1861

by Adam Goodheart

  Even some of the b’hoys themselves were moved, not just by the beauty of the night but by the sense that they were about to participate in history. “We believe it to have been the most impressive and beautiful scene we ever witnessed,” one of them wrote a few days later. “No length of years can wipe it from our memory—it is daguerreotyped on our mind forever.”39

  By the time the steamers neared Alexandria, the moon was sinking, and the glassy surface of the river had begun to gleam red with the rising sun. Crowding along the rails, the Zouaves scanned the waterfront for the enemy and, as they drew closer, spotted a thin line of Confederate sentinels, who fired their muskets into the air in warning. A few of Ellsworth’s men, thinking that these were the opening shots of the battle, let fly a volley in return. But the rebels were already scattering up the hillside, running “as if the Devil himself had been after them with a particularly sharp stick,” one Zouave thought. What the Union forces didn’t know is that those sentinels were simply rejoining their compatriots, who were withdrawing en masse from the town. The canny rebel commanders knew that they couldn’t hold Alexandria, and that the best strategy was to lure the enemy deeper into Virginia, and into the morass of war. The only risk was that some men might be captured by the advancing federals.40

  Meanwhile, aboard his steamer, Ellsworth discovered that his troops would not, after all, be the first to reach Alexandria. A small landing party of marines from the Pawnee was already rowing toward shore in a cutter, flying a white flag of truce. The junior naval officer in charge, a certain Lieutenant Lowry, quickly found the Confederate colonel and offered to let his entire rebel force evacuate unmolested in exchange for the surrender of the town. By the time Ellsworth leapt ashore at the wharf, Lowry was waiting to inform him that the deal—an incomprehensible one, to the Zouave colonel’s mind—had just been sealed. The Stars and Stripes already flew from the town flagpole. The Battle of Alexandria was won before it could be fought.41

  But it was not in Ellsworth’s nature to remain dejected for long. There was still work to be done, and laurels for his bold Zouaves to win. There were arms and matériel to be captured, railroads to be seized, telegraph lines to be cut. And in any event, he knew, this landing was only the initial stage of a glorious Union sweep across Virginia toward victory. It was the first morning of his war.

  His disembarking Zouaves must have felt equally let down by their first steps on enemy soil. Before them now was not the alien citadel that had menaced them from across the river but an ordinary American town, with white-steepled churches, rows of old-fashioned brick houses, and wide, muddy streets. An air of patrician dowdiness hung about the place, a sense that its best days were fifty years in the past. The wharves should have been starting to bustle with activity at this early hour, but the complete silence of night still reigned. Shutters were closed or curtains drawn in most of the windows. Wherever the townsfolk might be, they were not to be seen or heard. Only the long, high whistle of a steam engine in the middle distance broke the stillness, as a train pulled away from Alexandria’s station carrying the last of the Confederate garrison.42

  Even before everyone was ashore, Ellsworth ordered Company E of his regiment to march at all speed to the railway line and, albeit somewhat belatedly, tear up the tracks leading to Richmond. The other companies were to remain at the wharf and await further orders. The colonel himself would lead a small force into town and take control of the telegraph office. He chose an unusual group for this mission: there were Ned House of the Tribune; Henry J. Winser, the regimental secretary, who did double duty as an occasional correspondent for the New York Times; and the Zouaves’ chaplain, the Reverend E. W. Dodge. At first, Ellsworth planned to set out without any other men—Alexandria was officially under truce now, after all—but at the last moment, on Winser’s suggestion, he turned and called for a single squad of soldiers to follow.43

  The men jogged quickly up Cameron Street toward the center of town. But as soon as they rounded the corner toward King Street, Alexandria’s main thoroughfare, they halted. In front of them was a tall brick building, and hanging from the large pole atop it, stirring only slightly in the morning air, was the rebel banner that had taunted Washington for weeks, the one President Lincoln could see from his window.

  The Marshall House was an old hotel, really just a tavern with guest rooms upstairs, known among locals as a second-rate lodging for travelers. It was also known as a center of prosecession activity; the innkeeper, James W. Jackson, was one of the area’s most ardent secessionists. Jackson had a powerful six-foot build and a temperament always spoiling for a fight—once, when a Catholic priest made the mistake of offending him, Jackson beat the cleric senseless. Anyone foolish enough to utter antislavery remarks in his presence received similar treatment. Two years earlier, Jackson had been one of the first local militiamen to rush off to Harper’s Ferry in pursuit of John Brown. He returned having missed the fight, but bringing as a trophy one of the captured pikes with which Brown had planned to arm the slaves, as well as a wizened bit of flesh that he boasted came off the ear of Brown’s son, who had died defending his father. As soon as the other Southern states began leaving the Union, Jackson and a friend had commissioned a couple of local seamstresses to stitch up a banner some eighteen feet wide, blazoned with the clustered stars and three broad stripes of the first Confederate flag. Each time another state joined the rebellion, Jackson had the women add another star. On the afternoon of April 17, the day Virginia’s legislature voted for secession, a single large star was added to the center, and the banner hoisted on the forty-foot staff above his hotel.44

  On the night of May 23, just as Union troops were massing on the opposite shore to attack Alexandria, the Marshall House hosted a raucous party, complete with a brass band and carousing militiamen, to celebrate the statewide secession referendum. But the fun broke up before midnight and the militiamen dispersed. Jackson had gone to bed, and the hotel was now quiet.45

  Spotting the flag, Ellsworth ordered a sergeant back to the landing for another company of infantry as reinforcements, and then started trotting off quickly again toward the telegraph office. But suddenly, on some impulse, he stopped and turned back toward the steps of the Marshall House. His boyish pride, and perhaps a desire to impress the two journalists, had trumped military prudence. If he was going to have this trophy, he would cut it down with his own hands.46

  Ellsworth entered the hotel accompanied by seven men: House, Winser, Dodge, and four Zouave corporals. Immediately inside the front door, they encountered a disheveled-looking man, only half dressed, who had apparently just gotten out of bed. Regardless of who this person was, he was the first real, live Confederate that the New Yorkers had encountered up close. So Ellsworth demanded to know what the rebel flag was doing atop the hotel. The man replied that he had no idea—he was only a boarder. All the other guests seemed to be still asleep. Without further delay, the Union men hastened upstairs. Ellsworth stationed one soldier at the front door, another on the first floor, a third at the foot of the stairs. Revolver in hand, he bounded up the final flights toward the roof’s trapdoor, followed by the two newspaper correspondents, the chaplain, and a single Zouave armed with a rifle, Corporal Frank Brownell. Climbing a short ladder to the hatch cover, Ellsworth pushed it open and handed Winser his revolver before sawing away with a bowie knife at the halyards tethering the huge flag to its staff.47

  Finally the ropes gave way and the banner drooped, then collapsed almost onto the men’s heads, its defiant stripes suddenly a slack heap of red-and-white cloth. Ellsworth started pulling it through the open trapdoor, but it was so large he needed Winser’s help to get the whole thing inside. As the little group made its way back downstairs, the colonel still had most of the flag draped around his shoulders, while Winser followed behind, clumsily trying to roll it up over one arm as they descended.

  What happened next was too fast for any of the men to fully comprehend. Quickly rounding the turn between the third
and second stories, Brownell, House, and Ellsworth saw a figure step out onto the landing and level a double-barreled shotgun at point-blank range. Winser, struggling with his end of the flag, had barely heard the blast of the gun before he felt the cloth go suddenly taut as Ellsworth, still wrapped in its folds, pitched forward. Almost instantly there was a second, louder explosion, and Jackson—the assailant, the man they had seen downstairs—lurched back, his face torn away in a mess of gore, as Brownell thrust his saber bayonet again and again into the innkeeper’s body. Moments later, two men—one Northern, one Southern—lay dead on the staircase, their blood pooling across the dusty boards, soaking the shabby floorcloth, seeping into the folds of the fallen flag.48

  ACROSS THE RIVER, five miles away, the capital avidly awaited news. President Lincoln had hastened early to the War Department telegraph office for the first dispatches from the front lines. Ordinary Washingtonians, too, were waking up and learning that the invasion of the Confederacy had commenced—an invasion that, according to the Tribune’s editorial page, was sure to cut a victorious swath from Richmond to the Gulf of Mexico in a matter of months. District residents, peering from their bedroom windows, were disappointed not to see the smoke of musket fire rising above the Virginia shoreline or hear the deep rumble of artillery.49

  By morning’s end, however, a different sound echoed over the city’s rooftops, as dozens of bells tolled in mourning from church steeples and firehouse belfries. The steamer James Guy was pulling slowly into the Navy Yard with a body aboard, and everyone in Washington already knew who the dead man was.

  Ellsworth’s companions had brought his corpse into a room at the hotel and covered it with the Confederate flag. When reinforcements finally arrived, the body was wrapped tenderly in a red Zouave blanket. Six men formed a stretcher with their muskets to carry their dead colonel through the streets that he had jogged up just minutes before. The sun had only half risen over Alexandria, and eight hundred men at the wharf were still awaiting their colonel’s orders. Many of the fire b’hoys wept when they heard the awful news; others raged against the Alexandrian traitors and talked of burning the town. But the murder had been avenged in the instant of its commission. There was no battle to fight; no enemy to vanquish. There was only the blind, stupid fact of death.

  As reports flashed by telegraph across the Union, flags dipped to half-mast in cities, towns, and villages throughout the North. By early afternoon, in newspaper offices from Maine to Nebraska, editors were composing eulogies, reporters compiling obituaries, and poets penning elegiac verses that would crowd the next day’s newspaper columns.50 By the following evening, public gatherings in New York and other major cities offered grandiloquent testimonials and took up collections for the support of Ellsworth’s parents, left destitute by the death of their only child. Army recruiting offices were mobbed as they had not been since the first week of the war. At the beginning of May, Lincoln had asked for 42,000 more volunteers to supplement the militiamen called up in April. Within four weeks after Ellsworth’s death, some five times that number would enlist.51

  A torrent of emotion had been released, pouring out for a dead hero who had never fought a battle but rather, as one newspaper put it, had been “shot down like a dog.”52 There was more to the response than just nineteenth-century sentimentality, more than just patriotic fervor. Sumter’s fall had loosed a flood of patriotic feeling. Now, across America, Ellsworth’s death released a tide of hatred, of enmity and counterenmity, of sectional bloodlust that had hitherto been dammed up, if only barely, amid the flag waving and anthem singing.

  Indeed, it was Ellsworth’s death that made Northerners ready not just to take up arms but actually to kill. For the first month of the war, some had assumed that the war would play out more or less as a show of force: Union troops would march across the South, and the rebels would capitulate. Yankees talked big about sending Jeff Davis and other secessionist leaders to the gallows but almost never about shooting enemy soldiers. They preferred to think of Southerners in the terms that Lincoln would use throughout the war: as estranged brethren, misled by a few demagogues, who needed to be brought back into the national fold. Many Confederates, however, openly relished the prospect of slaughtering their former countrymen. “Well, let them come, those minions of the North,” wrote one Virginian in a letter to the Richmond Dispatch on May 18. “We’ll meet them in a way they least expect; we will glut our carrion crows with their beastly carcasses. Yes, from the peaks of the Blue Ridge to tide-water will we strew our plains, and leave their bleaching bones to enrich our soil.”53

  After the tragic morning in Alexandria, it suddenly dawned on the North that such talk had not been mere bluster. Newspapers dwelled on every lurid detail of the awful death scene, especially the “pool of blood clot, I should think three feet in diameter and an inch and one half deep at the center,” as one correspondent described it. The point-blank shotgun blast had torn open Ellsworth’s heart.

  On the Southern side, editorialists rejoiced at the slaying of Ellsworth, boasting that he would be only the first dead Yankee of thousands. “Virginians, arise in strength and welcome the invader with bloody hands to hospitable graves,” exhorted the next day’s Richmond Enquirer. “Meet the invader at the threshold. Welcome him with bayonet and bullet. Swear eternal hatred to a treacherous foe.” The Richmond Whig proclaimed, “Down with the tyrants! Let their accursed blood manure our fields.”54

  Although the Union rhetoric would never quite reach such levels, many in the North now began demanding blood for blood. The Zouaves, Hay wrote with solemn approbation, had pledged to avenge Ellsworth’s death with many more: “They have sworn, with the grim earnestness that never trifles, to have a life for every hair of the dead colonel’s head. But even that will not repay.” In the Tribune, Greeley demanded that the entire neighborhood surrounding the Marshall House be leveled. With the deaths of just two men, the unthinkable—Americans killing their own countrymen—became the imperative.55

  In Washington, Ellsworth’s body was brought to lie in state in the East Room of the White House, his chest heaped with white lilies. On the second morning after his death, long lines of mourners, many in uniform, filed through to pay their respects; so many thronged into the presidential mansion that the funeral was delayed for many hours. In the afternoon, the cortege finally moved down Pennsylvania Avenue, between rows of American flags bound in swaths of black crape, toward the depot where the Fire Zouaves had disembarked a few weeks earlier. Rank after rank of infantry and cavalry preceded the hearse, which was drawn by four white horses and followed by Ellsworth’s own riderless mount. Behind came companies of Zouaves, then a carriage with the president and members of his cabinet. But the figure that drew the most attention was Corporal Brownell, who walked alone behind the hearse with the bloodstained flag, the accursed trophy for which Ellsworth had died, crumpled up and speared upon the end of his bayonet.56

  At the depot near the Capitol, a black-shrouded funeral train waited to carry the iron coffin to New York, where tens of thousands lined the streets from Union Square to City Hall to view the cortege. As Brownell passed with the now famous Confederate banner, crowds overwhelmed the human barriers of straining policemen, breaking through and rushing into the street to clasp the young Zouave’s hand or touch a corner of the flag.57

  Even after Ellsworth’s body had, at last, been laid to rest on a hillside behind his boyhood home in Mechanicville, the nationwide fervor scarcely waned. Photographs, lithographs, and pocket-size biographies paying tribute to the fallen hero poured forth by the tens of thousands. Music shops sold scores for such tunes as “Col. Ellsworth’s Funeral March,” “Ellsworth’s Requiem,” “Col. Ellsworth Gallopade,” “Brave Men, Behold Your Fallen Chief!,” “Ellsworth’s Avengers,” “He Has Fallen,” “Sadly the Bells Toll the Death of the Hero,” and “Our Noble Laddie’s Dead, Jim,” the last referring to a remark that one sorrowing Zouave was supposed to have made to another on the morning of the killing
. For years afterward, enlisted men wrote letters home on stationery stamped with crude woodcuts of the colonel teetering on the steps of the Marshall House, clutching his wounded breast with one hand and the captured flag in the other—and invariably, a motto pledging vengeance to traitors. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of babies born in 1861 were named after him. One regiment, the Forty-fourth New York, even rechristened itself Ellsworth’s Avengers.

  The young colonel seemed to have been transfigured by death into a kind of national saint. Within hours of his killing, a New York World editor wrote of his “halo of martyrdom.” Significantly, Ellsworth became the first notable American whose body was treated with the newly discovered practice of chemical embalming. As he lay in state, mourners peering into his coffin were amazed to see that the boyish face looked, as one man wrote, “natural as though he were sleeping a brief and pleasant sleep”—or as though modern technology had sanctified his flesh, rendering it incorruptible.58

  As with a medieval saint, too, relics of his martyrdom became objects of veneration. In Alexandria, soldiers vied for pieces of the sacred flag within hours of the killing; it would have quickly been reduced to shreds had the Zouave officers not placed it under round-the-clock guard and threatened any man who approached it with thirty days’ imprisonment. By evening, the few pieces that some Zouaves had managed to obtain were being traded literally for more than their weight in gold. One man enclosed a bit of red cloth in a letter he sent to his family the next day, entreating his mother to “keep it under lock and key” and “let no one have even one thread.” “I tried hard to get a piece with his blood on it,” he added, “but could not.”59