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From town to town they traveled, riding the railways across the Upper Midwest, through New York and New England, down the Eastern seaboard. Their performances dazzled nearly all who saw them, and the trip quickly became a thousand-mile triumphal procession. After their drill in Cleveland, they marched to the city’s train station flanked by uniformed firemen, as torches flared and Roman candles arced across the dusk, with young girls running out into the street proffering bouquets of flowers to the cadets.41 At Albany, New York, little more than a week into the tour, twenty-five thousand people turned out to watch. One of the town’s most worldly—or, one suspects, just imaginative—local journalists claimed that he had “seen Lord Wellington review his veterans in Hyde Park; Napoleon, his Guards on Champ de Mars; and the Emperor of Russia, an Austrian army in Vienna,” but this “simple corps of citizen soldiers” from the edge of the prairies excelled them all.42

Just past daybreak the following morning, when the lads from Chicago arrived by Hudson River steamboat at the Cortland Street pier in Lower Manhattan, a cheering crowd already lined the wharf to greet them, as artillery pieces boomed official welcome to the greatest city on the continent. Local papers were already using words like “mania” to describe the public’s response to the Zouaves.43 The New York Atlas satirized the media frenzy:

They have come!

Who?

Again every man, woman, and child echoes the cry.

They have come!

Who?

Upon lightning wings the words reach the uttermost bowels of the Union, and millions reiterate them:

They have come!

Who?

…

The far-famed military organization, the Tan Bark Sheiks from Little Egypt, is in town.44

It would be more than a century before New Yorkers would swoon like this for a few out-of-town boys newly arriving in the metropolis.

After breakfast at the city’s finest hotel, the Astor House, the cadets shouldered their muskets and marched up Broadway to Union Square, then down the Bowery to Grand Street. Packed masses of spectators awaited them in front of City Hall, sweltering in the mid-July sun as policemen swung billy clubs left and right to make way for Ellsworth’s troop. The windows of City Hall were crowded with Tammany grandees, and lesser mortals scrambled precariously along the roof for a better view, while the surrounding trees, one spectator wrote, “bent under the load of unripe boys they bore.”45 To Ellsworth, whose last experience of New York City had been his brief stint as a teenage shopboy, this triumphant return must have seemed like a waking dream.

Oddly, few of the watching thousands could describe afterward exactly what was so enthralling about Ellsworth and his men. For all the ink that was spilled on the subject of the Zouaves that summer, it is still hard to find any satisfactorily visual account, though some give us quick, glancing snapshots of the action: the young soldiers running in tight formation behind their commander; turning exuberant somersaults and handstands; crouching all together in a tight pyramid of men, bayonets bristling out on every side like the spines of a porcupine.46 Newspapermen excused themselves by explaining that words could not fully capture the cadets’ rapid maneuvers as they formed squares, triangles, crosses, and revolving circles, shifting from one shape to the next with the dizzying fluidity of a kaleidoscope.47 “Now that the parade is over, my single impressions of the scene are indistinct,” one of them confessed just a few hours later, recalling only a sense of “geometrical precision,” of “action,” of “runnings, hoppings, bayonet-guardings, and thrustings.”48 Many commented on the Zouaves’ jauntily elegant uniforms, on their youthfulness and muscularity, on their air of high spirits with a dash of ferocity. Each man, one journalist wrote, was “as wiry, athletic, and agile as a squirrel”; others compared them to tigers, steam engines, and electric clocks.49

To convey the full splendor of the Zouaves