Authors: Adam Goodheart
What happened next was too fast for any of the men to fully comprehend. Quickly rounding the turn between the third and second stories, Brownell, House, and Ellsworth saw a figure step out onto the landing and level a double-barreled shotgun at point-blank range. Winser, struggling with his end of the flag, had barely heard the blast of the gun before he felt the cloth go suddenly taut as Ellsworth, still wrapped in its folds, pitched forward. Almost instantly there was
a second, louder explosion, and Jackson—the assailant, the man they had seen downstairs—lurched back, his face torn away in a mess of gore, as Brownell thrust his saber bayonet again and again into the innkeeper’s body. Moments later, two men—one Northern, one Southern—lay dead on the staircase, their blood pooling across the dusty boards, soaking the shabby floorcloth, seeping into the folds of the fallen flag.
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A
CROSS THE RIVER,
five miles away, the capital avidly awaited news. President Lincoln had hastened early to the War Department
telegraph office for the first dispatches from the front lines. Ordinary
Washingtonians, too, were waking up and learning that the invasion of the Confederacy had commenced—an invasion that, according to the
Tribune
’s editorial page, was
sure to cut a victorious swath from Richmond to the Gulf of Mexico in a matter of months. District residents, peering from their bedroom windows, were disappointed not to see the smoke of musket fire rising above the Virginia shoreline or hear the deep rumble of artillery.
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By morning’s end, however, a different sound echoed over the city’s rooftops, as dozens of bells tolled in mourning from church steeples and firehouse belfries. The steamer
James Guy
was pulling slowly into the Navy Yard with a body aboard, and everyone in Washington already knew who the dead man was.
Ellsworth’s companions had brought his corpse into a room at the hotel and covered it with the Confederate flag. When reinforcements finally arrived, the body was wrapped tenderly in a red Zouave blanket. Six men formed a stretcher with their muskets to carry their dead colonel through the streets that he had jogged up just minutes before. The sun had only half risen over
Alexandria, and eight hundred men at the wharf were still
awaiting their colonel’s orders. Many of the fire b’hoys wept when they heard the awful news; others raged against the Alexandrian traitors and talked of burning the town. But the murder had been avenged in the instant of its commission. There was no battle to fight; no enemy to vanquish. There was only the blind, stupid fact of death.
As reports flashed by
telegraph across the Union, flags dipped to half-mast in cities, towns, and villages throughout the North. By early afternoon, in newspaper offices from Maine to Nebraska, editors were composing eulogies, reporters compiling obituaries, and poets penning elegiac verses that would crowd the next day’s newspaper columns.
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By the following evening, public gatherings in New York and other major cities offered grandiloquent testimonials and took up collections for the support of Ellsworth’s parents, left destitute by the death of their only child. Army recruiting offices were mobbed as they had not been since the first week of the war. At the beginning of May, Lincoln had asked for 42,000 more volunteers to supplement the militiamen called up in April. Within four
weeks after Ellsworth’s death, some five times that number would enlist.
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A torrent of emotion had been released, pouring out for a dead hero who had never fought a battle but rather, as one newspaper put it, had been “shot down like a dog.”
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There was more to the response than just nineteenth-century sentimentality, more than just patriotic fervor.
Sumter’s fall had loosed a flood of
patriotic feeling. Now, across America, Ellsworth’s death released a tide of hatred, of enmity and counterenmity, of sectional bloodlust that had hitherto been dammed up, if only barely, amid the flag waving and anthem singing.
Indeed, it was Ellsworth’s death that made Northerners ready not just to take up arms but actually to kill. For the first month of the war, some had assumed that the war would play out more or less as a show of force: Union troops would march across the South, and the rebels would capitulate. Yankees talked big about sending Jeff Davis and other
secessionist leaders to the gallows but almost never about shooting enemy soldiers.
They preferred to think of Southerners in the terms that Lincoln would use throughout the war:
as estranged brethren, misled by a few demagogues, who needed to be brought back into the national fold. Many Confederates, however, openly relished the prospect of slaughtering their former countrymen. “Well, let them come, those minions of the North,” wrote one Virginian in a letter to the
Richmond Dispatch
on May 18.
“We’ll meet them in a way they least expect; we will glut our carrion crows with their beastly carcasses. Yes, from the peaks of the Blue Ridge to tide-water will we strew our plains, and leave their bleaching bones to enrich our soil.”
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After the tragic morning in Alexandria, it suddenly dawned on the North that such talk had not been mere bluster. Newspapers dwelled on every lurid detail of the awful death scene, especially the “pool of blood clot, I should think three feet in diameter and an inch and one half deep at the center,” as one correspondent described it. The point-blank shotgun blast had torn open Ellsworth’s heart.
On the Southern side, editorialists rejoiced at the slaying of Ellsworth, boasting that he would be only the first dead Yankee of thousands. “Virginians, arise in strength and welcome the invader with bloody hands to hospitable graves,” exhorted the next day’s
Richmond Enquirer.
“Meet the invader at the threshold. Welcome him with bayonet and bullet. Swear eternal hatred to a treacherous foe.” The
Richmond Whig
proclaimed, “Down with the tyrants! Let their accursed blood manure our fields.”
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Although the Union rhetoric would never quite reach such levels, many in the North now began demanding blood for blood. The Zouaves, Hay wrote with solemn approbation, had pledged to avenge Ellsworth’s death with many more: “They have sworn, with the grim earnestness that never trifles, to have a life for every hair of the dead colonel’s head. But even that will not repay.” In the
Tribune,
Greeley demanded that the entire
neighborhood surrounding
the Marshall House be leveled. With the deaths of just two men, the unthinkable—Americans killing their own countrymen—became the imperative.
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In Washington, Ellsworth’s body was brought to lie in state in the East Room of the White House, his chest heaped with white lilies. On the second morning after his death, long lines of mourners, many in uniform, filed through to pay their respects; so many thronged into the presidential mansion that the
funeral was delayed for many hours. In the afternoon, the cortege finally moved down
Pennsylvania Avenue, between rows of American flags bound in swaths of black crape, toward the depot where the Fire Zouaves had disembarked a few weeks earlier. Rank after rank of infantry and cavalry preceded the hearse, which was drawn by four white horses and followed by Ellsworth’s own riderless mount. Behind came companies of Zouaves, then a carriage with the president and members of his cabinet. But the figure that drew the most attention was Corporal Brownell, who
walked alone behind the hearse with the bloodstained flag, the accursed trophy for which Ellsworth had died, crumpled up and speared upon the end of his bayonet.
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At the depot near the Capitol, a black-shrouded funeral train waited to carry the iron coffin to New York, where tens of thousands lined the streets from Union Square to City Hall to view the cortege. As Brownell passed with the now famous Confederate banner, crowds overwhelmed the human barriers of straining policemen, breaking through and rushing into the street to clasp the young Zouave’s hand or touch a corner of the flag.
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Even after Ellsworth’s body had, at last, been laid to rest on a hillside behind his boyhood home in Mechanicville, the nationwide fervor scarcely waned. Photographs, lithographs, and pocket-size biographies paying tribute to the fallen hero poured forth by the tens of thousands. Music shops sold scores for such tunes as “Col. Ellsworth’s Funeral March,” “Ellsworth’s Requiem,” “Col. Ellsworth Gallopade,”
“Brave Men, Behold Your Fallen Chief!,” “Ellsworth’s Avengers,” “He Has Fallen,” “Sadly the Bells Toll the Death of the Hero,” and “Our Noble Laddie’s Dead, Jim,” the last referring to a remark that one sorrowing Zouave was supposed to have made to another on the morning of the killing. For years afterward, enlisted men wrote letters home on stationery stamped with crude woodcuts of the colonel
teetering on the steps of the Marshall House, clutching his wounded breast with one hand and the captured flag in the other—and invariably, a motto pledging vengeance to traitors. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of babies born
in 1861 were named after him. One regiment, the Forty-fourth New York, even rechristened itself Ellsworth’s Avengers.
The young colonel seemed to have been transfigured by death into a kind of national saint. Within hours of his killing, a
New York World
editor wrote of his “halo of martyrdom.” Significantly, Ellsworth became the first notable American whose body was treated with the newly discovered practice of chemical embalming. As he lay in state, mourners peering into his coffin were amazed to see that the boyish face looked, as one man wrote,
“natural as though he were sleeping a brief and pleasant sleep”—or as though modern technology had sanctified his flesh, rendering it incorruptible.
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As with a medieval saint, too,
relics of his martyrdom became objects of veneration. In Alexandria, soldiers vied for pieces of the sacred flag within hours of the killing; it would have quickly been reduced to shreds had the Zouave officers not placed it under round-the-clock guard and threatened any man who approached it with thirty days’ imprisonment. By evening, the few pieces that some Zouaves had managed to obtain were
being traded literally for more than their weight in gold. One man enclosed a bit of red cloth in a letter he sent to his family the next day, entreating his mother to “keep it under lock and key” and “let no one have even one thread.” “I tried hard to get a piece with his blood on it,” he added, “but could not.”
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Relic-hungry soldiers unable to obtain any of the flag took their knives and sliced up the oilcloth floor covering on the Marshall House staircase, which was drenched with even more blood than the flag. Once all the oilcloth was gone, they started in on the floorboards. During the next year, thousands of Union troops, passing through Alexandria on their way to the front, would make pilgrimages to the Marshall House, their relic-hunting encroaching upon the planks of the
stairs, the banisters, the nearby doors and door frames, and the wallpaper, all whittled away one sliver at a time. When
Nathaniel Hawthorne visited in the spring of 1862, so much of the hotel’s interior was gone that, he wrote in
The Atlantic Monthly,
“it becomes something like a metaphysical question whether the place of the murder actually exists.”
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Ellsworth’s death was different from all those that followed over the next four years: most Northern writers referred to it as a “murder” or “assassination,” an act not of war but of individual malice and shocking brutality. By the time Hawthorne’s article appeared, however, many other American places had been soaked in blood. Thousands of Northerners and Southerners, in almost equal numbers, had been cut down amid the peach
orchards and cotton fields at Shiloh. On the
hillsides of southern
Virginia, over seven murderous days, whole regiments had uselessly sacrificed themselves to McClellan’s pointless slog toward Richmond. And
at Bull Run, just eight weeks after Ellsworth’s death, his gallant b’hoys had been in the forefront of the war’s first disastrous Union defeat. At first the
Zouaves advanced boldly toward the Confederate lines, crying “Ellsworth! Remember Ellsworth!” Then the rebel infantry and cavalry counterattacked. The New York firemen got off only a single volley before they broke ranks and ran. The Zouaves had more men killed, wounded, or captured at Bull Run than any other Union regiment.
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As the war’s inexorable toll rose and rose, touching almost every family throughout the nation, Americans would lose their taste for collective mourning. Death became so commonplace that the demise of any one soldier, whether a gallant recruit or battle-scarred hero, was drowned in the larger grief. Not until the war’s final month—when another body would lie in state in the East Room, and another black-draped train make its slow way
north—would Americans again shed common tears for a single martyr.
Ellsworth’s memory never faded for those who knew him well. Hay, Nicolay, and Stoddard, who all lived to see the twentieth century, would reflect for decades on the meaning of his death. Stoddard always remembered how, as the crowds of mourners filed through the
White House, he glanced over at the windowpane Ellsworth had broken a few days earlier and saw that the new glass was still smudged with the glazier’s
fingerprints. “I am not afraid to say that it was a little too much for me then,” he wrote. “We had not become so hardened as we grew to be under the swift calamities that afterward trod so rapidly upon each other’s heels.” Nicolay, in his sweeping history of the war, wrote that the response to Ellsworth’s death “opened an unlooked-for depth of individual hatred, into which the political animosities of
years . . . had finally ripened.” Hay, throughout his own long career as a statesman, never stopped pondering what might have been. Thirty-five years after Ellsworth’s killing, he wrote: “The world can never compute, can hardly even guess, what was lost in his untimely end. . . . Only a few men, now growing old, knew what he was and what he might have been if life had been spared him.”
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