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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