Sunday, October 26, 2014

Charles Russell Lowell to Anna Jackson Lowell, June 19, 1861

Washington, June 19, '61.

Don't let any one blame Governor Andrew — he is good and thoughtful, and if he is sometimes misled by good nature, he is never hampered by ulterior personal aims; all the faculty of ways and means in the world, if so hampered, is a curse to the country. At least I am sometimes tempted to say so.1
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1 As for our good and great War-Governor, the doubts concerning him when elected, his early unpopularity, and his triumphant record, I quote the words of that admirable citizen, the late Colonel Henry Lee of his staff: —

Meeting the Governor just after his election, at a political levee, I refrained from joining in the congratulations generally expressed because I was afraid he might be one-sided and indiscreet, deficient in common sense and practical ability.  . . . I unexpectedly received a summons to a position upon his staff.  . . . Work began at once. But it is needless to repeat the hundred-times-told tale of Governor Andrew’s military preparations, the glory whereof has since been comfortably adopted by Massachusetts as her own — by right of eminent domain, perhaps — whereas in fact nearly all Massachusetts derided and abused him at the time, and the glory was really as much his individual property as his coat and hat.

“The war had begun, and Massachusetts, that denounced State which was to have been left out in the cold, had despatched within one week five Regiments of Infantry, one Battalion of Riflemen, and one Battery of Artillery, armed, clothed, and equipped. Behind every great movement stands the man, and that man behind this movement was the ridiculed, despised fanatic, John A. Andrew. As the least backwardness on the part of Massachusetts, whose sons had done more than all others to promote the ‘irrepressible conflict,’ would have endangered the Union and exposed us to the plottings and concessions of the Conservatives and ‘Copperheads,’ so her prompt response, in consequence of the courage and foresight of her Governor, strengthened the timid, rebuked the disaffected, cemented the Union, fused the whole country into one glow of patriotism.

Saint Paul was not more suddenly or more thoroughly converted than were many of those who had, up to that week, been loudest in their lamentations, or denunciations of the Governor. Rich men poured in their gifts.  . . . Conservatives and Democrats rushed to pay their respects and to applaud the very acts which they had so deplored and ridiculed.”  (Memoir of Henry Lee, by John T. Morse, Jr. Boston: Little & Brown, 1905.)

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 212, 403-4

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