“Everything worth looking at seemed unfinished,” said one acerbic visitor. “Everything finished looked as if it should have been destroyed generations before.” Indeed, the Washington of 1861 seemed in itself a kind of tacit argument against the very idea of a national government, or at least as evidence of that government’s incapability to maintain its own existence. The few offices of the executive branch had an almost makeshift feel: even the State Department possessed the atmosphere of a county courthouse, with a posted notice in the front hall listing the weekly hours that Secretary Seward received callers. “The government had an air of social instability and incompleteness that went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from,” Henry Adams later wrote. “The Union was a sentiment, but not much more.”16
The local civilians’ sole professional activity seemed to be the leisurely task of waiting: waiting for a bill to wend its way through the slow peristalsis of congressional committees; waiting in the lobby of Willard’s for an elusive cabinet patron to make his appearance; waiting in the shabby White House anteroom to ask a favor of the president. The archetypal Washingtonian had his feet propped on the end table, a wad of tobacco in his cheek, and a newspaper in his hand.17
Waiting may have been the locals’ favorite pastime, but the New York firemen did not share their taste. After four days en route to the capital, cooped up on the steamer and then the train, they had expected and hoped to disembark straight into the thick of battle. (You could hardly blame them—it had been weeks since their last chance for even a good street brawl.) As they tumbled out of their train, a newspaperman had heard one Zouave ask, “Can you tell us where Jeff Davis is? We’re lookin’ for him.” A comrade chimed in: “We’re bound to hang his scalp in the White House before we go back.” Others squinted in perplexity, looking around for secession flags to capture but failing to discover any.18
On the morning after their arrival, ten-year-old Willie Lincoln, whose parents had allowed him to stay up late and watch the grand procession the evening before, wrote excitedly to a former playmate in Illinois, eking out the letters in a laborious schoolboy hand: “I suppose that you did not learn that Colonel, E.E. Ellsworth had gone up to New York and organized a regiment,—divided in to companys, and brought them here, & to be sworn in—I dont know when. Some people call them the B’hoys, & others call them, the firemen.” It wasn’t long before Willie and his younger brother, Tad, had asked their indulgent father for their own pint-size Zouave uniforms, in which they paraded, chests out and heads high, around the White House grounds. Their parents solemnly reviewed the two-man regiment (which the boys had named Mrs. Lincoln’s Zouaves) and presented it with a flag; a photograph of Tad in his uniform survives to this day.19
Willie and Tad Lincoln were not alone in having gone a bit b’hoy crazy. “Every zouave is surrounded by a group of eager listeners,” a New York Herald writer reported, amused at how these ordinary Bowery roughnecks had become exotic novelties. Washington was not without its own, homegrown rowdy element, to be sure: “Riot and bloodshed are of daily occurrence,” reported a Senate committee in 1858, exaggerating perhaps just a little. But it is safe to say that few locals had ever observed at close range such a colorful troupe of ruffians as the b’hoys. Their salty New York dialect won particular admiration.20
Local newspapermen delighted in regaling readers with tales of the Zouave exploits—many at least slightly exaggerated in the telling—and these stories were picked by newspapers throughout the Union, even in the odd corner of the Confederacy. One gang of b’hoys was said to have strolled nonchalantly into a restaurant, ordered themselves a fine meal, knocked over the tables, and smashed the crockery, at the end of their romp cheerfully telling the proprietor that he should charge the whole bill to Jeff Davis. Another group swaggered over to the National Hotel, treated the barroom to a few rounds of drinks, “and tendered three cheers for the Union as payment in full.” Still others raided cigar shops and liquor stores, bowling over any unfortunate policeman who tried to interpose himself. Wild rumors of sexual outrages circulated, “terrifying all the maiden antiques of the city for several days,” as Hay dryly put it.21 Even some of the b’hoys’ Union comrades kept their distance: “I fear we shall stand a poorer chance with these fellows than with the Southerners,” a Massachusetts soldier wrote home.22
Barely twenty-four hours after his triumphant arrival, Ellsworth found himself compelled to place an apology in the newspapers, explaining that the “Regiment of Zouaves were recruited in great haste,” and promising that although a few miscreants had found their way into the ranks, they would be sternly dealt with.23 It could not have pleased him that his gallant b’hoys had already acquired the sarcastic new moniker “Ellsworth’s pet lambs.”
Within the week, however, the pet lambs were given a fortuitous oportunity to redeem themselves. In the early-morning hours of May 9, a liquor store on Pennsylvania Avenue caught fire. Before long, the flames had spread to a second building and were licking against the walls of a third—one of the many lesser offshoots of the Willard Hotel. A couple local fire companies arrived and tried fecklessly to quench the flames. At last the cry went up for the Fire Zouaves. Within minutes, the red-shirted b’hoys had leapt out the windows of the Capitol and were rushing pell-mell down the avenue, pausing only to break into an unattended firehouse and make off with its engine. When they reached the Willard, it was filling rapidly with smoke, and the tarred roof was in imminent danger of catching fire. The New Yorkers called for ladders and, discovering that there were none, promptly formed a human pyramid and clambered six stories to the top of the hotel. Some hauled up a hose, while others grabbed washbasins, tubs, and chamber pots from the guest rooms and filled them with water to soak the roof. One particularly agile and fearless Zouave hung upside down from the cornice, as a comrade held him by the ankles, to hose the burning liquor store from the best possible angle. In no time, the fire was quenched, the hotel was saved, and hundreds of onlookers and evacuated guests cheered lustily for the boys from New York.
As the last flames flickered out, an upstairs window opened and a gray-haired man peered out curiously. The crowd redoubled its cheers—for the man was none other than Major Robert Anderson, who had arrived in the capital several days earlier to meet with General Scott, Secretary Cameron, and the president (who had rewarded his heroism by offering a lengthy leave of absence from active duty). After Sumter, apparently, he would let no mere hotel fire disturb his rest. After a quick wave to the crowd and salute to the Zouaves, Anderson closed the window again and returned to bed.
The next day’s newspapers were, of course, full of the story, and Harper’s Weekly, the leading national magazine, soon blazoned its cover with a full-page woodcut of the brave fire b’hoys silhouetted against a sheet of flame, while the Stars and Stripes waved implausibly above them, unscathed. In the highly charged atmosphere of wartime, unconfirmed reports buzzed across the country of Confederate arsonists—a logical assumption, The New York Times opined, since the hotel “has so often sheltered good and loyal Republicans.”24
Further enhancing their new dignity, Ellsworth’s New York recruits were now no longer mere volunteer militiamen but sworn soldiers of the United States. The day before the hotel fire, the entire regiment had gathered to take the oath of national service. Those witnessing this ceremony would not soon forget it. Late that afternoon, on the east side of the Capitol, the thousand men formed a square around the marble statue of Washington. At a signal, they straightened to attention and their colonel stepped forward to address them. He began with a stern denunciation of those whose conduct had disgraced the regiment, and vowed that any doing likewise would be sent home in irons forthwith. Then Ellsworth’s tone changed. Here is how Hay, writing later that same night, recorded his words:
You are now about to be mustered into the service of the United States, and are the first regim
ent who will pledge yourselves not for thirty days or sixty days, but for the war! (Tremendous applause, and nine loud, long, and hearty cheers.) Now if any man of you has the desire to back out, wants to leave this glorious war and go home, now is the time. Let him sneak away like a hound, and crawl over the fence and be off! (Cries of “No!” “No!” “Not one!” and three cheers for Colonel Ellsworth.)
Then, facing the Capitol, the men lined up in two rows across the entire width of the grounds. As the roll was called and each answered, a carriage drew up with the president, leading by the hand his younger son, Tad. Lincoln walked slowly along the row of soldiers, father and son inspecting each man as they passed.25
At last, two officers of the regular army stepped forward to administer the oath. One was the craggy, white-haired General Lorenzo Thomas, still dressed in the uniform of a colonel, having received his brigadier’s star only that morning. The other was a tall officer, stately and perhaps somewhat pompous-looking, with an out-thrust chest and lovingly tended Napoleon beard. This was Major Irvin McDowell, then commanding the troops guarding the Capitol. (In two months’ time, occupying a more exalted rank, he would be forever linked with this regiment in front of him, and with a catastrophic summer afternoon at Bull Run.)
There was another, humbler detail that Hay recorded that night. As he stood near the regimental flags, the proud standards that Mrs. Astor and Laura Keene had bestowed on the troop, he saw one of the Zouave color guards wrap his arm affectionately around a flagpole, as if he were embracing an old friend.
“The red, white, and blue! God bless them!” the man told Hay. “We boys is going to fight for these pieces of cloth till we die!”
Another added, “We’re going to have one more flag when we come back. It’ll be the flag of secession, nailed on the bottom o’ this flag staff.”26
DAYS OF WAITING FOLLOWED: not the languid expectancy that was the local specialty but an atmosphere of preparatory tension. Ellsworth seemed to be everywhere around the city, incessantly pestering officials for better arms and equipment. He was thin as a greyhound, his voice hoarse from the incessant shouting of drill commands. A curious civilian spotted the little colonel bounding into the lobby of the Willard with an enormous revolver flapping at his belt. Indeed, Ellsworth seemed to go everywhere armed as if ready at any moment to engage in single-handed combat against a grizzly bear. In addition to the revolver, he wore both an elaborately gilded officer’s sword and a more businesslike bowie knife, its blade more than a foot long, the kind jocularly known as an “Arkansas toothpick.” An amused Hay remarked that it looked as though it might easily “go through a man’s head from crown to chin as you would split an apple.”27
No task was too trivial for him. One newspaper correspondent wrote that at one moment, he would be seen marching at the head of his troops, and the next, “assisting a colored servant to carry a box of muskets across the room,” or showing a raw recruit how to fasten his knapsack. One fine Sunday afternoon, he was even spotted, in his billowy red Zouave shirt, playing a game of baseball with his men.28 Although barely twenty-four years old (he had celebrated his birthday the eve of the attack on Sumter), the colonel was already winning the affection and respect of the hardened New York firemen, who seemed willing to overlook that he had never bloodied his knuckles in a Bowery brawl, nor ever heard a gunshot fired in anger.
Much of Ellsworth’s boyishness remained, not just in his romantic approach to soldiering but in his quickness of affection and his longing for family. His parents still lived in their village in upstate New York; he had hardly seen them in years. The day before the regiment had left from New York, his mother had made her way down to the city and come to the Astor House, amid the bustle and fanfare of departure, to bid her only son farewell. Elmer’s much-loved brother, Charley, had died in Chicago the previous summer, just before the cadets set out on their tour.29
The Lincolns had become, in a sense, surrogate parents. Any free moment usually found Ellsworth at the White House. When the president and Mrs. Lincoln were unavailable, he would be romping through the corridors with Willie and Tad, or horsing around with Hay, Nicolay, and Lincoln’s other young aides.* One afternoon, he was in the office at the Executive Mansion, spiritedly showing a presidential secretary, William Stoddard, how to drill with a carbine Zouave-style, when he twirled the gun too close to a window. The two young men made up a far-fetched story to explain the broken glass: an assassin had been lurking in the shrubbery outside, they said, and, mistaking Ellsworth for the president, had fired a bullet through the windowpane.30
On other occasions, Ellsworth would join the Lincolns in peering curiously across the river at the large rebel banner that had mocked them for a month from the skyline of Alexandria. Afterward, some would say that Mrs. Lincoln had begged him to tear it down as soon as he and his troops reached Virginia, although others disputed this.31 For some anxious Unionists, that flag was becoming a symbol of the administration’s slowness to move against the gathering forces of the Confederacy. When one visitor to the White House, the radical abolitionist Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, pointedly complained to the president about the banner still waving there after so many weeks, Lincoln replied that he should not expect to see it waving much longer.32
Finally, the awaited order came. For days, Northern newspapers had been full of reports that a federal advance into Virginia was imminent. (“Secret Military Moves on Foot!” blared a headline in the irrepressible New York Herald.) Union and Confederate forces faced off across the Potomac, with opposing sentries posted just a few hundred yards apart, at the ends of the two bridges that spanned the river. Alexandria, the railway hub of northern Virginia—and a secessionist stronghold within sight of the capital—was the logical point of attack. And there was no overlooking its port as a potential haven for Confederate smugglers or privateers. Since early May, the federal gunboat Pawnee had lain just off Alexandria’s wharves, its full broadside of nine-inch cannons aimed at the town.33
On May 23, Virginians voted in a special referendum to ratify the state’s secession—the final step in leaving the Union. That night, before the last votes had been counted, federal troops gathered on the banks of the Potomac, and the first major Northern incursion into rebel-held territory was under way.
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, the planks of the Long Bridge, four miles above Alexandria, resounded with the rhythmic tramp of crossing infantry. Several miles upstream, Union cavalrymen were riding across the Chain Bridge. The plan was for these troops to approach the town overland from the north, while a smaller amphibious force crossed the river by steamer to land directly at the waterfront. Men from New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Massachusetts were making their way into Virginia.
It was a balmy, summer-like night: “mild, dewy, refulgent,” wrote Theodore Winthrop, whose kid-glove New York regiment was among the advancing infantry. The pale light of a full moon glinted off newly burnished bayonets and sabers. Scarcely a whisper was heard among the troops, only occasionally the muffled command of an officer. So silent was this crossing of thousands that on the shore behind them, the darkened capital slept; only William Seward, intent as ever on seeing and knowing as much as he could, had come down to survey the operations intently from the Washington end of Long Bridge.34
Ellsworth and his Zouaves were still in camp, on a rise just beyond the southeastern edge of the city. Despite the late hour and the hard work to come, the men went about their battle preparations quickly and almost gleefully, breaking out every so often into snatches of patriotic song. At last, the b’hoys were going to get the fine bare-knuckle fight they had been itching for. They checked and cleaned their new rifles, which had been fitted with saber bayonets: broadly curving steel blades that could, in an instant, turn a gun into a spear. When all was ready, the colonel gathered them for a few words of exhortation—no doubt the kind of night-before-the-battle speech he had been rehearsing in his mind since his boyhood in Mechanicville—and then told them to retire to t
heir tents for a couple of hours’ rest. Ellsworth himself sat up writing at his camp table, scribbling orders to his company commanders before turning to a more solemn task: composing letters to his parents and his fiancée, to be opened in the event of his death. Then he buttoned up the coat of his dress uniform, and at the last moment pinned to his chest a gold medal that had been given him the year before, during the Chicago cadets’ summer tour. Non solum nobis, sed pro Patria, the Latin inscription read: “Not for ourselves alone, but for our Country.”35
The Fire Zouaves had been chosen to carry out the amphibious part of the attack—and, as seemed likely, to be the first troops that would encounter enemy forces. At two o’clock in the morning, a navy captain arrived to tell Ellsworth that three vessels—the steamers James Guy, Baltimore, and Mount Vernon—were ready to carry them across, accompanied by a couple of launches from the USS Pawnee, which awaited them at anchor off Alexandria. The moon was now shining at its fullest: “bright and handsome as a twenty-dollar gold piece,” one soldier thought, while another would later recall that you could write a letter by its light. Many of the Zouaves, following their commander’s example, were doing just this, penning hasty notes to loved ones, which they tucked into knapsacks as they made their way down to the river.36
Another man present was busy scribbling as well: Ned House, a newspaper correspondent for the New-York Tribune. Though barely older than Ellsworth, House was one of the most ambitious and intrepid of Greeley’s protégés: eighteen months earlier, at John Brown’s execution, he had (at least by his own account) disguised himself as an army surgeon and managed to get a place standing on the scaffold just a few feet from the condemned man. His firsthand report in the Tribune—including all the ghastly details of Brown’s body jerking at the end of the rope—had shocked Northern readers.37 Now, getting wind of the impending attack on Alexandria, House had tried to talk his way past Northern sentries on the Long Bridge, and, failing this, hastened to the Zouave camp, attaching himself to Ellsworth’s regiment. It was a decision he would not regret. Watching the soldiers leave for battle, he found himself stirred by the sight: “the vivid costumes of the men—some being wrapt from head to foot in their great red blankets, but most of them clad in their gray jackets and trowsers and embroidered caps; the peaks of the tents, regularly distributed, all glowing like huge lanterns from the fires within them; the glittering rows of rifles and sabres; the woods and hills, and the placid river . . . and all these suffused with the broad moonlight.”38
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