His early life, Ellsworth would write as an adult, seemed to him nothing but “a jumble of strange incidents.” He was a child who seemed to live half in the gritty reality of his physical surroundings, half in a dream world of his own creation. Sometimes he cadged paint from a wagon shop in the village and daubed scenes onto a scrap of board or an old window shade. One of these has survived; it shows a forest-fringed river that might have been the nearby Hudson but for the turrets and spires of Arthurian castles rising along its banks. In summer, he wandered among the “green old hills” above the actual river, and in winter, he skated on the Champlain Canal, perhaps developing there the ease of movement that would later mature into a kind of balletic grace.5 His schooling must have been intermittent, and when he did attend, he was often teased; the other children nicknamed him “Oyster Keg,” on account of both his size and his father’s ignominious occupation. The boy learned to defend his honor with his fists.
Occasionally, though, the larger world offered glimpses of a reality nearly as glamorous as his painted fantasies. Malta lay astride the road to Saratoga Springs, a watering place popular with the officers and cadets of West Point, and in summer, the sprucely uniformed soldiers (with fine young women at their sides) must have passed through the village in hired carriages on their way to the nearby resort. For the watchful boy, the sight must have seemed a visitation from an imagined country. Many years later, Ellsworth’s aunt would recall him making forts out of loose bricks and shaping mud into breastworks; wooden blocks represented American soldiers and enemy redcoats.
His grandfather, George Ellsworth, had been a teenage militiaman in the Revolution, and although George’s pension application from the 1830s reveals that he was illiterate—he signed the document with a quavering X—it also shows that in old age he could still recount vivid tales of battling Tories and Indians along the Hudson Valley.6 Elmer’s grandfather died when the boy was not yet three, but the old veteran’s widow survived him by many years, and probably shared the stories she knew. The rocky slopes and tidy Dutch towns above the Hudson seemed themselves to tell tales of the many famous deeds they had witnessed. A boy with Ellsworth’s active imagination, looking out over the placid landscape of fields and pastures, must sometimes have felt as if the cannons were still booming and the tomahawks still flying in the forests, somewhere over the next line of hills.
When the boy was about eleven, his family moved to Mechanicville, a larger town with its own railroad station. Peddling the New York papers through the aisles of the crowded passenger cars, he must have scanned reports of the Mexican War and its aftermath, and of the liberal, nationalist revolutions in Europe, some of them sparked by student agitators not much older than he.7
Perhaps because of these colorful stories in the penny papers, or perhaps from his boyhood sightings of West Point cadets, Ellsworth’s dreams had early on taken a military cast. He organized the local boys into a militia company and somewhat grandiosely dubbed it the Black-Plumed Riflemen of Stillwater, the name stolen from a pulp novel he’d read about the Revolutionary War.8
Soon he was absent from home with increasing frequency, until finally, latching onto a prosperous-looking elderly gentleman who’d taken an interest in him one day on the train, he followed the stranger off to New York City to work in his linen shop. This is where the biographical record suddenly stops.
But we do know that he turned up eventually—as perhaps he was bound to—in Chicago. That town was in its restless adolescence in the 1850s, a half-wild place where patches of prairie still showed like blank canvas among the two- and three-story office buildings, and the occasional wolf still strayed in from the forested shores along Lake Michigan, to prowl the muddy streets and plank sidewalks.9
Restless, too, were the young men who roamed lean and hungry along those avenues of flimsy buildings. From villages in Ohio and western Pennsylvania, from New York and the stony farms of New England, from Germany and Ireland and Sweden, they crowded into the rising metropolis of the great West. Some found work in the sawmills that ran incessantly, gnawing virgin timber into clapboard and railroad ties; others amid the stench of the stockyards. Sometimes the tideless river ran viscous with the blood of slaughtered beasts.10
A year or two before the outbreak of the war, Elmer Ellsworth was one of these thousands of young men, clerking and copying papers in a law office for meager pay, living on dry biscuits and water, sleeping on the bare wooden floor. It was a life so spartan that when he could get a pound or two of salted crackers to vary his diet, the occasion was worthy of note in his diary: “Am living like a King.”11 It was a statement of characteristic, wildly unrealistic, optimism. Through all the years of roving, wherever they had taken him, he had never lost his boyhood dreams of glory. In his free time, Ellsworth pored over volumes on military tactics and drill formations until he knew some of them by heart.12 Not long after his arrival in Chicago, he also joined a local militia, the Cadets of the National Guard, one of many such groups that drew in young men far from home and family, worn thin from hard work and striving, looking for anything solid to which they could fasten themselves.13
Today, in an era of full-time, highly professionalized national armed forces, it is hard to appreciate the vastly different culture of the nineteenth century, when for most Americans, volunteering for military service was more like joining a weekend bowling league than enlisting in the army as we know it. The colonial militia companies, which had provided the rank and file during the Revolution, had faded away in the succeeding decades, especially after the War of 1812 had proven them no match for the British army’s hardened veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns. But the Founding Fathers’ old vision of a United States without standing armies, in which citizen-soldiers were the first line of defense, still beckoned. In both cities and towns, men formed military companies that stood ready—at least in theory—to answer their country’s call in case of emergency. In practice, most of these units were scarcely trained and haphazardly equipped; some marched with sticks or cornstalks instead of muskets. Members paraded on the village green every Fourth of July, unfurling tattered banners that had been stitched by local maidens who were now wrinkled grandmothers. The last serious mobilization had been the one back in 1812. Each month or two throughout the year, the boys gathered for “drills” that were often simply excuses to get away from home and do some hard drinking.14 Larger towns and cities had rival companies: one militia for the Democrats and another for the Whigs; one for the Methodists and another for the Presbyterians; one for the Irishmen and another for the Germans. New York City even had several all-Jewish units.15
In the 1850s, however, Americans started becoming a bit more serious about their militias, marching in drills and parades with fresh ardor, and even making sporadic attempts at professionalism. The Mexican War, the nation’s most dramatic military victory since the Revolution, had just been fought and won. From Europe came reports of the glorious charges and sieges of the Crimean War, and of the nationalist struggles for independence. And closer to home, some Americans were sensing the approach of civil war and beginning to sharpen their swords—in both the North and the South.
Elmer Ellsworth does not appear to have been one of these. None of his surviving writings suggests much thought about slavery and abolitionism, about the bloody struggles in Kansas or the wild-eyed prophecies of John Brown. He seems, rather, to have approached military drills with the enthusiasm and relentless discipline of an athlete pushing himself toward the big leagues.
And, like a basketball genius from the mean streets of the Bronx, or a home-run hitter sprouting amid the cornfields of Iowa, the oyster peddler’s son from upstate New York turned out to be a natural. Quite soon—by the time he was nineteen, if not earlier—the Cadets had elected him their major. What was more, he quickly found himself in demand to serve as drillmaster for regiments throughout Chicago’s environs. A photograph probably dating to around this time shows him in the resplendent but queerly antiquated g
arb of a militia officer, a remnant of the previous century: plumed cocked hat, tight breeches, and swallowtail coat with white facings.16
It is easy to picture this confident young man putting the even younger privates through their paces, lifting his sword to bark the commands: Attention! Squad forward! Double quick—march!17 More difficult is imagining the splendid major returning each night to his hard lodgings and meager supper. Ellsworth hid his poverty from all but his closest friends; he would later tell of sitting in a restaurant with acquaintances and watching them feast on oyster stew, as he pretended that he had just dined so he could avoid buying a meal.18 Such reticence fed the aura of mystery around him. His Hudson Valley origins and military prowess fueled whispers that he had attended West Point and been expelled for some mysterious infraction, rumors that Ellsworth may or may not have disclaimed.19
Sometime in the late 1850s, however, Ellsworth had an encounter that rivaled any romantic tale he might have dreamt up. It happened, improbably enough, in a Chicago gymnasium. There he met one Charles DeVilliers, a French fencing instructor recently arrived in the city. Back in Europe, DeVilliers had served as an officer in the Zouaves, an elite fighting force named for a band of Algerian tribesmen renowned for their ferocity in battle. The French Zouaves copied the North Africans’ uniform—fez, baggy pants, and a loose jacket, “suited to rapid movement and fierce daring”—and developed a reputation both for their dashing appearance and for their fearsome use of the bayonet.20 Newspapers and illustrated magazines worldwide, Amer-ica included, covered the Zouaves’ exploits in the Crimea (where DeVilliers had served) and in Italy’s war of unification.21 How a French Zouave ended up in Chicago is still a mystery, except that all sorts of people ended up in Chicago in those days. In any event, it is no surprise that the young militiaman gravitated toward the older officer and insisted on learning the Zouaves’ distinctive tactics. Somehow, over the course of just months—in a miraculous transformation that Hollywood, had it existed yet, might have invented—the threadbare clerk became an expert fencer, gymnast, and drill instructor.
Before long, he was teaching those skills to others. The cadets’ regiment was a militia unit “of the old school,” one member recalled many years later, composed of young men who drilled in old-fashioned uniforms and bearskin hats, “ponderous, slow, and heavy.”22 It was also on the verge of bankruptcy; membership had been dwindling, perhaps due to competition from newer and more glamorous organizations. Ellsworth saw an opportunity. When he showed the militiamen the Zouave moves he had learned from DeVilliers, they were fascinated. Within a month or two, he was drilling them six nights a week, for hours at a time, and the unit had renamed itself the U.S. Zouave Cadets.23
The cadets’ devotion to their new commandant was all the more remarkable in light of the strictures he imposed. The new company, he told them, was to be not merely a military organization but “a source of improvement morally as well as physically.”24 No member was allowed to enter any drinking saloon, gambling hall, or “house of ill-fame,” on pain of immediate expulsion. Even playing billiards was off-limits, on the grounds that it might “naturally lead to drinking.” The preamble to these rules explained that while many militia groups existed “with no higher object than the mere pursuit of pleasure,” this one would be different.25 And remarkably, the more rigid Ellsworth’s strictures became, the more the men seemed to thrive under them. “The clerk from behind the counter, the law student from the books, the young man of leisure from his loiterings around town—all have lived under strict military discipline, self-imposed,” wrote one impressed visitor to the regimental armory.26
And so it was that on July Fourth of the following year, Chicagoans lined the shore of Lake Michigan to observe a wholly unanticipated spectacle. Some forty cadets in the traditional blue-and-buff uniforms of the eighteenth-century militias—Algerian Zouave–style attire had been ordered but didn’t arrive in time—gave a performance that was more like a gymnastics event (or a nineteenth-century version of Cirque du Soleil) than any military drill the onlookers had ever seen. Instead of forming neat lines, shouldering their guns, and marching straight ahead, these militiamen leapt and rolled and yelled, loaded muskets while lying on their backs, jumped up to fire them and then fell again, thrust and twirled their bayonets like drum majors’ batons—all with a beautiful and precise synchrony. “The cadets are not large in stature, but athletes in agility and strength, moving at the word of command with the quickness and precision of steam men,” one newspaper editor marveled.27
On the day before the Zouaves’ first performance, on the far side of the Appalachians—and unknown but to a few others—John Brown arrived, incognito, at Harper’s Ferry. His deeds in the months to come would electrify the country and the world. But so, too, would the sensation born that Independence Day beside Lake Michigan and soon to be sweeping beyond Chicago, across the Midwestern prairies and then past them, throughout an unquiet land.
AMERICA HAD ALWAYS HARBORED a deep ambivalence about war, going back at least as far as the Revolution. General Washington had won the nation’s freedom on the battlefield, inspiring his men to many deeds of valor that would ring down through the ages, but after the final victory, when he resigned his commission and Congress disbanded the national army entirely, most citizens cheered. They associated standing armies with European monarchies, with troops of mercenaries and conscripts—“hirelings and slaves,” as Francis Scott Key called British redcoats in his famous anthem—maintained in support of tyranny. What could be less democratic, after all, than the use of force to sustain power and impose policy? In 1847, as American troops fought a war of aggression and conquest in Mexico, one young Midwestern congressman had warned against “the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.”28
Yet just a few months later, the same politician who had spoken those words took to the stump for Zachary Taylor—a leading general in the Mexican War whose only qualification for high office was “military glory,” since he had never held a civilian post of any kind. (Pro-Taylor campaign lithographs showed him gallantly leading the charge at Buena Vista; an anti-Taylor cartoon showed him perched atop a gigantic heap of skulls, clutching a bloody sword in his hand.) As for the Midwestern congressman himself, he would go on to be America’s greatest war president. That young legislator was, of course, Abraham Lincoln.29
Lincoln’s metaphor of the “rainbow that rises in showers of blood” perfectly captured his countrymen’s mixed feelings. Between the 1840s and the outbreak of the Civil War, however, more and more Americans, in the North as well as the South, were increasingly drawn to the gleam of that rainbow. The change was especially noticeable among antislavery advocates and other reformers. Theodore Parker, the famed Boston abolitionist, had once condemned war unequivocally as “an utter violation of Christianity.” But by the late 1850s, referring to the Garibaldian struggle in Italy, but also thinking of the growing conflict closer to home, he reflected: “All the great charters of humanity have been writ in blood, and must continue to be for some countries. I should let the Italians fight for their liberty till the twenty-eight millions were only fourteen million.”
In 1838, a dovish Emerson wrote in his journal: “a company of soldiers is an offensive spectacle.” By 1859, in the aftermath of the Harper’s Ferry raid, he was publicly calling John Brown “that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death.” By 1863, Emerson had accepted an appointment to the West Point military academy’s Board of Visitors.30
The 1850s saw an increasing spirit of militancy enter American politics and culture. The Wide Awakes who marched by the thousands for Lincoln in 1860 were simply the culmination of a trend, the logical outcome of the new republican ideology that prized manliness and unyielding idealism. It was a short step from such militancy to outright militarism. In retrospect, its seeds were clearly present even in th
e early work of avowed pacifists like Emerson: at the same time that he called for the outright abolition of war, he hailed Napoleon Bonaparte, the century’s most famous general, as the hero of “young, ardent, and active men, everywhere,” who had nobly transformed “old, iron-bound feudal France” into “a young Ohio or New York.” The sage failed to mention, of course, that in the laudable process of turning France into Ohio, the late emperor had also brought about hundreds of thousands of deaths.31
Indeed, despite the new republic’s professed aversion to war, military feeling often seemed more intense in the United States than it did among the European nations where Napoleon and Wellington had fought. Americans could lionize their military heroes as citizen volunteers, men who had freely chosen to lay down their lives for the nation. What higher expression of democratic values was there than willingly dying for the sake of one’s country and countrymen? It was the ultimate pledge of allegiance, an extreme subjection of individual interests to the greater good of the majority. Americans celebrated the volunteer military tradition for the same reason that they shunned their own nation’s peacetime standing army, a force whose ranks were filled by hirelings, if not quite by slaves. An Englishwoman, visiting Detroit in 1854 during the Michigan State Fair, was surprised at the martial tone of the festivities:
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