In the wagon yard of Fire Station No. 2 at Sixth and Castle streets, barely three blocks from the Daily Record office, sixty Red Shirts and their horses milled about. On the stern advice of Colonel Walker Taylor, Dowling was sober. It was seven-thirty, and a chilly dusk was already settling in.

“Form on me,” he told his men. “Mount up.”

With uncharacteristic discipline, the riders swung into line, two abreast, Winchesters and shotguns tucked into saddlebags. The column moved at a walk down Castle Street, wheeled onto Front Street, and broke into an easy trot as it passed through the business district, straddling the streetcar tracks. Pedestrians, many going in the same direction, stopped and stared. A few cheered. A policeman waved. Nobody challenged Dowling’s little army. No Negroes dared these streets tonight.

Dowling kept his eyes straight ahead.

At Princess Street, the column turned right and cantered three blocks, then reined up at the front steps of Thalian Hall. There, Dowling’s men formed a gauntlet to the door. Among the first to pass between their ranks was Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, splendid in top hat and tails. “Cavalry,” he observed happily, doffing his hat. From his horse, Dowling nodded. Behind Waddell came George Rountree, J. Allan Taylor and Colonel Walker Taylor, Captain William Rand Kenan, and every member of the Secret Nine and Group Six except Hugh MacRae, who slipped in by a side door to avoid the crowd. MacRaes had built this playhouse, and he knew all the back stairs.

Kenan glanced nervously at the mounted men. “Don’t much like the look of that,” he said to Walker Taylor.

“Don’t fret, Bill. They’ll behave. I read Dowling the riot act.”

White men and women by the hundreds poured up the steps and packed the hall. Sam and Gray Ellen found seats in the front row of the mezzanine. She hadn’t wanted to come, but Sam had insisted. Now, she marveled at the lavish appointments: pillars twined with a relief of painted grapevines; crimson velvet seats; crimson carpet on the main floor; an elaborate proscenium flanked by pillars and elevated private boxes, lavishly ornamented in gold leaf and carved rubies. The high, curving walls were a deep forest green, a warm contrast to all the crimson and gold. Electric lamps were strung under the curving rails of the mezzanine and balcony and bathed the stage in crisscrossing pools.

She was impressed. This could be the Philadelphia Academy of Music or Symphony Hall in Boston. On the stage, beyond the gleaming brass rail of the empty orchestra pit, sixty leading citizens took their seats in three semicircular tiers behind the podium.

After preliminary remarks by the Democratic chairman, the Reverend Peyton Hoge of First Presbyterian Church stood up. “During the War of Secession, our mills turned out iron for Confederate cannon,” he announced before he’d even reached the podium. “Those cannon are long gone now, broken into scrap. But let us pray that the Confederate iron that went into their making—that determination—is as strong as ever.”