1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [115]
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,