1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [166]
You are now about to be mustered into the service of the United States, and are the first regiment who will pledge yourselves not for thirty days or sixty days, but for the war! (Tremendous applause, and nine loud, long, and hearty cheers.) Now if any man of you has the desire to back out, wants to leave this glorious war and go home, now is the time. Let him sneak away like a hound, and crawl over the fence and be off! (Cries of “No!” “No!” “Not one!” and three cheers for Colonel Ellsworth.)
Then, facing the Capitol, the men lined up in two rows across the entire width of the grounds. As the roll was called and each answered, a carriage drew up with the president, leading by the hand his younger son, Tad. Lincoln walked slowly along the row of soldiers, father and son inspecting each man as they passed.25
At last, two officers of the regular army stepped forward to administer the oath. One was the craggy, white-haired General Lorenzo Thomas, still dressed in the uniform of a colonel, having received his brigadier’s star only that morning. The other was a tall officer, stately and perhaps somewhat pompous-looking, with an out-thrust chest and lovingly tended Napoleon beard. This was Major Irvin McDowell, then commanding the troops guarding the Capitol. (In two months’ time, occupying a more exalted rank, he would be forever linked with this regiment in front of him, and with a catastrophic summer afternoon at Bull Run.)
There was another, humbler detail that Hay recorded that night. As he stood near the regimental flags, the proud standards that Mrs. Astor and Laura Keene had bestowed on the troop, he saw one of the Zouave color guards wrap his arm affectionately around a flagpole, as if he were embracing an old friend.
“The red, white, and blue! God bless them!” the man told Hay. “We boys is going to fight for these pieces of cloth till we die!”
Another added, “We’re going to have one more flag when we come back. It’ll be the flag of secession, nailed on the bottom o’ this flag staff.”26
DAYS OF WAITING FOLLOWED: not the languid expectancy that was the local specialty but an atmosphere of preparatory tension. Ellsworth seemed to be everywhere around the city, incessantly pestering officials for better arms and equipment. He was thin as a greyhound, his voice hoarse from the incessant shouting of drill commands. A curious civilian spotted the little colonel bounding into the lobby of the Willard with an enormous revolver flapping at his belt. Indeed, Ellsworth seemed to go everywhere armed as if ready at any moment to engage in single-handed combat against a grizzly bear. In addition to the revolver, he wore both an elaborately gilded officer’s sword and a more businesslike bowie knife, its blade more than a foot long, the kind jocularly known as an “Arkansas toothpick.” An amused Hay remarked that it looked as though it might easily “go through a man’s head from crown to chin as you would split an apple.”27
No task was too trivial for him. One newspaper correspondent wrote that at one moment, he would be seen marching at the head of his troops, and the next, “assisting a colored servant to carry a box of muskets across the room,” or showing a raw recruit how to fasten his knapsack. One fine Sunday afternoon, he was even spotted, in his billowy red Zouave shirt, playing a game of baseball with his men.28 Although barely twenty-four years old (he had celebrated his birthday the eve of the attack on Sumter), the colonel was already winning the affection and respect of the hardened New York firemen, who seemed willing to overlook that he had never bloodied his knuckles in a Bowery brawl, nor ever heard a gunshot fired in anger.