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By Root 1721 0

scarcely waned. Photographs, lithographs, and pocket-size biographies paying tribute to the fallen hero poured forth by the tens of thousands. Music shops sold scores for such tunes as “Col. Ellsworth’s Funeral March,” “Ellsworth’s Requiem,” “Col. Ellsworth Gallopade,” “Brave Men, Behold Your Fallen Chief!,” “Ellsworth’s Avengers,” “He Has Fallen,” “Sadly the Bells Toll the Death of the Hero,” and “Our Noble Laddie’s Dead, Jim,” the last referring to a remark that one sorrowing Zouave was supposed to have made to another on the morning of the killing. For years afterward, enlisted men wrote letters home on stationery stamped with crude woodcuts of the colonel teetering on the steps of the Marshall House, clutching his wounded breast with one hand and the captured flag in the other—and invariably, a motto pledging vengeance to traitors. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of babies born in 1861 were named after him. One regiment, the Forty-fourth New York, even rechristened itself Ellsworth’s Avengers.

The young colonel seemed to have been transfigured by death into a kind of national saint. Within hours of his killing, a New York World editor wrote of his “halo of martyrdom.” Significantly, Ellsworth became the first notable American whose body was treated with the newly discovered practice of chemical embalming. As he lay in state, mourners peering into his coffin were amazed to see that the boyish face looked, as one man wrote, “natural as though he were sleeping a brief and pleasant sleep”—or as though modern technology had sanctified his flesh, rendering it incorruptible.58

As with a medieval saint, too, relics of his martyrdom became objects of veneration. In Alexandria, soldiers vied for pieces of the sacred flag within hours of the killing; it would have quickly been reduced to shreds had the Zouave officers not placed it under round-the-clock guard and threatened any man who approached it with thirty days’ imprisonment. By evening, the few pieces that some Zouaves had managed to obtain were being traded literally for more than their weight in gold. One man enclosed a bit of red cloth in a letter he sent to his family the next day, entreating his mother to “keep it under lock and key” and “let no one have even one thread.” “I tried hard to get a piece with his blood on it,” he added, “but could not.”59

Relic-hungry soldiers unable to obtain any of the flag took their knives and sliced up the oilcloth floor covering on the Marshall House staircase, which was drenched with even more blood than the flag. Once all the oilcloth was gone, they started in on the floorboards. During the next year, thousands of Union troops, passing through Alexandria on their way to the front, would make pilgrimages to the Marshall House, their relic-hunting encroaching upon the planks of the stairs, the banisters, the nearby doors and door frames, and the wallpaper, all whittled away one sliver at a time. When Nathaniel Hawthorne visited in the spring of 1862, so much of the hotel’s interior was gone that, he wrote in The Atlantic Monthly, “it becomes something like a metaphysical question whether the place of the murder actually exists.”60

Ellsworth’s death was different from all those that followed over the next four years: most Northern writers referred to it as a “murder” or “assassination,” an act not of war but of individual malice and shocking brutality. By the time Hawthorne’s article appeared, however, many other American places had been soaked in blood. Thousands of Northerners and Southerners, in almost equal numbers, had been cut down amid the peach orchards and cotton fields at Shiloh. On the hillsides of southern Virginia, over seven murderous days, whole regiments had uselessly sacrificed themselves to McClellan’s pointless slog toward Richmond. And at Bull Run, just eight weeks after Ellsworth’s death, his gallant b’hoys had been in the forefront of the war’s first disastrous Union defeat. At first the Zouaves advanced boldly toward the Confederate lines, crying “Ellsworth! Remember Ellsworth!” Then the rebel infantry and cavalry