1861 (35 page)

So the culture of Ellsworth’s generation of young urbanites, the generation of 1861, was a culture of toughness and comradeship, of tender yearnings and ruthless ambition. It was an American culture largely new. It was the world that
Walt Whitman sang.
³⁷

It was also a world rife with pitfalls and temptations. Countless self-help books warned of the dangers that lay in wait for young men on their own, away from the watchful eyes of parents and clergymen. Brothels and billiard halls, saloons and gambling dens, all lured the
unwary. Many, if not most, young men sampled these pleasures to some degree. (The immense quantities of
alcohol they consumed are especially
impressive.)
³⁸
But the sinful pleasures of urban life often came with a heavy price of remorse, especially for the sons of traditionally devout families. Alongside low dens of iniquity, temperance societies and self-improvement associations also flourished. Antebellum cities became not only battlefields of economic competition but also, as the sea was for Dana and
Melville, proving grounds of discipline, morality, and self-worth.
³⁹
It is easy to see why Ellsworth’s strict rules for his Zouaves, along with the all-consuming drill regimen and the promise of soldierly comradeship, appealed so strongly to certain rootless youth of Chicago, and to many who would answer their country’s call a few years later.

For these men, too, the chief apostle of American youth was not Whitman, whose poems had found only a few thousand readers as of 1860, but Emerson. Unlike previous generations of Protestant sermonizers, who had equated age with authority, and treated the young merely as unformed minds in need of guidance and discipline, Emerson extolled youth for its own sake. America itself was a young country, and young men and women had a special role to play in its destiny. In his
1844 lecture “The Young American,” first delivered at the Boston Mercantile Library, he exhorted, in ringing words:

Some years later—just about the time Ellsworth was learning to fence in a Chicago gymnasium—Abraham Lincoln took to the Illinois lecture circuit with his own variation on the Emersonian message, a talk that he called “Discoveries and Inventions.” Speaking before audiences at colleges and young men’s associations, he paid these listeners a characteristically wry, even sarcastic, tribute. “We have all heard of Young
America,” Lincoln said. “He is the most current youth of the age. Some think him conceited, and arrogant; but has he not reason to entertain a rather extensive opinion of himself? … Men, and things,
everywhere, are ministering unto him.” Thanks to global trade and modern inventions, he noted, any American youth of decent means lived like a virtual king, with the whole world catering to his every whim: he wore fabrics from
England and France, drank tea and coffee from China and South America, smoked
Cuban cigars and lit his home with oil from South Sea whales. “He owns,” Lincoln said, “a large part of the world.”

It was not just spoken words that summoned young men onto the global stage. Ellsworth’s generation was the first to grow up in the thrall of mass
popular media: news sheets carrying the latest telegraphic dispatches, cheaply printed books about the heroic exploits of 1776 and 1812, illustrated weeklies chockablock with wood engravings of cavalry clashes, political rallies, and militia parades. By bringing the wide world and its
pageantry into young Americans’ lives with such unprecedented immediacy, the new media of the 1840s and 1850s made once-distant adventures and opportunities seem achievable. They regaled readers with tales of far-off, yet newly accessible, California—an entire state of ambitious young entrepreneurs, drawn into the Gold Rush boom from every nation of the world, sometimes to gain fortunes and sometimes to lose their lives.

New horizons of possibility seemed to open on all sides in those final prewar years. The American press was also filled with even more outré tales of what were then known as “
filibusters,” men whose exploits are nearly forgotten today. The filibusters were gangs of young freelance military adventurers who set out to invade, in the name of Manifest Destiny, various soft parts of Latin America: Cuba,
Nicaragua, Honduras, northern
Mexico. These soldiers of fortune sailed from American ports under fanciful flags of nonexistent republics, of which they imagined themselves the founding fathers.

Though nearly all these expeditions flamed out like so many cheap firecrackers—with the occasional timely assistance of a Latin American firing squad—the dream of foreign conquest kept its hold on the American imagination right up to the eve of
Fort Sumter. Ellsworth himself, even as a penniless clerk, kept a map of Mexico pinned to his wall and sketched out plans of empire somewhere below the Rio Grande. But his
rendezvous with destiny, manifest or otherwise, would happen closer to home.

T
HE LAST SUMMER OF THE DECADE,
the last summer of peace, was the summer of the Chicago Zouaves. The men—a corps of sixty handpicked
by Ellsworth himself, plus a small regimental band—left home at the start of July, and by midmonth they were a national sensation.

From town to town they traveled, riding the railways across the Upper Midwest, through New York and New England, down the Eastern seaboard. Their performances dazzled nearly all who saw them, and the trip quickly became a thousand-mile triumphal procession. After their drill in Cleveland, they marched to the city’s train station flanked by uniformed firemen, as torches flared and Roman candles arced across the dusk, with young girls running out into the street
proffering bouquets of flowers to the cadets.
⁴¹
At Albany, New York, little more than a week into the tour, twenty-five thousand people turned out to watch. One of the town’s most worldly—or, one suspects, just imaginative—local journalists claimed that he had “seen
Lord Wellington review his veterans in Hyde
Park; Napoleon, his Guards on Champ de Mars; and the Emperor of Russia, an Austrian army in Vienna,” but this “simple corps of citizen soldiers” from the edge of the prairies excelled them all.
⁴²

Just past daybreak the following morning, when the lads from Chicago arrived by Hudson River steamboat at the Cortland Street pier in Lower Manhattan, a cheering crowd already lined the wharf to greet them, as artillery pieces boomed official welcome to the greatest city on the continent. Local papers were already using words like “mania” to describe the public’s response to the Zouaves.
⁴³
The
New York Atlas
satirized the media frenzy:

It would be more than a century before New Yorkers would swoon like this for a few out-of-town boys newly arriving in the metropolis.

After breakfast at the city’s finest hotel, the Astor House, the cadets
shouldered their muskets and marched up Broadway to Union Square, then down the Bowery to Grand Street. Packed masses of spectators awaited them in front of City Hall, sweltering in the mid-July sun as policemen swung billy clubs left and right to make way for Ellsworth’s troop. The windows of City Hall were crowded with Tammany grandees, and lesser mortals
scrambled precariously along the roof for a better view, while the surrounding trees, one spectator wrote, “bent under the load of unripe boys they bore.”
⁴⁵
To Ellsworth, whose last experience of New York City had been his brief stint as a teenage shopboy, this triumphant return must have seemed like a waking dream.

Oddly, few of the watching thousands could describe afterward exactly what was so enthralling about Ellsworth and his men. For all the ink that was spilled on the subject of the Zouaves that summer, it is still hard to find any satisfactorily visual account, though some give us quick, glancing snapshots of the action: the young soldiers running in tight formation behind their commander; turning exuberant somersaults and handstands; crouching all together in a tight
pyramid of men, bayonets bristling out on every side like the spines of a porcupine.
⁴⁶
Newspapermen excused themselves by explaining that words could not fully capture the cadets’ rapid maneuvers as they formed squares, triangles, crosses, and revolving circles, shifting from one shape to the next with the dizzying fluidity of a kaleidoscope.
⁴⁷
“Now that the parade is over, my single impressions of the scene are indistinct,” one of them confessed just a few hours later, recalling only a sense of “geometrical precision,” of “action,” of “runnings, hoppings, bayonet-guardings, and thrustings.”
⁴⁸
Many commented on the Zouaves’ jauntily elegant uniforms, on their youthfulness and muscularity, on their air of high spirits with a dash of ferocity. Each man, one journalist wrote, was “as wiry, athletic, and agile as a squirrel”; others compared them to tigers, steam engines, and electric clocks.
⁴⁹

To convey the full splendor of the Zouaves’ prowess, some scribes were driven to satirical exaggeration. One New York paper assured its readers that when he met an enemy soldier, a Zouave could drive the bayonet, musket and all, through the foe’s body, turn a somersault over his head, and draw the weapon out the other side in a single flourish. When he had to cross a river, a Zouave would nonchalantly throw a rope across it and tightrope-walk to the other
side. And if his commanders needed someone to reconnoiter the enemy’s lines, a Zouave would climb into a skyrocket, blast a thousand feet into the air, and have a complete set of photographs and hand-drawn maps ready by the time he alighted on the ground.
⁵⁰

America’s Zouave fever even caught the attention of
Charles Dickens, who was following the Chicago cadets’ exploits from across the Atlantic. “The individual action, the free agency of the Zouave drill, which is almost acrobatic, delight the Americans,” he commented.
⁵¹
Dickens,
who had toured the States twenty years before, was onto something important. What the Zouave drill demonstrated was how personal freedom could exist even amid military regimentation: a truly democratic way of soldiering.

The boys from Chicago caused Americans’ chests to swell with national pride. Over the past decade, they had sat on the sidelines while European armies clashed gallantly on the fields of Sevastopol and Solferino. Now, it seemed, their own republic was ready to take its part in that panoply. One spectator at the Zouaves’ performance in New York was inspired to write a poem. Its final stanza reads:

Many observers’ accounts betray an almost erotic excitement at the pure physicality of those men. In the early Victorian age, the idea that the human body could be simply that—a human body, strong and unconstrained—was radical and new in a way almost unimaginable in our own era obsessed with fitness and exercise. Here was a group of ordinary young Americans—law clerks and shop assistants, not circus acrobats, blacksmiths, or
stevedores—who had decided to make their own bodies into beautiful and powerful machines, and not because they needed to hammer iron or lift barrels, or even defeat foes in battle, but for something like the sheer pleasure of it, simply, as one newspaper account put it, “to gain excellence in a certain direction for its own sake.” And through the good old Puritan virtues of discipline and self-restraint, through all those months of cold water, hard floors, and
endless hours in the gym, they had succeeded. These young men, the
newspaper declared, were the harbingers of a new American phenomenon: “muscle mania.”
⁵³

As for their captain, the penniless young striver from Mechanicville became, almost overnight, a sex symbol. That term wasn’t used at the time, of course, but it is no exaggeration. Never before had any American become famous and adored not for any particular accomplishments—not for being a poet or an actor or a war hero—but simply for his charisma.

Looking at the surviving photographs of him, it is difficult to discern just what all the swooning was about. A short man even by the standards of his time, Ellsworth seems almost dwarfed by his own elaborate uniforms, blooming profusions of plumed hats, sashes, epaulettes, and medals. Add his hippie-length hair and droopy mustache, and he might almost be a member of a 1970s rock band. His face still has an unformed quality, a postadolescent doughiness. The dry-goods
store clerk lurks not far beneath the surface of the martinet.

Yet throughout that prewar summer, the nation’s eyes were on him. “His pictures sold like wildfire in every city of the land,” John Hay later remembered. “School-girls dreamed over the graceful wave of his curls, and shop-boys tried to reproduce the
Grand Seigneur
air of his attitude.” His body, too, attracted the camera’s ravenous gaze: Hay described one photograph—now apparently lost—that showed only the
hero’s muscular arm: “The knotted coil of thews and sinews looks like the magnificent exaggerations of antique sculpture.”
⁵⁴
Just a few years earlier, an English inventor had created the first photographs that could be reproduced in large numbers from single negatives. Now Ellsworth became the first male pinup in America’s—perhaps even
the world’s—history.