1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [122]
Other times, other tastes. Ellsworth’s strict moralism, too, what seems to us his teetotaling Victorian priggishness, drew nearly as many plaudits as his curls. The press extolled him and his men as new moral exemplars of American youth. In a front-page article, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper declared that “the scope of the Zouave Cadet is to raise the standard of American freemen” and predicted confidently that if the movement caught on, “it would almost change the aspect of our great cities, and … vice, rowdyism, and bloodshed would disappear.”55 And indeed, though vice was not permanently banished from America, the movement did catch on. As Ellsworth crossed the country, new Zouave corps, brilliant in crimson and gold, blazed up like phosphoresence in the wake of a passing ship.56
Oddly, for all the talk of a “nationwide” tour, there was a large portion of the country—about half—that the Zouaves seem never to have even considered touring. On August 4, a steamboat carried them down the Potomac, past the sleepy port town of Alexandria, Virginia, whose citizens crowded down along the waterside to cheer as the vessel passed without stopping. It moored downriver, at the foot of the high bluff of Mount Vernon, where the Chicagoans disembarked for an hour or two to perform a tribute drill in front of George Washington’s tomb. That brief veneration of the patron saint of liberty and union was the only time they somersaulted on the soil of the South. They shortly steamed past Alexandria again on their way to the national capital, where President Buchanan greeted them in the East Room of the White House and then hosted a Zouave drill on the South Lawn, as photographers crowded in to capture the scene.57 Standing under the mansion’s portico, Buchanan delivered a polite speech of welcome, observing blandly that the cadets’ military prowess would come in handy in case the United States ever found herself at war against a foreign country.58
But the most important man to see the Zouaves that summer was a less obtrusive spectator, who came out to watch when they were almost home.
Just before its triumphal return to Chicago, the troupe made one final stop at the Illinois state capital, Springfield. Ellsworth’s men were met at the station by a local militia company, the Springfield Grays, who escorted them through the streets to the music of a marching band, as several thousand curious locals followed on foot and in carriages. Gentlemen in top hats and young ladies in crinolines crowded around a large empty lot on South Sixth Street, near the State Armory, to watch the Zou-Zous—as the American public had fondly begun to call them—perform the famous drill. The excited crowd had to be pushed back as the young cadets pantomimed bloodless gestures of war: aiming harmless rifles, dodging and parrying invisible foes, slashing the thin air savagely with their bayonets.59
Watching over the heads of the crowd was a tall, solitary man, who had strolled over from his law office five blocks away.60 Abraham Lincoln was, like Ellsworth, one of the most famous men in America that summer, but no one seems to have paid him much attention as he stood quietly beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree. This was Ellsworth’s hour. Lincoln must have watched intently as the spruce, boyish colonel, leaner now and suntanned after six weeks’ travel, stood at the head of his corps, his sword flashing in the midday glare as he led the cadets through their drill for the last time.61
Lincoln and Ellsworth knew each