1861 (49 page)

Finally, the awaited order came. For days, Northern newspapers had been full of reports that a federal advance into Virginia was imminent. (“Secret Military Moves on Foot!” blared a headline in the irrepressible
New York Herald.
) Union and Confederate forces faced off across the Potomac, with opposing sentries posted just a few hundred yards apart, at the ends of the two bridges that spanned the river. Alexandria, the railway hub of northern
Virginia—and a secessionist stronghold within sight of the capital—was the logical point of attack. And there was no overlooking its port as a potential haven for Confederate smugglers or privateers. Since early May, the federal gunboat
Pawnee
had lain just off Alexandria’s wharves, its full broadside of nine-inch cannons aimed at the town.
³³

On May 23, Virginians voted in a special referendum to ratify the state’s secession—the final step in leaving the Union. That night, before the last votes had been counted, federal troops gathered on the banks of the Potomac, and the first major Northern incursion into rebel-held territory was under way.

S
HORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT,
the planks of the
Long Bridge, four miles above Alexandria, resounded with the rhythmic tramp of crossing infantry. Several miles upstream, Union cavalrymen were riding across the Chain Bridge. The plan was for these troops to approach the town overland from the north, while a smaller amphibious force crossed the river by steamer to land directly at the waterfront. Men from New York,
New Jersey, Michigan, and Massachusetts were making their way into Virginia.

It was a balmy, summer-like night: “mild, dewy, refulgent,” wrote
Theodore Winthrop, whose kid-glove New York regiment was among the advancing infantry. The pale light of a full moon glinted off newly
burnished bayonets and sabers. Scarcely a whisper was heard among the troops, only occasionally the muffled command of an officer. So silent was this crossing of thousands that on the shore behind them,
the darkened capital slept; only William Seward, intent as ever on seeing and knowing as much as he could, had come down to survey the operations intently from the Washington end of Long Bridge.
³⁴

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 moon was sinking, and the glassy surface of the river had begun to gleam red with the rising sun. Crowding along the rails, the Zouaves scanned the waterfront for the enemy and, as they drew closer, spotted a thin line of Confederate sentinels, who fired their muskets into the air in warning. A few of Ellsworth’s men, thinking that these were the opening shots of the battle, let fly a volley in return. But the
rebels were already scattering up the hillside, running “as if the Devil himself had been after them with a particularly sharp stick,” one Zouave thought. What the Union forces didn’t know is that those sentinels were simply rejoining their compatriots, who were withdrawing en masse from the town. The canny rebel commanders knew that they couldn’t hold Alexandria, and that the best strategy was to lure the enemy deeper into Virginia, and into the morass of
war. The only risk was that some men might be captured by the advancing federals.
⁴⁰

Meanwhile, aboard his steamer, Ellsworth discovered that his troops would not, after all, be the first to reach Alexandria. A small landing party of marines from the
Pawnee
was already rowing toward shore in a cutter, flying a white flag of truce. The junior naval officer
in charge, a certain
Lieutenant Lowry, quickly found the Confederate colonel and offered to let his entire rebel force evacuate
unmolested in exchange for the surrender of the town. By the time Ellsworth leapt ashore at the wharf, Lowry was waiting to inform him that the deal—an incomprehensible one, to the Zouave colonel’s mind—had just been sealed. The Stars and Stripes already flew from the town flagpole. The Battle of Alexandria was won before it could be fought.
⁴¹

But it was not in Ellsworth’s nature to remain dejected for long. There was still work to be done, and laurels for his bold Zouaves to win. There were arms and matériel to be captured,
railroads to be seized,
telegraph lines to be cut. And in any event, he knew, this landing was only the initial stage of a glorious Union sweep across Virginia toward victory. It was the first morning of
his war.

His disembarking Zouaves must have felt equally let down by their first steps on enemy soil. Before them now was not the alien citadel that had menaced them from across the river but an ordinary American town, with white-steepled churches, rows of old-fashioned brick houses, and wide, muddy streets. An air of patrician dowdiness hung about the place, a sense that its best days were fifty years in the past. The wharves should have been starting to bustle with activity at
this early hour, but the complete silence of night still reigned. Shutters were closed or curtains drawn in most of the windows. Wherever the townsfolk might be, they were not to be seen or heard. Only the long, high whistle of a steam engine in the middle distance broke the stillness, as a train pulled away from Alexandria’s station carrying the last of the Confederate garrison.
⁴²

Even before everyone was ashore, Ellsworth ordered Company E of his regiment to march at all speed to the railway line and, albeit somewhat belatedly, tear up the tracks leading to Richmond. The other companies were to remain at the wharf and await further orders. The colonel himself would lead a small force into town and take control of the telegraph office. He chose an unusual group for this mission: there were Ned House of the
Tribune;
Henry J. Winser, the regimental secretary, who did double duty as an occasional correspondent for the
New York Times;
and the Zouaves’ chaplain, the Reverend E. W. Dodge. At first, Ellsworth planned to set out without any other men—Alexandria was officially under truce now, after all—but at the last moment, on Winser’s suggestion, he turned and called for a single squad of soldiers to follow.
⁴³

The men jogged quickly up Cameron Street toward the center of town. But as soon as they rounded the corner toward King Street, Alexandria’s main thoroughfare, they halted. In front of them was a
tall brick building, and hanging from the large pole atop it, stirring only slightly in the morning air, was the rebel banner that had taunted Washington for weeks, the one President Lincoln could see from his window.

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.