“The Fall of a Sparrow”: The (Un)timely Death of Elmer Ellsworth and the Coming of the Civil War

Volume 1 Article 6 2010 “The Fall of a Sparrow”: The (Un)timely Death of Elmer Ellsworth and the Coming of the Civil War Adam Stauffer Follow this and additional works at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/gcjcwe Part of the United States History Commons Share feedback about the accessibility of this item. Stauffer, Adam (2010) "“The Fall of a Sparrow”: The (Un)timely Death of Elmer Ellsworth and the Coming of the Civil War," The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era: Vol. 1 , Article 6. Available at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/gcjcwe/vol1/iss1/6 This open access article is brought to you by The Cupola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of The Cupola. For more information, please contact . “The Fall of a Sparrow”: The (Un)timely Death of Elmer Ellsworth and the Coming of the Civil War Abstract On the morning of May 24, 1861, a group of Union cadets marched into the city of Alexandria, Virginia. The cohort looked peculiar in their flamboyant Zouave uniforms with bright blue shirts and flashy red sashes. They were led by a dashing young colonel named Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth and charged with occupying the city. Noticing a Confederate flag flying high on the roof of a hotel called the Marshall House, Ellsworth and a few of his men entered the building, determined to bring it down. The trip up the stairs was easygoing and the flag was quickly retrieved without incident. But on the way down everything went wrong. The innkeeper, a Confederate sympathizer named James W. Jackson, appeared with a shotgun and fired, piercing Ellsworth’s heart. As he stumbled backward he uttered his final words: “My God!” Almost immediately, Corporal Francis Brownell aimed his rifle directly at Jackson’s forehead and shot his colonel’s murderer. In the coming conflict scores of men and boys would be slaughtered in similar fashion causing Americans to rethink the grim and brutal realities of modern war. The deaths of Ellsworth and Jackson constituted the first official battle fatalities of the Civil War, but many more followed. [excerpt] Keywords Civil War, Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth, culture of war, culture of death, duty and honor This article is available in The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/gcjcwe/vol1/iss1/6 The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era “The Fall of a Sparrow”: The (Un)timely Death of Elmer Ellsworth and the Coming of the Civil War Adam Q. Stauffer On the morning of May 24, 1861, a group of Union cadets marched into the city of Alexandria, Virginia. The cohort looked peculiar in their flamboyant Zouave uniforms with bright blue shirts and flashy red sashes. They were led by a dashing young colonel named Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth and charged with occupying the city. Noticing a Confederate flag flying high on the roof of a hotel called the Marshall House, Ellsworth and a few of his men entered the building, determined to bring it down. The trip up the stairs was easygoing and the flag was quickly retrieved without incident. But on the way down everything went wrong. The innkeeper, a Confederate sympathizer named James W. Jackson, appeared with a shotgun and fired, piercing Ellsworth’s heart. As he stumbled backward he uttered his final words: “My God!”1 Almost immediately, Corporal Francis Brownell aimed his rifle directly at Jackson’s forehead and shot his colonel’s murderer. In the coming conflict scores of men and boys would be slaughtered in similar fashion causing Americans to rethink the grim and brutal realities of modern war. The deaths of Ellsworth and Jackson constituted the first official battle fatalities of the Civil War, but many more followed. When discussing the Civil War, this grim scene at Alexandria in 1861 is rarely conjured up. Yet, in a more general sense, it was a scene that became all too familiar to countless numbers of soldiers and civilians during the conflict—when thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers marched gloriously off to war only to be cut down by an enemy’s bullet. The war, which many saw early on as a contest of duty and honor, all too often descended into a firestorm of death and destruction. Elmer Ellsworth became the first official battle fatality of the conflict. His death challenged the assumptions of an entire generation raised on the idea that to serve one’s country in war was a moral act which demonstrated one’s virtues as a citizen. “The patriotic past and the Biblical past were the two great historic memories by which Americans measured their present,” Reid Mitchell points out.2 Christianity promised heavenly rewards to the individual who led a life of selflessness and demonstrated his or her commitment to protecting established institutions. Furthermore, Americans looked to the past, in particular the Revolutionary War, for their definitions of heroism. The true hero, it was thought, was one who died for liberty and country. As a consequence many pictured warfare as a romantic venture designed to show one’s national commitment to the rest of the citizenry. This martial spirit, which placed a strong emphasis on personal valor and patriotism, saturated the early nineteenth century American’s perception of combat and human conflict. 1. Quoted in Ernest B. Furgurson, Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 94. 2. Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 1. 44 45 During the antebellum era and the early years of the Civil War violence was glorified in both the North and South. “Military service was a grand romantic adventure or a showcase for strutting masculinity as a practical duty of citizenship,” Orville Vernon Burton explains. “That was the sum of military service as most understood it: quite apart from saving their country or defending their principles, every recruit anticipated that a fellow in uniform would always stand in good stead with the ladies, and quite possibly with employers and customers too, once the little fighting was concluded.” When the war came, this romantic sentimentalism was shattered on the battlefields of Manassas, Shiloh, and Fredericksburg. Soldiers above and below the Mason-Dixon Line placed their selfperceived virtues on a pedestal and believed that these virtues alone would ensure victory over the morally inferior enemy. “Courage,” military historian Gerald F. Linderman states, “was the individual’s assurance of a favorable outcome in combat . . . . The primacy of courage promised the soldier that no matter how immense the war . . . his fate would continue to rest on his inner qualities.”3 Elmer Ellsworth came to represent this pre-war mindset and his boyish features and upright moral conduct were seen as proof that he was ordained to become one of the North’s Civil War heroes. While still a child, Ellsworth’s mother once remarked in her journal that he possessed a “military propensity.” She (...truncated)