1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [119]
I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of this land. In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American?40
Some years later—just about the time Ellsworth was learning to fence in a Chicago gymnasium—Abraham Lincoln took to the Illinois lecture circuit with his own variation on the Emersonian message, a talk that he called “Discoveries and Inventions.” Speaking before audiences at colleges and young men’s associations, he paid these listeners a characteristically wry, even sarcastic, tribute. “We have all heard of Young America,” Lincoln said. “He is the most current youth of the age. Some think him conceited, and arrogant; but has he not reason to entertain a rather extensive opinion of himself? … Men, and things, everywhere, are ministering unto him.” Thanks to global trade and modern inventions, he noted, any American youth of decent means lived like a virtual king, with the whole world catering to his every whim: he wore fabrics from England and France, drank tea and coffee from China and South America, smoked Cuban cigars and lit his home with oil from South Sea whales. “He owns,” Lincoln said, “a large part of the world.”
It was not just spoken words that summoned young men onto the global stage. Ellsworth’s generation was the first to grow up in the thrall of mass popular media: news sheets carrying the latest telegraphic dispatches, cheaply printed books about the heroic exploits of 1776 and 1812, illustrated weeklies chockablock with wood engravings of cavalry clashes, political rallies, and militia parades. By bringing the wide world and its pageantry into young Americans’ lives with such unprecedented immediacy, the new media of the 1840s and 1850s made once-distant adventures and opportunities seem achievable. They regaled readers with tales of far-off, yet newly accessible, California—an entire state of ambitious young entrepreneurs, drawn into the Gold Rush boom from every nation of the world, sometimes to gain fortunes and sometimes to lose their lives.
New horizons of possibility seemed to open on all sides in those final prewar years. The American press was also filled with even more outré tales of what were then known as “filibusters,” men whose exploits are nearly forgotten today. The filibusters were gangs of young freelance military adventurers who set out to invade, in the name of Manifest Destiny, various soft parts of Latin America: Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, northern Mexico. These soldiers of fortune sailed from American ports under fanciful flags of nonexistent republics, of which they imagined themselves the founding fathers.
Though nearly all these expeditions flamed out like so many cheap firecrackers—with the occasional timely assistance of a Latin American firing squad—the dream of foreign conquest kept its hold on the American imagination right up to the eve of Fort Sumter. Ellsworth himself, even as a penniless clerk, kept a map of Mexico pinned to his wall and sketched out plans of empire somewhere below the Rio Grande. But his rendezvous with destiny, manifest or otherwise, would happen closer to home.
THE LAST SUMMER OF THE DECADE, the last summer of peace, was the summer of the Chicago Zouaves. The men—a corps of sixty handpicked by Ellsworth himself, plus a small regimental band—left home at the