1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [174]
As the war’s inexorable toll rose and rose, touching almost every family throughout the nation, Americans would lose their taste for collective mourning. Death became so commonplace that the demise of any one soldier, whether a gallant recruit or battle-scarred hero, was drowned in the larger grief. Not until the war’s final month—when another body would lie in state in the East Room, and another black-draped train make its slow way north—would Americans again shed common tears for a single martyr.
Ellsworth’s memory never faded for those who knew him well. Hay, Nicolay, and Stoddard, who all lived to see the twentieth century, would reflect for decades on the meaning of his death. Stoddard always remembered how, as the crowds of mourners filed through the White House, he glanced over at the windowpane Ellsworth had broken a few days earlier and saw that the new glass was still smudged with the glazier’s fingerprints. “I am not afraid to say that it was a little too much for me then,” he wrote. “We had not become so hardened as we grew to be under the swift calamities that afterward trod so rapidly upon each other’s heels.” Nicolay, in his sweeping history of the war, wrote that the response to Ellsworth’s death “opened an unlooked-for depth of individual hatred, into which the political animosities of years . . . had finally ripened.” Hay, throughout his own long career as a statesman, never stopped pondering what might have been. Thirty-five years after Ellsworth’s killing, he wrote: “The world can never compute, can hardly even guess, what was lost in his untimely end. . . . Only a few men, now growing old, knew what he was and what he might have been if life had been spared him.”62
As for Lincoln, his young friend’s death affected him like no other soldier’s in the four years that followed. On the morning that the news reached the president, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and a companion, not yet aware of Ellsworth’s death, called at the White House on a matter of urgent business and found Lincoln standing alone beside a window in the library, looking out toward the Potomac. He seemed unaware of the visitors’ presence until they were standing close behind him. Lincoln turned away from the window and extended his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “I cannot talk.” Then suddenly, to the men’s astonishment, the president burst into tears. Burying his face in a handkerchief, he walked up and down the room for some moments before at last finding his voice:
After composing himself somewhat, the President took his seat, and desired us to approach. “I will make no apology, gentlemen,” said the President, “for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard. Just as you entered the room, Capt. Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of Ellsworth’s unfortunate death. The event was so unexpected, and the recital so touching, that it quite unmanned me.” The President here made a violent effort to restrain his emotion, and after a pause he proceeded, with tremulous voice, to give us the incidents of the tragedy as they had occurred. “Poor fellow,” repeated the President, as he closed his relation, “it was undoubtedly an act of rashness, but it only shows the heroic spirit that animates our soldiers, from high to low, in this righteous cause of ours. Yet who can restrain their grief to see them fall in such a way as this, not by the fortunes of war, but by the hand of an assassin?”63
Almost alone among the millions of mourners, perhaps, Lincoln could admit that Ellsworth’s death had not been glorious. Others might talk of his gallantry, might hail him as a modern knight cut down in the flower of youth. But for the president, preparing to send armies into battle against their brothers, the double homicide in a cheap hotel represented something else: the squalid brutality of civil war.64
Even close