1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [123]
Ellsworth seems to have perceived in Lincoln, twenty-eight years his senior, a potential role model and father figure who had likewise risen from humble birth. “I believe that the influence of Mr L—— would do me great service,” he told his fiancée. “I mean the influence of his early example. He earned his subsistence, while studying law, by splitting rails.”64 On May 18, the night Lincoln was nominated for the presidency in Chicago, Ellsworth and some of his Zouaves celebrated by climbing onto the roof of the Tremont Hotel—adjoining the famous wigwam, where the Republicans had gathered—and hauling a howitzer up after them to fire off a salute. So exuberant was the little colonel that night, one cadet later remembered, that he nearly slipped off the hotel’s roof and broke his neck.65
As to the causes of Lincoln’s sudden, schoolboyish crush on Ellsworth, these are less immediately obvious. He was not one to develop intimacies easily, much less quickly. There is no surviving correspondence between them, and the only time Lincoln seems to have committed to paper his feelings for the younger man was in a single letter to Ellsworth’s parents, written almost a year later. Just as Ellsworth looked up to the self-made Lincoln, Lincoln must have seen something of himself in the struggling law clerk turned national hero, and in the Westerner challenging the silk-stockinged traditions of the East. Yet their differences probably drew him as much as or more than their similarities. It is difficult to imagine two specimens of American manhood more physically different than the long-limbed, stoop-shouldered, middle-aged lawyer and the trim soldier-athlete. Each man had his own charisma, to be sure, and each inspired intense devotion among the cadre of young men surrounding him, though in entirely different ways. In the end, Lincoln seems to have felt that Ellsworth complemented him, or perhaps even made up for parts of himself that were lacking.
In any event, something during the Zouaves’ short visit to Springfield in August apparently cemented the relationship between the two men. The following night, Ellsworth and his cadets returned to Chicago to find the entire city illuminated with torches, bonfires, and the flashes of rockets and Roman candles. They were escorted to the great wigwam itself, fêted and banqueted and lauded, with typical Victorian excess, until even their adulation-hungry leader must have had more than his fill. A few weeks later, Ellsworth resigned his command of the Zouaves. The cadets disbanded. Within a month, the erstwhile colonel had moved to Springfield and was a clerk once more—this time for the most famous lawyer in the country.
In the law office, Ellsworth found himself in the company of a lively group of ambitious young men surrounding the Republican presidential nominee, including the pair who would become Lincoln’s private secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay. He quickly managed to win the confidence of both of these very different personalities: the urbane, satirical Hay and the dour, Germanic Nicolay. Hay—a doctor’s son who had learned Latin and Greek as a boy before heading to college at Brown University—might have