Found / Antecedent

The Fall of a Sparrow

A war photographer’s unflinching images break the idealism surrounding a young Civil War hero’s death.

by Rachel Eisendrath via The Paris Review on October 23, 2025

...He was the first Union officer to die in the war. Describing himself to a reporter from the New York Herald as “unmanned” with grief, Lincoln at first couldn’t talk—and then burst into tears. John Hay recalled that when brought to see the body, the president cried out, “My boy! My boy!”

Civil War envelope showing a portrait of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth with the quotation “He who noteth even the fall of a sparrow will have some purpose even in the fate of one like me.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress, part of the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs. Public domain.

Ellsworth’s death aroused strong patriotic feelings in the North. Enlistments increased. A Union pastor remarked, “We needed just such a sacrifice as this.” It wasn’t long before commemorative souvenirs were being sold that celebrated Ellsworth’s heroism. Among the surviving ephemera are sheet music (“Ellsworth Requiem”), a white ironstone pitcher that depicts the moment of Ellsworth’s death and his killer’s assassination in relief, both their arms flung into the air, and multiple memorial envelopes like the one shown above, which is preserved in the Liljenquist Collection of the Library of Congress.

Printed in two colors, the envelope depicts Ellsworth wearing a red Union hat set at a rakish angle and a blue regulation jacket, dark longish hair curls around his temples and jawline; his gaze is level. Note as well the beautiful penmanship of whoever mailed this letter, how the lines suddenly taper into streamers that seem to wave about in the air. (One biographer describes Ellsworth’s own penmanship as “dress-parade handwriting.”) The date stamp lands on the gorgeous first letter of the recipient’s first name, Louisa: a true meeting in miniature of eras and ways, of the powers of automatization and the arts of the human hand.

The envelope includes a line from Ellsworth’s final letter to his parents, which was found in his pocket after his death. The quotation is close to what Shakespeare’s Hamlet says before his death—“There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”—which in turn is a version of Matthew 10:29, where sparrows also represent the smallest and least significant forms of life which God’s plan nonetheless comprises: “Not one of them,” Jesus reassures his disciples, “will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” The quotation registers a kind of hope that we, believers or not, might have for someone like Ellsworth: that his fall, too, can be countenanced, can be meaningful—if not in the eyes of God then at least in our everyday human eyes. Regardless, a sparrow is a good choice for this sentiment because it has always been a common bird.

II. A Dirty Shovel

The reality of war turned out to be very different than the fantasy of it. After the battle of Antietam, which took place on September 17, 1862, the Scottish-born photographer Alexander Gardner went out into the field with his plate camera and took a series of photographs of the dead. Antietam was (and remains today) the single bloodiest day in American military history. After the battle was over, no one could believe how many people—twenty-three thousand—could be killed or wounded in a matter of hours when line after line of rifled muskets were blasting directly at their heads.