All Other Nights (41 page)

“What the devil was that?” Little Johnny screamed.

To Jacob’s astonishment as he shifted his legs, he felt almost no pain—or perhaps he had suffered so much that night that he could no longer sense it. He pulled himself up into a sitting position, righting himself on the earth. He glanced around and saw that his cane had been blown over with him; he moved a bit along the ground and grabbed it from where it lay on a patch of grass.

“It was the powder magazine,” Jacob said. “The arsenal, by the river. The militia was told to blow it up.”

Little Johnny looked at him with wide eyes, then narrowed them. The sky was lit like daylight. The courier’s head was badly bruised, a red welt rising on one side of his forehead. “You’ve got all the answers, don’t you?” he sneered, pressing his hand to his temple. “You’re a goddamned Hebrew prophet.”

“I saw the evacuation orders,” Jacob spat back. “They were instructed to detonate the powder magazine. In fact they were told to blow up all the ordnance in the whole—” The battery of explosions began.

None was as violent as the first, but each was a rumbling, deafening crack that broke open the sky until the stars rained down over their heads, showering them with leaves, soot, pebbles from the tombstones, and once even a hailstorm of shattered glass from the single window of the morgue fifty yards away. Jacob clung to the granite slab with the priestly hands, trying to bend it over his own head as he buried himself in the ground beside it, his head rattling as though the pebbles from the tombstones had been deposited inside his skull. After what seemed like an endless volley of blasts, the silence that followed felt otherworldly, as if he were being ushered into the antechamber of death. For a long time he lay on the grave, dwelling in that dark and silent room. Then he heard the clop of horses’ hooves, and a high voice calling out, “Little Johnny? Is that you?”

Jacob might have been able to stand, with the help of his cane, but he was afraid to try. Instead he pulled himself up until he was sitting on the dirt, his head high enough to see Little Johnny crouching by the grave beside him and, a few yards past him, a boy of about thirteen. The boy was skinny, and might have had blond hair, though it was hard to tell with the layer of soot coating his head. He was wearing a ragged jacket that was dyed gray with ash, and his thin face and hands were streaked with soot and dirt. The boy was leading a horse by the reins—a large, magnificent animal that Jacob first thought was gray in color. But it was only the ash.

Jacob watched as Little Johnny hustled to his feet. For a moment Jacob envied the quick movements of the uninjured, the unappreciated talent for instant motion, for ease, for sudden escape.

“Yes!” Little Johnny shouted, as if the boy were about to offer him salvation. “Are you—are you—”

“I’m your ride to Washington,” the boy announced, and smiled. “I brought a horse for you.”

Little Johnny looked at the boy, then at the ash-covered horse. His face turned pale. “A
horse
?” he shrieked. “I’ve been sitting here for two whole nights, expecting a proper carriage, and all this time I’ve been waiting for a goddamned
horse
?” The boy said nothing, clutching the reins as Little Johnny continued shouting. “If I had known it was only going to be a horse, I could have managed on my own, without having to sit through the apocalypse in a goddamned graveyard!”

The boy scowled, his sooty face crinkling. “I started the night with a carriage, when I first set out,” he said. “And a second horse, too.” His voice was like a girl’s. “But that was hours ago. Some drunken soldiers took them.”

Little Johnny looked at him in despair. “You lost the carriage to a couple of drunks?”

The boy stamped a foot. “It wasn’t a couple of drunks. There were ten of them, maybe more. There was nothing I could do.” He rubbed the flank of the horse beside him, dusting ash off the horse’s hide. “But the Lord was on our side, and saved us a horse. He was awful spooked by the blasts, though.”

Little Johnny spat at the ground, clearly disgusted. “Well, bully for that,” he said.

Jacob looked at the boy and marveled at the pull of duty, how a thirteen-year-old had traversed a burning city—with the cause, to all appearances, already lost—just to complete this errand, as though it were more important than his own life. The boy patted the horse on the side of its neck, releasing a small cloud of ash, and quickly passed the reins to Little Johnny. Then he jutted his chin at Jacob. “Is the cripple going too?” he asked.

Before Jacob could answer, Little Johnny did. “Unfortunately, yes,” he replied, and glanced at Jacob with disdain. “But I’m a decent rider, so I’ll manage it. He’ll ride right behind me until we get to the next stop, even if I have to tie him to my waist. That horse looks like he can handle us. It’s only twenty miles or so.” Jacob flinched, anticipating the pain of such a ride, but it would hardly be the worst he had endured that night. Little Johnny was already looping the horse’s reins around a tall narrow monument, next to a raised flat gravestone that was wide and tall enough for them both to stand on. Mounting the horse would be painful too, but Little Johnny was big enough to help him, and Jacob was small enough to know how to suffer. “It would have been a hell of a lot more comfortable with a carriage,” Little Johnny muttered.

“‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,’” the boy quoted. He looked at Little Johnny, and smiled again. Then he held out a hand.

Little Johnny glared at him. “I suppose you are expecting full payment,” he said.

The boy stood firm, narrowing his eyes at Little Johnny as though he were the adult and Little Johnny the child. “After everything I did to get here, I ought to be paid triple,” he answered. He was almost two full heads shorter than Little Johnny, and had to strain to look up at him. His voice was comically high. “I risked my life just to keep that horse.”

Little Johnny opened his satchel and pulled out a change purse. “I won’t pay you more than you are owed,” he declared. “You’re lucky to get anything, frankly. You didn’t bring the carriage. You ought not to be paid at all.”

The boy smiled. Jacob thought of Rose, and of Abigail’s brothers, and remembered again how the world had been destroyed for these children, how nothing at all was left for them. He looked at the boy’s smile and imagined that he saw forgiveness in it, some expectation that the destruction the adults had wrought might not be in vain. But that was only Jacob’s imagination. The boy was still smiling as he reached under his jacket, pulled out a pistol, and leveled it at Little Johnny’s face. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got,” he said.

Jacob was surprised by how quickly Little Johnny complied. He turned purple, to be sure, but he didn’t resist. Instead he opened the bag and held it out for the boy, dropping his change purse back into it. “On your knees,” the boy ordered as he took the bag from Little Johnny’s hands. Little Johnny dropped to the ground, eye to eye with the boy as the boy helped himself to the purse, still pointing the gun at Little Johnny.
Savagery is a way of life
, Jacob heard Philip Levy say in his head.
My worst enemy is lawlessness.
The boy rummaged through Little Johnny’s satchel and pulled out a small Deringer pistol, which he slipped into his own jacket pocket, but apparently he found nothing else of interest. He dropped the bag in front of Little Johnny, without lowering his gun. Then he turned to Jacob. Jacob raised his hands above his head, but the boy merely smiled.

“Wounded in the line of duty, were you?” the boy asked, pointing at Jacob’s eye patch.

“Yes,” Jacob said.

“Don’t worry, sir, I won’t take anything from you. You’ve given plenty already,” he said. “Any fool can see that you’re a real patriot.” He saluted Jacob, a gesture that sent a little cloud of soot flying off his unruly hair. Then he turned and ran into the woods beyond the graves.

When the boy was out of sight, Little Johnny jumped to his feet, threw his hands up in the air and slammed them down on the gravestone in front of him. “Damn it!” he shouted. “That was two hundred dollars in gold. Two hundred dollars! How in hell am I supposed to get to Washington now?”

“At least he left us the horse,” Jacob said. He tried to make his voice nonchalant, as if he had seen thirteen-year-old boys holding up grown men at gunpoint every night of his life.
There was no king in Israel
, he heard Philip Levy quoting in his head,
and everyone did as he pleased
. Now he at least had the chance to stop the savagery in its tracks, his very last prospect for glory.

Little Johnny looked at Jacob where he was sitting on the dirt. “Well, Rappaport, this is your opportunity,” he grandly announced. “Are you coming with me?”

He asked the question almost sincerely, as though Jacob had a choice. “Of course,” Jacob said.

“First you’ll have to give me two hundred dollars, or neither of us are going anywhere,” Little Johnny replied. “You had better have it.”

Jacob did, though it was all he had. Little Johnny held open his satchel, and Jacob emptied gold pieces out of his pockets as Little Johnny grinned. “I knew I could rely on you for the gold,” the courier sneered as Jacob counted out the last piece. “Now let’s get your lame backside onto this goddamned horse.”

Jacob breathed in, a long, ash-laden breath, and exhaled, his whole life evaporating into the reeking tobacco-scented air. It was more difficult than he anticipated to bring himself to his feet. He struggled in his place on the ground for quite a while, fumbling with his cane. Little Johnny did nothing to help him. Instead he stepped away to fuss with the horse. Jacob turned around to balance himself on the tombstone and rose, with his back to John Surratt. And there he saw the little girl.

She was wearing a filthy soot-stained nightgown beneath a filthy soot-stained cloak, toddling toward him with uncertain steps in her battered buckled shoes. She was coated with gray ash. When she came closer, he squinted his remaining eye and saw her face—blue eyes, soot-smeared cheeks, a red gash on one side of her forehead, and ash-coated curls, her wet lips gleaming in the light of the fires from the burning city. She was standing before him now, shorter than his cane, looking up at his face. He trembled, unable to breathe. But she smiled at him, and wrapped her sooty arms around his crippled legs. He sank down to his knees and buried his lips in the ashes on her hair. Her mother was standing behind her.

“Sorry, miss. This livery service is already oversubscribed. You’ll have to book your passage elsewhere.”

Jacob turned, still on his knees, and saw Little Johnny watching him, his dark eyes bright and expectant in the unearthly light. “Rappaport, let’s leave,” he said.

Deborah had taken a step back from him now. She raised her hand to his face, reaching up to touch his eye patch and his scars. He took her fingers in his, gently, enveloping her whole hand until it was sealed within his fist, protected from ugliness and shame. He glanced at his wife, and looked back at Little Johnny.

“No,” he said.

A long slow grin spread across Little Johnny’s face. Jacob watched as Little Johnny reached into his vest pocket and removed Benjamin’s letter, holding it carefully in the air before him. “Well, now I know it,” he said, with a satisfaction Jacob had never heard before. “I always knew.” And then Little Johnny ripped the letter to shreds, releasing the pieces to the winds. Before Jacob could rise to his feet, Little Johnny had jumped up onto the tombstone, untied the reins, and mounted the horse. The horse reared and whinnied with Little Johnny on his back, the man’s figure tall and triumphant above the burning city.

“I know who you are, Rappaport!” he shouted at Jacob as he rode off into the woods beyond the graves.

For the first time in his life, as he held his daughter’s hand, Jacob Rappaport knew too.

W
HEN I WAS NINETEEN, I HAD THE PRIVILEGE OF SPENDING
a summer working as a fact-checker at the history magazine
American Heritage
. Part of my task was to protect the magazine from receiving angry letters from those readers most likely to be incensed by factual inaccuracies—railroad enthusiasts, military veterans, and dog lovers, among others. But I was warned that, among all irate readers, “Civil War buffs are to be feared the most.”

Although this novel is a work of fiction, I appreciate the impulse. As a scholar in another field with a profound appreciation of the lifelong commitment required to truly understand any place and time other than one’s own, I must admit that there are many people, living and dead, from whom I would be deeply honored to receive angry letters challenging the many liberties I have taken in this book.

First among these are the historical figures who appear in the novel, particularly Judah P. Benjamin—the first Jewish Cabinet member in American history, the author and orator of the address proposing the emancipation of the Confederacy’s slaves toward the end of the war, one of the greatest American orators of all time, and a talented statesman who served a justly doomed cause, yet proved his devotion to the last. His service to his country, despite the extensive abuse he endured from every side, made it possible to imagine the broadening of opportunities for all Americans. Prior to the Civil War, Benjamin was the first unconverted Jew to serve in the United States Senate, where he represented Louisiana, and he was considered a contender for a seat on the United States Supreme Court. When the Southern states seceded from the Union, Benjamin was briefly made the Confederacy’s attorney-general; he then became Secretary of War and finally Secretary of State, a position he held from 1862 to 1865. During the Civil War he was Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s closest adviser and confidant, and he also served as spymaster for operations initially organized in Canada, where many Confederate agents were based.

The episode in this book involving the assassination plot in New Orleans, as well as the plot itself, is entirely fictitious, though Lincoln was threatened by assassins at several points during the Civil War (and though Judah Benjamin did have a first cousin in New Orleans named Hyams—Henry Hyams, who served as lieutenant governor of Louisiana). There is a great deal of debate surrounding Lincoln’s assassination even nearly a century and a half later. Government investigations in the 1860s succeeded in proving only a “simple” conspiracy of locally organized assassins and collaborators (who also stabbed William Seward, the Union Secretary of State, on the same night), but it is now clear that many of these conspirators, including assassin John Wilkes Booth, had served for much of the war as agents on the Confederate government payroll, and that several of them, again including Booth, had also been engaged in a rather desperate plot to kidnap Lincoln and perhaps other Northern officials—a plot which circumstantial evidence has linked to the Confederate government. Given current research, one would have to stretch (as certain historians admittedly have) to claim any connection between the ultimate assassination and the by-then-defunct Confederate government, but it is reasonable to speculate that those involved in Lincoln’s assassination were Confederate agents who acted as rogues in the wake of the Confederate government’s flight.

In the months following Lincoln’s death, the only potential link that the Union investigation could find between the known conspirators and the Confederate government was Judah Benjamin’s hiring of John Surratt as a Confederate courier. Surratt’s mother, Mary Surratt, owned the boardinghouse in which the conspirators met, and later became the first woman ever executed by the United States government for her role in the conspiracy. Some contemporary observers, as well as some historians, believed that her death sentence was in part an attempt to draw out the then fugitive John Surratt. Years after his own capture in Egypt in 1867 and his subsequent trial, which ended in a hung jury, John Surratt publicly claimed that he had been given two hundred dollars in gold by Judah Benjamin the day before the evacuation of Richmond to defray his expenses while delivering messages to agents in Canada, and that this was the extent of his service to the Confederate government. He also stated that neither Jefferson Davis nor Judah Benjamin had any knowledge of Booth’s assassination plot. After the fall of Richmond and the collapse of the Confederacy, Judah Benjamin managed a fabulous escape, involving everything from disguising himself as a Frenchman to traversing the swamps of Florida on foot to following a talking parrot to the home of a Confederate sympathizer to surviving the sinking of one boat in the Caribbean and a fire on another. He ultimately succeeded in reaching England, where he had citizenship due to his birth in the British West Indies. In England he began an entirely new life as a barrister, rising to the level of Queen’s Counsel and authoring an important legal treatise used to this day. He never returned to the United States.

Among the many other historical figures, spies, and citizens who served as inspiration for the characters in this book, I must first mention Eugenia Levy Phillips, a Southern Jewish woman and mother of nine who was imprisoned twice by the Union army: once, with two of her daughters, for espionage along with the Confederate spy Rose Green-how (whose father had been murdered by one of his own slaves), and later, for insubordination against the occupying Union army in New Orleans, for three months in a boxcar on Ship’s Island in the Gulf of Mexico. Mrs. Phillips was the wife of Philip Phillips, a Jewish congressman from Alabama who was a moderate and opposed the South’s secession from the Union. Eugenia’s sister, Phoebe Pember, was the head nurse of Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, the largest hospital in the South. On the Northern side, I was intrigued by Dr. Issachar Zacharie, a Jewish Union spy from New York City who served on missions in New Orleans in 1862 and then in Richmond in 1863—the latter a covert peace mission authorized by Lincoln, during which he conferred with Judah Benjamin and other members of the Confederate Cabinet on a potential peace treaty. I was further inspired by Timothy Webster, a Union spy who succeeded in being hired by the Confederate secret service in Richmond, and by the Confederate spy sisters Ginnie and Lottie Moon, who worked in tandem under various identities. In addition to becoming engaged to sixteen men at the same time (one of whom, a Union soldier, she dismissed at the altar with the words “Nosiree, Bob!”), Lottie Moon had several unusual talents which she frequently used to her advantage—including the ability to dislocate her jaw at will and convincingly pretend to be suffering great physical pain. Others whose personalities contributed elements to this novel include Adah Isaacs Menken, a flamboyant Jewish actress and Confederate sympathizer in Baltimore whose gentleman caller was arrested as a Rebel spy; Pauline Cushman, an actress who used her performance skills as a Union spy herself; John Scobell, a fugitive slave and Union spy who worked with several white Union agents, including Hattie Lawton, who transferred her messages using hollowed-out handles of riding crops; Mary Bowser, a freed slave and Union spy who worked as a maid in Jefferson Davis’s house and sent her messages through the bakery that supplied the executive mansion; Nancy Hart, age eighteen, a Confederate woman who, when captured by Union soldiers, tricked one of them into giving her his gun in order to escape; Antonia Ford, age twenty-three, who arranged for the capture of Union officers as they left a party at her father’s Virginia boarding house; an anonymous female Union agent who posed as a refugee from New Orleans in Miss Ford’s boarding house in order to “befriend” Miss Ford and ultimately turn her over to Union authorities; and an anonymous African American couple—the wife enslaved at the headquarters of Confederate General Longstreet—who relayed messages concerning troop movements through the arrangement of clothes on a laundry line. The renowned actor Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln’s assassin and the owner of the “most perfect physical head in America” according to an 1865 article in the
New York World
, would be most justified in objecting to this novel: by his own account, he was always loyal to the Union, and cast the only vote of his life for Lincoln in 1864.

There were approximately 130,000 Jews living in the United States in 1860, a significant portion of whom were of Spanish-Jewish descent and had come to North America from the Caribbean and Latin America as early as the mid-seventeenth century, and a larger portion of whom were of German-Jewish descent and had arrived in the United States in the early nineteenth century. By 1860 they were dispersed throughout the nation, with the largest Jewish community in New York and the second largest in New Orleans. These Americans were as divided as the rest of the country over the issues surrounding the Civil War, usually but not always along geographic lines. At Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, the oldest German-Jewish congregation in New York City, the nationally prominent rabbi at the time of the Civil War, Dr. Morris Raphall, was known for his pro-slavery stance. His Jewish opponents on the national level included, among many others, Rabbi David Einhorn, an outspoken abolitionist in the pro-Southern city of Baltimore. (New York’s B’nai Jeshurun is a large and vibrant congregation today—and known for its progressive politics.)

Many scenes in this novel are drawn directly from historical events. Perhaps the least well known of these is the expulsion of the Jews from conquered areas of the South. Northern general Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order Number 11 from his headquarters in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on December 17, 1862, the text of which is reproduced verbatim in the novel. This order expelled the Jews from the Department of the Tennessee, an administrative territory covering areas of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi, for the ostensible reason that the Jews “as a class” were war profiteers. It resulted not only in the forced evacuation of Jewish families within twenty-four hours, but also in the imprisonment of those who refused to comply, as well as instances of property seizure. The order was overturned by President Lincoln three weeks later, when a delegation representing thirty-five Jewish families expelled from Paducah, Kentucky, visited the White House to plead to return to their homes.

Other incidents in the novel drawn from historical sources include the description of the slave auction, whose details come from interviews with ex-slaves that were collected by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. The dialogue involving Dorrie and Dabney in the aforementioned scene is taken almost verbatim (along with its dialect) from an 1859 article in the
New York Herald
, written by an undercover correspondent who attended the auction of Pierce Butler’s slaves in Savannah, Georgia. The details of espionage in the novel, such as the types of codes used by the North and the South, are also well documented, as is the Legal League, a network of African-American spies who worked for the North by providing information on Southern troop movements and also by maintaining an ancillary underground railroad used by Northern spies (both white and black) to move between North and South.

I am most grateful to the many writers and scholars, living and dead, whose works provided me with the historical background for this book. First among these are Bertram Korn, author of the pioneering study
American Jewry and the Civil War
; Eli Evans, author of the masterful biography
Judah Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate
; and Robert Rosen, author of the comprehensive and fascinating
The Jewish Confederates
, from all of which I drew extensively. I also used Jacob Rader Marcus’s
Memoirs of American Jews
, itself an indispensable resource, and occasionally consulted American Jewish newspapers from the period, including the
Jewish Messenger
and the
Israelite
. Concerning espionage, I drew from sources including Edwin C. Fishel’s
The Secret War for the Union
, Alan Axelrod’s
The War Between the Spies
, Larry Eggleston’s
Women of the Civil War
, David Kahn’s
The Codebreakers
, which offers very technical explanations of certain Civil War ciphers, and
Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assasination of Lincoln
by William Tidwell and James O. Hall. The last of these is quite controversial for its unabashedly speculative probing of potential links between the Confederate spy network and the murder of Abraham Lincoln. (For a viewpoint quite opposite Tidwell and Hall’s, see
Beware the People Weeping
and other works by Thomas Turner.) For general information on the war and the period I have relied upon works such as Shelby Foote’s
The Civil War: A Narrative
, as well as the U. S. government’s compendium of war documentation,
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion
. For the fall of Richmond I drew from Jay Winik’s
April 1865
, in addition to several contemporaneous articles from the
Richmond Whig
, the only local newspaper whose offices were not destroyed during the city’s self-destruction; for the December 1862 raid on Holly Springs, I relied on the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. On the culture of German-Jewish immigrants and their children, I used
Studies in Judaica Americana
, a volume of academic essays on the subject, as well as the less academic (and less informed on Jewish cultural matters)
“Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York
by Steven Birmingham, a book best enjoyed as American business history. I also drew from
A Century of Judaism in New York
, the celebratory 1925 volume published on the occasion of the centennial of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City.

These citations represent only the tiniest fraction of the vast resources available to any reader interested in this period. While I have tried to remain loyal to my fact-checking past, I can only hope that true Civil War buffs will do me the great honor of respecting my imagination as well.