Another vessel sailed along with drooping colors and told us how he died. And then the shadow of his death swept down and folded from our sight all of those great and rare experiences which we had been enjoying. It seemed to us that we should never be able to recollect them from that shadow. We went ashore at the great fortress, where his dear feet had been, scarcely a week before, but we had no eyes to see anything.............
It had been proposed to go to Portsmouth, Norfolk and to City Point. But we had no heart for it. And so we came together in the cabin and voted that we would go home.
JOHN WHITE CHADWICK.
The Government called for seventy-five thousand troops on April 15th to put down the rebellion “in ninety days,” according to Secretary Seward’s confident announcement.
On April 19th, the Sixth Regiment of the Massachusetts Brigade, first to respond to the call, was fired upon by a mob while passing through Baltimore, and a number were wounded and some killed.
The Ellsworth Zouaves were enlisted chiefly through the enthusiastic patriotism of young Colonel Ellsworth, who, on arriving at Alexandria with his regiment, saw a Confederate flag flying above a small hotel, and at once ordered the flag hauled down. This was refused, and the indignant boy rashly rushed to the roof, and dared to pull it down himself, when he was shot dead by the rebel owner. Colonel Ellsworth was killed May 24th, 1861. Lincoln’s grief at the death of this daring boy was overwhelming. Ellsworth had studied law with him for a time in his office, and he loved him as a son; and as a son and early martyr of the war, he was laid in state at the White House for funeral services.
War with its untold horrors had begun.
Meanwhile it was becoming evident that President Buchanan had permitted, or had at least become strangely blind to the introduction of foreign ammunition into Southern ports, while the traitor Secretary Floyd, still under oath to the Union, held his office until the last possible moment, encouraging and assisting the South in building forts and, in many ways, accumulating almost openly materials of war.
At last the people awoke to the fact that many southern regiments and garrisons were well equipped for the conflict, while the unsuspecting North was almost wholly unprepared. People had become so accustomed to “fire-eaters’ bluster” and their threats and boastings of the superior prowess of the South that, if they listened at all, it was considered mere political bombast which passed unheeded until war was actually begun.
In November, 1861, General McClellan superceded General Scott, who then retired from active duty, at the age of seventy-five, and died later at the good old age of eighty.