I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but [“countrym” deleted] fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not [“be broken they will not” deleted], I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from [“every ba” deleted] so many battle fields and [“patriot” deleted] so many patriot graves [“bind” deleted] pass through all the hearts and [“hearths” deleted] all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet [“harmon” deleted] again harmonize in their ancient music when [“touched as they surely” deleted] breathed upon [“again” deleted] by the [“better angel” deleted] guardian angel of the nation.49
Here is Lincoln:
I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stre[t]ching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Lincoln’s transformation of Seward’s imagery and style is striking. Seward’s abrupt “I close” became Lincoln’s emotive “I am loth to close.” Lincoln transformed Seward’s labored line about aliens, countrymen, and brethren into the concise “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” In a similarly graceful revision, Lincoln used parallelism to streamline Seward’s bumpy description of the broken bonds of affection.
Seward’s passage had cultural resonances that became especially emphatic in Lincoln’s final sentence, which called for national unity on the basis of common culture. The “mystic chords” connecting the dead with the living evoked spiritualism, the influential movement that deeply affected Mary Todd Lincoln and millions of other Americans, North and South. The connecting “chords” would remind many of Lincoln’s hearers of the electromagnetic forces that were then thought to form “spiritual telegraph” between the living and the dead. The joining of every “patriot grave” to “every living heart and hearthstone” drew from other sources of cultural unity: the shared worship of the founding generation (“every patriot grave”) that negated sectional categories such as Puritan and Cavalier; and the imagery found in popular domestic literature (“heart and hearthstone”), which had a nationwide readership. “This broad land” utilized political ecology in its suggestion of the American continent. “The chorus of union” referenced music, which Lincoln considered a key unifying cultural force. “The better angels of our nature” not only humanized Seward’s rather distant “guardian angel of the nation,” but it also drew from what was a common trope in sentimental literature of that era: the angelic nature of good people—exemplified by the heroine of the era’s most popular novel, Stowe’s Little Eva, who is repeatedly called a human angel and who is bound by goodness to her black companion, the enslaved Uncle Tom.
Lincoln’s revised version of Seward’s paragraph was a culturally representative passage offered to a divided nation in what was a massive rhetorical effort to repair the Union.
The effort failed. Although Northern journalists generally saw the inaugural as a sensible, compassionate peace offering, Southerners took it as coercive declaration by a Black Republican president. Extremists on both sides raved. For radical abolitionists, the speech was a doughfaced sellout to the South. For rabid fire-eaters, it was a declaration of war by the North.
Thomas Nast captured the divided response to the speech in one of his earliest political cartoons, The President’s Inaugural.50 One side of the cartoon shows the North’s response: Lincoln appears as a gentle woman holding a palm branch in one hand and the scales of justice in the other, with the word PEACE in the background. The other half of the cartoon, representing the South, pictures Lincoln as a saber-wielding, helmeted soldier with WAR blazing near him and his foot crushing a Southerner.
Lincoln had done his best to save the nation by affirming cultural and political union, but as he assumed office he faced irreparable division. After the inaugural ball that evening, in the early morning hours of March 5, he got word from Major Robert Anderson, the Union commander at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, that he needed provisions. Lincoln was determined to resupply Fort Sumter, over the initial objections of six of seven cabinet members and the aged general Winfield Scott. He notified the governor of South Carolina that he was sending a ship to deliver supplies to Fort Sumter.
Before the ship reached Charleston, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, the Confederate guns began bombarding Fort Sumter. During the battle, the US flag was torn and fell down. After thirty-four hours of shelling, Major Anderson evacuated the fort. On April 15, President Lincoln issued a proclamation calling up 75,000 militia for ninety days’ service.
The Civil War had begun.
REMEMBER ELLSWORTH!
Calling up 75,000 militia sounds simple enough in retrospect, but it was complicated in 1861. The regular army of the United States was then small, consisting of some 16,000 career soldiers who were on duty on the western frontier, the Canadian border, and installations on the Atlantic Ocean.51 The paucity of federally controlled troops resulted from the nation’s long-term animosity against standing armies.
Lincoln wanted to centralize control of a large army, but he was under constitutional restraints. On March 18, anticipating a civil war, he wrote his attorney general, Edward Bates, asking him to appoint the twenty-three-year-old drill instructor Elmer Ellsworth as the chief clerk of the War Department and inspector general of militia for the United States in a new government department to be dedicated to “promoting a uniform system of organization, drill, equipment,” for “the Militia of the several States.”52
Bates thought hard about the president’s proposal. In a month, he sent a detailed answer. Lincoln’s proposed appointment of Ellsworth was unconstitutional for three reasons, he wrote. First, the president had no control over state militias. He could call for volunteers, but as Bates wrote, “since the State militia are not now in the actual service of the national government, . . . the President has no power over them by virtue of his office.” Second, the creation of a new military department was the responsibility of Congress, not the executive branch. Finally, according to law, Lieutenant Ellsworth must serve three years in the military before he could be released for government service.53
Lincoln’s response to Bates’s rejection of Ellsworth is unrecorded, but surely he was disappointed. For Lincoln, Ellsworth promised great improvements to a US military system that was disorganized, inefficient, and demoralized.
Elmer Ellsworth has largely been minimized in works on Lincoln; one historian dismisses him as “a parade-ground warrior, ignorant of combat.”54 Actually, without knowing about Ellsworth, we do not fully understand either Lincoln or the Civil War. Ellsworth was a major source of inspiration to the president and to the Union army.
Born in 1837 in Malta, a hamlet near Mechanicsville in Saratoga County, New York, Ellsworth was raised in humble circumstances. His father, Ephraim Ellsworth, was a tailor who struggled to make ends meet. His mother, Phoebe Denton Ellsworth, was a pious Presbyterian. Both parents had New England ancestors; the father was descended from a Revolutionary War soldier. Elmer attended local schools and loved reading books, especially ones about war and battles. As a teenager, he organized a local military company, the Black Plumed Riflemen. He learned the manual of arms and became a good shot and a fine swordsman. He developed strict temperance habits, having heard a lecturer say that the devil dwelled in a barrel of hard cider.55
At fifteen Elmer became a clerk in a linen goods store in nearby Troy, New York. He then moved to New York City, where he worked at a dry goods store. In 1854, he relocated to Rockford, Illinois,
where he found employment in a patent agency, and then he moved to Chicago to work as a law clerk.
But his heart was in military matters. While in Chicago he met Charles A. DeVilliers, who had served in a French Zouave regiment in the Crimean War. Under DeVilliers’s guidance, Ellsworth became an expert fencer and adept at the intricate military exercises of the Zouaves. Originally a group of Berber warriors associated with the Zouaoua, a mountain tribe in Algeria, the Zouaves by the 1850s were composed mainly of French soldiers and officers known for their ferocity and rapidity in battle. The Zouaves wore uniforms that were partly Eastern—with billowing trousers, short coats, and Oriental caps—while retaining the bright colors of the French army.
Fascinated by the exotic Zouaves, Ellsworth studied them and decided to create a Zouave unit of his own. The United States Zouave Cadets of Chicago conducted their first drills under their young leader in April 1859. He aimed to improve his men “morally as well physically” and “to place the company in a position second to none in the United States.”56 Abstemious to the point of avoiding tobacco, tea, and coffee, he forbade his men from entering barrooms, gambling halls, or houses of prostitution. His Zouaves, striking in their Oriental uniforms, performed publicly before crowds who were thrilled by their precise coordination and quickness. Ellsworth trained them to perform exercises that combined acrobatics with military moves such as running in double quick-step, firing as skirmishers while advancing or lying down, parrying for the head, and so on.57 Soon Ellsworth took the Zouaves on the road, appearing before tremendous crowds in many cities throughout the North.
After the tour, he returned to Illinois and resumed his study of the law. Sometime that year, he became an apprentice in the law office of Lincoln and Herndon. He read law books and gained enough experience to earn entrance to the Illinois bar.
But his mind remained fixed on the military and on Republican politics. He spent much of 1860 campaigning for Lincoln and other Republicans. Lincoln grew to admire him, calling him “the greatest little man I ever met!”58 By the time Lincoln was ready to take his trip east to Washington in February 1861, he asked Ellsworth to come along and take care of crowd control.
Ellsworth not only fulfilled this function but also raised new possibilities for military organization that appealed to Lincoln, who declared, “That young man has a real genius for war!”59 Ellsworth, concerned about the disorganized condition of the regular army, discussed with Lincoln a plan to coordinate the militias of the various states through a department in Washington. His goal was to reorganize “the militia . . . of the whole country; to unify and bring the entire system more completely under the control of a central authority.”60 Lincoln liked the idea so much that he proposed it to Bates, whose objections based on the Constitution thwarted the plan.
But Bates’s interference did not spell the end of Ellsworth’s influence. After the fall of Fort Sumter, Ellsworth became the chief actor in a series of events that were a key part of the initial phase of the Civil War.
On April 29, Ellsworth was in New York City organizing a regiment to fight for the Union. For recruits, he sought none other than the original b’hoys: Manhattan firemen, known to be brave, tough, and skilled with firearms because of their pastime of going on target excursions.
For Ellsworth, the b’hoys had the mettle for being good soldiers, ready for the most arduous situations. Within a week, Ellsworth had selected 1,100 men, taken from New York’s fire companies. He organized them as the Eleventh New York Volunteer Army. They were known alternately as First Fire Zouaves, Ellsworth Zouaves, and the First Regiment New York Zouave.
The young men quickly fell into line under Ellsworth. A slight man who stood five feet five inches tall and had flowing black curls and a mustache, the handsome Ellsworth had a magnetic, no-nonsense presence that made even the b’hoys, given to disorder and insouciance, act in a disciplined way. The puritanical Ellsworth prohibited drinking, swearing, and unruly behavior among his troops, who became known as his “pet lambs,” ready to obey his every command and aware of the punishment that was forthcoming if they did not.
The departure from New York of Ellsworth’s regiment on April 30 was a grand affair, witnessed by cheering thousands who waved flags and hailed the troops of b’hoys, each attired in a modified Zouave uniform: a blue-trimmed gray jacket, red shirt, loose gray trousers, a red cap with a blue band, and a regulation overcoat. The Zouaves, aka the New York Eleventh, marched through the city
to a wharf on the Hudson, where they left on the steamship Baltic, on which they went to Annapolis and thence by rail to Washington, DC. They arrived in the capital on May 2.
Lincoln had been waiting for them. He had feared that Confederate forces could move on the capital at any time. Within days of the Fire Zouaves’ arrival, he reviewed the troops, shaking hands warmly with all of them. Tad and Willie loved watching Ellsworth lead the Zouaves in their acrobatic drills.
For lack of housing, the Zouaves camped out for a few days in the Capitol building. A journalist reported, “We visited the quarters of Col. Ellsworth’s Zouave regiment in the capitol on Saturday, and found the b’hoys in undisputed possession of the rotunda and the new and old House of Representatives.” These men “of herculean proportions, with massive shoulders and chests” lounged about with their feet on desks, chatting and laughing, and having fun, since “no one is given to more ‘mad pranks’ than ‘these ‘bold soger b’hoys’ from New York.” For instance, “We saw one of the b’hoys with bare legs and feet,” gleefully squirting hose water at his comrades.61
Within a week, Ellsworth moved his troops to a military camp on high ground near the Potomac southeast of Washington.
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