1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [168]
Ellsworth and his Zouaves were still in camp, on a rise just beyond the southeastern edge of the city. Despite the late hour and the hard work to come, the men went about their battle preparations quickly and almost gleefully, breaking out every so often into snatches of patriotic song. At last, the b’hoys were going to get the fine bare-knuckle fight they had been itching for. They checked and cleaned their new rifles, which had been fitted with saber bayonets: broadly curving steel blades that could, in an instant, turn a gun into a spear. When all was ready, the colonel gathered them for a few words of exhortation—no doubt the kind of night-before-the-battle speech he had been rehearsing in his mind since his boyhood in Mechanicville—and then told them to retire to their tents for a couple of hours’ rest. Ellsworth himself sat up writing at his camp table, scribbling orders to his company commanders before turning to a more solemn task: composing letters to his parents and his fiancée, to be opened in the event of his death. Then he buttoned up the coat of his dress uniform, and at the last moment pinned to his chest a gold medal that had been given him the year before, during the Chicago cadets’ summer tour. Non solum nobis, sed pro Patria, the Latin inscription read: “Not for ourselves alone, but for our Country.”35
The Fire Zouaves had been chosen to carry out the amphibious part of the attack—and, as seemed likely, to be the first troops that would encounter enemy forces. At two o’clock in the morning, a navy captain arrived to tell Ellsworth that three vessels—the steamers James Guy, Baltimore, and Mount Vernon—were ready to carry them across, accompanied by a couple of launches from the USS Pawnee, which awaited them at anchor off Alexandria. The moon was now shining at its fullest: “bright and handsome as a twenty-dollar gold piece,” one soldier thought, while another would later recall that you could write a letter by its light. Many of the Zouaves, following their commander’s example, were doing just this, penning hasty notes to loved ones, which they tucked into knapsacks as they made their way down to the river.36
Another man present was busy scribbling as well: Ned House, a newspaper correspondent for the New-York Tribune. Though barely older than Ellsworth, House was one of the most ambitious and intrepid of Greeley’s protégés: eighteen months earlier, at John Brown’s execution, he had (at least by his own account) disguised himself as an army surgeon and managed to get a place standing on the scaffold just a few feet from the condemned man. His firsthand report in the Tribune—including all the ghastly details of Brown’s body jerking at the end of the rope—had shocked Northern readers.37 Now, getting wind of the impending attack on Alexandria, House had tried to talk his way past Northern sentries on the Long Bridge, and, failing this, hastened to the Zouave camp, attaching himself to Ellsworth’s regiment. It was a decision he would not regret. Watching the soldiers leave for battle, he found himself stirred by the sight: “the vivid costumes of the men—some being wrapt from head to foot in their great red blankets, but most of them clad in their gray jackets and trowsers and embroidered caps; the peaks of the tents, regularly distributed, all glowing like huge lanterns from the fires within them; the glittering rows of rifles and sabres; the woods and hills, and the placid river . . . and all these suffused with the broad moonlight.”38
Even some of the b’hoys themselves were moved, not just by the beauty of the night but by the sense that they were about to participate in history. “We believe it to have been the most impressive and beautiful scene we ever witnessed,” one of them wrote a few days later. “No length of years can wipe it from our memory—it is daguerreotyped on our mind forever.”39
By the time the steamers neared Alexandria, the