Abstract
One of the first deaths of the American Civil War, on 24 May 1861, was that of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, a personal friend of President Lincoln. Ellsworth had climbed to the roof of an inn on the Virginia side of the Potomac River to haul down a Confederate flag that had allegedly been visible from the White House. The outraged innkeeper shot him. The combination of Ellsworth’s handsome features and the symbolism of the flag proved irresistible. Ellsworth was immediately apotheosized in mass-produced images and in hundreds of breathless accounts of his courage. Selfless, meeting his foe with steely heroism, adopting the pose of a slain Christian martyr as his life passed away, Ellsworth’s death became an idealized template for heroic sacrifice.
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Notes
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008), p. xi.
John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2005).
Walter Lowenfels (ed.), Walt Whitman’s Civil War (New York: Da Capo, 1989), pp. 38–9.
Edward N. Luttwak, ‘Toward Post-Heroic Warfare’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 74/3 (1995): 109–22.
Charles Eliot Norton, ‘The Advantages of Defeat’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 8/47 (1861): 360–5.
Quoted in Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press 1987), p. 138.
Charles Eliot Norton, ‘The Advantages of Defeat’, Atlantic Monthly vol. 8 (September 1861): 363–4.
Harold B. Hancock (ed.), ‘The Civil War Diaries of Anna M. Fenis’, Delaware History, vol. 9/3 (1961): 258.
Otto Eisenschiml (ed.), Vermont General: The Unusual War Experiences of Edward Hastings Ripley, 1862–1865 (New York: Devin-Adair, 1960), p. 47.
Jerome Mushkat (ed.), A Citizen-Soldier’s Civil War: The Letters of Brevet Major General Alvin C. Voris (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), p. 188.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies, vols I and II (Cambridge, MA: Sever and Francis, 1866), I: 19.
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© 2014 Adam I. P. Smith
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Smith, A.I.P. (2014). ‘On the Altar of the Nation’: Narratives of Heroic Sacrifice in the American Civil War. In: Scheipers, S. (eds) Heroism and the Changing Character of War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362537_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362537_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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