CHAPTER 21

The First to Fall

The Southern land shall rue the day

When he became the assassin’s prey;

And traitors’ wives shall weeping tell

Of that dark hour when Ellsworth fell.

—“In Memory of Col. Ellsworth”

In an almost biblical turn of events, the first Union officer killed in the war was a young man whom Abraham Lincoln loved like a brother. He was also the commander of a New York City volunteer regiment. Already a celebrity, he became a martyr with his death.

Born poor in 1837 and raised in upstate New York, the handsome, small-statured Elmer Ellsworth was fascinated by military pageantry from boyhood, organizing other kids in his own drill teams and dreaming in vain of attending West Point. At seventeen he went to Chicago, where he studied law while rising up the ranks of the Illinois militia. When he was twenty he met a veteran of the French Zouaves, the dashing North African light infantry whose outfits featured baggy pantaloons, short jackets, wide sashes, and a turban or fez. Ellsworth transformed his militia unit into the United States Zouave Cadets, designing their exotic uniforms and developing elaborate precision drills that reportedly were more gymnastic than military.

In the summer of 1860, Colonel Ellsworth—“le petit colonel,” he was called—toured his troops around the North. When they came to New York and Brooklyn in July, they performed in parks and at the Academy of Music on 14th Street. Ladies swooned to see the gallant little colonel and his athletic men. The best hotel restaurants—including the Astor, Lafarge, and Everett Houses—wined and dined them; every politician and militiaman in the city turned out to honor them. “The name Zouave is just now a household word,” the Times commented. Ellsworth’s Zouaves “have daily, nay hourly, astonished, delighted, surprised” the crowds. The celebrity merchandising followed instantly. “We see in the shop windows Zouave hats, caps, coats, canes, umbrellas and shoes.” Laura Keene added a dance number to The Seven Sisters, with chorus girls in tights doing a Zouave drill. The Sunday Mercury joked that a fellow “who can climb a greased pole feet first, carrying a barrel of pork in his teeth—that is a Zouave. A fellow who… can take a five-shooting revolver in each hand and knock the spots out of the ten of diamonds at 80 paces, turning somersaults all the time and firing every shot in the air—that is a Zouave.” By the end of the summer dozens of militia units around the country had decided to be Zouaves too—or Zoo-Zoos, as they were popularly known—and many such units would fight on both sides in the war. Both Meagher’s and Duryee’s units, for example, dressed as Zouaves, as did Billy Wilson’s, and the Garibaldis’ outfits included Zouave elements. Many New York Zouaves bought their fanciful uniforms from R. H. Macy’s Dry Goods on Sixth Avenue near 14th Street, the seed from which Macy’s department store would eventually grow.

In the fall of 1860, at Lincoln’s behest, Ellsworth went to Springfield to work for Lincoln’s law firm and on his presidential campaign. He quickly distinguished himself by his diligence and enthusiasm. Lincoln called him “the greatest little man I ever met” and “loved him like a little brother,” according to Lincoln’s young secretary John Hay. Ellsworth accompanied Lincoln on his long train ride to Washington in 1861, and even the chilly Henry Villard took a liking to him.

When Sumter fell, Ellsworth rushed to New York City with Lincoln’s blessings to raise a thousand men for a new Zouave regiment. Between his celebrity and the high level of war fever, it took only a few days. He set himself up at the Astor House and met with officials of the city’s fire department, because he’d determined to recruit from among the brawny, brave fire laddies. He started enrolling on Friday, April 19, the day the 69th marched off to tumultuous cheers, and had a full regiment signed up by Sunday. Although they were officially the 11th New York Volunteers, everyone would know them as the Fire Zouaves. Like the Tammany and Excelsior volunteers, they were a tough, unruly lot. Notable among them were the celebrated prizefighters Harry and Johnny Lazarus, “the sporting sons of Izzy the ‘Obese Man’ Lazarus, a boxing instructor and owner of the Falstaff, a renowned Jones Street sporting saloon.” Ellsworth hastily drilled them and issued them jaunty uniforms he designed: gray trousers, their red firemen’s shirts, and French-style kepis. They could have marched off a week after he arrived, but they had to wait another week for their supply of Sharps rifles to be delivered. Each man also got a pistol and a bowie knife. On the morning of Monday, April 29, they formed ranks on Canal Street outside their makeshift headquarters in the basement of a dry goods store. One of their banners was inscribed “From Captain Laura Keene to her Brother Zouaves.” They marched down Broadway to the Astor House and back, then across Canal to a dock where they boarded a waiting steamer—the Baltic—amid a roaring crowd and bands blaring.

When the Fire Zouaves reached Washington they slept for a week in the Capitol, the men bunking in the House of Representatives wing and the officers on the Senate side. For sightseeing they trudged up the long stairway to the top of the still incomplete dome, taking care not to slip on the tobacco juice previous visitors had spat out.

The rambunctious men of the 11th gave Ellsworth and his officers discipline headaches from the start. They were “a jolly, gay set of blackguards,” Hay wrote, “in a pretty complete state of don’t care a damn, modified by an affectionate and respectful deference to their Colonel.” Few had ever tasted military discipline, and, let loose in a new city, some went wild. There were reports of their slipping out at night, breaking into shops, stealing food and cigars and “gentlemen’s carriages,” raiding brothels, and getting drunk in restaurants. None of this endeared them to the people of Washington, but they redeemed themselves on May 9, when the city’s clanging fire bells woke them at 3 a.m. A fire, possibly set by secessionists, had broken out in a five-story building two doors down Pennsylvania Avenue from the much-loved Willard’s Hotel, still stuffed to the rafters with job-seekers. Ellsworth and a few hundred Fire Zouaves poured out of the Capitol building and ran “for the various engine-houses to get the machines, which was done, in many instances, by breaking open the doors, as the Fire Department of the city were not particularly energetic in responding to the alarm,” Henry J. Wisner, a Times writer attached to the regiment, reported. “How the boys astonished the natives when they rushed up the avenue to the scene of the fire, by the celerity of their movements and the confident manner in which measures were adopted for putting out the flames!” Clambering fearlessly all over the burning building, they got the fire out and saved Willard’s. The next day, “all Washington” was “loud in praise of the gallant fellows for their heroism and public spirit, and the fact of its exhibition will be to retrieve the character of the regiment from the disgrace cast upon by the excesses of the few rogues who have been turned out of its ranks.”

Virginia voters ratified secession on May 23. (The state would officially join the Confederacy in June.) A small force of Rebel troops was in Alexandria, a stone’s throw down the Potomac. General Scott wanted to clear them out to give Washington a little breathing room. He ordered troops to move on May 24. Ellsworth begged to let the 11th be among them, and Lincoln couldn’t deny his young friend. Wisner wrote a detailed account of what happened next. As the Union boats pulled up at the town in the early morning light, a few Rebel pickets fired at them and then ran away. Ellsworth was marching his men quick-time up a street to secure the telegraph office when he was outraged to see a large Confederate flag waving from the roof of the Marshall House, an inn. Ellsworth and some of his men impetuously rushed in. “He then went up stairs, and reaching the skylight, Col. E. ascended the ladder, myself after him,” Wisner wrote. “Handing me his revolver, I handed him my knife, with which he cut the halliards, and hauled the flag down.” They were coming down the stairs, Ellsworth triumphantly rolling up the flag, when James Jackson, the inn’s pugnacious owner, appeared “at the foot of the stairs, with a double-barreled gun in his hands, and aimed at our party.” Private Francis Brownell, from upstate New York, was descending ahead of Ellsworth and tried to knock the shotgun aside. “Jackson, however, discharged his gun, the contents lodging in the heart of the Colonel, who fell forward on his face, his life’s blood perfectly saturating the secession flag.”

Ellsworth had turned twenty-four a month earlier. After wishing all his life for a military career, he was dead at the very start of it. Brownell shot Jackson between the eyes. The ball went straight through Jackson’s head and bored into the wall behind him.

Lincoln was devastated by Ellsworth’s death. A Tribune reporter found him in the White House staring out a window; when the president turned, he shocked the correspondent by bursting into tears. Both the president and Mrs. Lincoln cried again at Ellsworth’s funeral in the East Room. They and others at the service were struck by how lifelike the corpse looked in its open coffin. That’s because Dr. Thomas Holmes, the Father of Embalming, had prepared it. He had been commissioned a captain in the Army Medical Corps and stationed in Washington. The Lincolns were so impressed that when their beloved son Willie died in 1862 they had him embalmed, and Mary did the same for the president when he was assassinated in 1865. Holmes did not carry out those two embalmings, but those who did used his techniques. He did train a cadre of “embalming surgeons” who traveled with the Union army and preserved, for a fee, thousands of fallen officers and soldiers.

Ellsworth’s body was brought to New York City, residing for a night in the Astor House before being moved to City Hall, where thousands filed past the open coffin. “The faces of all were sad, and many eyes were suffused with tears as they gazed upon the rigid features of the noble young soldier,” the Times reported. “At the head of the coffin there sat a modest young man in the Zouave uniform, who was no unmoved spectator of that touching scene. In his hands he held the musket that carried death to the murderer of his brave commander, and on his breast were pinned scraps of the flag through which the deadly ball had passed. He was recognized by many as the heroic avenger of Col. Ellsworth—young Brownell—and yet many passed hardly giving him a glance.” Brownell would be promoted to sergeant in the regular army; in 1877 he’d get the Medal of Honor for his actions at Alexandria.

As Ellsworth lay in state, a small and hastily assembled flotilla of makeshift warships from the Brooklyn Navy Yard was engaging the enemy in Virginia. When the war broke out the tiny Union navy was either deployed off the coast of Africa interdicting slavers or in dry dock at the navy’s largest and most modern shipyard, Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, now suddenly in enemy territory. Gosport was a rich prize for the Confederacy, filled with military stores and equipment, with a state-of-the-art dry dock and at least a dozen U.S. warships berthed there. Rather than let it all fall into Confederate hands, the officers set the whole shipyard ablaze and scuttled or burned as many ships as they could before they escaped into the night on April 20.

With so few available ships, the Union had nothing remotely like the navy it would need to carry out what General Scott called the Anaconda Plan—a total blockade of Southern shipping that would stretch from the Potomac down the coast to the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi. Like a giant snake, the blockade would wrap itself around the Confederacy and choke off all supplies coming by water. The Union was particularly worried that Britain would use its immensely superior navy to support the South and keep the cotton trade open. (Although the Crown officially opted for neutrality, Britain would back the South in subtle ways, like allowing Confederate ships to be built and fitted out in British shipyards.)

Now that Gosport had been surrendered, the Brooklyn Navy Yard took over as the Union’s main naval station for the duration of the war. By mid-April it was busy around the clock outfitting any ship it could get its hands on, not just hauling old navy vessels out of mothballs but procuring and bolting guns to private yachts, excursion steamers, even ferries. One of Herman Melville’s cousins, Guert Gansevoort, a career navy man who had served in the Mexican War, oversaw the operation. As early as May 7 the Times was reporting that a Captain James Ward, a fifty-five-year-old career officer from Connecticut, was organizing a flotilla of three converted civilian steamships—the Thomas Freeborn, the Resolute, and the Reliance—and would sail it down to the Potomac, where he’d attempt first to neutralize Confederate batteries along the river, then to blockade Norfolk. Guert’s crews outfitted and armed the ships in double-quick time. They steamed out of the navy yard on May 17 and shelled their first Rebel battery on the Potomac at the end of the month.

On June 29 the Times reported that while attempting to set up a Union battery on the river, Ward’s flotilla was attacked by a superior force of some eight hundred Confederate soldiers. On the deck of the Freeborn, which was close to shore, one of Ward’s gunners dropped. Ward took over manning the gun himself and was shot dead.

Ward’s casket came back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a viewing on the deck of a ship he’d formerly captained. “The sides of the awning which inclosed [sic] the deck were draped with American flags,” the Times reported. It continued:

A cross of red bunting was hung at the head of the coffin, with colors covered with crape; wax tapers burned at the head and foot of the coffin, on which rested the sword, chapeau and coat of deceased. A beautiful cross, formed of flowers rested upon the lid of the coffin.… The flags at the Navy-yard and upon the neighboring shipping were displayed at half-mast, and minute guns were fired for one hour during the moving of the procession.

Herman Melville happened to be in the city visiting family. He went to the navy yard to see Guert, and viewed Ward’s casket. The incident must have left an indelible mark on his memory. The man who planned the flotilla with Ward and captained the Resolute was a tough, pugnacious salt named William Budd. In the late 1880s Melville would return to writing fiction for the first time in thirty years. He was working on a novella when he died in 1891. It was based on a story Guert had told him about some mutineers who were hanged at sea when Guert was a midshipman. The unfinished manuscript would be found among Melville’s papers in 1919 and published for the first time in 1924. It was Billy Budd, Sailor.