Showing posts with label Anna C Lowell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anna C Lowell. Show all posts

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Captain Charles Russell Lowell to Anna Jackson Lowell, February 1, 1863

Boston,1 Feb. 4, 1863.

I am very glad to see that the Negro Army Bill has got so well through the House, — Governor Andrew is going to try a Regiment in Massachusetts. I am afraid he is too sanguine — it would be wiser to start with a smaller number, to be increased to a regiment in South Carolina, Texas, or Louisiana. The blacks here are too comfortable to do anything more than talk about freedom. I hope you are not too comfortable; comfort is so “demoralizing.”

1 Relative positions were now reversed, as Captain Lowell had been detailed to raise and drill the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, and his mother had been summoned to Washington, to the bedside of her daughter Anna, a nurse in Armory Square Military Hospital, who had fallen ill.

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 233-4, 413

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Captain Charles Russell Lowell to Anna Jackson Lowell, July 18, 1862

Harrison's Bar, July 18, 1862.

Your two last letters have told me more about Jimmy than I had learned from his friends here — they seem to bring me very near to him and also to you and Father — nearer than I might ever have been, had the little fellow lived. It is very pleasant to have had him with you so entirely last winter. I wish I had seen more of him on the Peninsula.

I think that the officers of his regiment feel his loss very much, for besides being a gallant officer, they all tell me he was a good one, which is much rarer—his noble behaviour after he received his wound has impressed them very much. George will tell you about this; — even Palfrey cannot speak of him without tears.1

Do, dear Mother, write to me a little oftener and try and help me to be a little more like what you saw me as a little child.

Your really loving Son.
_______________

1 Major Higginson, in giving the Soldiers' Field, said of James Lowell: —

“One of them was first scholar in his class — thoughtful, kind, affectionate, gentle, full of solicitude about his companions and about his duties. He was wounded in a very early fight in the war, and after his recovery and a hard campaign on the Peninsula, was killed at Glendale.  . . . Hear his own words: When the Class meets, in years to come, and honours its statesmen and judges, its divines and doctors, let also the score who went to fight for their country be remembered, and let not those who never returned be forgotten.’ If you had known James Lowell, you would never have forgotten him.”

I add this account of James Lowell's parting from life, given by Professor Francis J. Child in the Harvard Memorial Biographies:

When our troops moved on, and orders came for all who could to fall in, he insisted on Patten's (his 2d lieutenant) leaving him.  . . . ‘I have written them all. Tell them how it was, Pat.’ The officers of his regiment who went to bid him farewell tell us that the grasp of his hand was warm and firm and his countenance smiling and happy. He desired that his father might be told that he was struck while dressing the line of his men. Besides this he had no message but ‘Good-bye.’ He expressed a wish that his sword might not fall into the enemy's hands — a wish that was faithfully attended to by Colonel Palfrey,2 through whose personal care it was preserved and sent home. . . .

“Two of our surgeons, who had been left with the wounded at the farm, were much impressed with his behaviour, and one of them told the Rebel officers to talk with him, if they wished to know how a Northern officer thought and felt. . . .

"While the soul of this noble young soldier was passing slowly away, his sister, who had for some time been serving as volunteer nurse on a hospital steamer, which was lying at Harrison's Bar on the James River, only a few miles off, heard of his dangerous wound, and tried every expedient to get to him, but without success.”

2 Francis Winthrop Palfrey, Colonel of the Twentieth Massachusetts Infantry, and later brevetted Brigadier-General U. S. V., a good soldier, and the author of the volume Antictam and Fredericksburg, No. V, in “Campaigns of the Civil War.”

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 221-2, 407-8