Saving Lincoln
Adam began work on the feature film ‘Saving Lincoln’ today.
Directed by Salvador Litvak and starring Tom Amandes and Penelope Anne Miller as Abraham and Mary Lincoln, ‘Saving Lincoln’ charts Lincoln’s tumultuous wartime presidency through the eyes of U.S. Marshal and longtime friend, Ward Hill Lamon (played by Lea Coco) who struggles to protect the President from the host of would-be assassins who want him dead. Considering Lincoln's own laissez-faire attitude toward his personal safety, it proves not always an easy task.
Adam plays Colonel Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth, a life-long friend of the Lincolns from the time he studied law with the future president at his offices in Springfield.
Ellsworth became a national celebrity in the United States by the age of 24. Tiring of Law, he developed a fascination with the French Algerian method of light infantry drilling. He emulated these “Zouaves” and formed the “United States Zouave Cadets”. He required that his hand-picked volunteers be "morally upright," abstain from alcohol and tobacco, subjected them to a strict regimen of physical training, outfitted them in a Zouave uniform of his own design, and drilled them in tactics he had adapted from French manuals. By the summer of 1860, his U.S. Zouave Cadets of Chicago were being hailed as the finest militia in the American Midwest.
Thursday, 11 August 2011
On July 2, 1860, Ellsworth and 50 of his best men embarked
on a six-week tour that took them to 20 cities, including Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. The Zouaves humbled their competitors and awed thousands of spectators. Newspapers described Ellsworth as "the most talked-of man in the country."
In “Saving Lincoln”, Ellsworth historically becomes the first Union martyr of the Civil War, when, after retrieving a Rebel flag from the roof of the Marshall House (an affront, apparently being visible to Lincoln’s White House from across the Potomac) he is shot in the chest by the secessionist inn-keeper, James W. Jackson.
"Avenge Ellsworth!" became a Northern battle-cry, and the death of the charismatic founder of the "Zouave Craze" spurred even more volunteers to don the flashy attire Ellsworth had championed. Dozens of Zouave units would fight on the battlefields of that war, from Bull Run to Appomattox; and one of the finest of them was the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry, "Duryee's Zouaves."
