Elmer E. Ellsworth - Citizen Soldier
The following remarks were given by Dr. Paul Loatman, Jr., City Historian,
at the conclusion of the Ellsworth Parade on May 21, 2000
There is a Scripture passage which comes to mind at a time like this. It is from Ecclesiastes and goes:
Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begot us. All these were honored in their generations, and they were the glory of their times. Some of them left a name behind them, so that their praises are still sung. Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name lives on for all generations.
The outline of Ellsworth's life used to be well known:
Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth was born to Ephraim Ellsworth and Phoebe Denton on April I 1, 1837 in the town of Malta. His grandfather George had fought in the Revolution, and growing up after moving to Mechanicville, young Elmer's dreams of military glory were probably fed by the surprising victory of the United States in the Mexican War in the 1840's. Although he wanted to go to West Point, Elmer's limited schooling and the family's inability to afford a private education made it impossible. He did organize the "Black Plumed Rifleman of Stillwater" in his youth and he read every book he could find on military tactics. At age 14, he got a job with a local grocer, took a similar job in Troy the following year, and by age 16 in 1853, had moved to New York City to work in a dry goods store.
During the next two years while living in New York City, Elmer attended military drill unit displays and exhibitions and continued his reading. In 1856, he moved to Chicago where by chance he met Charles A DeVilliers, a former surgeon in the French army in Algiers who had served with a Zouave regiment in the Crimean War in southern Russia in 1854. Zouave training and drill tactics now became the driving force in Elmer's life. He organized a number of units and while devoting many hours to drilling his charges, he established a pattern that characterized his whole career - his refusal to be paid for his services.
Ellsworth became engaged to Carrie Spafford, the daughter of a prominent Illinois banker who told him he could marry her when he could financially support a wife. He also told Elmer to study law, something which did not excite him at all, but he eventually was admitted to the bar after clerking in the office of Abraham Lincoln. In 1859, Elmer took the National Guard Cadets - a unit about to be disbanded - and turned it into a crack military drill regiment. Using Zouave tactics and his own ideals of temperance, athleticism, will power, and moral stamina, he made them the pride of the Chicago area. A close friend of his, later Secretary to Lincoln and President McKinley's Secretary of State, John Hay, said at the time that Elmer's voice, character, and poise made him a natural leader "either as a general or an orator." Meanwhile, as his fame grew, he continued the practice of refusing to be paid for his services. Ellsworth met Abraham Lincoln in December of 1859, and the following summer when he and his Zouaves toured 20 cities throughout the nation performing their spectacular drills, Ellsworth's fame led to his being asked to become a stump speaker on behalf of Lincoln's presidential candidacy. The unusually tall lawyer was hoping that the popularity of the unusually short military drillmaster would rub off on his candidacy. Ellsworth was one of two men who accompanied Lincoln to the polls when he cast his ballot in the 1860 presidential election, the other being his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon. When Lincoln was elected, Ellsworth accompanied him on the 1900-mile journey from Springfield to Washington, often serving as the impromptu master of ceremonies at the various community stops along the way during the trip which took more than 12 days to complete.
Lincoln planned on naming Ellsworth as head of the Bureau of the Militia, and among other things, he intended to send him to West Point with his Zouaves to demonstrate to the generals of the regular army how a real army should drill, and march, and fire. However, political realities such as the vested interests of the regular army prevented Lincoln from initiating his plan for creating a national militia. If Elmer was disappointed, he never let on, and unlike virtually every other person in Washington, DC at the time, he went out of his way to not ask Lincoln for any personal favors. The President once remarked that he was afraid to look under his bed in the morning upon arising for fear that someone lurking there would be waiting to ask him for a job.
Meanwhile, the Secession Crisis had boiled over into a full-fledged emergency on April 12, 1861, when South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter. In response, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to come forward to defend the national honor. Resigning his army post, Ellsworth went to New York City where he recruited a regiment of 1,100 men among the city's volunteer firemen, organizing the First Regiment, Fire Zouaves. Elmer believed that firemen were ideally suited for military service because they were used to danger, duty, and obedience, but other observers believed that these men were "as wild as wharf rats." At any rate, the men loved their little commander, and when they were mustered into the regular army, they became what many credit as the first volunteer regiment of the Civil War.
Ellsworth, meanwhile, was a regular visitor at the White House, and his zest for life and spontaneity in playing with the first family's two younger boys, Willie and Tad, were so refreshing that he stayed on for days at a time as a guest. Although he caught the measles from the Lincoln boys, he was glad that his presence seemed to do so much to lift the President's spirits and make him feel young.
The President and the nation confronted a new emergency when Virginia seceded from the Union on May 23, 1861 and the Confederacy moved its capital from Alabama to Richmond. Located across the Potomac from Washington, Alexandria had important rail connections to the new Confederate capital, and since it seemed only a matter of time before the rebels would mount cannons there and shell the White House and Congress, Lincoln and General Winfield Scott ordered a pre-emptive strike to take the city before these plans could be effected. Ellsworth led 1,000 men across the Potomac, helping to seize Alexandria the following day without firing a shot, gaining control of the railroads and cutting the telegraph to Richmond.
While mopping up the operations, the Colonel and a handful of men went to the roof of a hotel which had been flying the Confederate flag for a number of days as a symbol of defiance, a symbol Lincoln could see from the White House where he used a hand-held telescope. Coming down the stain with the flag in hand, Ellsworth was shot through the heart by the proprietor, Mr. Jackson, who in turn, was shot by one of Ellsworth's men. As he lay dying, a gold medal was found on his chest: "Non sol Nobis; Sed Pro Patrio...... Not for ourselves but for our country."
As word quickly spread about the death, Sen. Henry Wilson and a reporter approached Lincoln in the White House. "I cannot talk. Ellsworth is dead and it has unnerved me," he said. The President and the North were crushed. Lincoln ordered Ellsworth's remains to be taken to the White House where thousands paraded through as his body lay in state. The body was then sent to New York City where it lay in state at City Hall, following which it was taken by boat to Troy, then by train to Mechanicville where Ellsworth was buried (in what for a number of years was an unmarked grave.) The three-day mourning period and extensive public viewing of his body - a practice not common before this - gives rise to the belief, as our local Coroner, Tom Salvadore reminds us, that Ellsworth may be the first person in the U.S. to have been embalmed.
In 1871, James G. Thompson, a graduate of Ames Academy in Mechanicville gave a commencement address entitled: "The Unmarked Grave of Elmer Ellsworth." The speech caused great comment, and a group was then formed to erect a filling memorial, a job completed in November 1873, although the unveiling did not take place until May 27, 1874. The state legislature footed a good part of the bill; but subscriptions and a donation from the First Regiment Zouaves covered the cost of the monument.
When the Zouaves first went to Washington in April, 1861, the Willard Hotel, a famous watering hole for politicians and the press, caught fire, and in a spectacular feat of daring and rescue, the Zouaves doused the flames quickly before much ham was done, an act so impressive that the owner gave Col. Ellsworth $500 in gratitude. True to his personality, however, Ellsworth gave the money to the regiment to cover the cost of military decorations which might be earned by the Zouaves in any future action. What goes around, comes around, and the regiment donated what was left from that money to the monument fund in 1873.
Part of the monument inscription contains a note from the last letter Ellsworth wrote his parents the night before he died:
"I am content ... confidant that he who knoweth even the fall of a sparrow, will have purpose even in the fate of one like me."
Lincoln, heart broken, wrote Ellsworth's parents:
"So much of promised usefulness to one's country, and of bright hopes for one's self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall ... my affliction here is scarcely less than your own."
A year later, when Lincoln lost his son Willie to consumption, part of the unbearable grief was due to the fact that it reminded him again of the dearly departed Ellsworth.
WHY CELEBRATE ELLSWORTH? BECAUSE HE DIED?
Didn't thousands, tens of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of young men die in the Civil War? He, after all, was just one of so many what possible purpose is served by remembering the loss of this one short life?
Elmer Ellsworth is remembered because he embodied so many of the values we as a society hold dear. He was loyal to his family, to his friends, to his country. He recognized that there was a higher power guiding us, and that there are higher purposes in life than self-gratification and material gain. In fact, he was so much a Spartan and moralist that he was the antithesis of the self-centered narcissist so much admired today in popular culture.
But, at the same time, Ellsworth maintained a spontaneity, playfulness, and youthful exuberance which became such a relief to the new President facing the gravest crisis in our history that he was invited to live in the White House. Most importantly, Ellsworth had courage, not simply the physical courage of a military leader, but the moral courage of his own convictions.
With little formal education, with no material wealth, coming from an obscure small community not even incorporated as a village yet, he had dared to set foot onto the larger stage in the national arena because he implicitly believed that men should be judged on their talents, not on their status or station in life.
He was never afraid to support unpopular positions, including the one that said a nation could not be half slave and half free without corrupting the democratic values it so loudly professed tot the rest of the undemocratic world.
It is suppositional, but not outlandish, to imagine that growing up in Mechanicville, Elmer witnessed the railroad journeys of wealthy Southerners who traveled to Saratoga each summer with their liveried black servants and slaves in tow, and that there was something inherently wrong in the whole picture which must have struck him as unjust. Like his mentor, Lincoln, Ellsworth stood behind a political position which said it was wrong for one man to eat the bread earned by another man's labor. In the 1860s there was a $5 fine for shooting dogs and Republicans, Elmer's political party. While it may seem easy to support his positions today, let us not forget that one-third of the Presidents up to Ellsworth's day, and a large number of the members of the Supreme Court, owned slaves.
When push comes to shove, when you boil it down to its essences, Ellsworth was a man who stood for principles, a man who put himself in harm's way in defense of those principles, and in doing so, he paid the ultimate price. As long as our society is founded upon the ideals of the Declaration of Independence - holding self-evident truths that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we should continue to celebrate the short but well-spent life of Elmer E. Ellsworth.
So I close where I began, repeating the words of Ecclesiastes:
Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begot us. All these were honored in their generations, and they were the glory of their times. Some of them left a name behind them so that their praises are still sung. Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name lives on for all generations.