1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [121]
America’s Zouave fever even caught the attention of Charles Dickens, who was following the Chicago cadets’ exploits from across the Atlantic. “The individual action, the free agency of the Zouave drill, which is almost acrobatic, delight the Americans,” he commented.51 Dickens, who had toured the States twenty years before, was onto something important. What the Zouave drill demonstrated was how personal freedom could exist even amid military regimentation: a truly democratic way of soldiering.
The boys from Chicago caused Americans’ chests to swell with national pride. Over the past decade, they had sat on the sidelines while European armies clashed gallantly on the fields of Sevastopol and Solferino. Now, it seemed, their own republic was ready to take its part in that panoply. One spectator at the Zouaves’ performance in New York was inspired to write a poem. Its final stanza reads:
Your Zouave corps, O haughty France!
We looked on as a wild romance,
And many a voice was heard to scoff
At Algiers and at Malakoff;
Nor did we Yankees credit quite
Their evolutions in the fight.
But now we’re very sure what they
Have done can here be done to-day,
When thus before our sight deploys
The gallant corps from Illinois,—
American Zouaves!52
Many observers’ accounts betray an almost erotic excitement at the pure physicality of those men. In the early Victorian age, the idea that the human body could be simply that—a human body, strong and unconstrained—was radical and new in a way almost unimaginable in our own era obsessed with fitness and exercise. Here was a group of ordinary young Americans—law clerks and shop assistants, not circus acrobats, blacksmiths, or stevedores—who had decided to make their own bodies into beautiful and powerful machines, and not because they needed to hammer iron or lift barrels, or even defeat foes in battle, but for something like the sheer pleasure of it, simply, as one newspaper account put it, “to gain excellence in a certain direction for its own sake.” And through the good old Puritan virtues of discipline and self-restraint, through all those months of cold water, hard floors, and endless hours in the gym, they had succeeded. These young men, the newspaper declared, were the harbingers of a new American phenomenon: “muscle mania.”53
As for their captain, the penniless young striver from Mechanicville became, almost overnight, a sex symbol. That term wasn’t used at the time, of course, but it is no exaggeration. Never before had any American become famous and adored not for any particular accomplishments—not for being a poet or an actor or a war hero—but simply for his charisma.
Looking at the surviving photographs of him, it is difficult to discern just what all the swooning was about. A short man even by the standards of his time, Ellsworth seems almost dwarfed by his own elaborate uniforms, blooming profusions of plumed hats, sashes, epaulettes, and medals. Add his hippie-length hair and droopy mustache, and he might almost be a member of a 1970s rock band. His face still has an unformed quality, a postadolescent doughiness. The dry-goods store clerk lurks not far beneath the surface of the martinet.
Yet throughout that prewar summer, the nation’s eyes were on him. “His pictures sold like wildfire in every city of the land,” John Hay later remembered. “School-girls dreamed over the graceful wave of his curls, and