Part 14

The New York men looked at each other. “We are quite helpless, sir,” said the old Judge, then. “We cannot force United States officers to surrender. I propose to my colleagues that a deputation shall go to Washington at once to lay your terms before the President as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. I assure you that we shall represent to him, most strongly, the advisability of yielding. Will you, for your part, give us more time?”

“I cannot go beyond my orders,” answered the officer. “Twenty-four hours, I fear, is the extreme limit. It will give you ample time, since the matter to be considered is most simple. You might inform His Excellency the President, if you wish, that we have succeeded in reducing and taking Forts Schuyler, Slocum and Totten. We shall proceed to invest Fort Hamilton before to-morrow morning. Surrender will prevent useless loss of life and destruction of property.”

_Government Surrenders Forts_

A special train brought the deputation into Washington before daylight next morning. The New York men went at once to the White House where they were received by the President, who had not been in bed. “You have no doubt that they mean to make good their threat of bombardment?” asked the President, after receiving their report. “Then, gentlemen, there is only one action for this Government to take.” He sighed, and echoed the refrain of all the past days. “There is nothing else that we can do.”

An hour later the wires to New York, cleared by orders from the War Department, carried a dispatch to the commandants at Fort Hamilton and Fort Wadsworth. It ordered them to surrender.

From his headquarters the enemy commander ordered detachments to go down the harbor in boats and occupy the captured defenses. Then he sent his troops forward into the City.

And now the New Yorkers who had expected that their streets would be flooded by a great army, were amazed at the ease and simplicity with which the city fell into military control. Instead of brigades entering the city, there were not even regiments. Troops of cavalry, companies of infantry, single machine-gun detachments, moving separately down separated avenues, with big intervals between them, were all the force that entered.

Some boatloads of men and artillery passed down the river and landed in Brooklyn, some to occupy the Navy Yard and others to reënforce the men who had come in through Long Island; but the army remained outside, holding the northern districts from the Sound to the Hudson, and guarding the Hudson River and Putnam Valleys against surprise attack from the direction of Albany.

_An Easy City to Occupy_

The officers in charge of the men who entered the city asked no questions and required no directions. Unhesitatingly each led his force to the point that he wanted. Within two hours New York was wholly in the hands of the soldiers.

Nobody had thought of it before. Now, all at once, when it was accomplished, it amazed the people of New York to learn how easy it was to control the city’s whole life, civic and commercial.

A battalion of infantry occupied the Grand Central Terminal. Another battalion took the great Pennsylvania terminal with its under-river tunnels to New Jersey and Long Island. Detachments appeared at the Twenty-third Street and Forty-second Street ferries over the Hudson River and by that one seizure controlled all railroad connections with the West from uptown. The occupation of half a dozen other Hudson River railroad ferries down-town, and of the Hudson Terminal Tube System, completed the entire control of all the city’s railroad traffic in every direction.

Equally simple was the control of its communications. Men appeared at the two great telegraph buildings and at the telephone building. Within half an hour they had every trunk line of wires in their hands and could strike the city dumb at will.

Thus less than three thousand men had their fingers on the big town’s spinal nerves, and could paralyze it with a slight pressure.

_Still Easier to Guard_

It was still easier to control the city from a military point of view. The citizens who had expected to see their streets commanded by cannon on limbers, did not at first comprehend why there were hardly any of these to be seen, while machine gun detachments scattered and disappeared as soon as they got well into the town. Only gradually did the citizens discover that their big, sprawling metropolis was being held subject by a very simple utilization of the city’s characteristic feature.

This feature was the sky-scraper. To the eye of the soldier, these high buildings were nothing so much as inviting and magnificent eminences for controlling the street-valleys and their population below.

Four men with a machine gun and abundance of ammunition in one of these stone and steel summits could control more area than half a dozen heavy field gun batteries posted in the streets could command.

These sentinel watchers were as aloof and as sure as fate. They could neither be rushed by a mob nor sniped from concealment. At a word from the telephone in their eyries, they could start death dancing among the pygmy hordes far under them.

From the top of the Woolworth Building two of the little guns pointed down into Broadway. Turned southward, they could sweep the town as far as the Battery. Eastward, they could rain their steel-jacketed bullets into the river front streets and over the two lower bridges that cross the East River. Northward, they had Broadway as far up as Canal Street under their fire.

They were supplemented by a gun on top of the great Municipal Building. It held a good part of the crowded tenement house district of the Lower East Side under its zone of fire, notably the doubtful sections of Cherry Street and other areas known to the police.

_Church Towers as Gun Stations_

On the tall towers of the suspension bridges themselves were other detachments with a gun each. The churches were not forgotten by the soldiers. The graceful steeple of Grace Church, standing at an acute angle of Broadway so that it can be seen from far down town, had been before men’s eyes so long that they had ceased, almost, to note its soft beauty. Now they looked at it with a new and acute perception, for its steeple held a gun that pointed down Broadway, whose southern zone of fire would just about reach to where the northern zone of fire from the Woolworth Building would end.

Trinity, too, had a gun in its tower, pointing down Wall Street. North and south on upper Broadway, guns on the Flatiron Building could reach any important street or any place where dangerous crowds might conceivably form. This eminence controlled both Madison and Union Squares. The tower of Madison Square Garden, near-by, also was armed. From it men could watch and reach any part of the East Side that was out of reach of the detachments in the bridge towers. Uptown New York was governed more easily still. The wide, geometrically regular streets with many open squares, were overlooked by tall apartment buildings and hotels that commanded long sweeps of avenue. As a result, many of the city squares and smaller parts had no artillery in them at all, and others had only half a battery.

The people knew that wherever they might move, they were within the range of cannon that were loaded and ready. Their Citizens’ Committee and their officials worked under guns. Every foot of their Great White Way could be changed into a Way of Death at a moment’s notice. Their women could not shop, their children could not play, except under the menace of weapons.

Small need was there in New York City of the many placards and notices warning the people against disorder. Every man’s eye was on every other man; and had one plotted mischief or rebellion, there would have been a hundred witnesses ready to suppress him, to betray him--anything to prevent those steel devils in the city towers from setting death loose in the streets!

X

THE PRICE THAT HAD TO BE PAID

Not until the City of New York actually was surrendered did the people of the Middle and Far West become startled into a really acute perception of the catastrophe that had fallen on the whole country.

Though they were fiery with patriotism and anger, and though they were giving not only lavishly but extravagantly of their wealth and men, they were free, unconquered and untouched. They had seen no invader. With a suddenly freshened realization of the hugeness of the country, they had attained the conviction that there was little danger that any foe possibly could reach them from the Atlantic.

They were willing to defend the East with all that they had. They were willing to toss to the air all their royal plans for the splendid future that was all but built. They were the real America, and they were willing to ruin themselves and die for America. But--the men of Chicago were a thousand miles from an enemy. Three thousand miles separated the men of the Pacific from the armed enemies in New England.

So their customary life and their business had continued. They continued to work and barter and plan. The loss of the industries of New England had made itself felt at once, but there was an enormous land left. Even the locking of all the Atlantic and Gulf ports with the attendant calamities could not wholly shatter their great web of trade.

_Pacific Remains Open_

Their commerce could go and enter through their own ports unimpeded, for happily in this crisis there was no danger threatening from across the Pacific.

Therefore, though the surrender of Boston had shaken them, it had not terrified them. The great inland country clung to the belief that the army would do something. During the enemy’s slow movement through Connecticut in the advance toward New York, the people of the West remained inspired by that hope, as men in past ages, stricken dumb by a darkened Heaven and a smoking mountain, still clung to the belief that a kindly miracle would interpose to save them, though the earth of their market places was trembling under their feet.

That spiritual self-defense with which men armor themselves against inevitable fates had not given way until the Administration announced the surrender of the City of New York and its two great forts, with the statement:

“The President assumes full responsibility. After a careful examination of the situation in person, he issued orders, as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, that the army in the field should offer no opposition.”

Then the West began to fear with a great fear that its Pacific coast was not safe, after all. It thought, appalled, that an enemy so formidable and successful, confronting opposition so futile, might succeed in breaking the defenses of the Panama Canal as easily as he had broken the defenses of the Atlantic.

_Panama Canal Safe_

But the Panama Canal was being held. The United States fleet, having failed to prevent the hostile landing on the New England coast, had turned at once to defend the one vital spot that it could protect even against superior numbers. That was the Caribbean entrance to the Canal.

It raced there under forced draught. It surprised and destroyed an inferior force of cruisers and battleships that the enemy had stationed there for blockade. Again it was mathematics. The foe, forced to assure himself against attack on his transports off the New England coast, had held all his powerful ships north of the American fleet. The weaker blockaders in the South, facing guns of superior range, ships of superior speed, and superior volume of gun-fire, went down to destruction without even the satisfaction of biting hard as they died.

Now the country that had been sick with humiliation because its navy would not fight, thanked Heaven that the fleet had kept itself intact: that instead of going down in glorious disaster, it had worked out a scientific problem coolly. The big navy, intact to its smallest torpedo boat, was lying fully potent under the strong defenses of Limon Harbor.

The guns of the fortifications protected the ships, and the ships protected the fortifications. Three thousand naval officers and sixty thousand sailors and marines, added to the land forces in the defenses, made a force of highly trained, completely efficient men.[149]

_The Defenses Perfect_

The defenses were perfect. This precious possession was one American possession at least that could be held to the last. Its guns were fully installed. It had ammunition. Its range finding systems and its systems of fire control were complete. Without the navy, it, too, would have been sorely weak in men and would have been open, like America’s continental defenses, to attack from the land. But with the naval forces, it was able to hold out.[150]

The navy was ready to throw men ashore to meet any attempt at landings along the coast. The navy’s torpedo boats and destroyers crept to sea in the night and guarded all weak places. The American submarines, with a safe harbor for a base, worked under ideal submarine conditions. When the hostile navy, freed from the task of protecting its army, at last appeared in force off the Isthmus, it dared not institute anything like a close blockade.

It dared not even venture in to bombard. There were 16-inch guns at Panama. It was an object lesson for the United States. Exactly thus, had there been an army to protect them, the Atlantic coast defenses could have defied any attempt from the sea to force a harbor.

_Hostile Navy Powerless_

The enemy navy, overwhelming as it was, could do nothing except to wait and watch. It cruised up and down, far out in the purple Caribbean. Its only trophies in the South were Porto Rico and the United States Naval station of Guantanamo in Cuba. It had taken the latter by the simple method of steaming in, for this “naval station” was only an unfortified harbor.[151]

The news of Panama’s safety was the first and only good news that had been given to the country since the declaration of war. The relief that it gave was so great that the people received almost with equanimity the news which followed--that word had come from spies of the arrival of more transports in Boston Harbor and Narragansett Bay, bringing forces estimated at figures varying from 50,000 to 100,000 more men.

Soon after this landing had been accomplished, cavalry and light artillery moved northward through Vermont. They seized and occupied in force Bellows Falls and the White River, Wells River and St. Johnsbury Junctions of the Vermont railroads. This cut the last communication of New England with the United States. It gave the invader absolute command of the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad, the Central Vermont, the Maine Central, the Boston and Maine and the Rutland branch railroads. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont were in his power like the rest of New England. Blockaded from the sea, and cut off from railroad connection with the interior, they were subjugated even without the unfolding of forces that now began through their area.

Here, too, the invaders, despite their grown power, moved slowly, cautiously. They cut districts from each other, and occupied them one by one systematically, making united action by the population impossible even had it been feasible. By the simple method of disorganizing all the accustomed political and governmental affiliations, they turned to their purpose the ever-present lack of coherence between State governments and city governments, township authorities and County authorities. The machinery fell apart; and the enemy dealt with the bits as he chose.

_The Conquest Complete_

The few big cities of the three States could offer no resistance. Within a few days the conquest of all New England was complete. Not a word came out of it to the rest of the United States. The City of New York was equally sealed. Nothing was permitted to pass out of the gagged and fettered town. The messages that stormed at it were delivered to censors who did what they pleased with them, and passed practically none to the persons for whom they had been destined.

In this sealed city, for the first time in men’s memory, there were no crowds on the streets. Broadway from 59th Street to the Battery was almost naked of people by day and by night. Its electric signs were dark. Its hotels and theaters were all but dark.

Whenever, by chance, people found themselves in a given block in numbers sufficient to make a throng, there always was a hasty scattering, as if they feared to touch each other. As these little knots scattered, they cast swift glances of apprehension at the high roofs.

There had been an official notice on the front pages of all the New York newspapers on the morning after the occupation:

ALL ASSEMBLAGES OR GATHERINGS ON THE STREETS ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN

By Order of the Military Government.[152]

There was no threat as to penalty for infraction. None was needed. The machine guns in all the towers and sky-scrapers were sufficient warning.

The shape of the island on which the Borough of Manhattan lay, with immensely long straight streets running north and south through its narrow width, made it a simple matter to isolate all sections in which there were populations who might become unruly. The crowded tenement districts of the East Side were cut off from those in the West. They were separated into units within themselves. Very soon, the soldiers moved around the city with the ease of careless visitors. Officers, mounted and in automobiles, went where they pleased. They paid apparently no attention to the people, and these, in turn, could not guess anything that the conquerors had in mind or what would be their next act in the next minute.

_Surrounded by the Unknown_

The city’s newspapers, like those of Boston and all New England, were controlled and edited by military censors. They were permitted to tell their readers nothing of importance. This utter ignorance in which the multitudes were kept, made them more helpless than did even the guns that watched them everywhere.

It was a city surrounded, perpetually confronted and oppressed by the unknown. The veil of secrecy and silence was lifted only when newspapers or placards printed some new proclamation in formal, legal verbiage.

The first one to be issued had proclaimed the occupation, and the institution of a Military Government. It had added that the existing civil authorities had been empowered and ordered to continue their administration with the sanction and participation of the Military Government, and that all civil and criminal laws remained in effect subject to changes demanded by military exigency.[153]

But immediately under this announcement was a paragraph headed:

LAWS SUSPENDED

On and after this date the following Classes of Laws are Suspended. (1) The Right to Bear Arms. (2) The Right of Suffrage. (3) The Right of Assemblage. (4) The Right to Publish Newspapers or Circulate Other Matter. (5) The Right to Quit Occupied Territory or Travel Freely in same.[154]

Another announcement that struck home after the people saw its real meaning under its smooth wording was:

“The municipal and other civil and criminal laws as administered by the civil authorities, are for the benefit and protection of the civilian population. Their continued enforcement is not for the protection or control of officers and soldiers of the Occupying Army, who are subject to the Rules of War, and amenable only to their own Military Government.”[155]

At first this announcement seemed to the citizens to be for their protection, but the sharper readers soon pointed out that it was only a skillful way of intimating that the soldiers were above all the laws that controlled the conquered population.

_A Mysterious Flotilla_

A few days after the surrender, people along the water-front noticed a great movement of vessels. The big Fall River Line and other Sound steamers moved down the Upper Bay in long procession, with some steamships seized at the wharves.

They were full of troops. Some of the vessels towed railroad floats with flat cars on which were lashed cannon so big that even from the shore the eye could perceive their unusual size. Other craft towed strings of small scows, and still others towed floating derricks.

The flotilla passed down the Upper Bay, but it did not go out through the Narrows. It disappeared in the narrow water-way of the Kill von Kull that winds between Staten Island and the mainland of New Jersey, and connects with the Lower Harbor through Raritan Bay.

The story of the mysterious flotilla spread quickly through a city whose lack of newspapers made its apprehensive curiosity only the more keen. Robbed of its news and bulletin service, the people, without any conscious plan, had organized a news service of their own. They had fallen back on the primitive method of circulating information from man to man.

_New York’s “Bush Telegraph”_

Within twenty-four hours of the suppression of the liberty of its press, the highly modern, highly artificial city had in operation the same form of news-transmission that has so often puzzled and even awed travelers in savage lands. Under the sky-scrapers the “bush telegraph” carried its messages with almost the same astonishing swiftness as in the jungle.

It was done by hasty whispers and by furtive conversation, for among the Orders and Regulations that were promulgated daily there was a little warning that severe punishment would be inflicted on any person who “spread false news, communicated the movement of land and sea forces, made noises or uttered outcries of a nature to disturb troops, or inspected, sketched, photographed or made descriptions of views on land or sea without authority.”[156]

There were enough ominous elasticity and inclusiveness in this Order to cover almost any exchange of words. Yet men, even though they were mortally afraid while they did it, could not resist the human impulse to transmit anything that they learned.

The news merely puzzled the great mass of the population. Accustomed all their lives to turn to their newspapers for knowledge about everything, they were quite helpless with their one means of enlightenment shut off.

_To Open the Harbor_

The Citizens’ Committee and the city officials, however, were able to guess pretty clearly what this movement of troops and heavy artillery meant. There was nothing in the lower harbor that possibly could demand such force except one place--the forts on Sandy Hook, the last remaining harbor defense that still was under the American flag. Solitary though it was, so long as it remained intact it forbade the entrance of New York Harbor to any hostile vessel.

There had been wonder before because the enemy commander had not demanded the surrender of the Sandy Hook defenses under threat of bombarding the city, as he had demanded and forced the surrender of Forts Hamilton and Wadsworth.

“Because Sandy Hook is not within the city, as the other two forts were,” was the solution at which the city’s lawyers arrived, after considering the rules governing military action. “The invader plainly is adhering carefully to all the accepted Rules of War. By doing so, he can, and does, hold us to account rigorously under the same Rules. This is profitable to him, for despite all their apparent stipulations in favor of a conquered territory, the Rules of War are made, after all, to facilitate war.”

It was impossible to warn the commander at Sandy Hook. Private service over the telephone and telegraph systems was suspended entirely. The fire alarm system was operated under the watchful control of soldiers. In Police Headquarters sat a Colonel of Cavalry whose countersign was necessary for every order issued by the Police Commissioner.