The New York Legislature voted the amazing sum of three million dollars; the Chamber of Commerce whereas’d and resolved that the Southern ports should be blockaded; a hundred thousand people held a mass meeting in Union Square. Patty was there, telling everybody that when she was a girl Union Square was a paupers’ cemetery out in the country. Judge RoBards was one of the eighty-seven vice-presidents selected, along with Peter Cooper and historian Bancroft and W. C. Bryant, Mr. William Bond, Mr. J. J. Astor, Mr. Lorillard, Mr. Hewett, Mr. Morgan, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Fish—all the big ones.
The militia offered itself with a heroism all the finer for the fact that it lacked only uniform, equipment, ammunition, drill, organization, officers and men, and knowledge of war and of the more perilous problems of taking care of the feet and the bowels.
One regrettable effect of the war spirit was the boldness of some of the women. The ridiculous suffragists linked female freedom with black liberty and asked that white women be granted what black men were to receive. This impudence was properly quelled, but, in spite of all the opposition, the regrettable influence of Florence Nightingale encouraged restless women to offer their services in nursing—a nasty business hitherto mainly entrusted to drunken and dissolute women of the jails.
Before the wretched war was over, two thousand American women had drifted into the most unladylike of activities. Sane people feared that what was begun in war would be continued in peace, and that before long ladies would be studying physiology and other subjects, at the very mention of which nice females had fainted in the good old times.
While New York City was going mad with battle-ardor, up in Westchester County a teacher in the city public schools began to form a company called “The Westchester Chasseurs.”
One of the first to join was a lout named Gideon Lasher. RoBards saw the name in a paper and it gave his heart a twist.
There was a mad explosion of war feeling and the irresistible noise of war when the Sixth Massachusetts came to town one night on the boat. The next morning the New Englanders went up Broadway with a thumpity-thumpity-thump of drums and had breakfast at the Astor House; then marched with gleaming bayonets and Yankee-Doodling fifes and rolling standards through a sea of people. They met death first in the Baltimore streets.
On Friday afternoon the Seventh New York pushed through the mob of fathers, mothers, wives, sweethearts, sisters, brothers, on its way to the transports. It hurried to the salvation of Washington, where the Government was said to be packed in a valise for a backdoor escape.
Patty marched down Broadway clinging to the arm of Keith, embarrassing him wonderfully, and none the less for the fact that she crowded his wife aside.
Wives and mothers and girls betrothed were all agog over madly sweet farewells. There was a civil war of love about Keith.