1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [167]
Much of Ellsworth’s boyishness remained, not just in his romantic approach to soldiering but in his quickness of affection and his longing for family. His parents still lived in their village in upstate New York; he had hardly seen them in years. The day before the regiment had left from New York, his mother had made her way down to the city and come to the Astor House, amid the bustle and fanfare of departure, to bid her only son farewell. Elmer’s much-loved brother, Charley, had died in Chicago the previous summer, just before the cadets set out on their tour.29
The Lincolns had become, in a sense, surrogate parents. Any free moment usually found Ellsworth at the White House. When the president and Mrs. Lincoln were unavailable, he would be romping through the corridors with Willie and Tad, or horsing around with Hay, Nicolay, and Lincoln’s other young aides.* One afternoon, he was in the office at the Executive Mansion, spiritedly showing a presidential secretary, William Stoddard, how to drill with a carbine Zouave-style, when he twirled the gun too close to a window. The two young men made up a far-fetched story to explain the broken glass: an assassin had been lurking in the shrubbery outside, they said, and, mistaking Ellsworth for the president, had fired a bullet through the windowpane.30
On other occasions, Ellsworth would join the Lincolns in peering curiously across the river at the large rebel banner that had mocked them for a month from the skyline of Alexandria. Afterward, some would say that Mrs. Lincoln had begged him to tear it down as soon as he and his troops reached Virginia, although others disputed this.31 For some anxious Unionists, that flag was becoming a symbol of the administration’s slowness to move against the gathering forces of the Confederacy. When one visitor to the White House, the radical abolitionist Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, pointedly complained to the president about the banner still waving there after so many weeks, Lincoln replied that he should not expect to see it waving much longer.32
Finally, the awaited order came. For days, Northern newspapers had been full of reports that a federal advance into Virginia was imminent. (“Secret Military Moves on Foot!” blared a headline in the irrepressible New York Herald.) Union and Confederate forces faced off across the Potomac, with opposing sentries posted just a few hundred yards apart, at the ends of the two bridges that spanned the river. Alexandria, the railway hub of northern Virginia—and a secessionist stronghold within sight of the capital—was the logical point of attack. And there was no overlooking its port as a potential haven for Confederate smugglers or privateers. Since early May, the federal gunboat Pawnee had lain just off Alexandria’s wharves, its full broadside of nine-inch cannons aimed at the town.33
On May 23, Virginians voted in a special referendum to ratify the state’s secession—the final step in leaving the Union. That night, before the last votes had been counted, federal troops gathered on the banks of the Potomac, and the first major Northern incursion into rebel-held territory was under way.
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, the planks of the Long Bridge, four miles above Alexandria, resounded with the rhythmic tramp of crossing infantry. Several miles upstream, Union cavalrymen were riding across the Chain Bridge. The plan was for these troops to approach the town overland from the north, while a smaller amphibious force crossed the river by steamer to land directly at the waterfront. Men from New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Massachusetts were making their way into Virginia.
It was a balmy, summer-like night: “mild, dewy, refulgent,” wrote Theodore Winthrop, whose kid-glove New York regiment was among the advancing infantry. The pale light of a full moon glinted off newly burnished bayonets and sabers. Scarcely a whisper was heard among the troops, only occasionally the muffled command of an officer. So silent was this crossing of thousands that on the shore behind them, the darkened capital slept; only