CHAPTER SEVEN
Who here forecasteth the event?
—HERMAN MELVILLE,
“The March into Virginia” (1861)
The Marshall House, Alexandria, Virginia, circa 1862 (photo credit 7.1)
Washington, May 1861
DURING THE FIRST DAYS OF MAY, an unusual sight greeted visitors to the Capitol. In the great Rotunda, beneath the interrupted dome, young men in gray-and-red uniforms and fezzes swung like merry acrobats from ropes and shimmied up pillars. They capered over the muddy grounds, one observer wrote, “leaping fences, knocking down sentinels, turning aside indignant bayonets, hanging like monkeys from the outer ledges of the dome, some two hundred feet above the firm-set earth.”1
Those staid classical halls had witnessed some strange things already that year. The rancorous scenes to which they had long since become accustomed—Northerners thundering against Southerners, slaveholders denouncing abolitionists, torrents of baroque invective relieved only by occasional fistfights—had yielded suddenly to an unprecedented calm. But now, just weeks later, there was neither tranquility or rancor here. Rather, it might have seemed at first glance that a flying circus had invaded the Capitol.
Like the nation itself, the Capitol Building was a work in progress that spring. Several years earlier, a forward-thinking Southern statesman had directed an ambitious expansion project, spreading the marble wings across their hilltop, ready to encompass all the delegations and committees, offices and bureaus, that the rapidly growing federal union might require. To maintain proper scale, an architect was engaged to remove the old low-rise curve of the roof and replace it with a soaring new dome of cast iron, as serenely presumptuous in its grandiosity as a Natchez cotton planter’s mansion or a Newport railroad baron’s “cottage.” Then lawmakers busied themselves with deciding what kind of statue should crown the new structure. Taking a break from their debates over Kansas and slavery, they found a rare moment of bipartisan accord: the nation’s temple of democracy must be topped with a heroic statue of Freedom, that amiable and versatile goddess. But when the sculptor presented his plaster model, sectional strife erupted again. On her head, the figure wore a pileus, the Roman cap of liberty, a conventional bit of allegory. But the Southern politician who had taken such interest in the work, a man with a fine classical education, knew that the pileus had been used in ancient times to denote a slave who had been freed by his master. The gentleman—Jefferson Davis, then serving as secretary of war—protested lest such a blatant symbol of abolitionism crown the very pinnacle of the Republic.2
Now the statue, her objectionable liberty cap replaced by a politically innocuous, if allegorically dubious, Roman helmet, lay in pieces, yet to be assembled, at a Maryland bronze foundry. (Freedom’s casting was being overseen there by an expert metalworker, a slave named Philip Reid.) The Capitol dome itself rose half finished, wooden scaffolding and an enormous crane jutting up above its open shell, which seemed to hang in the balance between creation and destruction. Sage minds reflected that it symbolized the incomplete—and imperiled—Union itself. The metaphor, if not the building, was satisfyingly perfect. Walt Whitman, though he had little use for the statue of Freedom, deriding it as “an extensive female, cast in bronze, with much drapery, especially ruffles,” loved the incomplete Capitol and suggested it be left perpetually as it was, with the derrick crane a more “poetical” emblem of the republic than Davis’s statue.3
What, though, was the meaning of the sight—to say nothing of the sounds and smells—that greeted visitors in May? No poetical explanations came immediately to mind. In corridors off the rotunda, statues of lawmakers and patriots trembled precariously on their pedestals as hordes of young rowdies raced past. The building reeked of urine (and worse) as men, tired of lining up for the overcrowded privies, availed themselves of any corner they could find. When a sentry tried to block one group from entering an off-limits area, they rolled him down the Capitol steps. In the House of Representatives, they playacted a session of Congress, in the course of which they “elected a Speaker, Clerk, and other officers, went into full session, dissolved the Union and reconstructed it and then wound up the joke by going into executive session.”4 Others put their feet up, enjoying penny-ante card games on the desk of one South Carolina congressman, a fire-breathing states’ rights man, who had decamped when his state seceded.
In the Senate, the invaders quickly found the desk that until recently had been occupied by Senator Davis, still bearing a placard with his name neatly inked. A distraught custodian arrived to find the young men hacking it to pieces with their bayonets, and feebly protested that it was the property not of the Confederate traitor but of the federal government that they had just pledged their lives to defend. Ignoring him, the soldiers divvied up the wooden fragments as souvenirs.5
These were the thousand soldiers of the First New York Fire Zouaves, who, through the infinite wisdom of military authorities, had been bivouacked in the Capitol upon their arrival in Washington, two days before.
They had landed in a city already teeming with soldiers—so many, one newspaperman reflected, that its customarily drab streets at last resembled, in at least one respect, the imperial capitals of Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg: every third man you passed wore some sort of gaudy uniform. Everywhere, too, particularly in the grandest public buildings, in fact, was the stench of unwashed bodies and fresh piss. Troops bunked on makeshift cots among filing cabinets and display cases in the Patent Office; in the courtyard of the Treasury on Pennsylvania Avenue; even in the East Room of the White House, twenty feet directly below the president’s desk.6
Several different regiments quartered in the Capitol. Soldiers slept under congressmen’s desks by night; by day drilled hourly before the east front; in the intervening hours stretched out on the young grass beneath the horse chestnut trees heavy with pink-white blossoms in the burgeoning spring. Sometimes they played baseball on the lawn where, weeks earlier, a crowd had gathered to see Mr. Lincoln give his inaugural address. (How distant that seemed now!) At night, recalled one New York private, the crimson-and-gold House chamber reverberated with the rhythmic breathing of a thousand sleepers, until the drums beat reveille at dawn, when the din of rambunctious voices began again, unceasing until dusk. The irony of his location was not lost on this thoughtful recruit, Theodore Winthrop, a poet and travel writer of some repute who had joined up with the New York Seventh, and who was now hunched over a lamp in one corner of the hall, penning a dispatch to The Atlantic Monthly. “Our presence here was the inevitable sequel of past events,” he wrote. “We appeared with bayonets and bullets because of the bosh uttered on this floor; because of the bills—with treasonable stump-speeches in their bellies—passed here; because of the cowardice of the poltroons, the imbecility of the dodgers, and the arrogance of the bullies, who had here cooperated to blind and corrupt the minds of the people. Talk had made a miserable mess of it.” He scoffed at the departed congressmen as belonging already to “that bygone epoch of our country when men shaved the moustache, dressed like parsons, said ‘Sir,’ and chewed tobacco”—supplanted now in their own inner sanctum by a bolder and more colorful generation.7
NO CROWDS HAD GREETED the Zouaves’ entry into the capital. The troop train from Annapolis rattled slowly and unceremoniously through the fields of Maryland amid the gathering dusk, through cow pastures and then past the garbage dumps, drainage pipes, and heaps of abandoned bricks that lined the approach to the city. At last the dome of the Capitol loomed up from out of nowhere, moments before it was blotted from sight by the low roof of the soot-blackened central depot.8 No one but the president himself seemed to have been notified of the regiment’s arrival—and in any case Washington was, by this point, jaded by the coming of troops—so only a few passersby were there to give the disembarking men handshakes and wan cheers.9 Even the military authorities seemed less pleased to see them than irritated at the task of having to find somewhere to put them, before shrugging their shoulders and deciding to quarter the Zouaves in the Capitol.
None of this was exactly what Ellsworth had planned for his triumphant return at the head of his regiment. So, before letting his weary and hungry men find rest and food in their makeshift barracks, he insisted on marching them up Pennsylvania Avenue in the opposite direction, toward the White House. Though it was now fully dark, an overcast and almost moonless night, he was still set on making the grand entrance he had lovingly envisioned. By the time the regiment reached the presidential mansion, he could see a familiar stooping figure silhouetted against the north portico. The president, his family, and a few aides had gathered on the gravel drive to watch as the companies passed by for their impromptu nighttime review, and hundreds of throaty voices boomed, “Three cheers for Abraham Lincoln!” or “Hooray for Old Abe!”
As the marchers strode abreast past the streetlamps, circles of gaslight revealed their whiskered faces, flattened noses, and shining scalps. The firemen had, nearly to a man, shaved their heads in preparation for battle. “A jolly gay set of blackguards,” John Hay called them.10 These Zouaves were not the lithe gymnasts Ellsworth had paraded here for President Buchanan the summer before, a summer that already seemed a century ago. Their uniforms may have been just as splendid—red caps and shirts, gray jackets, baggy pantaloons in authentic Franco-Algerian style—but from their belts hung unromantic implements of killing: large and wicked-looking bowie knives, omens of fraternal bloodshed not merely imminent but brutal and close range.
In New York, the war had seemed a somewhat remote adventure, a fanfare in the middle distance. Here in Washington, it was palpable in the ever-present drumbeat of men drilling for war, the measured tramp of boots, and the urgent click of telegraph keys transmitting mostly bad news. Virginia’s legislature had cast its lot with the Confederacy three weeks earlier; Arkansas and Tennessee were teetering on the brink. Resignations still arrived daily at the War Department from many of the most seasoned officers of the regular army. Amid the panic and disorder after Sumter’s fall, many residents had fled the city—Union sympathizers jammed Seventeenth Street in carriages, wagons, and loaded carts, pressing northward toward the Maryland line, while Southerners slipped one by one across the Potomac.11
There had been good reason for those Unionists to panic. Washington was encircled by slave territory, and it looked as though Marylanders might be following the Virginians into rebellion. Baltimore secessionists, who controlled the city’s telegraph office, severed communications between the nation’s capital and the rest of the loyal states. Railroad travel was interrupted; mail stopped. Just a handful of troops defended the District, and when the Sixth Massachusetts tried to relieve the capital, it was attacked by a mob on its way through Baltimore. In the confused melee, four soldiers and twelve civilians were killed. These were the first combat deaths of the war; a Northern lithographer issued a print showing apelike street toughs hurling bricks at the brave boys in blue, and titled it The Lexington of 1861.12
Southerners were calling for an immediate attack on the capital. “There is one wild shout of fierce resolve to capture Washington City, at all and every human hazard,” wrote the editors of the Richmond Examiner. “The filthy cage of unclean birds must and will be purified by fire. . . . Many indeed will be the carcasses of dogs and caitiffs that will blacken the air upon the gallows, before the great work is accomplished.”13
But the birds, dogs, and caitiffs had managed to squeak through, at least for the time being. The Sixth Massachusetts, the Seventh New York, and other regiments eventually arrived, and soon more troops were pouring into Washington daily. They represented, if not a cross section of the North, then at least a vivid assortment of citizen-soldiers. Later in the war, Union enlisted men would nearly all be clad in identical navy blue tunics, factory made by the tens of thousands—indeed, the concept of standard sizes in men’s clothing, eventually picked up for civilian attire, began with that wartime mass production. But there was nothing mass-produced about the war in early 1861. The volunteers who had converged upon the capital sported scarlet plumes and gold lace, turbans and tyroleans. (That is, those who had any uniforms at all: quite a few, awaiting shipments from home, were still in civilian garb.) Some belonged to prewar militias, but there were many newly formed regiments. As with the Fire Zouaves, these had customarily been organized in local communities by individual men of sufficient wealth or charisma to rally the troops together, arm them, and lead them off toward the front. Each of these colonels was a grandee of some sort—whether a metropolitan police commissioner or a country squire—and often the regiment bore his name.14
These fresh volunteers, with their spotless clothing and jaunty self-confidence, had done much to relieve the feeling of siege, and some Washington citizens were returning home, a bit sheepishly. Still, no one could forget that the enemy forces were massing just on the other side of the river. In Alexandria—until recently part of the District of Columbia—a hotelkeeper had raised an enormous secession banner atop his establishment, so large that on the clear spring afternoons it could be seen in downtown Washington. From the windows of the White House, Hay, Nicolay, and even the president and first lady stole glances at it through a spyglass.
For the New York fire boys, many of whom had never ventured farther from home than certain out-of-the-way sections of Brooklyn, the national capital was a disappointment. Even in wartime, the city seemed sleepy in comparison to Gotham, almost rustic. With the exception of a few gleaming federal temples, the buildings were mostly ramshackle wooden affairs set amid sprawling yards, where black men and women—the first slaves that most of the Yankees had ever actually seen—looked up from their chores to watch with wary eyes the passing troops. Pigs and goats foraged for scraps in the avenues laid out optimistically by L’Enfant at the end of the previous century: broad, empty thoroughfares that dead-ended suddenly in cornfields, and whose mud was so deep in springtime that you often had to walk several blocks before finding a safe place to cross the street. Not many years earlier, the Great Compromiser himself, Senator Henry Clay, had found himself attacked by a large billy goat in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, much to the delight of the newsboys and bootblacks who gathered to watch the contest between quadruped and statesman.15
“Everything worth looking at seemed unfinished,” said one acerbic visitor. “Everything finished looked as if it should have been destroyed generations before.” Indeed, the Washington of 1861 seemed in itself a kind of tacit argument against the very idea of a national government, or at least as evidence of that government’s incapability to maintain its own existence. The few offices of the executive branch had an almost makeshift feel: even the State Department possessed the atmosphere of a county courthouse, with a posted notice in the front hall listing the weekly hours that Secretary Seward received callers. “The government had an air of social instability and incompleteness that went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from,” Henry Adams later wrote. “The Union was a sentiment, but not much more.”16
The local civilians’ sole professional activity seemed to be the leisurely task of waiting: waiting for a bill to wend its way through the slow peristalsis of congressional committees; waiting in the lobby of Willard’s for an elusive cabinet patron to make his appearance; waiting in the shabby White House anteroom to ask a favor of the president. The archetypal Washingtonian had his feet propped on the end table, a wad of tobacco in his cheek, and a newspaper in his hand.17
Waiting may have been the locals’ favorite pastime, but the New York firemen did not share their taste. After four days en route to the capital, cooped up on the steamer and then the train, they had expected and hoped to disembark straight into the thick of battle. (You could hardly blame them—it had been weeks since their last chance for even a good street brawl.) As they tumbled out of their train, a newspaperman had heard one Zouave ask, “Can you tell us where Jeff Davis is? We’re lookin’ for him.” A comrade chimed in: “We’re bound to hang his scalp in the White House before we go back.” Others squinted in perplexity, looking around for secession flags to capture but failing to discover any.18
On the morning after their arrival, ten-year-old Willie Lincoln, whose parents had allowed him to stay up late and watch the grand procession the evening before, wrote excitedly to a former playmate in Illinois, eking out the letters in a laborious schoolboy hand: “I suppose that you did not learn that Colonel, E.E. Ellsworth had gone up to New York and organized a regiment,—divided in to companys, and brought them here, & to be sworn in—I dont know when. Some people call them the B’hoys, & others call them, the firemen.” It wasn’t long before Willie and his younger brother, Tad, had asked their indulgent father for their own pint-size Zouave uniforms, in which they paraded, chests out and heads high, around the White House grounds. Their parents solemnly reviewed the two-man regiment (which the boys had named Mrs. Lincoln’s Zouaves) and presented it with a flag; a photograph of Tad in his uniform survives to this day.19
Willie and Tad Lincoln were not alone in having gone a bit b’hoy crazy. “Every zouave is surrounded by a group of eager listeners,” a New York Herald writer reported, amused at how these ordinary Bowery roughnecks had become exotic novelties. Washington was not without its own, homegrown rowdy element, to be sure: “Riot and bloodshed are of daily occurrence,” reported a Senate committee in 1858, exaggerating perhaps just a little. But it is safe to say that few locals had ever observed at close range such a colorful troupe of ruffians as the b’hoys. Their salty New York dialect won particular admiration.20
Local newspapermen delighted in regaling readers with tales of the Zouave exploits—many at least slightly exaggerated in the telling—and these stories were picked by newspapers throughout the Union, even in the odd corner of the Confederacy. One gang of b’hoys was said to have strolled nonchalantly into a restaurant, ordered themselves a fine meal, knocked over the tables, and smashed the crockery, at the end of their romp cheerfully telling the proprietor that he should charge the whole bill to Jeff Davis. Another group swaggered over to the National Hotel, treated the barroom to a few rounds of drinks, “and tendered three cheers for the Union as payment in full.” Still others raided cigar shops and liquor stores, bowling over any unfortunate policeman who tried to interpose himself. Wild rumors of sexual outrages circulated, “terrifying all the maiden antiques of the city for several days,” as Hay dryly put it.21 Even some of the b’hoys’ Union comrades kept their distance: “I fear we shall stand a poorer chance with these fellows than with the Southerners,” a Massachusetts soldier wrote home.22
Barely twenty-four hours after his triumphant arrival, Ellsworth found himself compelled to place an apology in the newspapers, explaining that the “Regiment of Zouaves were recruited in great haste,” and promising that although a few miscreants had found their way into the ranks, they would be sternly dealt with.23 It could not have pleased him that his gallant b’hoys had already acquired the sarcastic new moniker “Ellsworth’s pet lambs.”
Within the week, however, the pet lambs were given a fortuitous oportunity to redeem themselves. In the early-morning hours of May 9, a liquor store on Pennsylvania Avenue caught fire. Before long, the flames had spread to a second building and were licking against the walls of a third—one of the many lesser offshoots of the Willard Hotel. A couple local fire companies arrived and tried fecklessly to quench the flames. At last the cry went up for the Fire Zouaves. Within minutes, the red-shirted b’hoys had leapt out the windows of the Capitol and were rushing pell-mell down the avenue, pausing only to break into an unattended firehouse and make off with its engine. When they reached the Willard, it was filling rapidly with smoke, and the tarred roof was in imminent danger of catching fire. The New Yorkers called for ladders and, discovering that there were none, promptly formed a human pyramid and clambered six stories to the top of the hotel. Some hauled up a hose, while others grabbed washbasins, tubs, and chamber pots from the guest rooms and filled them with water to soak the roof. One particularly agile and fearless Zouave hung upside down from the cornice, as a comrade held him by the ankles, to hose the burning liquor store from the best possible angle. In no time, the fire was quenched, the hotel was saved, and hundreds of onlookers and evacuated guests cheered lustily for the boys from New York.
As the last flames flickered out, an upstairs window opened and a gray-haired man peered out curiously. The crowd redoubled its cheers—for the man was none other than Major Robert Anderson, who had arrived in the capital several days earlier to meet with General Scott, Secretary Cameron, and the president (who had rewarded his heroism by offering a lengthy leave of absence from active duty). After Sumter, apparently, he would let no mere hotel fire disturb his rest. After a quick wave to the crowd and salute to the Zouaves, Anderson closed the window again and returned to bed.
The next day’s newspapers were, of course, full of the story, and Harper’s Weekly, the leading national magazine, soon blazoned its cover with a full-page woodcut of the brave fire b’hoys silhouetted against a sheet of flame, while the Stars and Stripes waved implausibly above them, unscathed. In the highly charged atmosphere of wartime, unconfirmed reports buzzed across the country of Confederate arsonists—a logical assumption, The New York Times opined, since the hotel “has so often sheltered good and loyal Republicans.”24
Further enhancing their new dignity, Ellsworth’s New York recruits were now no longer mere volunteer militiamen but sworn soldiers of the United States. The day before the hotel fire, the entire regiment had gathered to take the oath of national service. Those witnessing this ceremony would not soon forget it. Late that afternoon, on the east side of the Capitol, the thousand men formed a square around the marble statue of Washington. At a signal, they straightened to attention and their colonel stepped forward to address them. He began with a stern denunciation of those whose conduct had disgraced the regiment, and vowed that any doing likewise would be sent home in irons forthwith. Then Ellsworth’s tone changed. Here is how Hay, writing later that same night, recorded his words:
You are now about to be mustered into the service of the United States, and are the first regiment who will pledge yourselves not for thirty days or sixty days, but for the war! (Tremendous applause, and nine loud, long, and hearty cheers.) Now if any man of you has the desire to back out, wants to leave this glorious war and go home, now is the time. Let him sneak away like a hound, and crawl over the fence and be off! (Cries of “No!” “No!” “Not one!” and three cheers for Colonel Ellsworth.)
Then, facing the Capitol, the men lined up in two rows across the entire width of the grounds. As the roll was called and each answered, a carriage drew up with the president, leading by the hand his younger son, Tad. Lincoln walked slowly along the row of soldiers, father and son inspecting each man as they passed.25
At last, two officers of the regular army stepped forward to administer the oath. One was the craggy, white-haired General Lorenzo Thomas, still dressed in the uniform of a colonel, having received his brigadier’s star only that morning. The other was a tall officer, stately and perhaps somewhat pompous-looking, with an out-thrust chest and lovingly tended Napoleon beard. This was Major Irvin McDowell, then commanding the troops guarding the Capitol. (In two months’ time, occupying a more exalted rank, he would be forever linked with this regiment in front of him, and with a catastrophic summer afternoon at Bull Run.)
There was another, humbler detail that Hay recorded that night. As he stood near the regimental flags, the proud standards that Mrs. Astor and Laura Keene had bestowed on the troop, he saw one of the Zouave color guards wrap his arm affectionately around a flagpole, as if he were embracing an old friend.
“The red, white, and blue! God bless them!” the man told Hay. “We boys is going to fight for these pieces of cloth till we die!”
Another added, “We’re going to have one more flag when we come back. It’ll be the flag of secession, nailed on the bottom o’ this flag staff.”26
DAYS OF WAITING FOLLOWED: not the languid expectancy that was the local specialty but an atmosphere of preparatory tension. Ellsworth seemed to be everywhere around the city, incessantly pestering officials for better arms and equipment. He was thin as a greyhound, his voice hoarse from the incessant shouting of drill commands. A curious civilian spotted the little colonel bounding into the lobby of the Willard with an enormous revolver flapping at his belt. Indeed, Ellsworth seemed to go everywhere armed as if ready at any moment to engage in single-handed combat against a grizzly bear. In addition to the revolver, he wore both an elaborately gilded officer’s sword and a more businesslike bowie knife, its blade more than a foot long, the kind jocularly known as an “Arkansas toothpick.” An amused Hay remarked that it looked as though it might easily “go through a man’s head from crown to chin as you would split an apple.”27
No task was too trivial for him. One newspaper correspondent wrote that at one moment, he would be seen marching at the head of his troops, and the next, “assisting a colored servant to carry a box of muskets across the room,” or showing a raw recruit how to fasten his knapsack. One fine Sunday afternoon, he was even spotted, in his billowy red Zouave shirt, playing a game of baseball with his men.28 Although barely twenty-four years old (he had celebrated his birthday the eve of the attack on Sumter), the colonel was already winning the affection and respect of the hardened New York firemen, who seemed willing to overlook that he had never bloodied his knuckles in a Bowery brawl, nor ever heard a gunshot fired in anger.
Much of Ellsworth’s boyishness remained, not just in his romantic approach to soldiering but in his quickness of affection and his longing for family. His parents still lived in their village in upstate New York; he had hardly seen them in years. The day before the regiment had left from New York, his mother had made her way down to the city and come to the Astor House, amid the bustle and fanfare of departure, to bid her only son farewell. Elmer’s much-loved brother, Charley, had died in Chicago the previous summer, just before the cadets set out on their tour.29
The Lincolns had become, in a sense, surrogate parents. Any free moment usually found Ellsworth at the White House. When the president and Mrs. Lincoln were unavailable, he would be romping through the corridors with Willie and Tad, or horsing around with Hay, Nicolay, and Lincoln’s other young aides.* One afternoon, he was in the office at the Executive Mansion, spiritedly showing a presidential secretary, William Stoddard, how to drill with a carbine Zouave-style, when he twirled the gun too close to a window. The two young men made up a far-fetched story to explain the broken glass: an assassin had been lurking in the shrubbery outside, they said, and, mistaking Ellsworth for the president, had fired a bullet through the windowpane.30
On other occasions, Ellsworth would join the Lincolns in peering curiously across the river at the large rebel banner that had mocked them for a month from the skyline of Alexandria. Afterward, some would say that Mrs. Lincoln had begged him to tear it down as soon as he and his troops reached Virginia, although others disputed this.31 For some anxious Unionists, that flag was becoming a symbol of the administration’s slowness to move against the gathering forces of the Confederacy. When one visitor to the White House, the radical abolitionist Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, pointedly complained to the president about the banner still waving there after so many weeks, Lincoln replied that he should not expect to see it waving much longer.32
Finally, the awaited order came. For days, Northern newspapers had been full of reports that a federal advance into Virginia was imminent. (“Secret Military Moves on Foot!” blared a headline in the irrepressible New York Herald.) Union and Confederate forces faced off across the Potomac, with opposing sentries posted just a few hundred yards apart, at the ends of the two bridges that spanned the river. Alexandria, the railway hub of northern Virginia—and a secessionist stronghold within sight of the capital—was the logical point of attack. And there was no overlooking its port as a potential haven for Confederate smugglers or privateers. Since early May, the federal gunboat Pawnee had lain just off Alexandria’s wharves, its full broadside of nine-inch cannons aimed at the town.33
On May 23, Virginians voted in a special referendum to ratify the state’s secession—the final step in leaving the Union. That night, before the last votes had been counted, federal troops gathered on the banks of the Potomac, and the first major Northern incursion into rebel-held territory was under way.
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, the planks of the Long Bridge, four miles above Alexandria, resounded with the rhythmic tramp of crossing infantry. Several miles upstream, Union cavalrymen were riding across the Chain Bridge. The plan was for these troops to approach the town overland from the north, while a smaller amphibious force crossed the river by steamer to land directly at the waterfront. Men from New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Massachusetts were making their way into Virginia.
It was a balmy, summer-like night: “mild, dewy, refulgent,” wrote Theodore Winthrop, whose kid-glove New York regiment was among the advancing infantry. The pale light of a full moon glinted off newly burnished bayonets and sabers. Scarcely a whisper was heard among the troops, only occasionally the muffled command of an officer. So silent was this crossing of thousands that on the shore behind them, the darkened capital slept; only William Seward, intent as ever on seeing and knowing as much as he could, had come down to survey the operations intently from the Washington end of Long Bridge.34
Ellsworth and his Zouaves were still in camp, on a rise just beyond the southeastern edge of the city. Despite the late hour and the hard work to come, the men went about their battle preparations quickly and almost gleefully, breaking out every so often into snatches of patriotic song. At last, the b’hoys were going to get the fine bare-knuckle fight they had been itching for. They checked and cleaned their new rifles, which had been fitted with saber bayonets: broadly curving steel blades that could, in an instant, turn a gun into a spear. When all was ready, the colonel gathered them for a few words of exhortation—no doubt the kind of night-before-the-battle speech he had been rehearsing in his mind since his boyhood in Mechanicville—and then told them to retire to their tents for a couple of hours’ rest. Ellsworth himself sat up writing at his camp table, scribbling orders to his company commanders before turning to a more solemn task: composing letters to his parents and his fiancée, to be opened in the event of his death. Then he buttoned up the coat of his dress uniform, and at the last moment pinned to his chest a gold medal that had been given him the year before, during the Chicago cadets’ summer tour. Non solum nobis, sed pro Patria, the Latin inscription read: “Not for ourselves alone, but for our Country.”35
The Fire Zouaves had been chosen to carry out the amphibious part of the attack—and, as seemed likely, to be the first troops that would encounter enemy forces. At two o’clock in the morning, a navy captain arrived to tell Ellsworth that three vessels—the steamers James Guy, Baltimore,and Mount Vernon—were ready to carry them across, accompanied by a couple of launches from the USS Pawnee, which awaited them at anchor off Alexandria. The moon was now shining at its fullest: “bright and handsome as a twenty-dollar gold piece,” one soldier thought, while another would later recall that you could write a letter by its light. Many of the Zouaves, following their commander’s example, were doing just this, penning hasty notes to loved ones, which they tucked into knapsacks as they made their way down to the river.36
Another man present was busy scribbling as well: Ned House, a newspaper correspondent for the New-York Tribune. Though barely older than Ellsworth, House was one of the most ambitious and intrepid of Greeley’s protégés: eighteen months earlier, at John Brown’s execution, he had (at least by his own account) disguised himself as an army surgeon and managed to get a place standing on the scaffold just a few feet from the condemned man. His firsthand report in the Tribune—including all the ghastly details of Brown’s body jerking at the end of the rope—had shocked Northern readers.37 Now, getting wind of the impending attack on Alexandria, House had tried to talk his way past Northern sentries on the Long Bridge, and, failing this, hastened to the Zouave camp, attaching himself to Ellsworth’s regiment. It was a decision he would not regret. Watching the soldiers leave for battle, he found himself stirred by the sight: “the vivid costumes of the men—some being wrapt from head to foot in their great red blankets, but most of them clad in their gray jackets and trowsers and embroidered caps; the peaks of the tents, regularly distributed, all glowing like huge lanterns from the fires within them; the glittering rows of rifles and sabres; the woods and hills, and the placid river . . . and all these suffused with the broad moonlight.”38
Even some of the b’hoys themselves were moved, not just by the beauty of the night but by the sense that they were about to participate in history. “We believe it to have been the most impressive and beautiful scene we ever witnessed,” one of them wrote a few days later. “No length of years can wipe it from our memory—it is daguerreotyped on our mind forever.”39
By the time the steamers neared Alexandria, the moon was sinking, and the glassy surface of the river had begun to gleam red with the rising sun. Crowding along the rails, the Zouaves scanned the waterfront for the enemy and, as they drew closer, spotted a thin line of Confederate sentinels, who fired their muskets into the air in warning. A few of Ellsworth’s men, thinking that these were the opening shots of the battle, let fly a volley in return. But the rebels were already scattering up the hillside, running “as if the Devil himself had been after them with a particularly sharp stick,” one Zouave thought. What the Union forces didn’t know is that those sentinels were simply rejoining their compatriots, who were withdrawing en masse from the town. The canny rebel commanders knew that they couldn’t hold Alexandria, and that the best strategy was to lure the enemy deeper into Virginia, and into the morass of war. The only risk was that some men might be captured by the advancing federals.40
Meanwhile, aboard his steamer, Ellsworth discovered that his troops would not, after all, be the first to reach Alexandria. A small landing party of marines from the Pawnee was already rowing toward shore in a cutter, flying a white flag of truce. The junior naval officer in charge, a certainLieutenant Lowry, quickly found the Confederate colonel and offered to let his entire rebel force evacuate unmolested in exchange for the surrender of the town. By the time Ellsworth leapt ashore at the wharf, Lowry was waiting to inform him that the deal—an incomprehensible one, to the Zouave colonel’s mind—had just been sealed. The Stars and Stripes already flew from the town flagpole. The Battle of Alexandria was won before it could be fought.41
But it was not in Ellsworth’s nature to remain dejected for long. There was still work to be done, and laurels for his bold Zouaves to win. There were arms and matériel to be captured, railroads to be seized, telegraph lines to be cut. And in any event, he knew, this landing was only the initial stage of a glorious Union sweep across Virginia toward victory. It was the first morning of his war.
His disembarking Zouaves must have felt equally let down by their first steps on enemy soil. Before them now was not the alien citadel that had menaced them from across the river but an ordinary American town, with white-steepled churches, rows of old-fashioned brick houses, and wide, muddy streets. An air of patrician dowdiness hung about the place, a sense that its best days were fifty years in the past. The wharves should have been starting to bustle with activity at this early hour, but the complete silence of night still reigned. Shutters were closed or curtains drawn in most of the windows. Wherever the townsfolk might be, they were not to be seen or heard. Only the long, high whistle of a steam engine in the middle distance broke the stillness, as a train pulled away from Alexandria’s station carrying the last of the Confederate garrison.42
Even before everyone was ashore, Ellsworth ordered Company E of his regiment to march at all speed to the railway line and, albeit somewhat belatedly, tear up the tracks leading to Richmond. The other companies were to remain at the wharf and await further orders. The colonel himself would lead a small force into town and take control of the telegraph office. He chose an unusual group for this mission: there were Ned House of the Tribune; Henry J. Winser, the regimental secretary, who did double duty as an occasional correspondent for the New York Times; and the Zouaves’ chaplain, the Reverend E. W. Dodge. At first, Ellsworth planned to set out without any other men—Alexandria was officially under truce now, after all—but at the last moment, on Winser’s suggestion, he turned and called for a single squad of soldiers to follow.43
The men jogged quickly up Cameron Street toward the center of town. But as soon as they rounded the corner toward King Street, Alexandria’s main thoroughfare, they halted. In front of them was a tall brick building, and hanging from the large pole atop it, stirring only slightly in the morning air, was the rebel banner that had taunted Washington for weeks, the one President Lincoln could see from his window.
The Marshall House was an old hotel, really just a tavern with guest rooms upstairs, known among locals as a second-rate lodging for travelers. It was also known as a center of prosecession activity; the innkeeper, James W. Jackson, was one of the area’s most ardent secessionists. Jackson had a powerful six-foot build and a temperament always spoiling for a fight—once, when a Catholic priest made the mistake of offending him, Jackson beat the cleric senseless. Anyone foolish enough to utter antislavery remarks in his presence received similar treatment. Two years earlier, Jackson had been one of the first local militiamen to rush off to Harper’s Ferry in pursuit of John Brown. He returned having missed the fight, but bringing as a trophy one of the captured pikes with which Brown had planned to arm the slaves, as well as a wizened bit of flesh that he boasted came off the ear of Brown’s son, who had died defending his father. As soon as the other Southern states began leaving the Union, Jackson and a friend had commissioned a couple of local seamstresses to stitch up a banner some eighteen feet wide, blazoned with the clustered stars and three broad stripes of the first Confederate flag. Each time another state joined the rebellion, Jackson had the women add another star. On the afternoon of April 17, the day Virginia’s legislature voted for secession, a single large star was added to the center, and the banner hoisted on the forty-foot staff above his hotel.44
On the night of May 23, just as Union troops were massing on the opposite shore to attack Alexandria, the Marshall House hosted a raucous party, complete with a brass band and carousing militiamen, to celebrate the statewide secession referendum. But the fun broke up before midnight and the militiamen dispersed. Jackson had gone to bed, and the hotel was now quiet.45
Spotting the flag, Ellsworth ordered a sergeant back to the landing for another company of infantry as reinforcements, and then started trotting off quickly again toward the telegraph office. But suddenly, on some impulse, he stopped and turned back toward the steps of the Marshall House. His boyish pride, and perhaps a desire to impress the two journalists, had trumped military prudence. If he was going to have this trophy, he would cut it down with his own hands.46
Ellsworth entered the hotel accompanied by seven men: House, Winser, Dodge, and four Zouave corporals. Immediately inside the front door, they encountered a disheveled-looking man, only half dressed, who had apparently just gotten out of bed. Regardless of who this person was, he was the first real, live Confederate that the New Yorkers had encountered up close. So Ellsworth demanded to know what the rebel flag was doing atop the hotel. The man replied that he had no idea—he was only a boarder. All the other guests seemed to be still asleep. Without further delay, the Union men hastened upstairs. Ellsworth stationed one soldier at the front door, another on the first floor, a third at the foot of the stairs. Revolver in hand, he bounded up the final flights toward the roof’s trapdoor, followed by the two newspaper correspondents, the chaplain, and a single Zouave armed with a rifle, Corporal Frank Brownell. Climbing a short ladder to the hatch cover, Ellsworth pushed it open and handed Winser his revolver before sawing away with a bowie knife at the halyards tethering the huge flag to its staff.47
Finally the ropes gave way and the banner drooped, then collapsed almost onto the men’s heads, its defiant stripes suddenly a slack heap of red-and-white cloth. Ellsworth started pulling it through the open trapdoor, but it was so large he needed Winser’s help to get the whole thing inside. As the little group made its way back downstairs, the colonel still had most of the flag draped around his shoulders, while Winser followed behind, clumsily trying to roll it up over one arm as they descended.
What happened next was too fast for any of the men to fully comprehend. Quickly rounding the turn between the third and second stories, Brownell, House, and Ellsworth saw a figure step out onto the landing and level a double-barreled shotgun at point-blank range. Winser, struggling with his end of the flag, had barely heard the blast of the gun before he felt the cloth go suddenly taut as Ellsworth, still wrapped in its folds, pitched forward. Almost instantly there was a second, louder explosion, and Jackson—the assailant, the man they had seen downstairs—lurched back, his face torn away in a mess of gore, as Brownell thrust his saber bayonet again and again into the innkeeper’s body. Moments later, two men—one Northern, one Southern—lay dead on the staircase, their blood pooling across the dusty boards, soaking the shabby floorcloth, seeping into the folds of the fallen flag.48
ACROSS THE RIVER, five miles away, the capital avidly awaited news. President Lincoln had hastened early to the War Department telegraph office for the first dispatches from the front lines. Ordinary Washingtonians, too, were waking up and learning that the invasion of the Confederacy had commenced—an invasion that, according to the Tribune’s editorial page, was sure to cut a victorious swath from Richmond to the Gulf of Mexico in a matter of months. District residents, peering from their bedroom windows, were disappointed not to see the smoke of musket fire rising above the Virginia shoreline or hear the deep rumble of artillery.49
By morning’s end, however, a different sound echoed over the city’s rooftops, as dozens of bells tolled in mourning from church steeples and firehouse belfries. The steamer James Guy was pulling slowly into the Navy Yard with a body aboard, and everyone in Washington already knew who the dead man was.
Ellsworth’s companions had brought his corpse into a room at the hotel and covered it with the Confederate flag. When reinforcements finally arrived, the body was wrapped tenderly in a red Zouave blanket. Six men formed a stretcher with their muskets to carry their dead colonel through the streets that he had jogged up just minutes before. The sun had only half risen over Alexandria, and eight hundred men at the wharf were still awaiting their colonel’s orders. Many of the fire b’hoys wept when they heard the awful news; others raged against the Alexandrian traitors and talked of burning the town. But the murder had been avenged in the instant of its commission. There was no battle to fight; no enemy to vanquish. There was only the blind, stupid fact of death.
As reports flashed by telegraph across the Union, flags dipped to half-mast in cities, towns, and villages throughout the North. By early afternoon, in newspaper offices from Maine to Nebraska, editors were composing eulogies, reporters compiling obituaries, and poets penning elegiac verses that would crowd the next day’s newspaper columns.50 By the following evening, public gatherings in New York and other major cities offered grandiloquent testimonials and took up collections for the support of Ellsworth’s parents, left destitute by the death of their only child. Army recruiting offices were mobbed as they had not been since the first week of the war. At the beginning of May, Lincoln had asked for 42,000 more volunteers to supplement the militiamen called up in April. Within four weeks after Ellsworth’s death, some five times that number would enlist.51
A torrent of emotion had been released, pouring out for a dead hero who had never fought a battle but rather, as one newspaper put it, had been “shot down like a dog.”52 There was more to the response than just nineteenth-century sentimentality, more than just patriotic fervor. Sumter’s fall had loosed a flood of patriotic feeling. Now, across America, Ellsworth’s death released a tide of hatred, of enmity and counterenmity, of sectional bloodlust that had hitherto been dammed up, if only barely, amid the flag waving and anthem singing.
Indeed, it was Ellsworth’s death that made Northerners ready not just to take up arms but actually to kill. For the first month of the war, some had assumed that the war would play out more or less as a show of force: Union troops would march across the South, and the rebels would capitulate. Yankees talked big about sending Jeff Davis and other secessionist leaders to the gallows but almost never about shooting enemy soldiers. They preferred to think of Southerners in the terms that Lincoln would use throughout the war: as estranged brethren, misled by a few demagogues, who needed to be brought back into the national fold. Many Confederates, however, openly relished the prospect of slaughtering their former countrymen. “Well, let them come, those minions of the North,” wrote one Virginian in a letter to the Richmond Dispatch on May 18. “We’ll meet them in a way they least expect; we will glut our carrion crows with their beastly carcasses. Yes, from the peaks of the Blue Ridge to tide-water will we strew our plains, and leave their bleaching bones to enrich our soil.”53
After the tragic morning in Alexandria, it suddenly dawned on the North that such talk had not been mere bluster. Newspapers dwelled on every lurid detail of the awful death scene, especially the “pool of blood clot, I should think three feet in diameter and an inch and one half deep at the center,” as one correspondent described it. The point-blank shotgun blast had torn open Ellsworth’s heart.
On the Southern side, editorialists rejoiced at the slaying of Ellsworth, boasting that he would be only the first dead Yankee of thousands. “Virginians, arise in strength and welcome the invader with bloody hands to hospitable graves,” exhorted the next day’s Richmond Enquirer. “Meet the invader at the threshold. Welcome him with bayonet and bullet. Swear eternal hatred to a treacherous foe.” The Richmond Whig proclaimed, “Down with the tyrants! Let their accursed blood manure our fields.”54
Although the Union rhetoric would never quite reach such levels, many in the North now began demanding blood for blood. The Zouaves, Hay wrote with solemn approbation, had pledged to avenge Ellsworth’s death with many more: “They have sworn, with the grim earnestness that never trifles, to have a life for every hair of the dead colonel’s head. But even that will not repay.” In the Tribune, Greeley demanded that the entire neighborhood surrounding the Marshall House be leveled. With the deaths of just two men, the unthinkable—Americans killing their own countrymen—became the imperative.55
In Washington, Ellsworth’s body was brought to lie in state in the East Room of the White House, his chest heaped with white lilies. On the second morning after his death, long lines of mourners, many in uniform, filed through to pay their respects; so many thronged into the presidential mansion that the funeral was delayed for many hours. In the afternoon, the cortege finally moved down Pennsylvania Avenue, between rows of American flags bound in swaths of black crape, toward the depot where the Fire Zouaves had disembarked a few weeks earlier. Rank after rank of infantry and cavalry preceded the hearse, which was drawn by four white horses and followed by Ellsworth’s own riderless mount. Behind came companies of Zouaves, then a carriage with the president and members of his cabinet. But the figure that drew the most attention was Corporal Brownell, who walked alone behind the hearse with the bloodstained flag, the accursed trophy for which Ellsworth had died, crumpled up and speared upon the end of his bayonet.56
At the depot near the Capitol, a black-shrouded funeral train waited to carry the iron coffin to New York, where tens of thousands lined the streets from Union Square to City Hall to view the cortege. As Brownell passed with the now famous Confederate banner, crowds overwhelmed the human barriers of straining policemen, breaking through and rushing into the street to clasp the young Zouave’s hand or touch a corner of the flag.57
Even after Ellsworth’s body had, at last, been laid to rest on a hillside behind his boyhood home in Mechanicville, the nationwide fervor scarcely waned. Photographs, lithographs, and pocket-size biographies paying tribute to the fallen hero poured forth by the tens of thousands. Music shops sold scores for such tunes as “Col. Ellsworth’s Funeral March,” “Ellsworth’s Requiem,” “Col. Ellsworth Gallopade,” “Brave Men, Behold Your Fallen Chief!,” “Ellsworth’s Avengers,” “He Has Fallen,” “Sadly the Bells Toll the Death of the Hero,” and “Our Noble Laddie’s Dead, Jim,” the last referring to a remark that one sorrowing Zouave was supposed to have made to another on the morning of the killing. For years afterward, enlisted men wrote letters home on stationery stamped with crude woodcuts of the colonel teetering on the steps of the Marshall House, clutching his wounded breast with one hand and the captured flag in the other—and invariably, a motto pledging vengeance to traitors. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of babies born in 1861 were named after him. One regiment, the Forty-fourth New York, even rechristened itself Ellsworth’s Avengers.
The young colonel seemed to have been transfigured by death into a kind of national saint. Within hours of his killing, a New York World editor wrote of his “halo of martyrdom.” Significantly, Ellsworth became the first notable American whose body was treated with the newly discovered practice of chemical embalming. As he lay in state, mourners peering into his coffin were amazed to see that the boyish face looked, as one man wrote, “natural as though he were sleeping a brief and pleasant sleep”—or as though modern technology had sanctified his flesh, rendering it incorruptible.58
As with a medieval saint, too, relics of his martyrdom became objects of veneration. In Alexandria, soldiers vied for pieces of the sacred flag within hours of the killing; it would have quickly been reduced to shreds had the Zouave officers not placed it under round-the-clock guard and threatened any man who approached it with thirty days’ imprisonment. By evening, the few pieces that some Zouaves had managed to obtain were being traded literally for more than their weight in gold. One man enclosed a bit of red cloth in a letter he sent to his family the next day, entreating his mother to “keep it under lock and key” and “let no one have even one thread.” “I tried hard to get a piece with his blood on it,” he added, “but could not.”59
Relic-hungry soldiers unable to obtain any of the flag took their knives and sliced up the oilcloth floor covering on the Marshall House staircase, which was drenched with even more blood than the flag. Once all the oilcloth was gone, they started in on the floorboards. During the next year, thousands of Union troops, passing through Alexandria on their way to the front, would make pilgrimages to the Marshall House, their relic-hunting encroaching upon the planks of the stairs, the banisters, the nearby doors and door frames, and the wallpaper, all whittled away one sliver at a time. When Nathaniel Hawthorne visited in the spring of 1862, so much of the hotel’s interior was gone that, he wrote in The Atlantic Monthly, “it becomes something like a metaphysical question whether the place of the murder actually exists.”60
Ellsworth’s death was different from all those that followed over the next four years: most Northern writers referred to it as a “murder” or “assassination,” an act not of war but of individual malice and shocking brutality. By the time Hawthorne’s article appeared, however, many other American places had been soaked in blood. Thousands of Northerners and Southerners, in almost equal numbers, had been cut down amid the peach orchards and cotton fields at Shiloh. On the hillsides of southern Virginia, over seven murderous days, whole regiments had uselessly sacrificed themselves to McClellan’s pointless slog toward Richmond. And at Bull Run, just eight weeks after Ellsworth’s death, his gallant b’hoys had been in the forefront of the war’s first disastrous Union defeat. At first the Zouaves advanced boldly toward the Confederate lines, crying “Ellsworth! Remember Ellsworth!” Then the rebel infantry and cavalry counterattacked. The New York firemen got off only a single volley before they broke ranks and ran. The Zouaves had more men killed, wounded, or captured at Bull Run than any other Union regiment.61
As the war’s inexorable toll rose and rose, touching almost every family throughout the nation, Americans would lose their taste for collective mourning. Death became so commonplace that the demise of any one soldier, whether a gallant recruit or battle-scarred hero, was drowned in the larger grief. Not until the war’s final month—when another body would lie in state in the East Room, and another black-draped train make its slow way north—would Americans again shed common tears for a single martyr.
Ellsworth’s memory never faded for those who knew him well. Hay, Nicolay, and Stoddard, who all lived to see the twentieth century, would reflect for decades on the meaning of his death. Stoddard always remembered how, as the crowds of mourners filed through the White House, he glanced over at the windowpane Ellsworth had broken a few days earlier and saw that the new glass was still smudged with the glazier’s fingerprints. “I am not afraid to say that it was a little too much for me then,” he wrote. “We had not become so hardened as we grew to be under the swift calamities that afterward trod so rapidly upon each other’s heels.” Nicolay, in his sweeping history of the war, wrote that the response to Ellsworth’s death “opened an unlooked-for depth of individual hatred, into which the political animosities of years . . . had finally ripened.” Hay, throughout his own long career as a statesman, never stopped pondering what might have been. Thirty-five years after Ellsworth’s killing, he wrote: “The world can never compute, can hardly even guess, what was lost in his untimely end. . . . Only a few men, now growing old, knew what he was and what he might have been if life had been spared him.”62
As for Lincoln, his young friend’s death affected him like no other soldier’s in the four years that followed. On the morning that the news reached the president, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and a companion, not yet aware of Ellsworth’s death, called at the White House on a matter of urgent business and found Lincoln standing alone beside a window in the library, looking out toward the Potomac. He seemed unaware of the visitors’ presence until they were standing close behind him. Lincoln turned away from the window and extended his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “I cannot talk.” Then suddenly, to the men’s astonishment, the president burst into tears. Burying his face in a handkerchief, he walked up and down the room for some moments before at last finding his voice:
After composing himself somewhat, the President took his seat, and desired us to approach. “I will make no apology, gentlemen,” said the President, “for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard. Just as you entered the room, Capt. Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of Ellsworth’s unfortunate death. The event was so unexpected, and the recital so touching, that it quite unmanned me.” The President here made a violent effort to restrain his emotion, and after a pause he proceeded, with tremulous voice, to give us the incidents of the tragedy as they had occurred. “Poor fellow,” repeated the President, as he closed his relation, “it was undoubtedly an act of rashness, but it only shows the heroic spirit that animates our soldiers, from high to low, in this righteous cause of ours. Yet who can restrain their grief to see them fall in such a way as this, not by the fortunes of war, but by the hand of an assassin?”63
Almost alone among the millions of mourners, perhaps, Lincoln could admit that Ellsworth’s death had not been glorious. Others might talk of his gallantry, might hail him as a modern knight cut down in the flower of youth. But for the president, preparing to send armies into battle against their brothers, the double homicide in a cheap hotel represented something else: the squalid brutality of civil war.64
Even close friends of the Lincoln family were afraid, for a long time afterward, to talk about Ellsworth in front of the president, who sometimes wept at the mention of his name. On the morning of the funeral, the East Room was crowded with dignitaries: generals, cabinet secretaries, ambassadors. At the end of the service, all rose to file past the open casket. Then the line suddenly stopped. Lincoln and his wife stood at length, looking down on the face of their dead friend. Those standing nearest could hear the president lament: “My boy! My boy! Was it necessary this sacrifice should be made?”65
MORE THAN A DECADE LATER, a reporter named Eli Perkins of the New York Commercial Advertiser happened to be passing through Mechanicville, New York, and decided to stop and take a look. Perkins had known Ellsworth slightly in former days, and recalled that the legend’s boyhood home was in the village. Perkins found the dead soldier’s elderly parents still living alone in the little wooden cottage. The front parlor was a kind of shrine to their son, its walls lined with the many lithographs and cartes de visite that had been published shortly after his death. But when Perkins walked up the hill behind the house in search of the fallen colonel’s tombstone, he was surprised to find that there was none.
“When Elmer fell,” old Mr. Ellsworth explained, “so many people and societies were going to put up a monument that I suppose they got it all mixed up. First the Chicago people were going to do it—then the regiment, and then the State. Then the citizens around here made an attempt, but still it remains undone.” The late war’s first great hero—the man whose name, one New York newspaper had proclaimed, “will not be blurred so long as the record of our war of liberty survives”—still lay in an unmarked grave.66
The Marshall House in Alexandria has long since disappeared. On that corner today stands a Hotel Monaco. A bronze plaque on an outside wall, installed sometime in the last century, reads:
The Marshall House stood upon this site, and within the building on the early morning of May 24, 1861, James W. Jackson was killed by federal soldiers while defending his property and personal rights, as stated in the verdict of the coroners jury. He was the first Martyr to the cause of Southern Independence. The Justice of History does not allow his name to be forgotten.
On a recent morning in Washington, I made an appointment with a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to see something that had not been on display for a long time. I waited as she went to a metal filing cabinet and retrieved a small box, which she placed on the table in front of me. Inside were two artifacts: a scrap of red bunting and a small piece of nondescript oilcloth, its corner stained with faded blood.
*Earlier that spring, in the weeks before the firing on Sumter, Ellsworth was put temporarily out of commission after contracting measles from the Lincoln boys.