His use of the telegraph to spread disinformation to the Union forces was declared by The Times as the greatest innovation to come out of the war.

According to a death notice in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, "In 1858 he served under Col. C. W. Hammond, the superintendent of telegraph for the Missouri Pacific-Iron Mountain system, who at that time was working for the Western Union Telegraph company at its first St. Louis office, on Chestnut street, between Second and Main streets.

He fled by swimming across the Ohio River with his portable telegraph, hanging on to a mule, at the Battle of Buffington Island.

In 1867, Ellsworth was charged with shooting and killing a man named James Swathers or Smothers at Sharpsburg, Kentucky.

[9] In 1899, a Brooklyn newspaper reprinted a story from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that mentioned Ellsworth: "He is still living in Alabama, just where Morgan originally picked him up and attended the Confederate reunion at Nashville last year, much to the surprise and joy of Morgan's survivors, for there was a tradition among the men that Ellsworth fell in the famous Ohio raid of 1863, or had died in captivity.

[12] Ellsworth was married at Algiers, Louisiana,[11] to a woman named Mary Mullen, native of Virginia,[7] who died in 1939.