Edwin’s salons resume, his friends emerging from their holes, shocked and traumatized. It’s over, Rosalie tells herself, but what she hears makes her wonder if such a thing can ever truly end. So many buildings burned and looted, so many women molested in their houses, so many people murdered cruelly and capriciously, especially the Negroes, hunted like animals, shot down, hanged, burned alive, tortured, and mutilated with no one daring to help. Black families are leaving the city as fast as they can.

She’s unsurprised to learn that the old familiar gangs from Baltimore, the Plug Uglies and the Blood Tubs, as well as the Schuylkill Rangers from Philadelphia, had raced in to take their share of the spoils. Were the riots a criminal enterprise, a secessionist attack, a racial massacre? Or something else, something more formless and ancient? People, stripped of restraint and consequence, to be what they really are. The Town is taken by its rats, Herman Melville will write.

The abolitionists believe that the governor, a Southern sympathizer, deliberately emptied the city of all military units prior to the draft. These soldiers then had to return, including some four thousand troops from Gettysburg that might otherwise have pursued General Lee’s retreating army. A complete victory for the South, is the conclusion of most of Edwin’s friends.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

—

The riots have roused Edwin from his catatonic grief. He buys a brownstone on 19th Street. He tells Mother to furnish it as she pleases; he has the money for comfort and taste. They can’t match the magnificence and history of the Putnam home, but somehow the riots have spoiled Rosalie’s pleasure in that. There may be such a thing as too rich. She would never feel completely safe in that house again.

In small and larger ways, Rosalie is changed. At the same time that Edwin is finding his faith, Rosalie is deciding it might be easier not to believe. Her relationship with God has always been transactional. She thinks now that God would be a fool to love us, rotted as we are, and she is too proud to believe in a foolish God.

Asia

vii

Years later, when Asia feels quite desperate to hear someone, anyone, say something nice about John, she’ll discover a newspaper article in which Adam Badeau’s been asked about this time with the Booths, and about John in particular. John saved my life, Adam will say. He treated me with great gentleness. He gave no indication of deep Southern sympathies.