An exhaustive search does not reveal his name again. On December 26, 1858, the Governor’s Guard “were out in full uniform for the first time since the State Fair and to us appear much improved in a military point.”
We have not been able to determine what brought Ellsworth to Madison. W. J. Ellsworth lived in the city at the time. Possibly they were kinsmen.
One other relic of Ellsworth’s activities among us is in the Keyes Papers. In 1910, Col. Elisha W. Keyes wrote an article for the Madison Democrat on the organization of the Governor’s Guard. In it he says “Soon after the organization of the guard he [Ellsworth] appeared in Madison and spent much time, without Compensation, in drilling the men. He was then a young man, not much over 30 years of age. He had been an apt student of military science and discipline. His heart and soul were in the work. His enthusiasm was boundless, although at the time of his work here no one hardly dreamed that the rebellion was possible. Before he left he contemplated the full organization of the eighteenth regiment State militia [of which Keyes was then Colonel]. I have in my possession now a roll of maps and instructions for regimental drill, which involved much labor, that he prepared for me, as colonel, without reward.” These drafts came to the Society with Judge Keyes’s other papers. They are large map-like drafts, colored, of the positions of the regiment, and fully written out directions in Ellsworth’s own hand for the various orders for military positions and movements.
Probably you know that Ellsworth’s diary was given to Frank Brownell, his avenger. We have two pamphlets giving liberal excerpts from the diary, but we find therein no mention of Madison. Probably the full text of this diary would show when and why he came to Madison.
Your letter of the nineteenth instant concerning Ellsworth is before me and I wish to thank you earnestly for the time and care which you have devoted to this subject; it illuminates a portion of his career with which I was entirely unacquainted and which to have searched out myself would have involved much expense and inconvenience. Your communication will be excellent to appear verbatim in the book.
I am unable to say as to the identity of W. J. Ellsworth, but I have written to an uncle of Colonel Ellsworth who may be able to shed light on the matter. Colonel Keyes, when he estimated Ellsworth’s age as “not over 30 years” when he was in Madison, was evidently deceived by his remarkable degree of development, which was in advance of his age: at that time he was but twenty-one, having been born April 11, 1837.
Ellsworth’s diary I have not yet unearthed. John Hay’s article published in McClure’s Magazine, VI, 354, has many citations from it, but nothing concerning Madison. Mr. Hay also contributed to the Atlantic, very soon after Ellsworth’s death, a fine article on him (VIII, 119), and the two comprise the best literature so far published on Ellsworth. These two young men were students in Lincoln’s law office, and Mr. Hay all his life down to his last years mourned for him, whom he estimated as a most wonderfully brilliant and patriotically devoted man whose future would have been exceedingly prominent and useful. My own investigations lead me to the same conclusion. Yet he had very few early advantages; practically none, except a limited district school education. His parents, whom I knew, were plain people, and others of the relations whom I have met or corresponded with exhibit nothing out of the common.
C. A. Ingraham,
Cambridge, New York.
THE STORY OF “GLORY OF THE MORNING”
We are about to give the play Glory of the Morning. I am under the impression that there was such a character in Wisconsin as “Glory of the Morning,” and that she was married to a Frenchman, and deserted by him, as in the play.