Colonel Charles Russell Lowell to Josephine Shaw Lowell, October 14, 1864

CEDAR CREEK, Oct. 14, 1864.

You’re an innocent. Go on with the shoulder-straps, you needn’t be expecting any change, — those eagles will flourish a good while yet. I'm perfectly satisfied too, now that I have this Brigade; it has only been commanded before by Buford and Merritt, Colonel Gibbs had it for a few weeks at a time temporarily.¹

Our movements here are so entirely dependent on Grant's success before Richmond, that I can't form the faintest idea of the prospect of a speedy rest here.

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¹ Perhaps Mrs. Lowell thought that before her shoulder-straps — the silver eagles on yellow ground of a cavalry colonel — were finished, her husband would be entitled to the single star of a brigadier-general. For more than a year he had borne the responsibility and done the work of one.

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 359-60, 473