11. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 92.
12. Ibid., p. 43.
13. Ibid., p. 37.
14. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007), p. 491; James B. Whisker, The Rise and Decline of the American Militia System (Selinsgrove, Pa., 1999), p. 331.
15. Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Tradition in America (Boston, 1968), p. 226.
16. Luther E. Robinson, “Elmer Ellsworth, First Martyr of the Civil War,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1923, illus. facing p. 111.
17. W. J. Hardee, Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (Philadelphia, 1855).
18. [John Hay], “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.
19. See, e.g. [Jeremiah Burns], The Patriot’s Offering; or, the Life, Services, and Military Career of the Noble Trio, Ellsworth, Lyon, and Baker (New York, 1862), p. 9.
20. Robinson, Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 112–13; Martha Swain, “It Was Fun, Soldier,” American Heritage, vol. 7, no. 5 (Aug. 1956).
21. See, e.g., Chicago Press and Tribune, June 6, 1859.
22. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 2, 1896.
23. Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1860.
24. Quoted in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 28, 1860.
25. E. E. Ellsworth, Manual of Arms for Light Infantry, Adapted to the Rifled Musket, with, or without, the Priming Attachment, Arranged for the U.S. Zouave Cadets, Governor’s Guard of Illinois, n.d., n.p. [Chicago, 1860], pp. 15–17.
26. Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1860.
27. Undated [1859–60] clipping in scrapbook, History of U.S. Zouave Cadets, G. G. Military Champions of America, 1859–60, n.p., Library of Congress General Collections, UA178.Z8.H6.
28. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 267.
29. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, p. 71; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, pp. 272ff.
30. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, pp. 97, 427; John J. McDonald, “Emerson and John Brown,” New England Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3 (Sept. 1971), pp. 386–87 n.
31. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, pp. 400–01.
32. Ibid., p. 356.
33. Ibid., pp. 90, 369.
34. Ibid., p. 348; Charles Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth and the Zouaves of ’61 (Chicago, 1925).
35. Eighteen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe, in his first published poem, Tamerlane (1827), rang out a challenge to his elders that could have been a battle cry for the rising generation: “I was ambitious—have you known / The passion, father? You have not.”
36. For the culture and experiences of young men in nineteenth-century America, see especially E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to Modern Era (New York, 1993); as well as Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, 1999); and Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 2006).
37. Whitman knew personally what it was like to be a solitary young man—and boy—in the city. When he was only about thirteen, in the early 1830s, his struggling parents moved from Brooklyn back to rural Long Island, and Walt remained alone to seek his fortune.
38. Early-nineteenth-century Americans above the age of fourteen consumed an average of 6.6 to 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol each year. The average at the turn of the twenty-first century was about 2.8 gallons. Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933 (Chicago, 1998), p. 7.
39. See Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2003), Introduction and chap. 1.
40. Emerson’s lecture was reprinted in The Dial, April 1844.
41. Cleveland Morning Leader, n.d. [July 1860], Library of Congress scrapbook.
42. Albany Evening Journal, July 14, 1860.
43. New York Herald, July 15, 1860.
44. Unidentified clipping, n.d. [July 1860], Library of Congress scrapbook.
45. New-York Daily Tribune, July 16, 1860.
46. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 28, 1860.
47. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 7.
48. “Our New York Letter: The Zouaves in New York,” unidentified clipping in Library of Congress scrapbook, July 14, 1860.
49. Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth, p. 94; misc. clippings in Library of Congress scrapbook.
50. “The Zouaves,” clipping in Library of Congress scrapbook, n.p., n.d.
51. Charles Dickens, “Naval and Military Traditions in America,” All the Year Round, June 15, 1861.
52. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, p. 245.
53. New-York Tribune, July 16, 1860.
54. [John Hay], “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.
55. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 28, 1860.
56. The simile is John Hay’s. See “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.
57. Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth, p. 97; Daily National Intelligencer, Aug. 6, 1860; Washington Star, Aug. 6, 1860.
58. New York Herald, Aug. 5, 1860.
59. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 4–5; Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth, pp. 106–07.
60. “Springfield, Illinois,” map drawn by A. Ruger, 1867.
61. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 6–7.
62. Quoted by Ellsworth in a letter to his fiancée, Carrie Spofford, in Ingraham, Elmer E. Ellsworth, p. 54.
63. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 163.
64. Ibid., pp. 163–64.
65. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, p. 174.
66. John Hay, “A Young Hero. Personal Reminiscences of Colonel E. E. Ellsworth.” McClure’s Magazine, March 1896, p. 354; Stephen Berry, House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War (Boston, 2007), pp. 55–56.
67. Hay, “A Young Hero.”
68. Illinois State Journal, June 3, 1861, reprinted in Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Carbondale, Ill., 1998), p. 69.
69. Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1887.
70. Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.
71. John Langdon Kaine, “Lincoln as a Boy Knew Him,” Century Magazine, vol. 85, no. 4 (Feb. 1913), p. 558.
72. Kaine, “Lincoln as a Boy Knew Him,” p. 557.
73. Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 13, 1861.
74. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 221–26, citing an undated article in the Chicago Times.
75. Carl Schurz to his wife, Apr. 17, 1861, in Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841 to 1869 (Evansville, Wisc., 1929).
76. Many Union regiments in these early days of the war, and throughout the months that followed, wore gray. It wasn’t until the following year, after a few ugly incidents in which federal troops fired on their own comrades, that blue was adopted as the standard dress throughout the service. See chap. 8, infra, and Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis, 1952), p. 22.
77. Kenneth Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1950), p. 291; New York Herald, Apr. 16 and 17, 1861; New-York Tribune, Apr. 16, 1861; Alan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, The Diary of George Templeton Strong (Seattle, 1988), p. 186. Bennett also published a news story denying all of the “false reports” in the local press about the riot, assuring readers that the only reason a crowd had gathered in front of the building was that New Yorkers were so eager for copies of the city’s most trusted source of news.
78. Mary A. Livermore, “War Excitement in Chicago,” in McIlvain, Reminiscences, p. 68.
79. John A. Page, “A University Volunteer,” in McIlvain, Reminiscences, p. 84.
80. Chicago Tribune, Oct. 27, 1910; “The Original Zouaves,” Chicago Post, n.d. [c. 1861], in New York State Military Museum clippings file, 11th New York Infantry, accessed at www.dmna.state.ny.us.
81. OR, series III, vol. 1, pp. 73, 106.
82
. Wiley, Billy Yank, p. 18.
83. Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale, Ill., 2000), p. 120; Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, III, vol. 1, pp. 140, 77–78, 175–76. In his reply to Pug-o-na-ke-shick through a state official, Secretary Cameron cordially thanked the chief, but regretted that “the nature of our present national troubles, forbids the use of savages.”
84. A. M. Green, “The Colored Philadelphians Forming Regiments,” in Letters and Discussions on the Formation of Colored Regiments, and the Duty of the Colored People in Regard to the Great Slaveholders’ Rebellion (Philadelphia, 1862), p. 3.
85. Harlan Hoyt Horner, Lincoln and Greeley (Westport, Conn., 1971), pp. 176–78.
86. James Nye, quoted in William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley: Voice of the People (New York, 1950), p. 244.
87. Lincoln to Ellsworth, Apr. 15, 1861, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953), vol. 4, p. 333.
88. New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861.
89. Harper’s Weekly, Apr. 11, 1857.
90. A. E. Costello, Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments, Volunteer and Paid (New York, 1887), pp. 559–702, passim.
91. Most fires broke out at night, when an overturned lamp or an unattended candle could set a building aflame.
92. Costello, Our Firemen, pp. 171–72; Paul C. Ditzel, Fire Engines, Firefighters: The Men, Equipment, and Machines from the Earliest Days to the Present (New York, 1986), pp. 65–69.
93. Costello, Our Firemen, pp. 610, 588.
94. Terry Golway, So Others Might Live: A History of New York’s Bravest (New York, 2002), pp. 85–91.
95. Luc Sante, Low Life (New York, 1991), pp. 77–78.
96. Costello, Our Firemen, pp. 125–44.
97. New-York Tribune, Apr. 18, 1861.
98. Reprinted in Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Apr. 22, 1861.
99. New York Herald, Apr. 18, 1861; Brooklyn Eagle, Apr. 20, 1861.
100. New York Herald, Apr. 19, 1861.
101. Brooklyn Eagle, Apr. 20, 1861; New York Herald, Apr. 18, 1861.
102. New York Herald, Apr. 30, 1861.
103. New York Herald, Apr. 21, 1861; James McPherson, Battle-Cry of Freedom, p. 327; John Hay, Apr. 20, 1861, in Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1999), p. 5.
Chapter Six: Gateways to the West
1. See Mark Twain’s famous firsthand description of a Pony Express rider passing in Roughing It (Hartford, 1872), pp. 70–72. For the landscape of the Carson Valley near Fort Churchill, see Sir Richard F. Burton, The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (New York, 1862), pp. 492–93; Horace Greeley, Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (New York, 1860), pp. 272–76. For details of the Overland Telegraph Company operations in the spring of 1861, see James Gamble, “Wiring a Continent,” The Californian, vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1881), pp. 556ff; Carlyle N. Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” master’s thesis, Iowa State University, 1937, esp. chap. 4.
2. National Register of Historic Places Inventory, Nomination Form, “Fort Churchill,” 1978.
3. San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 27, 1861.
4. Christopher Corbett, Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (New York, 2003), pp. 87–88; Twain, Roughing It, pp. 70–71; Daily Evening Bulletin, May 29, 1861.
5. Southerners opposed the act’s passage, fearing—correctly—that the line would take a northern rather than a southern route (Klise, “The First Transatlantic Telegraph,” pp. 26–29).
6. Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States (Princeton, 1947), pp. 348–58.
7. Ibid., pp. 290–92; Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” p. 37.
8. Jeptha Homer Wade Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, passim; Gamble, “Wiring a Continent.” Wade acted as Sibley’s agent in San Francisco.
9. “Across the Continent,” Continental Monthly, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1862); Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York, 2002), pp. 210–19, 262; John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 (Urbana, Ill., 1979), pp. 240–43, 300–01.
10. The projected Russian-American telegraph ended up reaching only as far northwest as Hazelton, British Columbia. Work stopped abruptly in 1867 after Sibley’s rival, Cyrus W. Field, opened the first successful transatlantic line. The project, however, was an important factor in the United States’ acquisition of Alaska. Cf. John B. Dwyer, To Wire the World: Perry M. Collins and the North Pacific Telegraph Expedition (Westport, Conn., 2001).
11. Gamble, “Wiring a Continent.” The actual work on the western portion of the line was undertaken by a new firm, the Overland Telegraph Company, in which various California lines participated but with Sibley as the controlling investor. As soon as construction was completed, the short-lived company—along with all the previously autonomous California ones—was absorbed into Western Union. Alvin F. Harlow, Old Wires and New Waves: The History of the Telegraph, Telephone, and Wireless (New York, 1936), pp. 311–12.
According to one account, President Lincoln met with Sibley early in 1861 and told him that the planned Pacific line was a “wild scheme” and that it would be “next to impossible to get your poles and materials distributed on the plains, and as fast as you build your line the Indians will cut it down.” George A. Root and Russell K. Hickman, “The Platte Route, Part IV, Concluded: The Pony Express and Pacific Telegraph,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 1 (Feb. 1946), p. 66.
12. Klise, “The First Transcontinental Telegraph,” p. 52.
13. Geoffrey C. Ward, The Civil War (New York, 1990), p. 17.
14. The 1860 census has been largely ignored by historians as a source of Southern anxiety during the secession crisis. For detailed early census results, see, e.g., New York Herald, Sept. 13, 1860.
15. Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 2, 1861 and Feb. 9, 1861; New York Herald, Sept. 6, 1860.
16. See David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York, 1999), esp. pp. 48–51, for Davis’s role; Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), p. 69.
17. Jessie Benton Frémont, “A Home Lost, and Found,” The Home-Maker, February 1892; JBF to Elizabeth Blair Lee, June 14, 1860, in Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence, eds., The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont (Urbana, Ill., 1993), pp. 229–30.
18. Selections of Editorial Articles from the St. Louis Enquirer (St. Louis, 1844), p. 5, quoted in Henry Nash Smith, “Walt Whitman and Manifest Destiny,” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4 (Aug. 1947), pp. 378–79 n. Benton’s vision, of course, did not account for the Spanish colonists, who had long since reached the Pacific—let alone for the Native American children of Adam who had been settled along its shores for millennia.
19. Elbert B. Smith, Magnificent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Philadelphia, 1958), pp. 47–48, 63–64, 68–69; Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John C. Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York, 2002), pp. 80–81.
20. It later turned out that the place where Frémont planted his famous flag—the tallest peak in the Wind River Range—was not, in fact, the highest point of the Rockies, though he believed it to be at the time.
21. Sally Denton, Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2007), p. xi; Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography (New York, 1987), pp. 82–83, 110–11; Jessie Benton Frémont, Souvenirs of My Time (Boston, 1887), p. 186. The question of how large a hand Jessie Frémont had in her husband’s books has been a point of contention almost since they were published
. Many people believed then that she was the sole author. The most careful recent historians conclude that the reports were a joint effort but that Jessie was responsible for much of the color, style, and literary touch that won them a large readership.
22. Early in his career, Benton always placed “Southern rights” ahead of antislavery principles, but by the end of his life, his views shifted to the point where he wrote to Charles Sumner congratulating him on his inflammatory “Crime Against Kansas” speech. William Nisbet Chambers, Old Bullion Benton: Senator from the New West (New York, 1970), p. 419.
23. Allan Nevins, Frémont: Pathmarker of the West (New York, 1928), pp. 387–89; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 180–81; Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2007) pp. 57–59, 102–3.
24. David Grant, “ ‘Our Nation’s Hope is She’: The Cult of Jessie Frémont in the Republican Campaign Poetry of 1856,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 2 (2008), pp. 187–213; Denton, Passion and Principle, pp. 243–48; Ruth Painter Randall, I Jessie (Boston, 1963), pp. 176–78. Colonel Frémont was such a popular figure that Southern Democratic leaders had previously offered to make him their party’s standard bearer, on the condition that he pledge not to oppose the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This he refused to do—after a long discussion with Jessie—even though he knew that whomever the Democrats nominated that year would be almost certain to win the presidency. Nevins, Frémont, pp. 424–25.
25. Richards, California Gold Rush, pp. 93ff.; Robert J. Chandler, “Friends in Time of Need: Republicans and Black Civil Rights in California During the Civil War,” Arizona and the West, vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 319–21; Imogene Spaulding, “The Attitude of California to the Civil War,” Historical Society of Southern California Publications, vol. 9 (1912–13), p. 106.
26. See Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 105.
27. See Joseph Ellison, “Designs for a Pacific Republic, 1843–62,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 (Dec. 1930), pp. 319–42.
28. Spaulding, “The Attitude of California,” p. 108; San Francisco Herald, Jan. 3, 1861.
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