1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [170]
The Marshall House was an old hotel, really just a tavern with guest rooms upstairs, known among locals as a second-rate lodging for travelers. It was also known as a center of prosecession activity; the innkeeper, James W. Jackson, was one of the area’s most ardent secessionists. Jackson had a powerful six-foot build and a temperament always spoiling for a fight—once, when a Catholic priest made the mistake of offending him, Jackson beat the cleric senseless. Anyone foolish enough to utter antislavery remarks in his presence received similar treatment. Two years earlier, Jackson had been one of the first local militiamen to rush off to Harper’s Ferry in pursuit of John Brown. He returned having missed the fight, but bringing as a trophy one of the captured pikes with which Brown had planned to arm the slaves, as well as a wizened bit of flesh that he boasted came off the ear of Brown’s son, who had died defending his father. As soon as the other Southern states began leaving the Union, Jackson and a friend had commissioned a couple of local seamstresses to stitch up a banner some eighteen feet wide, blazoned with the clustered stars and three broad stripes of the first Confederate flag. Each time another state joined the rebellion, Jackson had the women add another star. On the afternoon of April 17, the day Virginia’s legislature voted for secession, a single large star was added to the center, and the banner hoisted on the forty-foot staff above his hotel.44
On the night of May 23, just as Union troops were massing on the opposite shore to attack Alexandria, the Marshall House hosted a raucous party, complete with a brass band and carousing militiamen, to celebrate the statewide secession referendum. But the fun broke up before midnight and the militiamen dispersed. Jackson had gone to bed, and the hotel was now quiet.45
Spotting the flag, Ellsworth ordered a sergeant back to the landing for another company of infantry as reinforcements, and then started trotting off quickly again toward the telegraph office. But suddenly, on some impulse, he stopped and turned back toward the steps of the Marshall House. His boyish pride, and perhaps a desire to impress the two journalists, had trumped military prudence. If he was going to have this trophy, he would cut it down with his own hands.46
Ellsworth entered the hotel accompanied by seven men: House, Winser, Dodge, and four Zouave corporals. Immediately inside the front door, they encountered a disheveled-looking man, only half dressed, who had apparently just gotten out of bed. Regardless of who this person was, he was the first real, live Confederate that the New Yorkers had encountered up close. So Ellsworth demanded to know what the rebel flag was doing atop the hotel. The man replied that he had no idea—he was only a boarder. All the other guests seemed to be still asleep. Without further delay, the Union men hastened upstairs. Ellsworth stationed one soldier at the front door, another on the first floor, a third at the foot of the stairs. Revolver in hand, he bounded up the final flights toward the roof’s trapdoor, followed by the two newspaper correspondents, the chaplain, and a single Zouave armed with a rifle, Corporal Frank Brownell. Climbing a short ladder to the hatch cover, Ellsworth pushed it open and handed Winser his revolver before sawing away with a bowie knife at the halyards tethering the huge flag to its staff.47
Finally the ropes gave way and the banner drooped, then collapsed almost onto the men’s heads, its defiant stripes suddenly a slack heap of red-and-white cloth. Ellsworth started pulling it through the open trapdoor, but it was so large he needed Winser’s help to get the whole thing inside. As the little group made its way back downstairs, the colonel still had most of the flag draped around his shoulders, while Winser followed behind, clumsily trying to roll it up over one arm as they descended.
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