The Zouaves could not stifle their unruliness. When some of them went on a drunken spree, Ellsworth had the miscreants confined in a jail. Other soldiers aggressively approached women on the streets. John Hay noted that many Washingtonians “persist in believing Ellsworth’s ‘pet lambs’ to be the most graceless mauvais sujects. Girls who were never kissed before, complain dolefully of rude salutes.”62
Not all the women, however, resisted the men’s advances. Looking from a hotel window, a reporter saw Ellsworth’s men in action:
They are in every respect emphatic representatives of that peculiar element of city life, popularly classed as “b’hoys.” They are I-don’t-care-a-dammish set of fellows, whose quaint dress, slushing manners, and questionals [sic] have proven sadly alluring to our neighborhood young ladies, some of whom are a little distinguished for not being “slow.” . . . [The typical Fire Zouave] is a type of his fellows, loves a glass, a girl, or a row, don’t care for expenses, and is “bound to be a hero, by jingo, or die!”63
The boisterous Zouaves became local heroes when they put to use their firefighting skills in a dramatic incident. Willard’s Hotel, where the Lincolns had stayed between their arrival to Washington and their move into the White House, caught fire in the early morning of May 9. An alarm sounded. Ellsworth’s b’hoys swarmed to the conflagration, which they fought bravely and doused.
An aura of mythic fearlessness surrounded the firemen soldiers. A common saying had it that if a battle was raging against the Confederates and you rang a fire bell behind it, Ellsworth’s Fire Zouaves would rush forward and scatter the enemy in order to reach the fire on the other side.64
Anti-Confederate fever seized Ellsworth’s soldiers. The rebel flag became a symbol of the detested “traitors” who were trying to destroy the Union. John Hay noted that every member of the regiment was eager to bring home a Confederate flag. Hay reported soldiers who declared, “We boys is goin’ to fight for these pieces of cloth till we die!” and “It’ll be the flag o’ secession, nailed on to the bottom o’ this flag staff!”65
Lincoln shared their hatred of the flag. He was appalled when he looked out of the White House and saw the Confederate flag flying from the Marshall House Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington.
That flag, as it turned out, had a key role in elevating Elmer Ellsworth to virtual sainthood in the North.
On May 23, Ellsworth gathered his troops and told them they would move the next day across the Potomac to take Alexandria. The Zouaves, champing at the bit, prepared for the attack, priming their weapons and loading their knapsacks. On the evening before the attack Ellsworth wrote his parents, saying that “whatever may happen” in the battle tomorrow, they should recall that he was “engaged in a sacred duty.” At the end of the note, he wrote, “My darling and ever-loved parents, good-bye.” He also wrote his fiancée, Carrie Spafford, proclaiming his love for her and asking God to “grant you a happy & useful life & us a union hereafter.”66
Early in the morning of May 24, Ellsworth and his troops crossed by boats and bridges from Washington to Virginia. As they entered Alexandria, Ellsworth saw the rebel flag suspended on a pole from a high dormer in the Marshall House. He thought of sending a small detail to remove the flag but then decided to retrieve it himself. Along with a corporal, Francis Brownell, he entered the hotel and went upstairs, where he found narrow stairs leading up to the dormer. Once there, he hauled in the flag and started with it downstairs along with Brownell. When he reached the second floor, he was met by the hotel’s owner, James W. Jackson, who leveled a shotgun at Ellsworth and blasted him in the chest, killing him instantly. In the next moment, Jackson himself was sprawled on the floor, killed by Brownell’s carbine.
The news of Ellsworth’s death shook the entire North. Ellsworth had attracted widespread admiration during his prewar tour with the United States Zouaves, and he was revered for having helped protect the capital from invasion with his Fire Zouaves. He had chosen the rowdiest elements of the American population—the b’hoys—and turned them into disciplined, obedient soldiers ready to direct their energy toward the defense of the Union. He persuaded all but only a handful of them to sign on for military service, not for the required ninety days but for the entire length of the war. For Ellsworth to become the first Union officer killed in battle was both gut-wrenching and inspirational. He suddenly was a martyr to the Northern cause.
The South regarded him as a demon. A typical Southern journalist wrote, “A band of execrable cut-throats and jail-birds, known as the Zouaves of New York, under that chief of all scoundrels, Ellsworth, broke open the door of a citizen, to tear down the flag of the house—the courageous owner met the favorite hero of the Yankees in his own hall, alone, against thousands, and shot him through the heart.”67
Ellsworth’s passing deeply affected Lincoln, who thought of the young man as a family member. Reporters arrived at the White House for an interview and found the president unable to speak. He
was in tears. He had just learned of Ellsworth’s death. As he dried his face with a handkerchief, he said, “I will make no apology, gentlemen, for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard.”68
He and Mary went to the Navy Yard, where Ellsworth’s body had been brought. He arranged for a public viewing of the body in the East Room of the White House. Thousands streamed by the coffin, of solid iron, with glass showing Ellsworth’s body from the head to the waist. When Lincoln leaned over the coffin, he cried, “My boy! My boy! Was it necessary that this sacrifice should be made!”69 The coffin subsequently was taken by train north for burial in Ellsworth’s upstate New York village. On the way, the train stopped in Manhattan, where hordes of people turned out to see the fallen soldier. The coffin was taken by boat to Albany, where a funeral service was held. Ellsworth was buried in Mechanicsburg.
Lincoln wrote a heartfelt letter to Ellsworth’s parents. “Our affliction here,” he wrote, “is scarcely less than your own.” He praised Ellsworth highly: “His power to command men, was surpassingly great—This power, combined with a fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew. And yet he was singularly modest.”70
A friend of the Lincolns wanted to share with them a happy memory involving the fallen hero but, in her words, “I was told the President wept at the mention of Ellsworth and I was afraid it would make him grieve.”71 The bloodied Confederate flag Ellsworth had captured ended up in the possession of Mary, who put it in a drawer, for she couldn’t bear to look at it. (More than once, the mischievous Tad removed it and displayed it outside the White House, to the shock of visitors.)
Also distraught was Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, who had been close to Ellsworth ever since the two had worked together in Lincoln’s law office. “No man ever possessed in a more eminent degree the power of personal fascination,” Hay wrote. “He has left a void which is not to be filled.”72 Three months after Ellsworth’s death, Hay wrote to his Rhode Island friend Hannah Angell: “When Ellsworth was murdered all my sunshine perished. I hope you may never know the dry, barren, agony of soul that comes with the utter and hopeless loss of a great love.”73
The reaction of most Northerners to the killing of Ellsworth was anger and a desire for revenge. Ellsworth’s death, predicted the New York Herald, will create “a deep feeling of indignation in our community, which will spread throughout the loyal States, inspiring a patriotism that will not expire until full justice is meted out to the rebels who have put the constitution and law at defiance.”74
By July, those signed up for Union military duty had swelled to 187,000.75 In Lincoln’s hometown a company formed called the Springfield Zouaves, who resolved to “establish as our war cry ‘Ellsworth,’ and our motto ‘Death to all traitors and rebels.’”76
“Remember Ellsworth!” was a popular Union slogan throughout the war, shouted by soldiers and hailed in poems like this one:
Before he found a martyr’s crown
In Freedom’s cause, O bright renown!
He tore the flag of Treason down.
Remember Ellsworth, boys!
Remember Ellsworth—this shall be
The rallying cry of all the free
Who would our flag still honored see.
Remember Ellsworth, boys!
After Ellsworth’s death, the New York Eleventh was taken over by Colonel Noah L. Farnham, an ex-fireman who, like Ellsworth, was small, wiry, and a tough disciplinarian.
Farnham and his Fire Zouaves met with a harsh reckoning at the First Battle of Bull Run (aka First Manassas) on July 21, 1861. They served under General Irvin McDowell in the attack on a railroad junction at Manassas, where Confederate troops under P. G. T. Beauregard were trying to halt the Union army’s march south toward Richmond.
Northerners were so excited about the battle that they expected an easy victory as a prelude to a quick war. Civilians and politicians arrived from Washington, some with picnic baskets and blankets, in order to watch the battle from Centreville Heights, several miles from the battlefield. What they saw was unexpected, to say the least. Although the initial skirmishes went well for the Union, a Confederate reinforcement under Joseph E. Johnston changed the tide of the battle. Also crucial was the performance of brigade commander Thomas J. Jackson, who earned his nickname “Stonewall” by closing a gap in the Confederate line just when it had begun to give way under a heavy Union assault.
The battle turned into a rout in which many Union soldiers and officers ran away. During the battle, Noah Farnham received a head wound from which he later died. His men suffered more than one hundred casualties, with an additional sixty-eight men missing and presumed captured.
Confederates believed that God had punished the North for Ellsworth’s flag-stealing escapade at the Marshall House. A Southern newspaper stated, “A terrible retribution has fallen upon the brutal regiment known as ELLSWORTH Fire Zouaves. . . . The Fire Zouaves [at Manassas] . . . threw themselves upon their knees and pleaded for mercy. But mercy there was none. No quarters were shown, and only a scanty remnant of the famous Fire Zouave saved themselves by flight. So has the death of [James W.] JACKSON been avenged at last!”78
But in the North, Ellsworth quickly became a martyr whose death must be violently avenged. Popular songs about the fallen hero included “Ellsworth’s Avengers,” “Death of Col. Ellsworth,” and “Ellsworth, the Gallant Zouave.” The vastly popular John Brown marching song, with its rousing “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” chorus, was often sung as a tribute to Ellsworth, with lines such as:
Ellsworth’s body lies mouldering in the dust, . . .
Ellsworth’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, . . .
His pet lambs will meet him on the way . . .
The Fire Zouaves are marching on their way
For Ellsworth’s death to avenge.
Ellsworth’s Fire Zouaves, as a contemporary journalist noted, became “the nucleus of other extensive bodies of men whose mode of warfare would soon strike terror in the enemy.”79 Two regiments were formed in honor of Ellsworth: the New York Seventeenth Regiment, called Ellsworth’s Avengers, which consisted of volunteers from every county in New York State; and the Seventy-third New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, called the Second Fire Zouaves, which mustered in July 1861 and served in many major battles, including Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Antietam, and Appomattox Court House.
Ellsworth’s influence lived on in other ways, too. Soldiers sent letters home in envelopes decorated with an engraving of Ellsworth standing in his colorful Zouave outfit, his sword drawn as he holds a flagstaff crowned by a miniature fireman’s axe, with a Confederate flag on the ground below his boots.80 Cartes de visite, lithographs, and broadsides kept Ellsworth’s image before the public.
The Fire Zouaves nickname was adopted by several units. There were Baxter’s Fire Zouaves, the Philadelphia Fire Zouaves, the Boston Tiger Fire Zouaves, and others. Tad and Willie Lincoln received as a gift a Zouave doll, which they summarily court-martialed for a military crime, executed, and buried in the White House rose garden.81
Fire Zouaves became a source of fun for popular humorists, including one of Lincoln’s favorites, Robert Henry Newell, who as Orpheus C. Kerr (a pun on “office seeker,” the bane of Lincoln’s early presidency) wrote about a mythical army unit, the Mackerel Brigade. According to a contemporary source, “Lincoln . . . seized eagerly upon everything Orpheus C. Kerr wrote, and knew it all by heart.”82 In one of Kerr’s sketches, a Fire Zouave named Private Shorty takes a comically long time to die. When he is shot in the head by a Confederate sniper, he asks his comrade, “Is any of my brains hanging out?” “No, Shorty,” answered the other, bursting into tears; “you never had any to hang out.” The narrator describes Shorty calmly taking out a pipe and, while smoking it, giving “a history of Nine’s [Fire] Engine and the first ‘muss’ he was ever engaged in. After finishing the pipe, and requesting me to wrap him up in the American flag, he spit on one of my boots, and then died.” The narrator adds, “His remains will be taken to the first fire that occurs.”83
While funny, such portraits of working-class bravery and patriotism had serious meaning for Lincoln. Early in the war, he found himself distrustful of officers. A third of commissioned officers in the regular army and navy went over to the Confederacy. These included several whom Lincoln tried to woo for the Union. He appealed to Colonel John B. Magruder, saying, “You are an officer of the army and a Southern gentleman, and incapable of any but honorable conduct.” Lincoln explained he was constitutionally obliged to challenge secession, but he “bore testimony to the honor, good faith, and high character of the Southern people, whom he ‘knew well.’” Magruder’s defection was devastating. Lincoln said, “When I learned that he had gone over to the enemy and I had been so completely deceived in him, my confidence was shaken in everybody, and I hardly knew who to trust anymore.”84
Also shattering was the defection of Robert E. Lee, to whom Lincoln offered command of the Union army. Even though Lee objected to secession and said he would, if he could, surrender the South’s enslaved millions to the Union, he declared that he could not take up weapons against his native state, Virginia. On April 20, three days after Virginia seceded, Lee resigned from the regular army, went to Richmond, and was soon in command of Virginia’s state forces.
Although Lincoln was reassured by the fact that Virginians such as Winfield Scott, George H. Thomas, John W. Davidson, and several other officers remained loyal to the Union, his bitterness over the resignation of more than three hundred regular officers after Fort Sumter led him to place special value on the loyalty of average Northerners. In his July 4 message to Congress, he thanked the officers who had remained loyal but excoriated their “treacherous associates” who chose the Confederacy. “It is worthy of note,” he said, “that while in this, the government’s hour of trial, large numbers of those in the Army and Navy, who have been favored with the offices, have resigned, and proved false to the hand which had pampered them, not one common soldier, or sailor is known to have deserted his flag.” “This is essentially a People’s contest,” he declared, and the “most important fact of all, is the unanimous firmness of the common soldiers, and common sailors.”85
The South, unsurprisingly, looked down on the Northern army as vulgar and lowly while extolling its “chivalrous” troops under Cavalier leaders like Lee and Magruder. A Raleigh, North Carolina, paper stated, “The army of the South will be composed of the best material that ever yet made up an army; whilst that of Lincoln will be gathered from the scum of the cities—the degraded, beastly off-scouring of all quarters of the world.”86 One Virginia journalist noted “the rapid enlistment at the North of ‘Dead Rabbits,’ ‘Plug Uglies,’ ‘Blood Tubs,’ ‘Jakies,’ ‘Soap Locks,’ ‘Bar-room Loungers,’ ‘Loafers,’ ‘Wharf-Rats,’ ‘Thieves’ and ‘Pick-Pockets,’” while another said the Union military consisted of “barbarians who compose the lower orders of the Northern cities, and who are much inferior in humanity and refinement to African negroes.”
But Ellsworth had made the b’hoys and their ilk the pride of the North. The respect for the common-man soldier Lincoln showed in his message to Congress was captured in a Northern song that blamed the South for starting the war by invading forts, which prompted Ellsworth’s Fire Zouaves to lead the fight against the South:
So then we called the Volunteers the Country for to save,
And show the Southern Chivalry that Northern men were brave;
And then our gallant Firemen formed a regiment of Zouaves
And under Colonel Ellsworth expressed the Country’s cause,
But they lost their young Commander, for the Union he did die,
But they’ll make the South pay dearly.87
Ellsworth had not only enhanced Lincoln’s appreciation of the common soldier; he had also made the president think deeply about the relationship between the federal government and the states in the control of the armed forces.
This issue was in turn part of a larger question. In a time of civil war, how large and powerful was the federal government permitted to grow while remaining within constitutional limits? Lincoln’s answer, as time proved, was: very large. He expanded the power of the central government—and especially the executive office—more dramatically than had any previous president. He did so, not because of personal aggrandizement or “socialist” leanings, but to repair the Union and restore harmony to the American people, now engaged in a terrible civil war.
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