Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Colonel Charles Russell Lowell to Josephine Shaw, October, 1863

Vienna, October, 1863.

It has been a lovely day, — I hope we shall have such days after you come here, — the woods in all their softest and warmest colours, and seen in the light of a balmy Italian spring sky. I am afraid it has “demoralized” me or discouraged me, and made me feel as if the end of the war were a great way off yet: we don't deserve to have peace yet: what I have seen of the Army of the Potomac really pains me: I do not mean that the men are not in good spirits and ready to fight, but the tone of the officers (those that I see) doesn't seem to improve in earnestness at all. I almost think we shall need a Cromwell to save us. I cannot feel about Lincoln at all as you do, — and as to Halleck — . . .

I do not see that this war has done us as a nation any good, except on the slave question, — in one sense that is enough; but how is it that it has not taught us a great many other things which we hoped it would ?1
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1 Colonel Lowell obtained a short leave of absence, and, on the last day of October, married Miss Shaw, at Staten Island. Soon after, she came with him to his brigade camp at Vienna, and they had their only home life that winter and the following spring, in a little house within the camp lines, and when the camp was moved to Fall's Church, for a short time in a tent. Yet couriers by day, bringing word of Mosby's ubiquitous raids, and sudden and stealthy attacks on the pickets at midnight, constantly harassed the command, and did not allow the Colonel to relax his vigilance.

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 313-4, 445

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