"Montgomery Blair urged an immediate attack on the Confederates, but General Scott and Montgomery Meigs argued against a precipitate offensive because the troops were woefully ill-prepared. Lincoln accepted their advice, though he did authorize a mission to secure Alexandria. When one of Lincoln’s favorite surrogate sons, Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth, asked to serve in the vanguard of that expedition, the president 'replied that the first movement on Southern soil was one of great delicacy. Much depended thereon. He desired to avoid all violence. The people of Virginia were not in a mass disloyal and he wanted nothing to occur that might incense them against the government, but rather wished to so conduct the movement that it would win them over.' On May 24, federal troops crossed the Potomac and occupied Alexandria without opposition, though Ellsworth took umbrage at the Confederate flag flying atop a hotel. (Visible from the White House, that flag had been an irritant to Lincoln and his cabinet. Two weeks earlier Chase said 'very emphatically' that 'if I had my way yesterday that Flag wouldn’t be there this morning.') Impetuously the young officer dashed into the offending hostelry, clambered up the stairs to the roof, and hauled down the secessionist ensign. As he descended, Ellsworth encountered the hotel proprietor, who shot him dead. News of his murder shocked Northerners and devastated Lincoln, who 'mourned him as a son.' Upon learning of Ellsworth’s death, the president burst into tears, telling some White House callers: 'Excuse me, but I cannot talk.' After regaining his composure, he said: 'I will make no apology, gentlemen, 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! It was undoubtedly an act of rashness, but it only shows the heroic spirit that animates our soldiers, from high to low, in this righteous cause of ours.'"
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2, pg. 177, Michael Burlingame