1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [126]
Amid all this glorious confusion, Ellsworth went up to New York, just three days after Sumter’s surrender, with a plan already formed in his mind. He arrived at 3 a.m., and as soon as the city began to stir, he began scouting the men who could help make his scheme a reality. One of the first places he called was in Printing House Square, at the office of Horace Greeley, the most important newspaperman not just in the city but in the country. Greeley was an unlikely power broker. With his round, bespectacled face above a fringe of long white whiskers drooping from the underside of his chin—more than a bit outré even in that era of exuberant facial hair—he looked like a cross between a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher and an elderly gibbon. During his long editorial career, Greeley had espoused, with equal fervor, causes as disparate as vegetarianism, spiritualism, and human-manure farming. Yet he also possessed a curious sense for the pulse of his times. Many said he had made Lincoln president. His New-York Tribune had banged its drum unceasingly for Honest Old Abe, while behind the scenes, Greeley brokered votes at the Chicago convention and personally helped draft the Republican platform.85 When the Southern states seceded, he was among the first to call for war without compromise. “Imagine Greeley booted & spurred with Epaulets on his shoulders and with a whetted blade in his hands,” scoffed one politician. “The idea … is too ridiculous to be thought of.”86 However improbable Greeley was as a warrior, though, his pen was as mighty as any sword in the Union.
Ellsworth struck Greeley as possessing an “unusually fine physique,” “frank and attractive manners,” and “great intelligence.” The editor must also have been impressed by a letter of introduction from the president that Ellsworth showed him. It was dated two days after Sumter’s fall, and expressed Lincoln’s great esteem for his protégé as both a military man and a personal friend.87
Still, the young officer’s proposal may at first have startled even the idiosyncratic Greeley. He wanted to raise his own regiment. But its members, this time, would not be law clerks and shop assistants. Instead, he said firmly, “I want the New York firemen.” In Washington, Ellsworth explained, the military authorities were “sleeping on a volcano,” and while they dithered about organizing and training the various state militias, the forces of rebellion might blow them sky-high at any moment. “I want men who can go into a fight now.”88 Despite any skepticism Greeley may have harbored, he put an article detailing Ellsworth’s plan into the next morning’s Tribune.
Whatever else they may have been, the firemen of New York were certainly just what Ellsworth hoped for: ready for a fight. In fact, locals often remarked that they seemed less interested in battling fires than in battling one another. The city on the eve of the Civil War was not merely a rough-and-tumble place but “a huge semi-barbarous metropolis … not well-governed or ill-governed, but simply not governed at all.”89 As for the city’s firemen, they were not merely ungoverned, they were almost completely, and famously, ungovernable.
Since colonial times, New York had relied for its fire protection on volunteer companies, much as the nation relied for its defense on volunteer militias. It was a marvelously democratic