Authors: Adam Goodheart
Back in Chicago, crowds jammed the Wigwam, where a judge stood up and administered a solemn oath of allegiance: ten thousand hats came off and ten thousand right hands went up, in a pledge to the Union and Constitution.
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Recruiting stations were jammed; the crowd in front of the Zouaves’ old armory was so dense that a group of students from
Northwestern University, who had come into the city from campus in the hopes of enlisting, couldn’t even get near it.
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As for the former cadets themselves, they were soon scattered among a dozen different regiments, as most were given officers’ commissions on the merit of their military prowess—“show
business” fame notwithstanding.
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In Washington, in the
telegraph office at the War Department, the overheated machine tapped for hours on end with messages from every corner of the Union. Since Lincoln had requested only seventy-five thousand volunteers, governors in the North worried not about whether they could fill their quotas but about how they could deal with the onrush of eager patriots. Governor Denison of
Ohio begged
Secretary Cameron to take as many militiamen from his state as humanly possible. From New York came a promise that the city by itself could meet two-thirds of Lincoln’s requirement.
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In a small town in
Maine, thirty-odd veterans of the
War of 1812 proclaimed themselves a military company and
pledged to totter off southward into the thick of the fighting.
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In Buffalo, former president
Millard Fillmore put on the uniform of a militiaman. An Indian chief named Pug-o-na-ke-shick, or Hole-in-the-Day, and an ex-major of the Ottoman Army, as well as several groups of bellicose Canadians, all offered their services, and were
politely turned down.
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Hundreds of
free blacks in Philadelphia rallied near Independence Hall, offered two regiments of colored troops “in whose hearts burns the love of country,” and were ignored.
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Amid all this glorious confusion, Ellsworth went up to New York, just three days after Sumter’s surrender, with a plan already formed in his mind. He arrived at 3 a.m., and as soon as the city began to stir, he began scouting the men who could help make his scheme a reality. One of the first places he called was in Printing House Square, at the office of
Horace Greeley, the most important newspaperman not
just in the city but in the country. Greeley was an unlikely power broker. With his round, bespectacled face above a fringe of long white whiskers drooping from the underside of his chin—more than a bit outré even in that era of exuberant facial hair—he looked like a cross between a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher and an elderly gibbon. During his long editorial career, Greeley had espoused, with equal fervor, causes as disparate as vegetarianism,
spiritualism, and human-manure farming. Yet he also possessed a curious sense for the pulse of his times. Many said he had made Lincoln president. His
New-York Tribune
had banged its drum unceasingly for Honest Old Abe, while behind the scenes, Greeley brokered votes at the Chicago convention and personally helped draft the Republican platform.
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When the Southern
states seceded, he was among the first to call for war without compromise. “Imagine Greeley booted & spurred with Epaulets on his shoulders and with a whetted blade in his hands,” scoffed one politician. “The idea … is too ridiculous to be thought of.”
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However improbable Greeley was as a warrior, though, his pen was
as mighty as any sword in the Union.
Ellsworth struck Greeley as possessing an “unusually fine physique,” “frank and attractive manners,” and “great intelligence.” The editor must also have been impressed by a letter of introduction from the president that Ellsworth showed him. It was dated two days after Sumter’s fall, and expressed Lincoln’s great esteem for his protégé as both a military man and a personal friend.
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Still, the young officer’s proposal may at first have startled even the idiosyncratic Greeley. He wanted to raise his own regiment. But its members, this time, would not be law clerks and shop assistants. Instead, he said firmly, “I want the New York firemen.” In Washington, Ellsworth explained, the military authorities were “sleeping on a volcano,” and while they dithered about organizing and training the various state militias, the
forces of rebellion might blow them sky-high at any moment. “I want men who can go into a fight now.”
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Despite any skepticism Greeley may have harbored, he put an article detailing Ellsworth’s plan into the next morning’s
Tribune.
Whatever else they may have been, the firemen of New York were
certainly just what Ellsworth hoped for: ready for a fight. In fact, locals often remarked that they seemed less interested in battling
fires than in battling one another. The city on the eve of the Civil War was not merely a rough-and-tumble place but “a huge semi-barbarous metropolis … not well-governed or ill-governed, but
simply not governed at all.”
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As for the city’s firemen, they were not merely ungoverned, they were almost completely, and famously, ungovernable.
Since colonial times, New York had relied for its fire protection on volunteer companies, much as the nation relied for its defense on volunteer militias. It was a marvelously democratic system that became an utterly impossible mess—though admittedly a colorful and entertaining one, so long as your own house was not the one going up in flames. As the city grew, its warehouses and tenements spreading ever northward up the island, so did the number of hose,
hydrant, and hook-and-ladder companies, ever dividing and proliferating. Their official names formed a kind of prose poem of American grandeur: Mohawk, Valley Forge, Eagle, Excelsior, Niagara, Pioneer, Empire, Lady Washington.
But the unofficial nicknames by which New Yorkers actually knew them told a different story: Screamer, Black Joke, Hounds, Old Nick, Shad-Belly, Bucky-Boys, Dry Bones, Old Turk, Mankiller.
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The contests between these companies were epic, hard fought, and often bloody: thirty years’ wars whose battlefields were the nighttime streets of Brooklyn and the Bowery, Greenwich Village and Five Points. The ringing of a fire alarm wasn’t so much a signal of emergency as the starting bell of a no-holds-barred decathlon. Companies raced one another to the scene of the fire, hurtling through the muddy, unlit thoroughfares, young runners sprinting
alongside with torches as brawny firemen pulled hand-drawn engines weighing up to a ton each—and woe betide any unfortunate gentleman, groping his way homeward from late revels at a tavern or bawdy house, who might stumble into their path.
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As the engines pulled up in front of the blaze, another competitive event began, as companies vied to see who could pump the fastest; the volunteers stripped to the waist and worked until their breath came in choking gasps; the foremen stood atop the engines bawling orders through brass trumpets above the din. Sometimes they drove the wooden pump handles into such a frenzy that the flailing shafts might crush a man’s fingers or even break his arms if he
momentarily lost his grip. Often, different engines had to connect their leather hoses to relay water from a hydrant or cistern, which meant that if one
group pumped faster than the next one down the line, the water would burst out the sides of the rival company’s engine, spilling out over the ornate woodwork and polished brass in a spectacularly humiliating torrent known as a “washing.” Whether or not this calamity might interfere with the
task of actually putting out a fire was wholly inconsequential: every company’s fondest hope was to “wash” its enemies.
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Not surprisingly, these rivalries often degenerated into all-out brawls. The Black Joke men once rolled out a howitzer loaded with bolts and chain links to defend their firehouse from a rival company’s attack, while Old Nick’s main engine was known to other companies as the Arsenal, for it was rumored to hold a cache of loaded revolvers. In their impatience to avenge defeats, the firefighters themselves sometimes set buildings aflame so as to hasten the
opportunity for a rematch.
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For decades after the invention of horse-drawn, steam-pumped engines that carried their own water supply, New York firefighters refused to give up their inefficient machines, little changed since colonial times, since this would have taken all the sporting fun out of it.
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More genteel New Yorkers shuddered at press reports of nocturnal rampages, and agitated for reform, with little result. Not only were the companies an essential voting bloc for the city’s Democratic political machine, they had become folk heroes. Ordinary workingmen coined the fond nickname “b’hoys”—based on
Irish immigrants’ pronunciation of “boys.” Down in the taverns of Five
Points, people swapped tall tales of the ultimate b’hoy, a semilegendary figure called Mose the Fireboy, an urban Paul Bunyan who stood eight feet tall, could swim across the Hudson in two strokes, carried streetcars on his back, smoked a two-foot cigar, and drank wagonloads of beer at a sitting. When a brawl broke out against a rival fire company, Mose uprooted lampposts with his bare hands to smite his enemies. The character of Mose may have been a slight exaggeration, but
the actual b’hoys were still impressive figures. Their fame spread throughout the nation thanks to a series of plays about Mose that began touring to great popular acclaim in the 1840s.
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The b’hoys became emblems not just of sheer physical strength but also of the workingman and the immigrant—of America’s rambunctious grassroots
democracy, in all its vital, and sometimes brutal, force. Back in the 1830s, when Tocqueville toured the United States, he had celebrated it as a nation of “voluntary associations” (a category that might, indeed, have seemed to include the prewar Union
itself). The post-Revolutionary era had been a time of few official decrees from on high, a time when federal authority and national politics
were distant abstractions for most people—what mattered more were local loyalties and associations, the rough bands of tradesmen and farmers who paraded in the streets on Election Day or the Fourth of July. By 1861, the volunteer companies, each with its own storied victories and affectionate nickname, and their old
engines, each meticulously hand-painted with elaborate historical and allegorical scenes—Jefferson penning the Declaration, Jupiter hurling his thunderbolts from Olympus—already seemed like quaint relics of a vanishing America. Like the colorful, ragtag local militia units to which the country had entrusted its defense, New York’s volunteer fire companies would be swept away on the war’s tide of modernization and consolidation. In 1865, two weeks before
the surrender at Appomattox, a bill was passed creating a new
Metropolitan Fire Department of paid and trained firefighters, using steam-powered engines, and under a set of strict regulations enforced by a citywide commissioner. The b’hoys were unceremoniously cashiered, along with Black Joke and Old Nick, Jupiter and Jefferson.
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In the first spring of the war, though, the old ways and the new still hung in fragile equipoise. So Ellsworth came to New York prepared to form a regiment after the model of the fire companies themselves: a free association of noble volunteers lending themselves to the Union cause. Moreover, he confidently assured Greeley, he could turn the recruits into proper Zouaves in as little as five days—after all, the b’hoys were the finest raw material the city
or even the nation had to offer, combining Mose-like strength with the agility of those skilled at catwalking along rain gutters and swinging from ropes, the hardiness of those used to braving disaster at a moment’s notice, the esprit de corps of those accustomed to rallying around the standard of their firehouse and upholding its honor with blood if necessary.
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“The firemen of New York are renowned the continent over for their great qualities of endurance, hardihood, activity, and restless daring,” enthused a correspondent of the
Chicago Tribune.
“Every man is a gymnast, and can run, jump, and climb like a catamount. There is no better material for Zouave soldiers in the world. We predict that Col. Ellsworth’s regiment will reap glory or find a grave.”
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I
N LITTLE MORE THAN
twenty-four hours after Ellsworth’s late-night arrival, posters appeared on walls and fences throughout the city, bearing a screaming American eagle across the top and the legend
DOWN WITH SECESSION! THE UNION MUST AND SHALL BE PRESERVED!
In
smaller type, an appeal signed by Ellsworth called on members of the fire department to enlist at recruiting offices hastily
organized at firehouses, meeting halls, and Republican Party clubhouses throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.
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Ellsworth set up his regimental headquarters in the elegant Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square—perhaps not coincidentally, the same place where Lincoln had stayed the year before when he visited New York to give his
Cooper
Union address.
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Volunteers were offered pay of thirteen dollars per month, plus food and equipment. Their uniforms, Ellsworth promised, would be of the most dashing Zouave cut, with a special flourish: bright red firemen’s shirts. The firemen answered his call; perhaps many of them had been in the crowd for his performance at City Hall the summer before. He asked for a thousand men, and by nightfall he had that many and more. Long lines formed at all of the recruiting offices.
Engine Company 14 (Columbian), one of the finest organizations in the city, was rumored to have enlisted en masse, and made Ellsworth an honorary member while they were at it. Three hundred firemen from Brooklyn alone volunteered on the first day. Donations for uniforms and supplies poured in as well, including a handsome gift of one hundred dollars from Boss Tweed himself; less well-heeled citizens were invited to contribute fresh socks,
towels, and underwear.
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