in his mind’s eye) looked down upon the whole range of the Stevenson empire and possessed it. Now, here, on Trinity steeple, a lump came into his throat at the memory.

  He thought it extraordinary. All those stifling summer evenings and nights on the Atlantic when he had watched the water coil back in the slick wake behind the ship, had watched yard by yard the distance grow between him and all he had ever wanted—all that time he had felt more hopeful than downcast. Yet here, where the focus of those hopes was spread in a vast panorama at his feet, he thought instead of all those things his father’s tyranny had denied him forever—for Caspar now had no thought of going home again except as a rich and independent businessman in his own right.

  He shook his head, as if he might thereby dislodge these gloomy thoughts. He told himself that this nostalgia would serve no purpose. He reflected that most people probably felt this way an hour or two after the euphoria of landing. He needed a woman. Tonight he’d go out and find one. Or even hire one—why not? Heartened at the idea, he turned to take stock of his new empire.

  And from those dizzying heights, he had to confess, it looked nowhere near as large as imagination (fed by that somewhat bombastic map) had painted it. The built-upon part of the city pushed up two fingers to the level of Central Park—one fat one between Sixth and Eight Avenues, one thin one on Third. Between and on either side the buildings dropped back to the low Thirties. To be sure, he could not number them so precisely from where he stood, but the general pattern was clear: New York was small.

  After lunch he lay despondently on the bed he had hired in the least fly-infested room of twelve fly-infested rooms he had seen before resigning himself. The house was between Lispenard and Canal streets and had horse railways on both sides. If he opened the windows, the dust and cinders came dancing in on the merciless sunbeams; if he closed them, he stifled. It was certainly no city to be in during early July. Maybe he ought to go to the Mercantile Library that Ford had mentioned and look at directories going back over the last ten years. He hadn’t been able to do that in England. There he’d see how the gun trade was growing. Or if it was.

  Armed with this new resolve, he leapt up from the bed, regretted the exertion, and strolled at a much more leisurely pace out into air so hot and sticky you could almost bottle it. He could not face the idea of going back indoors, into a library especially. He’d do it tomorrow. Surely he’d earned this half day off?

  He had it in mind to explore the edges of his new territory, and so set off up Broadway. After a mile or so, Astor Place, running diagonally northeast, offered some relief from the depressing monotony of the right angle and he took it. At Third Avenue he decided to ride a car uptown, but before he had gone four blocks north the track was blocked by a line of stationary cars as far as the eye could see. By Thirteenth Street he was back on the foot pavement; most of the people in the street were heading north. There was an air of suppressed excitement about them.

  From Twentieth Street all the shops were shut. From the low Thirties the throng grew steadily more dense. In several places small crowds had collected around street orators who spoke to one purpose only—to damn the draft. But the crowds seemed curious rather than responsive. It was the same at Forty-sixth Street, where the press of people entirely blocked the highway. The centre of their interest was a three-floor wooden house guarded by a single line of frightened-looking policemen with drawn locust sticks.

  Caspar learned from a man in the crowd that this was one of the draft offices. There were several competing explanations of what was happening, or going to happen, but the most popular among the bystanders was the belief that the leader of a local volunteer fire company called the Black Joke had been drafted, and the company had come to destroy the house and the wheel.

  It soon became clear that the mob on the south side of the street was mostly of peaceful, curious sightseers, but on the north a much larger and very much less orderly mob was pouring down from the direction of Central Park. It did not take them long to drive the police indoors, and then out again by the back door; and very soon after, the Black Joke had set fire to the place. Within half an hour it was a heap of glowing cinders. Other fire companies were then, at last, allowed through to save the ashes.

  Throughout, Caspar was astounded at the behaviour of the more respectable part of the crowd. They did not exactly laugh or cheer, but they treated it as a fairly everyday sort of spectacle—something to look at, shake the head and frown over, but not to be unduly upset by. Anywhere in England such scenes would be the talk of the country. The police and the military would have been there at once.

  And every rioter would have been safely in chains within the hour. Clearly, he thought, life in America, even in its most civilized city, was going to be a shade more raw than in Tipperary.

  The mood was less tolerant at Lexington Avenue, whither most of the rioters drifted once it was clear that the draft office would not be saved. Lexington was undeveloped beyond Forty-first Street, but a
t Forty-fifth there were two isolated houses on a vacant block and these became the next focus of the mob’s anger. One person said a wounded policeman had gone into one of the houses, another that a draft officer lodged there, a third that it was occupied by Negroes.

  Soon there was no window left whole in either house. The occupants—no wounded policeman, nor military person, nor anyone who was not white of skin among them—fled through the back yard and over the fields. Caspar felt, and could sense around him, a bitter anger as laughing, drunken louts and women looted both houses of all portable articles, even washstands and writing desks. Soon a slow curl of smoke came from one of the downstairs windows and, rather than face again the sickening sight of a property burning, unhindered, to its foundations, he turned west and made for Fifth Avenue in the middle of the island. People in the crowds had said there was now serious rioting all down the east and west sides. The mob was going for the weapons and ammunition in the Armory on East Twenty-second Street.

  At Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, on the northern edge of the city, he came to the reservoir. Opposite were the smouldering remnants of what had once obviously been a fine, large building. There was a grim-faced man, a gentleman by his clothes, standing a little apart from the crowd. Caspar asked him quietly what the building was.

  The man looked at him, sizing him up. “You are an Englishman, sir?”

  “Caspar Stevenson, at your service.”

  “Bidwell Fox, sir, at yours.” Both men bowed. “What it was”—Fox returned his gaze to the remains of the building—“is the Colored Half Orphan Asylum. What it is is the fruit of the corrupt and unbridled Democratic politics that has turned this city into the modern Sodom and Begorrah.”

  “And the children?” Caspar asked, appalled.

  “All saved but one—a little girl of six. They battered her to death for the crime of nigritude. She hid beneath her bed.”

  He was obviously disgusted, yet in the heavy, bitter calm of his words Caspar detected a variant of that same acceptance of violence he had noted in the other, earlier crowd. It was dreadful, his tone implied, but it happened every day.

  And now Fox even smiled ruefully, as if his seriousness had been a small breach of etiquette. “I see you have a stout cane there, Mr. Stevenson. And so have I.” He firmly renewed his grip. “Back to back we should make a formidable pair. So, if it is your intention to return downtown…”

  “Will it be so bad?”

  “You never know. In this city you never know.”

  In fact, if Caspar had confined his wanderings to the middle of the island, south of Twenty-fifth Street, he would have remained unaware that any disturbance was taking place at all. Omnibuses were plying as usual the length of Fifth Avenue. Nevertheless the two men elected to walk; it would be less torrid out in the street than inside the cars.

  Fifth Avenue was obviously the place to build his mansion once he had made his fortune, Caspar thought. There were houses here as fine as any modern London houses. While the two men strolled, Fox enlarged upon his theme of the destruction of New York by its Democratic politicians.

  “The perpetrators of that outrage upon the Asylum were apprehended by the police, but you may be sure that even now there are Democratic politicians at the station houses demanding their release, Democratic magistrates are announcing that this war is unconstitutional, the draft is unconstitutional, and the murderers of coloured children are merely exercising their legal right to resist an oppressive government. And that scoundrel Archbishop Hughes is already passing out thousand-year indulgences. Oh yes! Jefferson Davis is king of New York, sir.”

  At Fifteenth Street he startled Caspar with a sudden, and obviously unpremeditated invitation to dinner. But of course Caspar was delighted to accept—he was learning so much about his new home city he would have been a fool not to, whatever his twenty years of drummed-in etiquette said to the contrary. He was doubly surprised that Fox intended them to dine in his own home. And trebly surprised to find that he quite liked this easy, affable intimacy on so short an acquaintance. In England you were taught to distrust any stranger until you had good cause to think better of him. Here, it seemed, the reverse was true. And why not? It was certainly working to his advantage.

  The time drew on to eleven o’clock before he left his new friends, Mr. and Mrs. Fox, in their house in (no, on—he must remember that) on Irving Place. Funny to think of a house being on a Street! Sort of perched, would it be? On stilts, perhaps? He giggled. Still, the English wasn’t much better: in a street! On a river…in a river? When Americans heard English people saying their house is in such-and-such a street, they must have a picture of a house half buried among the cobblestones! He giggled even louder. Why was it so important anyway? Much more important to keep this bloody pavement still. Not “pavement.” They had another word. Sideway? No. Gone! Ask tomorrow.

  The rain, which began to fall in lovely, cooling bucketsful before he was halfway back to his lodging, helped to sober him. He was quite steady—without needing to take elaborate care to be so—as he went up to his room, where he hung up his clothes, towelled himself dry, and lay naked on his bed listening to the sheets of rain falling on the rooftops, streets, and…and sidewalks!

  His achievement of the word sent him almost at once into a deep, smiling slumber. Twice in the night he got up to drink greedily; it saved him from a thick head next day. It was still raining hard, both times, so he felt not too bad about pissing straight out into the street. Onto the street? He chuckled. He pissed into. The piss went onto—surely?

  Back in bed he remembered he was supposed to have had a girl. Never mind, he thought with a yawn. Time enough. Time enough. It wasn’t so important.

  Chapter 44

  Next morning at breakfast they all ate at the same table like one big family; indeed, the semi-permanent residents, who formed the majority, were one big family, and all highly tickled to be joined by an English aristocrat. There was no secret in how they came to discover him for what he was. Mrs. Axelschmidt, the German widow who owned and ran the house, had, she explained, unabashed, looked through his belongings and then gone up to the library to consult Debrett. Of course, the current edition did not mention the recently conferred earldom. And nor did Caspar.

  When all the welcomes and introductions were through, they went back to their earlier topic—the riots of yesterday, which probably formed the only topic at every New York breakfast table that morning.

  Caspar heard, but only half believed, that a great fire had destroyed Central Park and even the rain hadn’t fully extinguished it; that Croton Reservoir had been breached, sending a wall of water down as far as Madison Square; that two Negroes had been hanged and mutilated by women on Clarkson Street in the Third Ward; that the Armory on Twenty-second Street had taken fire and collapsed with several hundred looters self-barricaded inside it; that the Irish were intent on driving the Yankees out of Manhattan; that the rioters were sure to try to break into the banks on Wall Street today; and that the inmates of a house of prostitution on Water Street had been savagely beaten for concealing a Negro servant girl.

  The last item surprised him in that no one appeared embarrassed or flustered that such a place was mentioned by its proper name in mixed company. The girls at the table, too, several of whom worked in shops and private houses nearby, all seemed a very forthcoming, independent lot. Anyway—Water Street. He stored away the name.

  The other information—about the intended looting of the banks of Wall Street—worried him deeply. His first action today, he decided, must be to get down to the Bank of the Republic, draw out all his money, and then leave the island by the nearest ferry. There must be plenty of safe places nearby, on Long Island or Staten Island or in New Jersey, where he could stay until the authorities had brought the mob in Manhattan to heel. He went south on Broadway, hurrying despite the oppressive heat that had already built up. The rain had stopped but the s
ky was still overcast in one even gray of eye-hurting intensity from horizon to horizon.

  Broadway was jammed solid by a mob several blocks before Wall Street. This was a mob that had tried (and almost succeeded in) firing the Tribune offices in Printing House Square. The police had driven them along Park Row and on down Broadway, planning, no doubt, to keep them penned on the southern tip of the island. Seeing no possibility of getting forward by this route, Caspar looked at his map and cut eastward along Maiden Lane, thinking he could then go down William Street and come into Wall Street halfway along.

  But no sooner had he turned south than a vast mob, many thousand strong, men and women of the most ruffianly kind, came pouring down the road behind him, from the slums and tenements of the Bowery and the Five Points district. Now he was securely wedged between two mobs—this one behind him and the one at the foot of Broadway. He had no choice but to make for Wall Street as fast as he could.

  The street was already crowded. The authorities must have heard of the rumoured attack on the banks, for the police were there in force, making repeated club attacks on the mob. Many of the people trapped in the crowd were, like himself, respectable men on lawful business—and there were even one or two respectable women there, as well. Caspar was relieved to discover that the police did not rain their clubs down indiscriminately. For the moment he was safe from that quarter.

  But the sudden inrush of new rioters from the Five Points and the Bowery changed the whole picture. Within minutes the police withdrew to the shelter of banks and houses in the portion of the street they had so laboriously cleared. At first he thought this move was either out of cowardice or represented a sensible regrouping before they launched a new attack. He soon saw that their reason was far more sinister.

  For there, broadside on between the piers at the end of the street, was a frigate. She towered over the street. Every gunport was open, and from the black mouth of each peered a cannon. Hundreds of times, in imagination and fact, he had peered at the business ends of cannons without ever realizing what it would feel like if they were loaded and primed. He was terrified. Those guns weren’t there as an empty threat. They were charged with canister and grape. At any moment, to judge by the speed of the police retreat, they would fill this street with whizzing balls of lead flying fast enough to cut right through a man. He had never felt so vulnerable. Every gun seemed to be aimed right between his eyes.