Following up the Prince Street Mystery—Tom Leslie's Peculiar Ideas—A Call upon Superintendent Kennedy—The Departure of a Regiment—Josey Harris in a Street-Squall—A Rencontre.
It was not to be supposed that Tom Leslie and Walter Lane Harding, after the expenditure of ten dollars, a whole night's rest and a considerable amount of bodily energy, in the investigation of what they called the 'Prince Street mystery,' would permit it to remain uninvestigated afterwards, so far as a little more money and a good deal more of inquisitiveness could go in unravelling it. Even before they parted, late on the night of the adventure, they had discussed half a dozen plans for gaining admission to the house on Prince Street or that on East 5—th, by fair means or foul. Harding, who was something of a stickler for propriety in ordinary cases, in spite of the fact that he had on that one occasion been inveigled into following a carriage and playing spy under a front stoop—Harding expressed himself satisfied that there being now in their minds a sufficient certainty of the existence of a disloyal organization in the city to make affidavits to that effect a duty—the proper course would be to lay the matter at once before the Superintendent of Police and request that a watch might be set upon the houses or some proceedings taken to "work up" the case for after proceedings. The young merchant no doubt had more confidence in this plan than he might otherwise have done, from the fact that a few months previous a robbery had been committed at his place of business, and that upon his laying the matter at once before the police authorities, such steps had been taken as within two weeks secured the detection of the leading culprit and the recovery of most of the missing property. Here was a detective "bridge" that had once "carried him safe over" in a commercial point of view: why would not the same bridge offer both of them a safe footing when attempting to unravel a mystery of disloyalty?
Tom Leslie, as was natural to one of his temperament, took a different view of the whole matter. Mysteries "bothered" the straight-forward Harding; but to Tom they formed one of the necessities of existence—a little less indispensable than his breakfast, but much more important than his cigar. Had he been precisely the sort of man for employing police agency where personal investigation was possible, he would never have climbed the tree in Prince Street or dragged Harding under the stoop of the brown-stone house. He suggested that Harding would not have much difficulty in making himself up for a postman, and getting inside the up-town house in that capacity, trusting to his own skill to remain within until he had made the necessary investigations; while as for himself—well, he had no particular objections to entering temporarily upon the occupation of a tinker or a gatherer of old rags and bottles, with a disguise from his friend Williams, the costumer, and working the basement of the house on Prince Street, and the domestics therein employed, in one of those capacities. He had no doubt whatever that if he could only succeed in concealing himself in the sub-cellar or the coal-vault, until the house should be closed for the night, he could then, with the aid of a few matches and a pair of list slippers carried in the pocket, make a "rummage" of the premises which must prove eminently satisfactory. He did not seem to labor under any fear that the little accident of being discovered while lying perdu or while making his explorations, and arrested and sent to Blackwell's Island as an ordinary sneak-thief, might possibly stand in the way. In fact, if all stories of his earlier life were to be credited, he had taken some pains, in more than one instance, to be arrested by the Police under what appeared to be suspicious circumstances, spend a night in the station-house, and astound the Police Justices, who personally knew him somewhat too well for their comfort, by his appearance as a very woe-begone culprit in the morning. "De gustibus non est," etc.—there is really no disputing about tastes, since St. Simeon Stylites roosted upon the top of a very inconvenient pillar, and the first ostrich inaugurated the dietary proclivities of the race by gobbling down a small cart-load of cord-wood with a garnish of a peck of paving-stones! A night in a station-house may not be so very unpleasant a thing, when taken from choice and with a certainty of the door being laughingly opened in the morning: Whiskey Tom or Scratching Sall, who visit the institution perforce, for small burglaries or big vagrancies, with a prospect of "six months" or "two years" at the end, may form a very different opinion of it!
Tom Leslie, as has been remarked, did not seem to have any fears of such a result as an arrest, to his proposed spy-movements; but it cannot be concealed that for a moment Walter Harding, who had before thought that he knew him well, looked at him out of the corners of his eyes, with some impression that he must unwittingly have been keeping company with a genteel house-breaker. At all events, Harding did not fall in with the spy-proposition, so far as his own action was concerned, alleging that there might be such a thing as a business man having other occupations than traversing the city in disguise as a volunteer detective; and so that project, if any there had really been in the mind of Leslie, was abandoned.
A resort to the police remained; for neither of the friends, after what they had seen and heard, could think of the whole affair being allowed to go by default. Superintendent Kennedy must be visited, after all; and though Harding's business for the next day would interfere, it was more than half agreed upon before they separated, that they would call together upon that official on the next day but one and lay the whole matter before him.
The agreement, though only half made, was better kept than many that are made more conclusively; for at eleven o'clock on the day named Leslie made his appearance at the place of business of Harding, and dragged him away from a series of mercantile calculations over the desk, in which he had more than half forgotten the existence of his friend as well as the whole adventure of the chase and the mystery. He came up to the work pretty readily, however—the presence of the rattling, go-ahead Leslie always having the effect of carrying him a little off his feet; and half an hour afterwards the two friends had entered that melancholy-looking five-story brick building on the corner of Broome and Elm, then and till lately known as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police,—and were being shown by a policeman in attendance, with the blue of his suit undimmed by exposure to the weather and the brass of his buttons radiantly untarnished, into the presence of John A. Kennedy, Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police District and for the time Provost Marshal of the City of New York. They entered from the hall of the building by a side door to the left, in the rear of what had been the centre of the house when occupied as a private residence before New York moved up "above Bleecker,"—and advancing towards the front under the guidance of the respectful official, passed the table at which sat the half-bald, stern-faced, and iron-gray Deputy Superintendent Carpenter, through the door that had once separated the two parlors, and stood in the presence of another iron-gray man, seated writing at a table covered with books and papers, his back to the front of the building, and the smooth-shaven and round-faced Inspector Leonard busily examining a roll of papers behind him in the corner.
Few men in this whole country have occupied a more marked position in the public mind, during all this struggle, than Superintendent Kennedy, in his legitimate position at the head of the Police and in what we must believe to have been his illegitimate one as Provost Marshal. He made himself peculiarly conspicuous, and won the enmity of all the secession wing of the Northern democracy, by stopping the shipment of arms to the rebellious States, and blocking the apparent game of Mayor Wood and his aiders and abettors to curry favor with the extreme South by truckling to every one of its arrogant dictations. The enmity then created has never died, and can never die until those who hold it happen to die themselves. At the same time, those who were and are unconditionally loyal to the Union, have never judged the action of Superintendent Kennedy very harshly—aware that something needed to be done to prevent the existing evil, and that only a man of his indomitable "pluck" could be found to apply the remedy at such a period.
A somewhat broader and more general charge has since been preferred against him—that in the exercise of the duties of Provost Marshal, which he assumed without propriety, he showed himself a willing tool of governmental despotism and displayed indefensible harshness and arrogance. There is something of truth in this charge, beyond a question,—as the impossibility of "touching pitch" without being "defiled," applies to intercourse with wrong-doers high in power as well as to those in lower station. The station-houses of the New York police were certainly made receptacles for accused parties whose crimes were very different from those contemplated in their erection,—just as the forts in the harbors of New York and Boston have been made "Bastilles" for state-prisoners whose arrests were signally reckless and improper. Many of the prisoners, in both cases, have deserved more than all the punishment received; but the blind uncertainty as to their guilt, and the impossibility of discovering even the nature of the charges against them, have made those imprisonments equally indefensible and dangerous, and brought them at last to their end.
There is a woman at the bottom of almost every revolution—political as well as social. Tradition tells us, though history is silent on the subject, that the sad fate of the daughter of a French citizen, flung into the Bastille for alleged complicity in a conspiracy during the early days of Louis XVI., and dying there—rankled in the minds of the Parisians much more than the wrongs done to thousands of brave and noble men during the centuries previous, and furnished the burden of the terrible cry with which the men of 1789 thundered at the walls of that old fortress of feudal oppression, and with which they butchered not only De Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, but Flesselles, the Provost Marshal. The case of a woman—Mrs. Brinsmaid—was the last drop in the cup of endurance, here, and the event which we believe was finally and forever to close the melancholy doors of Lafayette and Warren, against arrest without charge and imprisonment without trial—spite of indemnity bills passed and unlimited powers conferred upon the President by a mad Congress.
Through all this, meanwhile, John A. Kennedy was unquestionably more sinned against than sinning—made the tool of worse and more unscrupulous men, who used his hard conscientiousness and his narrow bigotry of mind, fostered by too long and too close connection with the lodges of secret societies—to carry out their own designs of despotism, without the nobility to stand between him and his possible sacrifice for obeying the very orders they had given. He is not the first man who has been misused and placed in a false position, nor the last, as a later victim of blind confidence and obedience, Burnside,[8] is very likely to bear sad witness.