I. He Who Noteth
Everyone had fallen in love with the short (five feet, six inches), young (twenty-four years old), big-hearted leader of the Chicago Zouaves. Even Abraham Lincoln. The president and Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth were as “intimate”—these are Lincoln’s words in a letter to Ellsworth’s parents—“as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit.” Lincoln had given Ellsworth a job in his law office in Illinois and then invited the young man to accompany him on his famous inaugural train journey from Springfield, Illinois, to the East Coast. In his hopeful idealism, Ellsworth seemed to exemplify Aristotle’s description of the virtues of young people: “They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things—and that means having exalted notions.” In this account, the young are by nature uncynical, hopeful, magnanimous—in contrast to the pragmatic, fearful, and miserly old, who may maintain their grip on money but not much else; as Mary Chesnut puts it, “all other muscles are relaxed by age.”
The son of a tailor, Ellsworth grew up in Mechanicville, New York. He had tried a few different lines of work before becoming preoccupied with infantry drills, poring over handbooks that taught the art of complex martial formations. Soon, he had taken over a drill team in Chicago, renaming it the United States Zouave Cadets (or the Chicago Zouaves) after the Zouaoua, a tribe that had been recruited into the French Army in the coastal Algerian mountains in the 1830s. The French developed these “exotic” uniforms, which soon became famous, to romanticize the colonists’ incorporation of local tribes into a European nation. The uniforms were the opposite of camouflage: ballooning red pantaloons, black jackets with gold, orange, or red trim, and fez-like hats (described in the Western Railroad Gazette of Chicago as “the jauntiest little scarlet head gear ever worn by a practical fighting man”). By the time of the Crimean War, 1853 to 1856, there were three Zouave regiments composed entirely of Frenchmen. Ellsworth may have heard about the Zouaves from his French fencing instructor, Charles A. DeVilliers, who claimed to have served in the Crimea in such a Zouave unit.