1861

by Adam Goodheart

  Military bands playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail, Columbia,” were constantly passing and re-passing, and the whole population seemed on the qui vive. Squadrons of cavalry continually passed my window, the men in gorgeous uniforms, with high waving plumes.… Two regiments of foot followed the cavalry.… The privates had a more independent air than our own regulars, and were principally the sons of respectable citizens. They appeared to have been well drilled, and were superior in appearance to our militia.32

  As foreign visitors also noted, many Americans of all social classes often seemed simply to enjoy a good brawl. The rough-hewn Westerner bristling with six-shooters and bowie knives and the aristocratic Southerner with his brace of dueling pistols became stock characters in European depictions of the young republic. Yankees—though perhaps not quite so bellicose—were not entirely excluded from this culture of violence. The most spectacular gang combat of the antebellum years took place in Northern cities, such as the storied street battle between New York’s Roach Guards and Dead Rabbits, fought on Independence Day in 1857, which left eight men dead. Such fights often broke out between Democrats and Whigs, or Know Nothings and immigrants: decades before the Civil War began, some Americans were accustomed to battling other Americans over political differences. And Yankees filled the ranks of the nation’s peacetime officer corps. Of the active duty officers in 1860, almost 60 percent came from the free states; the only branch the Southerners dominated was the cavalry.33

  Both before and after the war, Southerners loved to glamorize themselves at the North’s expense: their own region was redolent of magnolias, romantic chivalry, and Sir Walter Scott, while Yankeedom was a land of naught but cold-eyed profiteering. Later generations on both sides have largely accepted this Southern myth, like so many others. But the reality was much more ambiguous, and in many ways the two regions were more alike than different. The South’s economy was as ruthlessly profit-driven as the North’s; each plantation was, in a sense, a cog in a vast industrial machine, and many of the great cotton planters had actually come from above the Mason-Dixon Line. So too, young Northerners thrilled to chivalric fantasies just as much as their Southern counterparts.

  Walter Scott was hardly the exclusive property of Southern cavaliers: Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that as a girl, she read Ivanhoe no fewer than seven times in a single summer, until she was able to recite many of its scenes from memory. This was the era of Romanticism’s exuberant flowering, when nary a middle-class parlor, even in the backwaters of New England or the Midwest, was without its thick, gilt-edged volumes of Byron and Tennyson, laid reverently alongside the family Bible. Such books were not just displayed but read and memorized. Like the rock lyrics of a later generation, their verses stirred millions of young Americans who heard in them the language of their own souls, and a kind of prophetic authority. As an adult, Ellsworth would cite a passage from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King as his favorite lines of poetry. Something in the Arthurian legend, with its gallant young knights riding off to sacrifice their lives for their king, spoke powerfully to his heart.34

  American authors of the 1840s and 1850s, especially in the North, developed home-grown versions of such heroic fantasies. One of the best sellers of the period, Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, is the true story of a privileged young Bostonian who makes his way as a merchant seaman aboard a vessel bound for California, via the perilous waters of Cape Horn. Dana returns to Boston no longer a sickly Harvard undergraduate but a tough and seasoned adventurer, a comrade of salty old mariners and California ranch hands, who has proven his manhood with brawn as well as brains. That book probably inspired the young Herman Melville to sign aboard a whaling ship the year after its publication, thus spawning still more magnificent tales of young men setting sail upon the high seas. (And it definitely inspired the teenage James Garfield to run away “to sea”—which in his case consisted of six weeks on a mule-drawn canal boat.)

  Indeed, as the nineteenth century reached its midpoint, it seemed that youth was ascendant as it had never been before. A new generation scoffed at the values of its parents, proclaiming its devotion to deeper and truer things than mere getting and spending. A political movement called Young America swore eternal enmity to “old fogyism” in all its forms. Farm boys and apprentices, laboring at their drudge work in fields and shops, dreamed of greater things.35

  Most young Americans, of course, never crossed the Pacific aboard a whaler. But hundreds of thousands embraced other opportunities to test their mettle in a world wider than their fathers had known—whether in America’s booming cities or along her expanding frontiers. In places like rural New England and the Hudson Valley, where generations of the same families had farmed the same lands, and children often lived under strict parental authority well into adulthood, it was a bold and radical act for a young man to pull up stakes and seek his fortune in the gold fields of California or the bare-fisted markets of Chicago. Moreover, when the adventurers arrived at their destination, the competition—for jobs or gold, for the attention of would-be patrons or would-be wives—could be ruthless. The newcomers, nearly all in their teens and twenties, formed their own rough-and-tumble communities in mining camps and boardinghouses. Postadolescent tempers ran high, flaring into brawls with fists, knives, and sometimes pistols. Yet at the same time, ardent feelings of brotherhood, like those Garfield knew in rural Ohio, were quick to kindle, as solitary adventurers banded together against an unforgiving world. They joined militias, volunteer fire companies, “young men’s societies,” and gymnasiums. (The first true college fraternities began to flourish in the 1840s and 1850s, too.)36

  So the culture of Ellsworth’s generation of young urbanites, the generation of 1861, was a culture of toughness and comradeship, of tender yearnings and ruthless ambition. It was an American culture largely new. It was the world that Walt Whitman sang.37

  It was also a world rife with pitfalls and temptations. Countless self-help books warned of the dangers that lay in wait for young men on their own, away from the watchful eyes of parents and clergymen. Brothels and billiard halls, saloons and gambling dens, all lured the unwary. Many, if not most, young men sampled these pleasures to some degree. (The immense quantities of alcohol they consumed are especially impressive.)38 But the sinful pleasures of urban life often came with a heavy price of remorse, especially for the sons of traditionally devout families. Alongside low dens of iniquity, temperance societies and self-improvement associations also flourished. Antebellum cities became not only battlefields of economic competition but also, as the sea was for Dana and Melville, proving grounds of discipline, morality, and self-worth.39 It is easy to see why Ellsworth’s strict rules for his Zouaves, along with the all-consuming drill regimen and the promise of soldierly comradeship, appealed so strongly to certain rootless youth of Chicago, and to many who would answer their country’s call a few years later.

  For these men, too, the chief apostle of American youth was not Whitman, whose poems had found only a few thousand readers as of 1860, but Emerson. Unlike previous generations of Protestant sermonizers, who had equated age with authority, and treated the young merely as unformed minds in need of guidance and discipline, Emerson extolled youth for its own sake. America itself was a young country, and young men and women had a special role to play in its destiny. In his 1844 lecture “The Young American,” first delivered at the Boston Mercantile Library, he exhorted, in ringing words:

  I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of this land. In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?40

  Some years later—just about the time Ellsworth was
learning to fence in a Chicago gymnasium—Abraham Lincoln took to the Illinois lecture circuit with his own variation on the Emersonian message, a talk that he called “Discoveries and Inventions.” Speaking before audiences at colleges and young men’s associations, he paid these listeners a characteristically wry, even sarcastic, tribute. “We have all heard of Young America,” Lincoln said. “He is the most current youth of the age. Some think him conceited, and arrogant; but has he not reason to entertain a rather extensive opinion of himself? … Men, and things, everywhere, are ministering unto him.” Thanks to global trade and modern inventions, he noted, any American youth of decent means lived like a virtual king, with the whole world catering to his every whim: he wore fabrics from England and France, drank tea and coffee from China and South America, smoked Cuban cigars and lit his home with oil from South Sea whales. “He owns,” Lincoln said, “a large part of the world.”

  It was not just spoken words that summoned young men onto the global stage. Ellsworth’s generation was the first to grow up in the thrall of mass popular media: news sheets carrying the latest telegraphic dispatches, cheaply printed books about the heroic exploits of 1776 and 1812, illustrated weeklies chockablock with wood engravings of cavalry clashes, political rallies, and militia parades. By bringing the wide world and its pageantry into young Americans’ lives with such unprecedented immediacy, the new media of the 1840s and 1850s made once-distant adventures and opportunities seem achievable. They regaled readers with tales of far-off, yet newly accessible, California—an entire state of ambitious young entrepreneurs, drawn into the Gold Rush boom from every nation of the world, sometimes to gain fortunes and sometimes to lose their lives.

  New horizons of possibility seemed to open on all sides in those final prewar years. The American press was also filled with even more outré tales of what were then known as “filibusters,” men whose exploits are nearly forgotten today. The filibusters were gangs of young freelance military adventurers who set out to invade, in the name of Manifest Destiny, various soft parts of Latin America: Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, northern Mexico. These soldiers of fortune sailed from American ports under fanciful flags of nonexistent republics, of which they imagined themselves the founding fathers.

  Though nearly all these expeditions flamed out like so many cheap firecrackers—with the occasional timely assistance of a Latin American firing squad—the dream of foreign conquest kept its hold on the American imagination right up to the eve of Fort Sumter. Ellsworth himself, even as a penniless clerk, kept a map of Mexico pinned to his wall and sketched out plans of empire somewhere below the Rio Grande. But his rendezvous with destiny, manifest or otherwise, would happen closer to home.

  THE LAST SUMMER OF THE DECADE, the last summer of peace, was the summer of the Chicago Zouaves. The men—a corps of sixty handpicked by Ellsworth himself, plus a small regimental band—left home at the start of July, and by midmonth they were a national sensation.

  From town to town they traveled, riding the railways across the Upper Midwest, through New York and New England, down the Eastern seaboard. Their performances dazzled nearly all who saw them, and the trip quickly became a thousand-mile triumphal procession. After their drill in Cleveland, they marched to the city’s train station flanked by uniformed firemen, as torches flared and Roman candles arced across the dusk, with young girls running out into the street proffering bouquets of flowers to the cadets.41 At Albany, New York, little more than a week into the tour, twenty-five thousand people turned out to watch. One of the town’s most worldly—or, one suspects, just imaginative—local journalists claimed that he had “seen Lord Wellington review his veterans in Hyde Park; Napoleon, his Guards on Champ de Mars; and the Emperor of Russia, an Austrian army in Vienna,” but this “simple corps of citizen soldiers” from the edge of the prairies excelled them all.42

  Just past daybreak the following morning, when the lads from Chicago arrived by Hudson River steamboat at the Cortland Street pier in Lower Manhattan, a cheering crowd already lined the wharf to greet them, as artillery pieces boomed official welcome to the greatest city on the continent. Local papers were already using words like “mania” to describe the public’s response to the Zouaves.43 The New York Atlas satirized the media frenzy:

  They have come!

  Who?

  Again every man, woman, and child echoes the cry.

  They have come!

  Who?

  Upon lightning wings the words reach the uttermost bowels of the Union, and millions reiterate them:

  They have come!

  Who?

  …

  The far-famed military organization, the Tan Bark Sheiks from Little Egypt, is in town.44

  It would be more than a century before New Yorkers would swoon like this for a few out-of-town boys newly arriving in the metropolis.

  After breakfast at the city’s finest hotel, the Astor House, the cadets shouldered their muskets and marched up Broadway to Union Square, then down the Bowery to Grand Street. Packed masses of spectators awaited them in front of City Hall, sweltering in the mid-July sun as policemen swung billy clubs left and right to make way for Ellsworth’s troop. The windows of City Hall were crowded with Tammany grandees, and lesser mortals scrambled precariously along the roof for a better view, while the surrounding trees, one spectator wrote, “bent under the load of unripe boys they bore.”45 To Ellsworth, whose last experience of New York City had been his brief stint as a teenage shopboy, this triumphant return must have seemed like a waking dream.

  Oddly, few of the watching thousands could describe afterward exactly what was so enthralling about Ellsworth and his men. For all the ink that was spilled on the subject of the Zouaves that summer, it is still hard to find any satisfactorily visual account, though some give us quick, glancing snapshots of the action: the young soldiers running in tight formation behind their commander; turning exuberant somersaults and handstands; crouching all together in a tight pyramid of men, bayonets bristling out on every side like the spines of a porcupine.46 Newspapermen excused themselves by explaining that words could not fully capture the cadets’ rapid maneuvers as they formed squares, triangles, crosses, and revolving circles, shifting from one shape to the next with the dizzying fluidity of a kaleidoscope.47 “Now that the parade is over, my single impressions of the scene are indistinct,” one of them confessed just a few hours later, recalling only a sense of “geometrical precision,” of “action,” of “runnings, hoppings, bayonet-guardings, and thrustings.”48 Many commented on the Zouaves’ jauntily elegant uniforms, on their youthfulness and muscularity, on their air of high spirits with a dash of ferocity. Each man, one journalist wrote, was “as wiry, athletic, and agile as a squirrel”; others compared them to tigers, steam engines, and electric clocks.49

  To convey the full splendor of the Zouaves’ prowess, some scribes were driven to satirical exaggeration. One New York paper assured its readers that when he met an enemy soldier, a Zouave could drive the bayonet, musket and all, through the foe’s body, turn a somersault over his head, and draw the weapon out the other side in a single flourish. When he had to cross a river, a Zouave would nonchalantly throw a rope across it and tightrope-walk to the other side. And if his commanders needed someone to reconnoiter the enemy’s lines, a Zouave would climb into a skyrocket, blast a thousand feet into the air, and have a complete set of photographs and hand-drawn maps ready by the time he alighted on the ground.50

  America’s Zouave fever even caught the attention of Charles Dickens, who was following the Chicago cadets’ exploits from across the Atlantic. “The individual action, the free agency of the Zouave drill, which is almost acrobatic, delight the Americans,” he commented.51 Dickens, who had toured the States twenty years before, was onto something important. What the Zouave drill demonstrated was how personal freedom could exist even amid military regimentation: a truly democratic way of soldiering.

  The boys from Chicago caused Americans’ chests to swell with national prid
e. Over the past decade, they had sat on the sidelines while European armies clashed gallantly on the fields of Sevastopol and Solferino. Now, it seemed, their own republic was ready to take its part in that panoply. One spectator at the Zouaves’ performance in New York was inspired to write a poem. Its final stanza reads:

  Your Zouave corps, O haughty France!

  We looked on as a wild romance,

  And many a voice was heard to scoff

  At Algiers and at Malakoff;

  Nor did we Yankees credit quite

  Their evolutions in the fight.

  But now we’re very sure what they

  Have done can here be done to-day,

  When thus before our sight deploys

  The gallant corps from Illinois,—

  American Zouaves!52

  Many observers’ accounts betray an almost erotic excitement at the pure physicality of those men. In the early Victorian age, the idea that the human body could be simply that—a human body, strong and unconstrained—was radical and new in a way almost unimaginable in our own era obsessed with fitness and exercise. Here was a group of ordinary young Americans—law clerks and shop assistants, not circus acrobats, blacksmiths, or stevedores—who had decided to make their own bodies into beautiful and powerful machines, and not because they needed to hammer iron or lift barrels, or even defeat foes in battle, but for something like the sheer pleasure of it, simply, as one newspaper account put it, “to gain excellence in a certain direction for its own sake.” And through the good old Puritan virtues of discipline and self-restraint, through all those months of cold water, hard floors, and endless hours in the gym, they had succeeded. These young men, the newspaper declared, were the harbingers of a new American phenomenon: “muscle mania.”53

  As for their captain, the penniless young striver from Mechanicville became, almost overnight, a sex symbol. That term wasn’t used at the time, of course, but it is no exaggeration. Never before had any American become famous and adored not for any particular accomplishments—not for being a poet or an actor or a war hero—but simply for his charisma.