“I Knew Poor Ellsworth Well”
Few men have been appointed of God to bear such burdens as were laid upon President Lincoln. A distracted country, a people at war, all the foundations of society broken up; the cares, trials, and perplexities which came every day without cessation, disaster upon disaster, the loss of those he loved, — Ellsworth, Baker, and his own darling Willie.
A visitor at the White House the day of Ellsworth’s death found him in tears. “I will make no apology, gentlemen,” said he, “for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard. Just as you entered the room. Captain Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of Ellsworth’s unfortunate death. The event was so unexpected, and the recital so touching, that it quite unmanned me. Poor fellow,” he added, “it was undoubtedly a rash act, but it only shows the heroic spirit that animates our soldiers, from high to low, in this righteous cause of ours. Yet who can restrain grief to see them fall in such a way as this, — not by the fortunes of war, but by the hand of an assassin?”
Quoted in “The boys of ’61; or, Four years of fighting”,by Coffin, Charles Carleton, p. 31