1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [124]
“Ellsworth read very little law that autumn,” Hay would recall.67 Instead, he almost immediately took to the campaign trail, firing up crowds in the barns and country schoolhouses of central Illinois, organizing the Republican cohorts just as he had organized the Zouaves.68 Lincoln is supposed to have called Ellsworth “the worst law clerk that ever lived, and the best executive to handle young men that I ever saw.”69 Still, it is clear that their relationship was based more on personal esteem than on Ellsworth’s political services; Lincoln, Hay wrote, “loved him like a younger brother.”70 The Zouave cadets’ drummer boy remembered half a century later: “Often I had seen Mr. Lincoln place his hand on Ellsworth’s shoulder or take hold of his arm in such a way as to show not merely liking, but sincere affection.”71
Scarcely any evidence survives of the two men’s specific interactions during this period, or in the months that followed. In contrast to the Zouave tour, when the press had chronicled almost his every move, Ellsworth was now out of the spotlight and in Lincoln’s shadow. One of the few detailed accounts has Ellsworth, shortly after his arrival in Springfield, sitting in the law office while Lincoln read poetry to him.72 It was one of Lincoln’s favorites, a composition by the obscure Scottish poet William Knox:
Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
Man passeth from life to his rest in the grave.
The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,
Be scattered around, and together be laid;
And the young and the old, and the low and the high
Shall molder to dust and together shall lie.
Four months later, when the president-elect bade farewell to Springfield—a parting that he did not know would be his last—Ellsworth was with him on the train.
THE FALL OF SUMTER must have seemed to Ellsworth like the last in a series of providential strokes, bearing him more swiftly toward glory than he could ever have dreamed. His meeting with the French officer in Chicago had made him a Zouave. His lucky meeting with the lawyer in Springfield had made him confidant to a president. And now, he thought, the shots in Charleston Harbor were about to make him a hero.
The question was not whether he would take to the field, but where. The day after the inauguration, Lincoln had already started working to get his young protégé an important—and well-compensated—post in the War Department, possibly even with the authority to oversee all of the nation’s local militias. But once the conflict with the seceding states broke out in earnest, and war fever swept across the North, there was little chance that Ellsworth would be satisfied with a desk job.
His rapid rise as the new president’s favorite had begun to make him enemies, however. The same press that had lionized him the summer before began to sneer at the pompous little “show business” drillmaster who thought he could vault over the army’s chain of command to become one of the most powerful officers in the country. And perhaps they were right. In the cold gray light of imminent war, there was something more than slightly ridiculous about the gamecock Midwesterner. The gaudy Zouave displays of the previous summer seemed frivolous, even silly. A leading Northern paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, which not long ago had poured forth rapturous column-inches about the Chicago cadets at Independence Hall, now suggested sarcastically that the self-anointed colonel might simply be packed back off to Illinois “to promulgate, privately,