Authors: Adam Goodheart
Sometime in the late 1850s, however, Ellsworth had an encounter that rivaled any romantic tale he might have dreamt up. It happened, improbably enough, in a Chicago gymnasium. There he met one
Charles DeVilliers, a
French fencing instructor recently arrived in the city. Back in Europe, DeVilliers had served as an officer in the Zouaves, an elite fighting force named for a band of
Algerian tribesmen renowned for their ferocity in battle. The
French Zouaves copied the North Africans’ uniform—fez, baggy pants, and a loose jacket, “suited to rapid movement and fierce daring”—and developed a reputation both for their dashing appearance and for their fearsome use of the bayonet.
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Newspapers and illustrated magazines worldwide, Amer-ica included, covered the Zouaves’ exploits in the Crimea (where DeVilliers had served) and in
Italy’s war of unification.
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How a French Zouave ended up in Chicago is still a mystery, except that all sorts of people ended up in Chicago
in those days. In any event, it is no surprise that the young militiaman gravitated toward the older officer and insisted on learning the Zouaves’ distinctive tactics. Somehow, over the course of just months—in a miraculous transformation that Hollywood, had it existed yet, might have invented—the threadbare clerk became an expert fencer, gymnast, and drill instructor.
Before long, he was teaching those skills to others. The cadets’ regiment was a militia unit “of the old school,” one member recalled many years later, composed of young men who drilled in old-fashioned uniforms and bearskin hats, “ponderous, slow, and heavy.”
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It was also on the verge of bankruptcy; membership had been
dwindling, perhaps due to competition from newer and more glamorous organizations. Ellsworth saw an opportunity. When he showed the militiamen the Zouave moves he had learned from DeVilliers, they were fascinated. Within a month or two, he was drilling them six nights a week, for hours at a time, and the unit had renamed itself the U.S. Zouave Cadets.
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The cadets’ devotion to their new commandant was all the more remarkable in light of the strictures he imposed. The new company, he told them, was to be not merely a military organization but “a source of improvement morally as well as physically.”
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No member was allowed to enter any drinking saloon, gambling hall, or “house of
ill-fame,” on pain of immediate expulsion. Even playing billiards was off-limits, on the grounds that it might “naturally lead to drinking.” The preamble to these rules explained that while many militia groups existed “with no higher object than the mere pursuit of pleasure,” this one would be different.
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And remarkably, the more rigid
Ellsworth’s strictures became, the more the men seemed to thrive under them. “The clerk
from behind the counter, the law student from the books, the young man of leisure from his loiterings around town—all have lived under strict military discipline, self-imposed,” wrote one impressed visitor to the regimental armory.
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And so it was that on July Fourth of the following year, Chicagoans lined the shore of Lake Michigan to observe a wholly unanticipated spectacle. Some forty cadets in the traditional blue-and-buff uniforms of the eighteenth-century militias—Algerian Zouave–style attire had been ordered but didn’t arrive in time—gave a performance that was more like a gymnastics event (or a nineteenth-century version of Cirque du Soleil) than any military
drill the onlookers had ever seen. Instead of forming neat lines, shouldering their guns, and marching straight ahead, these militiamen leapt and rolled and yelled, loaded muskets while lying on their backs, jumped up to fire them and then fell again, thrust and twirled their bayonets like drum majors’ batons—all with a beautiful and precise synchrony. “The cadets are not large in stature, but athletes in agility and strength, moving at the word of command with
the quickness and precision of steam men,” one newspaper editor marveled.
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On the day before the Zouaves’ first performance, on the far side of the Appalachians—and unknown but to a few others—John Brown arrived, incognito, at Harper’s Ferry. His deeds in the months to come would electrify the country and the world. But so, too, would the sensation born that Independence Day beside Lake Michigan and soon to be sweeping beyond Chicago, across the Midwestern prairies and then past them, throughout an unquiet land.
A
MERICA HAD ALWAYS HARBORED
a deep ambivalence about war, going back at least as far as the Revolution. General Washington had won the nation’s freedom on the battlefield, inspiring his men to many deeds of valor that would ring down through the ages, but after the final victory, when he resigned his commission and Congress disbanded the national army entirely, most citizens cheered. They associated standing armies with European
monarchies, with troops of mercenaries and conscripts—“hirelings and slaves,” as
Francis Scott Key called British redcoats in his famous anthem—maintained in support of tyranny. What could be less democratic, after all, than the use of force to sustain power and impose policy? In 1847, as American troops fought a war of aggression and conquest in Mexico, one young Midwestern congressman had warned against “the
exceeding brightness
of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.”
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Yet just a few months later, the same politician who had spoken those words took to the stump for
Zachary Taylor—a leading general in the Mexican War whose only qualification for high office was “military glory,” since he had never held a civilian post of any kind. (Pro-Taylor campaign lithographs showed him gallantly leading the charge at Buena Vista; an anti-Taylor cartoon showed him perched atop a gigantic heap
of skulls, clutching a bloody sword in his hand.) As for the Midwestern congressman himself, he would go on to be America’s greatest war president. That young legislator was, of course,
Abraham Lincoln.
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Lincoln’s metaphor of the “rainbow that rises in showers of blood” perfectly captured his countrymen’s mixed feelings. Between the 1840s and the outbreak of the Civil War, however, more and more Americans, in the North as well as the South, were increasingly drawn to the gleam of that rainbow. The change was especially noticeable among antislavery advocates and other reformers.
Theodore Parker, the famed
Boston abolitionist, had once condemned war unequivocally as “an utter violation of Christianity.” But by the late 1850s, referring to the Garibaldian struggle in
Italy, but also thinking of the growing conflict closer to home, he reflected: “All the great charters of humanity have been
writ in blood,
and must continue to be for some countries. I should let the Italians fight for their liberty till the twenty-eight
millions were only fourteen million.”
In 1838, a dovish Emerson wrote in his journal: “a company of soldiers is an offensive spectacle.” By 1859, in the aftermath of the Harper’s Ferry raid, he was publicly calling John Brown “that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death.” By 1863, Emerson had accepted an appointment to the West Point military academy’s Board of Visitors.
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The 1850s saw an increasing spirit of militancy enter American politics and culture. The Wide Awakes who marched by the thousands for Lincoln in 1860 were simply the culmination of a trend, the logical outcome of the new republican ideology that prized
manliness and unyielding idealism. It was a short step from such militancy to outright militarism. In retrospect, its seeds were clearly present even in the early work of avowed
pacifists like Emerson: at the same time that he called for the outright abolition of war, he hailed Napoleon Bonaparte, the century’s most famous general, as the hero of “young, ardent, and active men, everywhere,” who had nobly transformed “old, iron-bound
feudal
France” into “a young Ohio or New York.” The sage failed to mention, of course, that in the laudable process of
turning France into Ohio, the late emperor had also brought about hundreds of thousands of deaths.
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Indeed, despite the new republic’s professed aversion to war, military feeling often seemed more intense in the United States than it did among the European nations where Napoleon and Wellington had fought. Americans could lionize their military heroes as citizen volunteers, men who had freely chosen to lay down their lives for the nation. What higher expression of democratic values was there than willingly dying for the sake of one’s country and
countrymen? It was the ultimate pledge of allegiance, an extreme subjection of individual interests to the greater good of the majority. Americans celebrated the volunteer military tradition for the same reason that they shunned their own nation’s peacetime standing army, a force whose ranks were filled by hirelings, if not quite by slaves. An Englishwoman, visiting Detroit in 1854 during the
Michigan State Fair, was surprised at the martial
tone of the festivities:
Military bands playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail, Columbia,” were constantly passing and re-passing, and the whole population seemed on the
qui vive.
Squadrons of cavalry continually passed my window, the men in gorgeous uniforms, with high waving plumes.… Two regiments of foot followed the cavalry.… The privates had a more independent air than our own regulars, and were principally the sons of
respectable citizens. They appeared to have been well drilled, and were superior in appearance to our militia.
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As foreign visitors also noted, many Americans of all social classes often seemed simply to enjoy a good brawl. The rough-hewn Westerner bristling with six-shooters and bowie knives and the aristocratic Southerner with his brace of dueling pistols became stock characters in European depictions of the young republic. Yankees—though perhaps not quite so bellicose—were not entirely excluded from this culture of violence. The most spectacular
gang combat of the antebellum years took place in Northern cities, such as the storied street battle between New York’s Roach Guards and Dead Rabbits, fought on Independence Day in 1857, which left eight men dead. Such fights often broke out between Democrats and Whigs, or Know Nothings and immigrants: decades before the Civil War began, some Americans
were accustomed to battling other Americans over political differences. And Yankees
filled the ranks of the nation’s peacetime officer corps. Of the active duty officers in 1860, almost 60 percent came from the free states; the only branch the Southerners dominated was the cavalry.
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Both before and after the war, Southerners loved to glamorize themselves at the North’s expense: their own region was redolent of magnolias, romantic chivalry, and Sir
Walter Scott, while Yankeedom was a land of naught but cold-eyed profiteering. Later generations on both sides have largely accepted this Southern myth, like so many others. But the reality was much more ambiguous, and in many ways the two regions were more alike
than different. The South’s economy was as ruthlessly profit-driven as the North’s; each plantation was, in a sense, a cog in a vast industrial machine, and many of the great
cotton planters had actually come from above the Mason-Dixon Line. So too, young Northerners thrilled to chivalric fantasies just as much as their Southern counterparts.
Walter Scott was hardly the exclusive property of Southern cavaliers:
Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that as a girl, she read
Ivanhoe
no fewer than seven times in a single summer, until she was able to recite many of its scenes from memory. This was the era of
Romanticism’s exuberant flowering, when nary a middle-class parlor, even in the backwaters of
New England or the
Midwest, was without its thick, gilt-edged volumes of Byron and Tennyson, laid reverently alongside the family Bible. Such books were not just displayed but read and memorized. Like the rock lyrics of a later generation, their verses stirred millions of young Americans who heard in them the language of their own souls, and a kind of prophetic authority. As an adult, Ellsworth would cite a passage from Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
as his favorite lines of poetry. Something in the Arthurian legend, with its gallant young knights riding off to sacrifice their lives for their king, spoke powerfully to his heart.
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American authors of the 1840s and 1850s, especially in the North, developed home-grown versions of such heroic fantasies. One of the best sellers of the period,
Richard Henry Dana’s
Two Years Before the Mast,
is the true story of a privileged young Bostonian who makes his way as a merchant seaman aboard a vessel bound for California, via the perilous waters of Cape Horn. Dana returns to Boston no longer a sickly Harvard
undergraduate but a tough and seasoned adventurer, a comrade of salty old mariners and California ranch hands, who has proven his manhood with brawn as well as brains. That book probably
inspired the young
Herman Melville to sign aboard a whaling ship the year after its publication, thus spawning still more magnificent tales of young men setting sail upon the high seas. (And it definitely inspired the teenage
James Garfield to run away “to sea”—which in his case consisted of six weeks on a mule-drawn canal boat.)
Indeed, as the nineteenth century reached its midpoint, it seemed that youth was ascendant as it had never been before. A new generation scoffed at the values of its parents, proclaiming its devotion to deeper and truer things than mere getting and spending. A political movement called Young America swore eternal enmity to “old fogyism” in all its forms. Farm boys and apprentices, laboring at their drudge work in fields and shops, dreamed of greater
things.
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Most young Americans, of course, never crossed the Pacific aboard a whaler. But hundreds of thousands embraced other opportunities to test their mettle in a world wider than their fathers had known—whether in America’s booming cities or along her expanding frontiers. In places like rural
New England and the
Hudson Valley, where generations of the same families had farmed the same lands,
and children often lived under strict parental authority well into adulthood, it was a bold and radical act for a young man to pull up stakes and seek his fortune in the gold fields of California or the bare-fisted markets of Chicago. Moreover, when the adventurers arrived at their destination, the competition—for jobs or gold, for the attention of would-be patrons or would-be wives—could be ruthless. The newcomers, nearly all in their teens and twenties, formed their
own rough-and-tumble communities in mining camps and boardinghouses. Postadolescent tempers ran high, flaring into brawls with fists, knives, and sometimes pistols. Yet at the same time, ardent feelings of brotherhood, like those Garfield knew in rural
Ohio, were quick to kindle, as solitary adventurers banded together against an unforgiving world. They joined
militias, volunteer fire companies, “young
men’s societies,” and gymnasiums. (The first true college fraternities began to flourish in the 1840s and 1850s, too.)
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