Summary

This chapter begins with the description of the Negro regiment in Central Park on the Great Lawn. Tents full of men with broken spirits and some with physical wounds as well cover the main lawn. The reader is told that the Negro men had enlisted in the all-Negro regiment to fight against slavery, but found that once the war was over that they were expected to stay on to protect and care for the Freedmen in the South. They have been moving from one Southern town to another for this service and have been dealing with men calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan.

Now, more than 75 soldiers, who have pooled their resources and obtained transportation back home to New York, are camped in protest on the lawn in Central Park. The reader is told that when the soldiers returned back to their families in...