Harrison's Bar, July 18, 1862.
Your two last letters have told me more about Jimmy than I
had learned from his friends here — they seem to bring me very near to him and
also to you and Father — nearer than I might ever have been, had the little
fellow lived. It is very pleasant to have had him with you so entirely last
winter. I wish I had seen more of him on the Peninsula.
I think that the officers of his regiment feel his loss very
much, for besides being a gallant officer, they all tell me he was a good one,
which is much rarer—his noble behaviour after he received his wound has
impressed them very much. George will tell you about this; — even Palfrey
cannot speak of him without tears.1
Do, dear Mother, write to me a little oftener and try and
help me to be a little more like what you saw me as a little child.
Your really loving
Son.
_______________
1 Major Higginson, in giving the Soldiers' Field,
said of James Lowell: —
“One of them was first scholar in his
class — thoughtful, kind, affectionate, gentle, full of solicitude about his companions
and about his duties. He was wounded in a very early fight in the war, and
after his recovery and a hard campaign on the Peninsula, was killed at
Glendale. . . . Hear his own words: ‘When the Class meets, in years to
come, and honours its statesmen and judges, its divines and doctors, let also
the score who went to fight for their country be remembered, and let not those
who never returned be forgotten.’ If you had known James Lowell, you would
never have forgotten him.”
I add this account of James Lowell's parting from life,
given by Professor Francis J. Child in the Harvard Memorial Biographies:
“When
our troops moved on, and orders came for all who could to fall in, he insisted
on Patten's (his 2d lieutenant) leaving him. . . . ‘I have written them all. Tell them how
it was, Pat.’ The officers of his regiment who went to bid him farewell tell us
that the grasp of his hand was warm and firm and his countenance smiling and
happy. He desired that his father might be told that he was struck while dressing
the line of his men. Besides this he had no message but ‘Good-bye.’ He
expressed a wish that his sword might not fall into the enemy's hands — a wish
that was faithfully attended to by Colonel Palfrey,2 through whose
personal care it was preserved and sent home. . . .
“Two of our surgeons, who had been left
with the wounded at the farm, were much impressed with his behaviour, and one
of them told the Rebel officers to talk with him, if they wished to know
how a Northern officer thought and felt. . . .
"While the soul of this noble
young soldier was passing slowly away, his sister, who had for some time been
serving as volunteer nurse on a hospital steamer, which was lying at Harrison's
Bar on the James River, only a few miles off, heard of his dangerous wound, and
tried every expedient to get to him, but without success.”
2 Francis Winthrop Palfrey, Colonel of the
Twentieth Massachusetts Infantry, and later brevetted Brigadier-General U. S.
V., a good soldier, and the author of the volume Antictam and
Fredericksburg, No. V, in “Campaigns of the Civil War.”
SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of
Charles Russell Lowell, p. 221-2, 407-8
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