Battle Of The Plains Of Abraham Quotes

This dog had a name which fitted him, Tonteur had thought. For he was a wreck of a dog—even more a wreck than the splendid seigneur himself, with his stub of a shot-off leg and a breast that bore sword marks which would have killed an ordinary man. The dog, first of all, was big and bony and gaunt, a physical ensemble of rough-edged joints and craggy muscles that came by nature and not because of hunger. He was a homely dog, so hopelessly homely that one could not help loving him at sight. His hair was bristly and unkempt. His paws were huge. His jaws were long and lank, and his ears were relics of many a hard-fought battle with other beasts of his kind. His tail was half gone, which left him only a stub to wag. He walked with a limp, a heavy, never-falling limp that seemed to shake his long body from end to end, for his left fore paw—like Tonteur’s foot—was missing. A crooked, cheery, inartistic, lovable dog to whom the woman—in a moment’s visioning of the fitness of things—had given the name of Odds-and-Ends.

York City, as bloodthirsty mobs of enraged working-class Whites roamed Midtown Manhattan “armed with clubs, pitchforks, iron bars, swords, and many with guns and pistols,” looking for any African Americans they could find.1 Marching through the streets, those with weapons fired toward anyone in their way, even at New York City policemen. On the corner of Twenty-Ninth Street, “a crowd who had been engaged all day in hunting down and stoning to death every negro they could spy” lingered in plain view of the Twenty-First Precinct police station. It was undermanned because thousands of New York State Militia troops who would have served as backup had been sent to the Battle of Gettysburg.2 Nothing was spared. The Colored Orphan Asylum at Forty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, home to more than two hundred disadvantaged Black children, had been burned to the ground. Horses pulling streetcars had been shot to death and the cars smashed to pieces. The homes of prominent abolitionists were being looted and destroyed. Railroad tracks had been torn up and telegraph wires cut. Dozens of public buildings, including churches, were ransacked and torched. Even the house of the New York City mayor, George Opdyke, was raided and set on fire. It was mayhem. Ever since President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, the city’s poorest Whites feared that freed slaves would migrate to Manhattan and steal their jobs. Then in March, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, which made all able-bodied adult males immediately eligible to be drafted into the Union Army. This reality sank in when the names of New York City draftees were published leading up to “Draft Week.” Making matters worse was that under the Enrollment Act, any wealthy man could escape the draft by paying a $300 fee (the equivalent of more than $6,500 today).3 He would be replaced by some poor fellow who simply couldn’t afford to pay that.