The day before, a secession convention in Virginia ratified a decision for the commonwealth to secede from the Union. Ellsworth and his regiment were among the first to arrive in the District to protect the capital city following the previous month’s bombardment of federal troops at Fort Sumter near Charleston, S.C. They also occupied adjacent territory across the Potomac River in Virginia, including the city of Alexandria.

Ellsworth would meet his fate that night at the hands of Marshall House innkeeper and fervent defender of slavery, James W. Jackson. Smithsonian magazine wrote that Ellsworth had approached the inn with only four soldiers and managed to take down its 8 foot by 14 foot Confederate flag, which could be seen from the White House with the aid of binoculars. When he returned to the main floor, Jackson fired his shotgun, killing Ellsworth. One of Ellsworth’s men, Cpl. Francis Brownell fired back, fatally injuring Jackson.

A reporter for the New York Tribune was on the scene and quickly dispatched news of Ellsworth's death. According to Washington History, his assassination sent Washingtonians “into a state of shock over the news.”

Ellsworth was more than just a Union officer. Smithsonian wrote that he worked as a patent agent in Rockford, Ill., and studied law in Chicago, where he also served in the National Guard. In 1860, Ellsworth became friends with Lincoln while working at his Springfield law office and accompanied the new president-elect when he moved to D.C. the following year.

Upon learning of Ellsworth’s death, Lincoln reportedly cried out, “My boy! My boy! Was it necessary this sacrifice should be made?" Equally distraught by their commander’s death, Ellsworth’s troops threatened to burn the city of Alexandria that night. Instead, Union authorities put them to work on building Fort Ellsworth, which overlooked the city, which would remain occupied by Union forces through the duration of the war.

According to the National Portrait Gallery’s current exhibition, "The Death of Ellsworth," his body was first brought to the Washington Navy Yard and later to the East Room of the White House upon Lincoln’s request. Ellsworth was buried in his hometown of Mechanicville, N.Y., where thousands came to pay their respects.

His esteem lived on among the 44th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment nicknamed Ellsworth’s Avengers. His true avenger, Brownell, later received the Medal of Honor, and "Remember Ellsworth!" became a battle cry for the Union. But both sides emerged with their own version of the war’s first martyr. In the South, Jackson was praised in an 1862 book, Life of James W. Jackson, The Alexandria Hero.

Image courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

But the act also provided a little pro-displacement policy. While former slave owners were taken care of handsomely, former slaves were only helped out in the event they were willing to leave D.C.—and the United States altogether. $100 would be provided for slaves willing to  immigrate to Haiti or Liberia, under the act.

At multiple points in its history, racist politicians have schemed to rid the District of its black population. Time and time again they failed, as the community hung tight.

I think it'll continue to, even though recent Census numbers might imply otherwise. Talking with black resident Annette Kenner a number of years ago, she told me a story that had been passed down through generations of her family.

Though it's hard to remember all the particulars of the tale now, Kenner, who lives in Capitol Hill, said one of her ancestors, known as Queenie, was working at a house near Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865. The former slave was hanging wash when an injured white man ran by, frightening her.

Queenie later learned that President Lincoln had been shot, and that the fellow she'd seen making a dash for it was none other than conspirator and assassin John Wilkes Booth, goes the story.

I don't pretend to have the historical chops to look into Kenner's tale and see whether it holds up. But the fact that Washington belongs to Kenner's family enough that a legend built up about such a historical event says something. There's been  too much history here, too much struggle for African American residents to ever truly abandon the city. Not even when the president of the United States himself is the one making the offer.

Photo by chadh Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

On March 17, 1865, two Confederate sympathizers, John Wilkes Booth and John Surratt, were positioned near the intersection of what is today 7th Street NW and Georgia and Florida avenues, hoping to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, who had been expected to visit Campbell General Hospital, one of the city's three dozen Civil War military hospitals. Lincoln liked to visit military hospitals unannounced, meeting with wounded soldiers, going from ward to ward.

According to this history on the Campbell General Hospital assassination plot:

John Wilkes Booth learned that President Lincoln was supposed visit wounded soldiers at Campbell General Hospital for a performance of Still Waters Run Deep on March 17, 1865 and arranged an ambush. "With an hour's notice, according to John Surratt, the gang raced out waited until they saw a carriage approach. Riding alongside, they saw the man in the vehicle was not Lincoln. It may have been Salmon P. Chase, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who did attend the show," wrote historian Robert H. Fowler. President Lincoln had changed his schedule and greeted a group of Indiana soldiers instead. He never showed up—thus postponing his assassination for nearly a month.

On March 17, 2003, just as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, a North Carolina tobacco farmer protesting cuts to federal tobacco subsidies, crashed his tractor into Constitution Gardens and claimed he had explosives. Dwight Watson's two-day standoff near the intersection of 17th Street NW and Constitution Avenue snarled traffic in all directions, blocking major commuter routes in and out of downtown. Watson would soon be called the "Tractor Man," whose protest amounted to a major annoyance, ill-timed with the U.S. invasion, which dominated news coverage.

As Timothy Noah wrote in Slate at the time:

Tractor Man's main impediment, of course, was the war. With the most ambitious U.S. military action in decades about to commence, he couldn't have picked a worse time to try to focus the country's attention on his chosen cause, which was to protest the federal government's tobacco farming policies. If his aim was to spotlight that cause, he couldn't have chosen a less popular or meritorious one than the injustice of lowering tobacco price supports and attempting to keep cigarettes away from minors. If, on the other hand, Tractor Man just wanted to kill people, he'd have done better to stay in North Carolina and continue farming tobacco. The cops couldn't have laid a finger on him.

Watson's standoff ended peacefully and there were no explosives found on his tractor. He was tried and convicted on charges related to his threats and was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison.

Image courtesy Library of Congress

The District is bracing for yet another gathering of Tea Party activists, seemingly furious about the very existence of the federal government and complaining about "taxation without representation." (Though, honestly, we in D.C. know from taxation without representation, and none of these grouches from states with two senators and voting House members really impress City Paper much for disenfranchisement.) On Saturday, Glenn Beck will do his best Martin Luther King, Jr., impression, addressing a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of King's 1963 March on Washington. Beck has a dream, too, you know. And it doesn't necessarily involve a Christmas sweater.

But Washingtonians aren't the only ones preparing for the invasion: The Tea Partiers are girding their loins for their imminent arrival in the District. A visitor's guide posted on a Maine Tea Party group's website has gotten some attention for advising the anti-government activists avoid Metro's Green and Yellow lines—a warning that's "even more important at night"—and stick to certain areas of the city for safety reasons if on foot, in a cab or a bus:

Bethesda, Arlington (preferably north Arlington), Crystal City, Falls Church, Annandale, or Alexandria, or in DC only in northwest DC west (i.e. larger street numbers) of 14th or 16th streets, or if on Capitol Hill only in SE Capitol Hill (zip 20003) between 1st and 8th Streets, not farther out than 8th (e.g. 9th, 10th etc). (Or stay on the Mall and at the various monuments.)

It seems unlikely many Tea Party activists will take this advice completely literally; a lot of them have been showing up here pretty often since President Obama took office, anyway, to scream about how unfair it is that the government will soon be helping people without health insurance get coverage, among other perfidies, so they may have learned their way around town by now.

Which is a good thing—because this visitor's guide would put quite a few sights off-limits. Among them:

• The National Archives, where—thanks, no doubt, to a socialist plot—the beloved Constitution now resides, best reachable by public transit via the Green or Yellow line;
• Ur-Republican Abraham Lincoln's cottage on the grounds of the Old Soldier's Home, located dangerously northeast of downtown, in Petworth along North Capitol Street;
• The Washington Times (if it's still publishing by the weekend), whose op/ed page unflaggingly supports Tea Party goals from its home off New York Avenue in Northeast;
• Baseball at Nationals Park, on the Green line—fortunately, both "mom" and "apple pie" stick to safer transit options;
• Target, in Columbia Heights, which faces a MoveOn.org-organized boycott over its political contributions to a business group that's given money to opponents of gay marriage in Minnesota;
• The street named after Tea Party heroine Sarah Palin's turf, Alaska Avenue NW, which runs northeast from 16th Street NW to Georgia Avenue NW.

Where else might Tea Party types want to go, or not go, this weekend? Leave your suggestions in the comments. And if you spot a Beck acolyte on any Metro line this weekend, remember—their farecard only covers 66 percent of the cost of their ride. The rest? Paid for by the government!

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr/Creative Commons attribution license

Wait, you ask: What's Emancipation Day? Today in 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act, a precursor to the Emancipation Proclamation that freed roughly 3,100 slaves in D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams declared it a D.C. public holiday in 2005. District government offices and public schools are closed. Feds, sorry, you're out of luck.

Emancipation Day falls the day after Tax Day—conveniently, for a couple reasons. One: For those procrastinators out there who filed their taxes at 11:59 p.m. last night and were in desperate need of a drink, you were in luck—D.C. bars can stay open an hour later than usual the day before public holidays. Two: For those incurable procrastinators out there who sometimes need a day or two extra to file their taxes, Emancipation Day has the effect of extending the filing deadline from April 16 to April 17 during years that April 15 falls on a weekend. Next time's 2012, for all of you keeping track.

Tax Day also brought out the protesters in full force, with thousands of Tea Baggers Tea Party activists gathering at Freedom Plaza and in the amphitheater of the apropos Ronald Reagan Building.

District residents are all atwitter about the filming of Top Chef. Foodies can track Gail Simmons, Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshmi and the cheftestants as they eat and compete their way through D.C. Our own Chris Shott was lucky enough to spot Padma at the Westend Bistro by Eric Ripert.

Nats fans, last year was rough, but take heart: wunderkind Stephen Strasburg lived up to the hype in a crackerjack professional debut with Double-A Harrisburg, fanning eight and allowing one earned run in five innings, and throwing in the 97-98 mph range.

Meanwhile in sports, the top-seeded Caps began their play-off run with a 3-2 loss to the Montreal Canadiens. Poster boy Alex Ovechkin had no shots on goal after leading the NHL in shots during the regular season. For the sake of fans everywhere, Ovie, don't drown your sorrows in vodka at Russia House just yet! 

Lincoln photo courtesy of gop.com. Gail, Tom, and Padma photo courtesy of photos.mlive.com.

Abe Lincoln hasn't been this hot since his body went cold.

Lincoln turned 200 this month. The new president idolizes him. Heck, his memorial just hosted one of the biggest rock concerts in U.S. history.

A crowd of kids from Hearst Elementary were among those making the pilgrimage today to Lincoln’s summer cottage in Petworth, the newly restored residence on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home.

“I need a nice, Lincoln-like smile from all of you!” shouts William Rope, a third-grade teacher at Hearst and the main adult chaperone on the field trip.

Rope has lined up his class in front of a statue of Lincoln in the rear of the cottage for a photo op, but he’s having trouble getting his pupils to follow orders.

Two-thirds of the kids smile, as per instructions.

The rest do various unauthorized, third-gradey things, like make goofy faces and poke each other in the arm.

Rope finally has reached the end of his, well, you know. And the teacher decides, as Lincoln would have, that for the good of the whole, some individuals must suffer: The teacher loudly tosses one of the funny facemakers out of the group.

The punishment gets everybody else’s attention, and the frazzled teacher snaps the group-minus-one photo and lets the kids disperse.

After a few second to let Rope defrazzle, I ask him if his students realize how in vogue all things Lincoln are right now.

“No,” he says. “I don't know that they know that he's in the news now. But if you ask them what he did during the Civil War, they know that. They’ve been taught that.”

Sharing a bicentennial with Abraham Lincoln is a bit like celebrating one's birthday on Christmas. Unless you're Charles Darwin, that is, in which case the playing field is much more level. Sure, Newsweek gives Lincoln precedence—not entirely surprising for an American publication—but rankings like that are totally beside the point when you're talking about giants.

Let's hope President Obama set aside a few moments to think on Darwin today—he certainly shows Lincoln enough love.

When David Axelrod was dissatisfied with an early draft of Obama's Grant Park victory speech, he sent back a simple directive to chief speechwriter John Favreau: “Figure out a good Lincoln quote to bring it all together.”

Favreau went with the money line: "We are not enemies, but friends.… Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection."

Yes, we get it: Obama The Candidate was a guy who seemed to promise renewal not principally through policy, but through a rearticulation of the dream that, say, made our nation what it is—he gives America back to us. "In every work of genius," Emerson writes in "Self-Reliance," "we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." At his best, to the credulous, this is what Obama offered.

To be sure, there's something sort of facile about the way Obama and his cohorts deal with the Lincoln thing. But Tom Hanks aside, they pull it off pretty convincingly.

Darwin's still in the background for most of us—a figure delivered to us in trite, one-dimensional snippets. We see him, if at all, in the mind’s eye: A vague, serious man with a jutting forehead and a Solzhenitsyn beard, a floating head circumscribed with some hazy words about natural selection. In the public realm, his lot's pretty dim: Most of the time he's either hated or forgotten. Think about it! Most of us take for granted that apes are our forebears, and we titter when the New York Times covers “bonobos porn.” This is the dusty Darwin of the college library, legible through micro-fiche copies of the Linnaean Society’s minutes from 1858. On the other hand, our born-again brothers and sisters call his theory specious, his Descent of Man a heresy, the man himself a DREAD APOSTATE.

Indeed. Thanks to Darwin—as the New York Times observed in its awesome 4/21/1882 obituary of this “epoch-making man”—“school children intuitively understood that if man is descended from the ape, he cannot be descended from Adam." So too may the Mikado’s Poo-Bah swell with pride at his ability to “trace my ancestry to a protoplasmic primordial globule.”

Obama, the progressive in me trusts, will put Darwin back in the foreground. In his Inaugural Address, Obama promised to "restore science to its rightful place," and not to spurn non-believers. And while the evangelical wackos cringe, Darwin, one hopes, would be proud. Here's a president who goes to church and agrees with Poo-Bah.

As the Texas Board of Education—on which Republicans have gained serious footing—gears up for its big vote in March, the same battle's being fought, at large and at small, all across the country.

"At a moment when we are far less divided than in Lincoln's day but when we are once again debating the critical issues of our time—and debating them sometimes fiercely—let us remember that we are doing so as servants of the same flag, as representatives of the same people and as stakeholders in a common future," Obama said in his speech at the Capitol today. That's not so different from his “red states/blue states" line at the 2004 DNC.

The fallout of Darwin’s legacy, 200 years later, will put that proposition to the test.

Image above snagged from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

In all seriousness, it does sound pretty awesome. I'm hoping this gets used for the promotional poster.