Authors: Adam Goodheart
Other times, other tastes. Ellsworth’s strict moralism, too, what seems to us his teetotaling Victorian priggishness, drew nearly as many plaudits as his curls. The press extolled him and his men as new moral exemplars of American youth. In a front-page article,
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
declared that “the scope of the Zouave Cadet is to raise the standard of American freemen” and predicted confidently that if the movement
caught on, “it would almost change the aspect of our great cities, and … vice, rowdyism, and bloodshed would disappear.”
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And indeed, though vice was not permanently banished from America, the movement did catch on. As Ellsworth crossed the country, new Zouave corps, brilliant in crimson and gold, blazed up like phosphoresence in the
wake of a passing ship.
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Oddly, for all the talk of a “nationwide” tour, there was a large portion
of the country—about half—that the Zouaves seem never to have even considered touring. On August 4, a steamboat carried them down the Potomac, past the sleepy port town of Alexandria, Virginia, whose citizens crowded down along the waterside to cheer as the vessel passed without stopping. It moored downriver, at the foot of the high bluff of
Mount Vernon, where the Chicagoans disembarked for an hour or two to perform a tribute drill in front of
George Washington’s tomb. That brief veneration of the patron saint of liberty and union was the only time they somersaulted on the soil of the South. They shortly steamed past Alexandria again on their way to the national capital, where President Buchanan greeted them in the East Room of the
White House and then hosted a Zouave drill on the South Lawn, as photographers crowded in to capture the scene.
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Standing under the mansion’s portico, Buchanan delivered a polite speech of welcome, observing blandly that the cadets’ military prowess would come in handy in case the United States ever found herself at war
against a foreign country.
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But the most important man to see the Zouaves that summer was a less obtrusive spectator, who came out to watch when they were almost home.
Just before its triumphal return to Chicago, the troupe made one final stop at the Illinois state capital, Springfield. Ellsworth’s men were met at the station by a local militia company, the
Springfield Grays, who escorted them through the streets to the music of a marching band, as several thousand curious locals followed on foot and in carriages. Gentlemen in top hats and young ladies in crinolines crowded around a large
empty lot on South Sixth Street, near the State Armory, to watch the Zou-Zous—as the American public had fondly begun to call them—perform the famous drill. The excited crowd had to be pushed back as the young cadets pantomimed bloodless gestures of war: aiming harmless rifles, dodging and parrying invisible foes, slashing the thin air savagely with their bayonets.
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Watching over the heads of the crowd was a tall, solitary man, who had strolled over from his law office five blocks away.
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Abraham Lincoln was, like Ellsworth, one of the most famous men in America that summer, but no one seems to have paid him much attention as he stood quietly beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree. This
was Ellsworth’s hour. Lincoln must have watched intently as the spruce, boyish colonel, leaner now and suntanned after six weeks’ travel, stood at the head of his corps, his sword flashing in the midday glare as he led the cadets through their drill for the last time.
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Lincoln and Ellsworth knew each other already. Sometime the previous
winter or spring, before Ellsworth’s ascent to national fame and before Lincoln had been spoken of for the presidency, the two had met in Springfield, probably through
John Cook, a local militia commander who had befriended the youth from Chicago. The young man made an immediate impression upon the elder. In March, a letter came to Ellsworth
from Cook: “You ask me if I have seen our friend Lincoln. I answer, Yes, repeatedly, and never without the conversation turning upon you and his expressing an earnest desire that you should make [Springfield] your home, and his office your headquarters. He has taken in you a greater interest than I have ever seen him manifest in anyone before.”
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At another
point, Ellsworth wrote to his fiancée, “Mr Cook told me that Mr L
—— especially desired him to leave no means unturned
to induce me to come to Springfield.”
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Ellsworth seems to have perceived in Lincoln, twenty-eight years his senior, a potential role model and father figure who had likewise risen from humble birth. “I believe that the influence of Mr L—— would do me great service,” he told his fiancée. “I mean the influence of his early example. He earned his subsistence, while studying law, by splitting rails.”
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On May 18, the night Lincoln was nominated for the presidency in Chicago, Ellsworth and some of his Zouaves celebrated by climbing onto the roof of the Tremont Hotel—adjoining the famous wigwam, where the Republicans had gathered—and hauling a howitzer up after them to fire off a salute. So exuberant was the little colonel that night, one cadet later remembered, that he nearly slipped
off the hotel’s roof and broke his neck.
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As to the causes of Lincoln’s sudden, schoolboyish crush on Ellsworth, these are less immediately obvious. He was not one to develop intimacies easily, much less quickly. There is no surviving correspondence between them, and the only time Lincoln seems to have committed to paper his feelings for the younger man was in a single letter to Ellsworth’s parents, written almost a year later. Just as Ellsworth looked up to the self-made Lincoln, Lincoln must
have seen something of himself in the struggling law clerk turned national hero, and in the Westerner challenging the silk-stockinged traditions of the East. Yet their differences probably drew him as much as or more than their similarities. It is difficult to imagine two specimens of American manhood more physically different than the long-limbed, stoop-shouldered, middle-aged lawyer and the trim soldier-athlete. Each man had his own charisma, to be sure, and each inspired intense
devotion among the cadre of young men surrounding him, though in entirely different ways. In the end, Lincoln seems to have felt that
Ellsworth complemented him, or perhaps even made up for parts of himself that were lacking.
In any event, something during the Zouaves’ short visit to Springfield in August apparently cemented the relationship between the two men. The following night, Ellsworth and his cadets returned to Chicago to find the entire city illuminated with torches, bonfires, and the flashes of rockets and Roman candles. They were escorted to the great wigwam itself, fêted and banqueted and lauded, with typical Victorian excess, until even their adulation-hungry
leader must have had more than his fill. A few weeks later, Ellsworth resigned his command of the Zouaves. The cadets disbanded. Within a month, the erstwhile colonel had moved to Springfield and was a clerk once more—this time for the most famous lawyer in the country.
In the law office, Ellsworth found himself in the company of a lively group of ambitious young men surrounding the Republican presidential nominee, including the pair who would become Lincoln’s private secretaries,
John Hay and
John Nicolay. He quickly managed to win the confidence of both of these very different personalities: the urbane, satirical Hay and the dour, Germanic Nicolay.
Hay—a doctor’s son who had learned Latin and Greek as a boy before heading to college at Brown University—might have been expected to sneer at the oyster peddler’s son. But the two struck up an intense friendship that would last the rest of Ellsworth’s life. “His parents were plain people, without culture or means,” Hay wrote many years later. “One cannot guess how this eaglet came into so lowly a nest.” Ellsworth also
attracted the interest of numerous young women in Springfield, including
Mary Todd Lincoln’s much younger half sister, Kitty.
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“Ellsworth read very little law that autumn,” Hay would recall.
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Instead, he almost immediately took to the campaign trail, firing up crowds in the barns and country schoolhouses of central Illinois, organizing the Republican cohorts just as he had organized the Zouaves.
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Lincoln is supposed to have called Ellsworth “the worst law clerk that ever lived, and the best executive to handle young men that I ever saw.”
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Still, it is clear that their relationship was based more on personal esteem than on Ellsworth’s political services;
Lincoln, Hay wrote, “loved him like a younger brother.”
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The Zouave cadets’ drummer boy remembered half a century later: “Often I had seen Mr. Lincoln place his hand on Ellsworth’s shoulder or take hold of his arm in such a way as to show not merely liking, but sincere affection.”
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Scarcely any evidence survives of the two men’s specific interactions during this period, or in the months that followed. In contrast to the
Zouave tour, when the press had chronicled almost his every move, Ellsworth was now out of the spotlight and in Lincoln’s shadow. One of the few detailed accounts has Ellsworth, shortly after his arrival in Springfield, sitting in the law office while Lincoln read poetry to him.
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It was one of Lincoln’s favorites, a composition by the obscure Scottish poet
William Knox:
Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
Man passeth from life to his rest in the grave.
The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,
Be scattered around, and together be laid;
And the young and the old, and the low and the high
Shall molder to dust and together shall lie.
Four months later, when the president-elect bade farewell to Springfield—a parting that he did not know would be his last—Ellsworth was with him on the train.
T
HE FALL OF
S
UMTER
must have seemed to Ellsworth like the last in a series of providential strokes, bearing him more swiftly toward glory than he could ever have dreamed. His meeting with the French officer in Chicago had made him a Zouave. His lucky meeting with the lawyer in Springfield had made him confidant to a president. And now, he thought, the shots in Charleston Harbor were about to make him a hero.
The question was not whether he would take to the field, but where. The day after the inauguration, Lincoln had already started working to get his young protégé an important—and well-compensated—post in the War Department, possibly even with the authority to oversee all of the nation’s local
militias. But once the conflict with the seceding states broke out in earnest, and war fever swept across the
North, there was little chance that Ellsworth would be satisfied with a desk job.
His rapid rise as the new president’s favorite had begun to make him enemies, however. The same press that had lionized him the summer before began to sneer at the pompous little “show business” drillmaster who thought he could vault over the army’s chain of command to become one of the most powerful officers in the country. And perhaps
they were right. In the cold gray light of imminent war, there was something more than
slightly ridiculous about the gamecock Midwesterner. The gaudy Zouave displays of the previous summer seemed frivolous, even silly. A leading Northern paper, the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
which not long ago had poured forth rapturous column-inches about the Chicago cadets at Independence Hall, now suggested sarcastically that the self-anointed colonel might simply be packed back off to Illinois “to promulgate, privately, his peculiar gymnastic drill.”
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This criticism depressed and infuriated Ellsworth, and gave him more reason than ever to seek a test on the battlefield.
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Luckily for him, the country needed even “show business” officers now. Immediately after the fall of Sumter, Lincoln called upon the state governors to mobilize their
militias and organize new state regiments to meet the crisis. His proclamation of April 15 asked for seventy-five thousand troops “to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular
government.”
He need hardly have asked, given the national mood at that moment. Volunteers were coming, whether the president and his cabinet were ready for them or not. “All the world wants to march,” wrote one of Lincoln’s confidants.
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In New York, the first soldiers to depart for Washington were members of the high-society Seventh Regiment, who marched proudly down Broadway in their fine gray uniforms, with heavy dirks and bowie knives tucked into each belt for hand-to-hand fighting, and cigars in each hatband for the more leisurely hours of soldiering.
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(At least a few fashion-conscious
militiamen, it was said, had stashed white kid gloves in their knapsacks, thoughtfully preparing to dress appropriately for the victory balls in Washington in just a few weeks’ time.)
The sudden flash of national solidarity dazzled even Lincoln’s most outspoken critics in the metropolis. The
New York Herald
’s editor, the feistily idiosyncratic
James Gordon Bennett, had quite recently favored avoiding war at any cost, and at one point even suggested that the mid-Atlantic states should join the Southern Confederacy, leaving
New England to fend for itself as an
independent republic. The day after Major Anderson’s surrender, the paper had taken almost comical pains to ignore the subject entirely, relegating the outbreak of civil war to its back pages, after reports on the new April fashions, harness races in Paris, and some interesting correspondence just received from Constantinople. But now even the perfidious
Herald
’s offices were duly adorned in red, white, and blue. This might have had something to do
with a mob of pro-Union toughs that had hooted its editor down Fulton Street, then stormed the building and nearly destroyed it. Finally reemerging before the crowd to a chorus of jeers, Bennett had promised not just to raise the Stars and Stripes without further delay but also to reverse his previous stance on the secession crisis. He hoisted one flag on a staff, draped another from a front window, and hastily penned an editorial invoking Lexington and Yorktown,
the Fourth of July and the Ship of State, the Potomac River and the Rocky Mountains, before declaring: “The North is consolidated as one man … we can no longer treat or temporize—we must fight.” The
Herald
’s offices, and its editor, were allowed to remain intact.
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