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By Root 1893 0

friends of the Lincoln family were afraid, for a long time afterward, to talk about Ellsworth in front of the president, who sometimes wept at the mention of his name. On the morning of the funeral, the East Room was crowded with dignitaries: generals, cabinet secretaries, ambassadors. At the end of the service, all rose to file past the open casket. Then the line suddenly stopped. Lincoln and his wife stood at length, looking down on the face of their dead friend. Those standing nearest could hear the president lament: “My boy! My boy! Was it necessary this sacrifice should be made?”65

MORE THAN A DECADE LATER, a reporter named Eli Perkins of the New York Commercial Advertiser happened to be passing through Mechanicville, New York, and decided to stop and take a look. Perkins had known Ellsworth slightly in former days, and recalled that the legend’s boyhood home was in the village. Perkins found the dead soldier’s elderly parents still living alone in the little wooden cottage. The front parlor was a kind of shrine to their son, its walls lined with the many lithographs and cartes de visite that had been published shortly after his death. But when Perkins walked up the hill behind the house in search of the fallen colonel’s tombstone, he was surprised to find that there was none.

“When Elmer fell,” old Mr. Ellsworth explained, “so many people and societies were going to put up a monument that I suppose they got it all mixed up. First the Chicago people were going to do it—then the regiment, and then the State. Then the citizens around here made an attempt, but still it remains undone.” The late war’s first great hero—the man whose name, one New York newspaper had proclaimed, “will not be blurred so long as the record of our war of liberty survives”—still lay in an unmarked grave.66

The Marshall House in Alexandria has long since disappeared. On that corner today stands a Hotel Monaco. A bronze plaque on an outside wall, installed sometime in the last century, reads:

The Marshall House stood upon this site, and within the building on the early morning of May 24, 1861, James W. Jackson was killed by federal soldiers while defending his property and personal rights, as stated in the verdict of the coroners jury. He was the first Martyr to the cause of Southern Independence. The Justice of History does not allow his name to be forgotten.

On a recent morning in Washington, I made an appointment with a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to see something that had not been on display for a long time. I waited as she went to a metal filing cabinet and retrieved a small box, which she placed on the table in front of me. Inside were two artifacts: a scrap of red bunting and a small piece of nondescript oilcloth, its corner stained with faded blood.

* * *

*Earlier that spring, in the weeks before the firing on Sumter, Ellsworth was put temporarily out of commission after contracting measles from the Lincoln boys.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Freedom’s Fortress

O a new song, a free song,

Flapping, flapping, flapping, flapping, by sounds, by voices clearer,

By the wind’s voice and that of the drum,

By the banner’s voice and child’s voice and sea’s voice and father’s voice,

Low on the ground and high in the air …

—WALT WHITMAN,

“Song of the Banner at Day-Break” (1860–61)

Fugitives fording the Rappahannock, Virginia, 1862 (photo credit 8.1)

Hampton Roads, Virginia, May 1861

THIS WAS WHERE IT HAD ALL BEGUN.

Here, where the river washed into the great bay: a place as freighted with the heavy past as anywhere in the still-young country; a place of Indian bones and deep-cellared manor houses and the armor of King James’s men rusting away beneath the dark soil.

Time itself seemed to move here like that tidal river, its ambivalent currents stirred first upstream, then down. By night, from the water, the sharp-edged silhouette of the federal fort might seem to soften and sink, becoming again the low palisades that the first colonists had raised on the same spot two and