Willard's Hotel, Washington,
Sunday noon, August 2d.
I found, when I reported in the evening, that I was ordered
to take command of all the Cavalry in the Department (only three regiments, not
very magnificent), headquarters to be at Fairfax Courthouse or Centreville.1
Everything that comes about Rob shows his death to have been
more and more completely that which every soldier and every man would long to
die, but it is given to very few, for very few do their duty as Rob had. I am
thankful they buried him “with his niggers;” they were brave men and they were
his men.2
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1 Besides that already mentioned,
other important reconnoissances, and escort duty to supply-trains, were
performed by Colonel Lowell's command during July. In the end of the month,
Mosby with his “Partisan” force made some very successful raids on the army
wagon-trains, capturing near Alexandria between one and two hundred prisoners,
with many horses, mules, wagons, etc. General King ordered Lowell to pursue,
and he returned on the last day of July, with many men and horses recaptured.
About the 1st of August, he was put in command of a brigade, consisting of the
Second Massachusetts and Thirteenth and Sixteenth New York Cavalry regiments.
The First Battalion now rejoined the Second Cavalry, after several months'
service in the Peninsula.
2
In the Reminiscences of Mr. J. M. Forbes (privately printed) is a
letter written to him by Mr. Frank G. Shaw, just after his son's death, from
which I am allowed to quote : —
“He has gone from us, and we try not to
think of our loss, but of his gain. We have had no doubt since the first news
came. We had expected it. . . . We thank
God that he died without pain, in what was to him the moment of triumph; and we
thank God especially for his happy life, and that he did not rise to his
eminence through suffering, but through joy.”
Mr. Forbes adds, “I have seen no reference yet to our late
friend's manly nobility [Mr. Shaw had recently died]. Every one remembers the
brutal answer of the rebels to our flag of truce, when General Gilmore, after
the assault on Fort Wagner, asked for Colonel Shaw's body: ‘We have thrown him
into the ditch under his niggers.’ When we recaptured the fort, an attempt was
made to find the sacred relics; and the general in command, or probably
Secretary Stanton, wrote to Mr. Shaw asking some intimation as to what should
be done in case of their recovery, and suggesting a monument recalling the
indignity which had been offered. No thought of vengeance had ever been mixed
up with Frank Shaw's patriotism or clouded his serene brow. . . . The answer which now came — I think from
both parents — was grand in its . . . simplicity. ‘We wish no search made, nor
is there any monument so worthy of a soldier as the mound heaped over him by
the bodies of his comrades.’”
SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of
Charles Russell Lowell, p. 289, 432-3
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