Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth

Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth 1837-61, American Civil War hero, b. near Mechanicville, N.Y. Just before the Civil War he became famous for his Zouave company, which toured the North giving exhibition drills. A friend and law student of Lincoln, Ellsworth accompanied him to Washington in 1861. When war began, he recruited a regiment from the volunteer firemen in New York City. At Alexandria, Va., in May, 1861, he removed a Confederate flag from atop the Marshall House and was shot and killed by the proprietor. His sensational death was the first officer casualty on the Virginia front.

Bibliography: See biography by R. P. Randall (1960).

Ellsworth, Elmer Ephraim (1837–61) the first prominent Union soldier to die in the Civil War, though not, strictly speaking, in battle. Ellsworth, born in Malta, New York, first gained prominence as commander of a championship drill outfit (based on the Zouave model) that toured the country in 1860. He entered the Springfield, Illinois, law office of Abraham Lincoln later that year, and soon accompanied him to Washington. When war broke out, Ellsworth raised a voluntary infantry in New York, and while leading a detachment in Alexandria, Virginia, impetuously cut down a Confederate flag from the roof of a hotel. As he was carrying it off, he was shot and killed by the proprietor. Ellsworth's funeral was held in the East Room of the White House, and his body later lay in state at city hall in New York and the state house in Albany.

Ellsworth was viewed as a martyr to the cause, and his death galvanized the Northern war effort.