Col. Elmer Ellsworth’s decision to rip down a Confederate flag during the Civil War cost him his life.
A native of Saratoga County, Ellsworth was the first Union officer killed in the war. Just 24, he took exception to James Jackson’s decision to fly a massive Confederate flag atop his hotel, the Marshall House, in Alexandria, Va., in April 1861.
So Ellsworth decided to tear it down. He and a few others succeeded, but after capturing the flag, they were confronted by Jackson, who was armed with a shotgun.
A firefight followed, and Ellsworth and Jackson were both killed. The flag, however, survived. It was sent back to New York with Ellsworth’s body, and it’s now on display at the state museum in Albany as part of its “An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War” exhibit.
“As far as New York objects go, this is one of the big ones,” said New York State Historian Robert Weible.
In fact, the flag was almost too big. The museum didn’t have room to display it with the rest of “An Irrepressible Conflict” in Exhibition Hall. So the 14-by-24-foot flag is instead hanging in the nearby South Hall.
“It’s enormous,” Weible said. “You look at it and you wonder how (Ellsworth) could have brought it down.”
That’s been lost to history, but what’s clear is this: Ellsworth, who was born in Malta and grew up in Mechanicville, was dedicated to the Union’s cause.
Ellsworth had left Saratoga County for Illinois, where he worked in Abraham Lincoln’s law office and struck up a close relationship with the future president. “He was very much Lincoln’s guy,” Weible said.
He became a tireless Lincoln supporter during the election of 1860 and accompanied him to Washington. When war broke out, Ellsworth returned to New York State to raise a regiment. Soon after, he was back in Washington, where Lincoln told him about the flag Jackson had hung. Word is it was visible from the White House.
Ellsworth, the story goes, told Lincoln he would bring the flag down. So across the Potomac he went. He and four others climbed to the top of the Marshall House and cut the flag down. Ellsworth was carrying the flag downstairs when Jackson fatally shot him. In turn, Col. Francis E. Brownell, of Troy, shot and killed Jackson. Brownell later was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Ellsworth had been a popular figure, Weible said. In death, “he became kind of a martyr.” Lincoln ordered Ellsworth’s body brought to the White House, where he lay in state in the East Room. The body was then taken to City Hall in New York and finally to the Capitol in Albany before Ellsworth was buried in the Hudson View Cemetery in Mechanicville.
It was rare in those days for a body to be put on public display, Weible said, so Ellsworth wound up being one of the first people ever embalmed.
The flag, meanwhile, was coveted, along with other mementoes related to the shooting. Today there are pieces of the flag housed at both the Smithsonian Institute and Bates College. But the bulk of the flag belongs to the New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center in Saratoga Springs, which has loaned it to the state museum.
The flag is part of what Weible called a “very ambitious exhibit” about the Civil War. Covering 7,000 square feet, it includes a brass slave collar, the only known portrait of Dred Scott and a number of other items from the collections of the state museum, library and archives. “An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War” will be on display until September of 2013. The flag will be on display until Feb. 24.