Elmer Ellsworth’s death began and ended almost in the same instant: a loud blast reverberating down a stairwell, punctuated by the smell of gunpowder and wreathed in smoke. He lived only a few more brief moments, the hole in his chest quickly gurgling away his life’s blood. He had just celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday.
When Lincoln first met Ellsworth sometime in 1860, the young man presented a somewhat curious mix of fiery bravado, ambition, and neediness. He was of average height, around five foot six, with a slight, compact frame. But he exuded an outsize charm that belied his ordinary size. Everyone who met him remarked on his effortless charisma, his good looks, and especially his athleticism. He was well coordinated and lithe, and he excelled in anything requiring physical activity or manual dexterity, “noted for his supremacy in all games requiring quickness of eye or limb.” A friend recalled that while “he was less than the medium size, yet his strength was extraordinary; he seemed made of tempered steel.”1
But athleticism and handsomeness were his only real assets; Ellsworth struggled much of his short life merely to gain respectability. His father’s finances were wrecked in the Panic of 1837, and the young man was forced to cast about for work as he grew up, first in Mechanicville, New York, then New York City and Boston, and eventually Chicago. He peddled newspapers on a train, sold linen as a merchant’s clerk, ran errands as an assistant to an engineer, and then for a time set type in a printing office. He did not last very long at any of these jobs, and none provided a stepping-stone to anything more lucrative or satisfying. His story was, according to an early biographer, “a weary history of uncongenial labor and foiled ambition.”2
He made the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, and sometime in the spring or early summer of 1860, he began reading and studying for the Illinois bar in the office of Lincoln and Herndon in Springfield. Like nearly everyone else, Lincoln took a shine to the young man. Maybe he saw a little of himself in Ellsworth’s penniless but intensely determined character, his constant casting about for a way to make something out of his life regardless of his humble background. By this point, Lincoln was an established, senior member of the Illinois bar, and although he was only fifty years old, he often cast himself as an older father figure for younger lawyers and men on the make. Ellsworth fit the mold, toiling away at Lincoln and Herndon’s behest in their downtown Springfield law office, struggling to master Blackstone’s Commentaries and the other seminal texts required of an attorney, all the while hoping for something more.3
Their relationship extended beyond Ellsworth’s pursuit of a legal career. Lincoln “loved him like a younger brother,” recalled Lincoln’s private secretary, John Hay, and the president later wrote that their friendship was “as intimate as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit.” Ellsworth became good friends with Hay and John Nicolay (Lincoln’s other secretary), two fellow up-and-coming young Springfield men. At some point, Ellsworth also met Lincoln’s family, and he developed a strong older-brother bond with the three Lincoln boys. Mary grew quite fond of him, and he became a regular visitor at the house on Eighth and Jackson Streets.4
Ellsworth was also a staunch Republican—he arrived in Springfield just as Lincoln began making his push to acquire the Republican Party’s 1860 presidential nomination—and during the fall delivered several speeches on behalf of Republican causes and candidates; he was a “persuasive stump speaker,” according to Hay. On the day Lincoln cast his own vote in the presidential election, Ellsworth (along with Herndon and several other friends) accompanied him to the polls. When he passed the bar exam early in 1861, Ellsworth had to a certain extent arrived. He was now a bona fide lawyer and part of the president-elect’s inner circle.5
But the military was always his real passion. He was especially fascinated by the exploits and reputation of French troops called Zouaves. Serving primarily in Algeria since the early 1830s, the Zouaves enjoyed an international reputation as crack troops, highly trained in marksmanship, drill, and skirmishing tactics. They were distinguished by their uniforms: brightly colored baggy pants, short braided jackets, and an idiosyncratic form of headgear called a tarboosh. Ellsworth sent away to Europe for books on Zouave tactics and their drill system, combining it with the U.S. Army’s system (which he also absorbed through late-night reading sessions) to create complex and athletic drill routines that he performed for admiring onlookers at a Chicago gymnasium.6
His reputation gained him command of a company of like-minded young drill enthusiasts, the Rockford Grays, who staged displays of their drilling prowess at fairs and other gatherings around Illinois. They quickly gained a following, as did their handsome commander. Ellsworth had found his niche. The law was always something of a struggle—“it takes on an average half an hour to [read] each page” of Blackstone, he dejectedly wrote in his diary—but military organization, drill, and command came naturally. “Attended meeting of cadets’ committee on ways and means,” he wrote, happily adding, “all my propositions accepted.”7
Lincoln knew of his student’s martial enthusiasm. “That young man has a real genius for war!” Herndon remembered him exclaiming. In fact, Ellsworth knew very little about war. He had never seen combat or a battlefield. He did not know what a war zone looked like, and he had no clear idea regarding the damage and dislocations a real war created for those unfortunate enough to be caught in its wake. Most of all, Ellsworth had little conception of war’s central, dark truth: violent and unremitting death. He had never seen someone die in battle, and he did not really know what a bullet, sword, or cannonball could do to a human body.8
But then again, few antebellum Americans knew wartime death, because few knew what any war looked like. There was the war with Mexico and the handful of desultory and infrequent combat encounters that sometimes arose with Native Americans. But this all took place far away and inflicted relatively few casualties, and it was an age when the national media, such as it was, was either unable or unwilling to shine a light into the darker corners of warmaking.
There was a battlefield version of the Good Death in antebellum America’s popular imagination, and it looked much like the peacetime version. The dying soldier in the American mind was a man with God, country, and duty uppermost in his thoughts and the presence of mind to prepare himself for a noble death. “‘Is not that the parley beating on the enemy’s side?’” ran a popular account of the last words of an American officer during the Revolution. “‘Have I not been fighting even to death to hear that sound? It is gladsome music to my, now, faint hearing—it ends this glorious war, and the colonies are now forever free. . . . Oh!—it’s glorious!—my country is—is—free!’” At that, according to the story, “He fell back, dead!”9
None of this bore much resemblance to the grim realities of battle, yet such stories and images dominated the mental landscape of most antebellum Americans. For Lincoln to have been convinced that Ellsworth possessed a “real genius for war” reveals naïveté on the president-elect’s part regarding the nature and hard truths of warfare. But his innocence merely reflected the larger American culture in which both he and his young friend dwelt.
It also reflected Lincoln’s own circumstances; he had never seen much of war. His sole military service came when he was twenty-three, during the 1832 Black Hawk War. Lincoln served as a volunteer in the Illinois state militia, raised to thwart an invasion of the state by Sauk, Meskwaki, and Kickapoo Native Americans seeking to reclaim tribal lands. Lincoln was elected captain of his company, but not because he possessed any military skill or expertise. He knew little about drills or maneuvers, and he was not much of a disciplinarian; he was once forced to wear a wooden sword as punishment for allowing some of his men to discharge their weapons while in camp. He saw no combat, later joking, “I had a good many bloody struggles with the musquetoes; and, although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry.”10
Throughout the 1850s, when talk in both the North and the South of a sectional conflict frequently devolved into hints of a fratricidal war between Americans, Lincoln consistently denied the possibility. War seemed at best a product of fevered imagination on both sides. “There will be no war, no violence” over slavery, he confidently declared during his last debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858. “It will be placed again where the wisest and best men of the world, placed it,” on the path to “ultimate extinction.” As Lincoln could not fully comprehend that there were large numbers of proslavery white Southerners who might be willing to destroy the Union to save slavery, so too did he fail to appreciate that they might kill or be killed in the pursuit of that same goal. War in Lincoln’s mind was political and often metaphorical; it had not much to do with actual, violent death.11
As he prepared to travel to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration, the talk of war in the national press and from various public figures around the country steadily increased. Some believed bloodshed was inevitable; others did not. But Lincoln was reluctant to even mention the possibility, perhaps thinking that merely speaking of a civil war out loud might give it more concrete form or encourage that entire line of thinking. At no point between the time when he was elected and his departure for the nation’s capital did he publicly use the word war.
Nor did he prepare himself or the nation for the possibility. Perhaps the most eloquent indicator of his attitude in this regard was his choice for secretary of war, Simon Cameron, a man with no military experience who would prove to be a poor administrator of the nation’s military affairs. But when Lincoln chose him in early 1861, he never seems to have considered the possibility that his new secretary of war might not be up to the task. The choice was purely political; Cameron was a powerful Pennsylvania Republican, and he had provided crucial support for Lincoln’s nomination and election. “War” in president-elect Lincoln’s head was at best only a dim theoretical possibility.12
Again, in this Lincoln was not alone. Even those Americans who actually had witnessed a war and knew its human costs possessed no conception of what lay on the horizon in 1860. There simply was no available paradigm for the coming carnage. Few Americans, North or South, saw the bloodbath coming, and those who did were widely ridiculed. A fundamentally decent, cerebral man, Lincoln believed reason would prevail in the South—that and a sense of community binding Americans together, North and South. “Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling,” he told a gathering in Springfield soon after his election. He genuinely believed in that feeling.13
He should have paid more attention to the tone of many of the letters that were pouring into his office in Springfield—bags full of hate mail, many written with a deep-seated savagery that presaged the war’s paroxysm of bloodletting. “May the hand of the devil strike you down before long—You are destroying the country. . . . Damn you—every breath you take,” read a letter signed “Hand of God against you.” Another letter from one R. A. Hunt pleaded with Lincoln to take the threats to his life seriously. “I have heard several persons in this place say that if you ever did take the President Chair that they would go to Washington City expressly to kill you,” he wrote. “For you wife and children sake dont take the Chair if you do you will be murdered by some cowardly scoundrel.” Hay kept a bulging folder marked “assassination,” and in early 1861, Henry Whitney recalled, Lincoln “showed me several vulgar letters, all having Southern postmarks, containing threats against his life.” And yet, Whitney noted, Lincoln “not only took no precautions against assassination himself, but allowed none to be taken on his behalf.”14
Thus began a persistent theme in Lincoln’s life, almost from the moment he became president and dogging him thereafter: his own mortality. Up to now, he had not spoken or written much about his own death. There was no compelling reason why he would have done so. He was in 1861 a healthy man with a robust physical constitution. He would turn fifty-two the day after he left Springfield for the capital, one of the younger presidents to that point in American history.15
All those death threats do not seem to have effected much of a change in his thinking. His chief worry was that the hate mail might fall into Mary’s hands, and he instructed his secretaries to see to it that it did not. As Whitney noted, he took no precautions for his own security. He did not make out a will (nor would he ever do so), and he did not seem to take the threat of his own violent death seriously. “Neither he nor the country generally then understood the true facts concerning the dangers to his life,” his friend and fellow lawyer Ward Hill Lamon later remembered.16
But if he did not comprehend just what exactly had been loosed with his election, he does seem to have felt, in a distant way, the rumblings of what was to come. As he boarded a train in Springfield for the journey east to Washington, D.C., he hinted at a sense of foreboding in his farewell speech at Springfield’s train depot. “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington,” he told the crowd gathered in a rainstorm before him at Springfield’s rail depot. He even made a rare reference to Eddy, gone almost nine years, speaking of the town as the place where his “children have been born, and one is buried.”17
The threats of assassination continued. Lamon was worried enough that he armed himself with multiple pistols, daggers, a blackjack, and brass knuckles and posted himself at the entrance to Lincoln’s railway car. And there was also Elmer Ellsworth.18
By 1861, Ellsworth had developed a national reputation as a precision drillmaster. He was engaged to teach his drilling methods to the Governor’s Guard in Madison Wisconsin, and in April 1859, he was elected captain of the U.S. Zouave Cadets of Chicago, a unit whose intricate drilling and marching skills earned it headlines nationwide and eventually an invitation to perform for President James Buchanan on the White House lawn in August 1860. Ellsworth rather cockily published a broadside pronouncing his unit of forty-two men (accompanied by an eighteen-piece band) “the best organized and drilled military company in the country” and issuing a challenge to all comers to prove otherwise. They embarked on a tour of the United States during the summer to prove their point, with a crowd estimated at ten thousand people seeing them off in Chicago. “There is not one member who is not a gentleman as well as a soldier,” enthused a New York newspaper account. “The drill is most arduous, but; notwithstanding, every movement, no matter how complex, is executed to perfection.”19
Returning home to Springfield after the tour, Ellsworth dutifully resumed his law studies throughout the summer and fall of 1860 and into early 1861. After Lincoln’s election, he joined Lamon, Hay, Nicolay, and the president-elect’s family for the trip east. Though he did not walk about with pistol butts and daggers protruding from his pockets, as the rather flamboyant Lamon was wont to do, Ellsworth did his part to help with security, checking arrangements for crowd control and the like. Like everyone else on the train, he worried about Lincoln’s safety, and he stayed busy. “It will be absolutely impossible for me to leave the party for an hour,” he wrote to his fiancée.20
Following the inauguration and the Fort Sumter crisis, and responding to Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to suppress the rebellion, Ellsworth traveled to his native state and recruited a new regiment, the 11th New York, specifically targeting the young men who manned New York City’s firefighting brigades. “I want the New York firemen for there are no more effective men in the country,” he proclaimed. “Our friends at Washington are sleeping on a volcano and I want men who are ready at any moment to plunge into the thickest of the fight.” His recruiting circular sounded a highly patriotic note: “We are entering upon a struggle for the maintenance of our government, our institutions, and our national honor. . . . The firemen of New York must give an account of themselves in this contest.”21
Two thousand men tried to enlist in his regiment, twice as many as he could accept. His “Fire Zouaves” quickly became one of the North’s most celebrated military units, and Ellsworth found himself in demand. “I find myself surrounded by hosts of friends, of whose existence I never dreamed before,” he wrote, and “who think they have discovered that my stock, is rising, and it will pay to invest.”22
He had emerged as the North’s beau ideal of a soldier. Other units copied his Zouave uniforms and drill routines, and he was keenly aware that his and his men’s behavior was now prominent in the public eye. While in New York, he tailor designed the Fire Zouaves’ uniforms, at one point taking the trouble to sketch out a special cap design for a New York haberdasher. The 11th New York was indeed a natty outfit, dressed in red shirts, short gray jackets, and gray pants. Ellsworth sported a sword, a “very heavy revolver,” and “an enormously large and bloodthirsty-looking bowie knife, more than a foot long in the blade,” according to John Hay.23
Leading his men on the journey from New York to Washington, Ellsworth enforced strict standards of behavior, mirroring his own. “Not one member of the company is allowed to indulge in the use of intoxicating drinks, or to visit places where drinks are sold,” according to one newspaper reporter. Hay knew better; the Fire Zouaves had been recruited from some of the city’s tougher neighborhoods, and Lincoln’s private secretary called them “a jolly, gay set of blackguards . . . in a pretty complete state of don’t care a damn, modified by an affectionate and respectful deference to the Colonel.” When some Fire Zouaves engaged in shenanigans in Washington, Ellsworth sent several of them home and paid for the damages out of his own pocket.24
This was Elmer Ellsworth’s war: impeccably dressed and drilled gentlemen with high moral standards embarked on a crusade for right and glory. There was no room in his war for boorish behavior, and their superlative marching and drilling made their warrior expertise seem all the more apparent, especially in those early days. “Much is hoped from the gallant Colonel’s Bloodtubs,” Hay observed. “They step together well and look as if they meant business.” Matters as serious as death and dying hardly entered into the calculation. War for Ellsworth was a parade, and for his men, something of a lark. “They don’t see what they were brought here to the ‘war’ for, as they can have more fighting any time in New York!” noted an amused reporter.25
Ellsworth’s war was Lincoln’s war as well, at least to a point. Lincoln lacked Ellsworth’s youthful expectations of stainless character among men; he had seen too much of the harder side of life, especially in his years litigating courtroom cases involving all sorts of bad behavior, to harbor unrealistic expectations. Nor did Lincoln possess Ellsworth’s enthusiasm for all things military—at no point in his life was Abraham Lincoln enamored of war or military matters generally. He never did learn how to properly return a salute, and some soldiers were already remarking on their new commander in chief’s frumpy and decidedly unmilitary bearing. A “source of worriment is your own personal manners,” wrote a man named Robert Colby to the president in early May. Colby had been hearing complaints from soldiers. “For God’s sake consult somebody, some military man, as to what you ought to do on [military] occasions. . . . You ought to assume some dignity for the occasion even though your breeding his not been military.”26
But if he was not much given to romanticizing war, the president did not have any better understanding than Ellsworth of how painful and deadly a real war could be—at least not yet. His days after the bombardment of Fort Sumter were spent with administrative details, politics, patronage requests—what one would expect of a president dealing with the first harried days of a rapidly sprawling military conflict. Much of what he saw had an unreal quality. The famous abolitionist Cassius Clay burst into his office on April 22, for example, sporting three pistols and a huge knife, shades of Ward Hill Lamon, and looking (according to Hay) “like an admirable vignette to 25-cents-worth of yellow-covered romance.” Three days later, a “jolly-hearted old Shaker from N[ew] H[ampshire] came in and filled the room with the freshness of his presence,” Hay wrote, noting that the man apologized profusely for his late arrival in coming to defend the capital.27
Ellsworth was a frequent visitor at the White House, as he had been at the Lincoln home in Springfield. He again struck up his friendship with Willie and Tad, and he saw them frequently enough that he contracted measles from the two boys; all three were briefly bedridden early in 1861. In the meantime, the president tried to find a job for Ellsworth that was commensurate with the “genius for war” Lincoln thought he possessed. “I have been, and still am anxious for you to have the best position in the military which can be given you,” he wrote to Ellsworth the day after the Sumter bombardment. He tried to have Ellsworth appointed inspector general for the militia but ran into a wall of opposition from more experienced military men. He then hoped to have Ellsworth appointed “chief clerk” in Cameron’s War Department, but nothing came of that either. If Ellsworth was admired by many in the general populace, he rubbed others the wrong way, especially professional military men and those with political ambitions who resented Ellsworth’s easy access to the president. “The jealousy of the staff officers of the regular army . . . was productive of very serious annoyance and impediment to Ellsworth,” Hay recalled.28
Lincoln was never quite so naïve as to equate Ellsworth’s talent for drill and organizational charts with expertise in real combat. The jobs Lincoln sought for his young friend were administrative and clerical, and Lincoln admitted that he was not yet, only two months into his presidency, a good judge of who might be good at war and who might not. “Ever since the beginning of our acquaintance, I have valued you highly as a person [and] friend,” Lincoln wrote on April 15 to what was apparently becoming a frustrated Ellsworth, “and at the same time (without much capacity of judging) have had a very high estimate of your military talent.” That qualification, “without much capacity of judging,” is a telling little phrase; unlike so many other Americans in those early days of the Civil War, Lincoln knew what he did not know.29
Virginia seceded from the Union and joined the new Confederacy two days after Lincoln wrote that letter to Ellsworth, and the state’s defection placed Confederate territory nearly on Lincoln’s doorstep. Visible from the White House was a Confederate flag flying from a rooftop in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River. The flag seemed to mock Lincoln, mock what many in the North saw as a flailing administration that was too supine to mount an effective response to secession and the new Southern nation.
More to the point, Alexandria was a strategically important little town, located as it was so near the nation’s capital, with both a railroad depot and telegraph office that could serve the new Confederate army, should its leaders decide to menace the national capital. Union planners wanted the town occupied and began massing units to mount a determined assault. Colonel Ellsworth saw an opportunity and presented himself and his command for the honor of leading the vanguard in the capture of Alexandria.
When the Fire Zouaves geared up for their mission on the evening of May 23, 1861, the war was only a little over a month old and had so far cost few lives. No one died at all during the war’s first bona fide battle, from April 12 to 14, when the Confederates bombed a U.S. Army garrison stationed in Charleston Harbor’s Fort Sumter (though two soldiers did die afterward from injuries they received when a cannon exploded during a one-hundred-gun salute fired during the lowering of the Fort’s American flag). Four soldiers died during a riot when their unit passed through heavily prosecessionist Baltimore on April 19. Six days prior to the Alexandria operation, Union gunboats exchanged cannon fire with a Confederate battery situated at Sewell’s Point in Virginia; to this day, no one is sure whether anyone died during this “battle.” Such was the Civil War by May 23.
Ellsworth and the men of the 11th New York, around a thousand strong, boarded three civilian steamers that had been pressed into service as military transports. They docked at Alexandria’s wharves in the predawn hours on May 24. A few desultory musket shots rang out from Confederate sentinels scattered around the riverbank, who then quickly fled. Ellsworth and his men met no resistance as they walked down the gangways and formed up in the street running along the wharves. It was five o’clock, with sunrise not far away.
They saw drowsy civilians here and there as they spread out through the town but no Confederate soldiers, the darkness gradually giving way to early morning gray. Ellsworth was busy giving orders, deploying guards and sending companies to seize key points in the town. Severing Alexandria’s communications was especially important; more Union units were scheduled to arrive, and keeping the town isolated from Confederate reinforcements and a possible counterattack was paramount. Ellsworth peeled off Company E and sent them toward Alexandria’s rail depot. Company A he pointed toward the town’s telegraph office.
He took a few steps down the street toward the telegraph office himself, thinking to accompany his men in accomplishing that vital mission. But the secession flag that everyone had seen from Washington, D.C., now fluttered overhead nearby, its folds clearly visible in the dawning light. It was affixed to a pole atop the roof of the Marshall House, a three-story hotel. “Boys, we must have that down before we return,” he said. Detailing several men to accompany him, he marched up the steps and entered the hotel’s front door.
A clerk and a few others—hotel boarders, perhaps—stared at the young colonel and his men as they entered the lobby. Ellsworth demanded to be shown the way to the roof. No one moved. Spying a staircase, Ellsworth ordered four of his men to remain on guard, while he and the remaining Zouaves clambered up the stairs.
In a hallway leading down the second floor from the stair landing, they saw an elderly man, standing half-dressed in only a shirt and trousers, with a sleepy, disheveled look. The sound of the soldiers’ feet on the steps had apparently roused him from bed. “Who put that flag up?” Ellsworth demanded, his men crowding behind him. The man retorted with a sullen air, “I don’t know. I am a boarder here.” They left him standing in the hallway and continued to the roof.
The men climbed out onto the steeply sloped roof, using a ladder they had found in the hotel’s attic, and cut the enormous flag down. The colonel picked up the folds and, with his men, began descending the staircase. In front was Corporal Francis Brownell, followed by Ellsworth and the rest. Ellsworth was unarmed, having handed his revolver to a comrade while he tried to stuff the flag into a manageable bundle.
They had nearly reached the second-floor landing again, when there appeared from the hallway that same half-dressed old man, now wielding a double-barreled shotgun. He was no mere boarder; his name was James Jackson, and he was the proprietor of the hotel. The sleepy look had given way to rage. Ellsworth was carrying his flag.
What happened next was a cacophony of split-second noise and confusion. Jackson leveled the shotgun at Ellsworth, who did not immediately see him, occupied as he still was with the unwieldy flag. Standing in front of his commander, Corporal Brownell swung his musket around to knock the shotgun barrel away. He swung so hard that he tripped and momentarily lost his balance, giving Jackson time to recover. The hotel proprietor pointed the gun again at Ellsworth and fired one barrel, hitting the young colonel at point-blank range. The concussion in that narrow space would have been deafening, the echo clanging down the stairwell, eyes stinging and ears ringing from the smoke and noise.
Brownell managed to regain his footing as his momentum carried him stumbling onto the second-floor landing where Jackson stood. Jackson swung the shotgun around at him and fired the other barrel, but adrenaline, the noise, and general confusion caused him to miss entirely. The buckshot buried itself into a door near the corporal’s head, pieces of wainscoting and splinters showering down. Brownell stuck his musket right in Jackson’s face and fired, adding a third report reverberating down the stairwell and hallway. He could not tell whether his shot had hit the mark—the smoke was blinding—and still seeing Jackson’s shadowy figure before him, he thrust the long bayonet at the end of his rifle into Jackson’s body, running him through. “My God!” Brownell heard someone scream from within the cloud of smoke. Only later did he realize it was Ellsworth.
The entire encounter was over in only a few seconds. “Who is hit?” yelled one of the men back up in the stairwell. They could hear the hotel’s occupants stirring in their various rooms. Brownell quickly reloaded his weapon and pointed it right at the door damaged by Jackson’s errant shotgun blast. The door began to open; pulling the musket’s stock up to his shoulder and sighting down the barrel, Brownell drew a bead and yelled that he would kill anyone who emerged. The remaining Zouaves had by this point crowded onto the landing, weapons at the ready and pointed down the hallway. “There were quite a number [of boarders] converging to the point where we stood,” recalled one. The nervous little band of Zouaves realized they were outnumbered, in a tightly confined space, and facing a possibly unruly crowd. Only their loaded weapons and the general shock kept them at bay.30
Jackson’s shotgun blast had blown Ellsworth back onto the staircase. “It was at first difficult to discover the precise locality of his wound, for all parts of his coat were equally saturated with blood,” a Zouave remembered. The men gingerly loosened his belt and began to unbutton his coat when they saw a hole, slightly smaller than a man’s fist, gaping just above and to the left of a brass button, over his heart. All those searing hot buckshot pebbles had shredded the aorta, broken Ellsworth’s third rib, and passed through his lung, burrowing into the spine and breaking two vertebrae. Bright streams of blood poured from his chest, soaking his clothes, his face, and much of the flag. A gold medallion Ellsworth carried in his lapel pocket had been slammed deep into his chest; a doctor would later dig it out during the autopsy.31
His pallor was rapidly turning a sickening pale bluish-white as blood drained away from the body. “None of us had any medical knowledge,” admitted a soldier, “but we saw that all hope must be resigned.” They nevertheless sent for the regimental surgeon, who arrived in a few minutes. By that point, Ellsworth was dead.32
So was his assailant. Brownell had fired his weapon at nearly point-blank range, the bullet and powder blast from the muzzle tearing into Jackson’s face and leaving a wound “so appalling that I shall not attempt to describe it,” recalled an onlooker. A reporter later wrote that Brownell’s bullet “blew [Jackson’s] brains out,” suggesting a ghastly mess. The blast and bayonet thrust had thrown Jackson down the stairs to the lobby floor. He lay there facedown, the empty shotgun underneath him, an angry crowd gathering around. It included Brownell’s wife, “wild almost to insanity” as she stared at her dead husband’s body and wondered aloud whether her children would now be killed. Jackson’s sister soon appeared as well, mumbling, “Of course they wouldn’t shoot a man dead in his house about a bit of old bunting.”33
Someone found a red blanket, in which they hastily sewed Ellsworth’s corpse. Wrenching a door loose from its hinges, the Zouaves turned it into a makeshift stretcher. By now the regiment had secured the town, and a crowd of onlookers watched as the body was removed from the stairwell, carried out of the hotel, and taken down the street to one of the steamers for the journey back to Navy Yard at Washington, D.C. There he was laid on a bench in the engine room, the red blanket was removed, and he was surrounded with the customary civilian accoutrements of mourning: black crepe on the building and a wreath of flowers on his breast (“shockingly lacerated by the slug shot,” noted an onlooker).34
This was a military affair, and there were customs regarding how a dead soldier was to be honored. He was still dressed in his Zouave uniform, and the bench on which he lay was covered in the national flag. Flags similarly adorned the engine house’s exterior, and he was afforded an honor guard—a military variant of the civilian practice that bodies should be guarded by vigilant family members until the actual funeral. Flags were flown at half-mast, both at the Navy Yard and soon at other military installations around Washington.35
Lincoln learned of Ellsworth’s death later that day, when a messenger from the War Department’s telegraph office arrived at the White House to deliver the news. A newspaper correspondent and Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts happened to call on the president soon afterward, and they found him in the library, staring out the window at the Potomac River below. “He did not move until we approached very closely,” wrote the correspondent, “when he turned round abruptly, and advanced toward us, extending his hand: ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I cannot talk.’ . . . To our surprise the President burst into tears, and concealed his face in his handkerchief.”36
The president and the First Lady arrived at the Navy Yard the next morning. After spending some time gazing at Ellsworth’s body, Lincoln personally supervised his removal to the White House’s East Room; deceased presidents William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor had both lain in state in that room. Ellsworth was now ensconced in a flag-draped coffin, set on a bier draped with an American flag, white lilies on his breast. The coffin had a glass covering to reveal Ellsworth’s head and upper body; some thought his complexion had an unnatural hue, a “livid paleness,” one report wrote, that “contrasted strongly with the ruddy glow of health that always characterized the Colonel in his lifetime.” The secessionist flag, still bloodstained, lay on the bier nearby.37
Like the viewing at the Navy Yard, Ellsworth’s East Room service had a military air, with honor guards flanking the coffin and prominent army officers in attendance. General Winfield Scott was resplendent in full dress uniform (though badly hampered by his great girth and the gout), along with various other high-ranking commanders from the army and navy.38 There were also at least two women present, exceptions to the prewar custom that women should not attend funeral services: the First Lady and Julia Taft, the teenage daughter of a Patent Office lawyer who had come to know both Ellsworth and the Lincoln family when she brought her two younger brothers to the White House as playmates for Willie and Tad. Mary placed a photo of Ellsworth on the coffin, and Julia a wreath of white flowers. In Ms. Taft’s case, the moment proved nearly overwhelming. “It made me quite faint,” she recalled. “I had never looked on one dead.”39
Lincoln’s deep involvement in the mourning and funeral for his young friend was evident in the unusual circumstance of how Ellsworth’s body was preserved: he was embalmed, a procedure that was rare before the war and was undertaken at the president’s personal behest. The man considered to be the “father of embalming,” Dr. Thomas Holmes, performed the service. Secretary of State Seward brought Holmes to the president’s attention while Lincoln directed preparations for Ellsworth’s funeral. How Seward knew of Holmes is unknown; the doctor had advertised his skills as a professional embalmer in Washington newspapers and only four days before Ellsworth’s death was appointed as a surgeon in the U.S. Army, with his stated duty being to “embalm all those killed in battle,” according to a New York Times reporter. The fact that Holmes would be expected to preserve the remains of every Civil War battle casualty is eloquent testimony to how unprepared the nation was for the coming carnage. Whatever procedure Dr. Holmes performed on Ellsworth’s corpse was apparently to the president’s satisfaction; while some thought the body was too pale, Lincoln remarked on the corpse’s lifelike quality.40
The Reverend J. Smith Pyne of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., performed the service. St. John’s was a traditional place of worship for American presidents, dating back to the days of James Madison. Lincoln was still not a regular churchgoer, but he did attend Reverend Pyne’s services soon after his arrival in Washington, accompanied by Seward. Following the service, large numbers of people filed through the East Room to gaze on the coffin, so many that army authorities had difficulty keeping the crowd orderly; some people even cut swatches of cloth from the secessionist flag as souvenirs. The coffin was then carried by Zouave pallbearers to a waiting hearse, followed by a procession down Pennsylvania Avenue, Lincoln riding in a carriage just behind the coffin. Crowds lined the street as they passed, and thousands more would come to view Ellsworth’s body when it was transported to New York City several days later. Church bells rang and flags flew at half-mast throughout the North.41
The day of the funeral, Lincoln wrote a letter of condolence to Ellsworth’s parents. “In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own,” he wrote. “So much of promised usefulness to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall.” Lincoln reiterated his faith in Ellsworth’s talents and military capacity. “His power to command men, was surpassingly great,” the president noted, and “this power, combined with a fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew.”42
Lincoln carried his grief for some time afterward. “He was a great pet in the [Lincoln] family,” noted Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Grimsley, who was visiting the White House at the time, “and Mr. Lincoln feels it very much.”43 He was moved to tears both while looking at Ellsworth’s body at the Navy Yard and while attending the East Room service. “I felt an impulse to tell the President about our pleasant visit to Colonel Ellsworth the day before he was ordered to Alexandria,” Julia Taft recalled, “but I was told that the President wept at the mention of Ellsworth and I was afraid it would make him grieve.” This man who was described by nearly everyone who knew him as being in tight control of his feelings seemed barely able to do so where the subject of Elmer Ellsworth was concerned.44
He was genuinely shocked by Ellsworth’s death. He of course knew that young men would die, probably in large numbers, in the war that was now the defining fact of his presidency. For that matter, he was mature enough to know—as so many nineteenth-century Americans knew—that he would probably lose at least one child to illness, as had occurred with Eddy, and death was an omnipresent feature of his early frontier life. Americans of his time spoke constantly of death, created elaborate rituals to wrap around the great central fact of death, made of death a familiar specter.
But Ellsworth’s demise, sudden and messy as it had been, put a name and a face on wartime death that previously had not existed, and it occurred in a war Lincoln had not really expected. As an athletic, energetic young man with a “genius for war,” Ellsworth did not seem like the sort who would die, who should die, before having a real chance to prove his mettle in combat, at the hands of a disgruntled, half-dressed old man wielding a shotgun, no less. “I have ventured to address you this tribute to the memory of my young friend, and your brave and early fallen child,” Lincoln wrote to the Ellsworths. “Early fallen child” was not just a reference to Elmer’s youth; it also seemed as if he had died far too early in his soldier’s career.45
Lincoln’s shock was the nation’s shock. “All classes seem to regard [Ellsworth’s] death as a personal affliction,” Hay wrote. “Our citizens are filled with grief and wrath at Colonel Ellsworth’s death,” Chicagoan Joseph Medill wrote Lincoln, “A Virgin[ia] traitor would fare no better at our hands than at those of his ‘Pet Lambs’ if we could get at the thieving assassins.”46
The idea of Ellsworth having been “assassinated,” rather than being a more legitimate combat victim, was common in the North, whose citizens characterized it as the wanton murder of an American soldier doing his duty by a crazed secessionist hothead. “He has been assassinated!” read Ellsworth’s obituary in the New York Times, “He has lived a brief but an eventful, a public and an honorable life. His memory will be revered, his name respected, and long after the rebellion shall have become a matter of history, his death will be regarded as a martyrdom, and his name will be enrolled upon the list of our country’s patriots.”47 Other newspapers around the country offered similar encomiums. “The entrance into Alexandria was attended by an event which has cast a deep gloom over this community,” said one Ohio newspaper. “Colonel Ellsworth, who had hauled down the secession flag from the Marshall house, was soon afterwards shot by a concealed foe.”48
Prints of Ellsworth’s death soon appeared. “Murder of Colonel Ellsworth of the Fire Zouaves” depicted a heroically fallen hero, still clutching the flag he had removed from the Marshall House’s steeple. “The Murder of Colonel Ellsworth” was the title of a similar illustration on the front page of the June 15 issue of Harper’s Weekly. Various reproductions of Ellsworth’s photographic portrait became popular, as did a photograph of Corporal Brownell, posed with his musket and one foot standing on the flag Ellsworth had removed. He was awarded the Medal of Honor.49
In the South, Ellsworth’s assailant was commemorated as a fallen hero, “the first martyr in the war for Southern independence.” Jackson had actually been an inconsequential man, but Southern culture cast him as a martyred hero of Confederate independence. In 1862, a pamphlet biography of Jackson appeared throughout the Confederacy, portraying Jackson as an aggrieved homeowner defending his hearth from a rapacious Yankee. “He is lauded as a hero,” read the pamphlet’s introduction, “loved for his devotion to the flag of his country, and the terrible determination with which he defended it.”50
The outpouring of stories, artwork, songs, and the like underline the fact that while Ellsworth’s death was profoundly personal to Lincoln and Elmer’s other friends, it carried political implications as well. When Northerners described Ellsworth’s death as a “murder” or an “assassination,” they were essentially delegitimizing the entire Southern enterprise of creating a viable, separate nation, for as a mere murderer, James Jackson represented nobody and was a martyr to nothing. Ellsworth, on the other hand, was in his martyrdom the embodiment of Northern resolve and legitimacy, his death proving to be a very effective recruiting tool. New regiments would name themselves “The People’s Ellsworth Regiment” and the like, and a desire to avenge his death was a motivating factor for some Northern men to enlist. Songs were written on the theme of Ellsworth’s inspiring patriotism, and a poem exhorted:
Brave Fire Zouaves! your leader’s name
Is left you for a battle-cry;
Let Ellsworth’s pure and spotless fame
Lead you to conquer or to die.51
But Lincoln never used Ellsworth’s death for political purposes or to fire up Northern resolve. The letter he wrote to Ellsworth’s parents, unlike later letters he wrote with an eye toward their public consumption, seems not to have had any larger audience or purpose other than comforting Elmer’s grieving parents. In July, when he sent his first major address to Congress following his inauguration, Lincoln did not directly reference Ellsworth’s death or the notion of dying for one’s country at all, instead concluding with the simple exhortation for loyal Americans to “go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.”52
New at his job, and never much inclined toward using death for political purposes, Lincoln seems not to have thought of using the death of his friend as a propaganda device. But he would soon learn. He would discover how to put more emotional distance between himself and battlefield death, and he would learn how to speak, with more eloquence than any other American president before or since, of the martyrdom of the battlefield dead and its higher political meaning. But first he would experience a death even more personal, more shocking, and more profound than even the demise of the young colonel.