His eventual position with the New York City Police Department provided stability.

He served the department for decades, working in administrative capacities that drew on his organizational and engineering skills rather than his military or political experience.

It was not the career that anyone reviewing his biography at Appomattox would have predicted, but it was steady, respectable work that allowed him to support his family comfortably.

His marriage to Minnie Orton Sackett in 1867 — a white woman from New York, whose family apparently accepted the marriage without the hostility that interracial marriages more commonly encountered in the period — was a long and apparently happy partnership.

Their daughter Maud grew up in New York City, educated and at home in the urban environment that had become her parents’ world.