Customer Reviews

The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ms. Bundy paints an exceptionally fine picture of the Boston cultural and political scene in the pre-war years. She clearly knows the Lowell family's story (she's a descendent) and she also is a good writer.

However, when she gets away from that and into the details of the war, she falls very short. Her information on Ball's Bluff, for example, contains several errors. Capt. Caspar Crowninshield did not command the 20th Massachusetts and was not the only officer from that regiment to make it back from Ball's Bluff.

On three occasions, she describes California governor Leland Stanford as a "copperhead" or a southern sympathizer though Stanford helped found the Republican party in California and was an ardent Unionist.

She notes Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts as Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, though Wilson was not even a member of that committee.

She treats the tactic of fighting cavalry dismounted almost as if it were invented by Col. Lowell instead of being an old and well-known dragoon technique.

There are numerous other small mistakes like that which some fact-checking or a little more research would have let her avoid. I give the book three stars instead of two only because it is very well written and because the mistakes she makes are not central to the story she is trying to tell about Lowell. They are very jarring, however, and the reader should be prepared for them.

The field of Civil War biography is a growth industry. Especially on the Confederate side, generals and even junior soldiers are written about constantly, and some of the more senior or famous soldiers have had several books written about them in recent years. This latter group includes Sherman, Sheridan, Grant, and (of course) Custer among the Yankees, and Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet among the Confederates. Many Confederate soldiers are written about also, including such household names as Alexander P. Stewart, Benjamin F. Cheatham, and John Bell Hood. By contrast, few if any of the junior Union army generals have had biographies written about them. One of the few books in this line in recent years is My Brave Boys, a study of Edward Cross and his New Hampshire volunteers. It's an excellent book, and the present volume, The Nature of Sacrifice, is worthy of standing on the shelf right along side it.

The subject of the Nature of Sacrifice is Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., the son of a failed businessman who graduated from Harvard first in his class, worked in business and travelled Europe, and joined the regular Union Army in 1861 as a lieutenant in the cavalry and rose to the rank of colonel in the next three years. He was promoted to brigadier general after his death.

The course of his career over the three years between the start of the Civil War and his death comprises the last two thirds of this book, while the first third covers his early life. Much time is spent inspecting his thoughts, feelings, philosophies and intents. When the Civil War started, his joining the Union Army and subsequent career are detailed at length. In the first two years of the war he saw action at Antietam, where he served as an aide to General McClellan. He then went North to raise a cavalry regiment in his home state of Massachusetts, led it back south the next year, chased guerillas for much of a year, then participated in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864. He was killed in the last battle of that campaign, Cedar Creek, and was instrumental in the Union victory there.

Lowell is a fascinating character. He was a fierce, devoted abolitionist, an aesthetic character who was Robert Gould Shaw's (Matthew Broderick in the movie Glory) brother-in-law, a man who could have gotten out of service in the war and instead embraced it repeatedly. He was universally well-regarded by the time of his death, receiving accolades from characters as diverse as George Armstrong Custer and Wesley Merritt (who detested one another, but agreed in their regard for Lowell). His men started out grumbling about his disciplinarian ways, but wound up loving him.

This is an excellent book, written by a relative who's never written a book before. It's well-written, informative, and frankly fills a gap in Civil War biography that I wouldn't have anticipated being filled in a long time, perhaps never. I thoroughly enjoyed this book (in case it wasn't obvious already) and would recommend it to anyone interested in the Civil War.

I first became interested in the career of Charles Russell Lowell Jr., when earlier this spring I saw the author, Carol Bundy, speak about him and read from her book on TV, on a fourm provided by the Public TV station Boston's WGBH. For this reader Boston visits always include at least a few hours spent curled up in front of a high-definition TV and turning on the public station, for it seems nowhere else in the country do the arts get such play. Nor the humanities, including the utterly humane biography that Bundy has written of a man she says is her great-great-great-great uncle I think. She was amazed when, after her grandmother died, among her trunks and effects out tumbled the clattering sword of Lowell, as well as his dress uniform, preserved through generations who had relished remembering him as their fallen hero.

As though honoring this family mandate, Bundy has done her level best to help preserve his memory for at least another generation. For on the one hand although Lowell was a forgotten soldier, dead before he was thirty, he fought with distinction at a number of pivotal sites in the War Between the States, at one point serving with "Mosby's Marauders." He was a curious chap, as Bundy relates. While his peers and elders were romantic dreamers-transcendentalists, really-who swore by the abolitionist movement and excused the barbarities of some of its activists as examples of ends justfying means, Lowell took the middle ground, sort of turning his nose up at the ideals in question, while cherishing a different set of ideals, by and large culled from a classical education and a tour of Europe on the grand scale. On this extended sojourn, the privilege of young gentlemen of the 19th century, Lowell became haunted by Michelangelo's painting of the three fates. Later on in the annals of art scholarship, ironically enough, it emerged that the painting was not by Michelangelo at all-not even close. But such is its power that it made Lowell sort of an ironist, and a fatalist too.

Bundy brings the War alive as Shelby Foote did, though from the union side of course. The sights and sounds of the battlefield waft over the reader who dares finish this exhsuaring biography all the way through, not only the sounds of glory but the rotting flesh of the dead and the mad faces of the survivors. Like Shakespeare, Lowell begs the question. No wonder his funeral was attended by so many notables, still spooked by him, for none could follow the oddments and the contours of his soul. Today his distinguished descendant has widened the field of inquiry, allowing us to see the lineaments of a brief life with tantalizing hesitance.

This is a three way review, along the lines of "readers who enjoyed this book also enjoyed....." Each of these books enriches reading of the other two. They are, in order of publication (and the order in which I read them), The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand, The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl, and The Nature of Sacrifice, a biography of Charles Russell Lowell, by Carol Bundy; These three fit together like birds in an Escher sketch. The many other reviews of each of these three explore their focus, their scholarship, their pace, breadth and depth, skillful turn of phrase and weaving of ideas: all of them excel in every way that their respective genre demands. What has intrigued me is how each, from their own genre and viewpoint, contribute to a fuller picture of the ideas and times that the others explore and a more informative and enjoyable total reading experience.

Briefly, The Metaphysical Club is primarily about ideas, and secondarily about their men: Oliver Wendell Holmes; William James; Charles Peirce and John Dewey, but Menand also necessarily explores the milieu from which these men and their eyes emerged. Holmes and James received the lion's share of delving into their history, as I recall from my reading several years ago, principally their lives as sons in their natal families, and their experiences with the Civil War: Holmes' an intimate, lucky survivor's life emerging from the corpses of a great many of his boyhood and college chums, James', a more distant, detached view. Menand explores how these war time experiences, as well as their exposure to zealous causes, such as abolition and the copperhead reaction thereto, shaped their approaches to life, to dealing with ideas, with movements, how Holmes applied these ideas in his jurisprudence and James in his philosophies. The Metaphysical Club is dense, tersely but often breezily written, requiring frequent re-readings of paragraphs and sections. If you let your mind wander for a sentence, you must retreat and reread. Menand also follows their ideas into the twentieth century, and their effects on public and higher education and other important areas in our country. We learn quite a bit about Boston, Cambridge and New England.

The Dante Club is fiction, which takes place within the boundaries, both geographical and temporal, of the Metaphysical Club. The club members tickle but do not overlap with the Metaphysicals: O.W. Holmes' father, the "diminutive doctor," as famous in his day as his son came to be in his; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the key figure, then widowered, and bringing forth his English translation of Dante's Inferno, with the help of Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell, poet, critic, and a founder of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, among other things, (including the uncle of Charles Russell Lowell, subject of the third book); and Charles Washington Green. The Dante Club is an exciting, interesting, chatty, rather informative and fast moving murder mystery, set mostly in Cambridge in the first few years after the Civil War had ended, partly in Boston, with forays to Boston's north shore, to civil war battle grounds south of the Mason Dixon line, and an occasional mention of Italy. Cameo appearances of Holmes Jr and his friends, his wounds and his ideas give hints of the developments of the Metaphysical Club, which was just then perhaps starting to take form. The Dante Club is a refreshingly easy reading barnstormer, a nice, light dessert after the Metaphysical Club. It inks a palpable picture of Cambridge after the civil war, and is great fun to read while sitting in a park along Brattle Street. J. R. Lowell enjoys a large role in it, and to understand its mystery, and the resolution thereof, it is helpful to know something of the lives, privations and crises of the everyday civil war soldier, and his officers. This then brings us to the missing piece in the puzzle, The Nature of Sacrifice.

The Nature of Sacrifice is Bundy's first published book, as the Dante Club is Pearl's. (Menand has several books to his credit, but he is mostly known for his remarkably wide ranging articles, essays and other short pieces that have established him as one of today's leading public intellectuals.) Bundy's biography of Charles Russell Lowell, J. R. Lowell's nephew and sometimes housemate, uncannily fills in territory left open by both these books about non-existent clubs, almost as if her book were written just for me, so that I could enjoy the other two more. Bundy's book is at once more compact, more potent than both, because her subject died before his 30th year, and also because he was a real live hero. She writes of the sounds, smells and sights of soldiering and battle with such vigor, organization and thrust that images and whole scenes arise in the mind's eye, as well as the mind's ear, and the mind's nostrils. Bundy's prose soars and charges, leaving the reader with no doubt that it tells the story of a flesh and blood man who lived earnestly, and died violently, leaving a family and community eviscerated by his death; and not only his death. Portrayal of His death stands as the synechdoche, the one death, put before us to call forth every single death in every family that lost a son to the Civil War adding up to the over 600,000 civil war deaths, and with just a little imagination, to all deaths, in all wars. Bundy gives us the catalogue of Boston and Cambridge families who sent their treasure to war, and lost that treasure, their individual names, their beautiful faces, the faces of their sisters, their playmates, the lists of places where they died, the lists of names who died in the same battles, or the same years; families with two sons dead (as was the case for the Lowells); She depicts the normal, daily childhood these boys led before they went off as men to kill and be killed. Bundy provides the real raw material for Holmes' pragmatic views, and James' different pragmatic views, for the motivations behind the actions of the main characters in the Dante Club, a picture of Dante's Hell, as well as really helping the reader to understand the insanity of the action in the Dante Club as something other than insanity, rather as a reaction to civil insanity that is beyond sane and insane, beyond good and evil as opposites. Bundy's descriptions also of the social and political background of the Civil War is very helpful to understand that war at at least a casual level. It certainly isn't and doesn't try to be an in depth study of those backgrounds, which studies have been done again and again. But it helped to get a picture of the country before the Civil war on many levels. Bundy's book is also a real counterweight to the other two, because much of the story is gleaned from sources written by or to women: Lowell's mother, his sister, his wife, wives of his comrades. Not to be simplistic, but mothers and sisters do have different views about war, risk and death than do most men.

These 3 books also reinforce each other, because they feel to be pieces of the same cloth. Nothing, or hardly anything in either of them contradicts matters in another, or jars the sense of the places and times established by the others.

So, I heartily recommend all three of these books to anyone interested in any one of them. And, I think that reading in the order of publication, or probably even better, its reverse, is the way to go, keeping Dante in the middle as a quick, driving light weight, between the two much more serious, albeit compelling and exciting non-fictions.

The Nature of Sacrifice: Charles Russell Lowell's Civil War
The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Rusell Lowell, Jr. 1835-1864, Carol Bundy, Farrer Strauss and Giroux, 560pp., endnotes, index, 2005, $35.00.

Within the first several chapters, this reader found Charlie Lowell a 'child of the(19)sixties living in the 1850s and not the Brahmin snob that he thought he would encounter.

Born in 1835, immediately before his family slipped from high social standing and wealth and into the 'poor cousins' category, Charlie the grew up in the 'high'culture' of Boston of close-knit kinship relations and opportunities.

With Transcendentalists and Abolitionists as neighbors and relatives, with books and debate as a part of family dinner discourse, and with newspapers and current bestsellers as a part of the table top literature of the household, Charlie grew into an apparently aimless but articulate Harvard student. Slight in build and height, surpassed all, after giving the commencement day address at Harvard in 1856, he took a manual laborers job on the Boston wharfs.

He approached manual labor and business in general with the soul of a philosopher and philanthropist. He was a subversive idealist in the workplace, a worker with a social conscience, and a son who wished to succeed where his father failed. Charlie chose the iron industry as his place in the world. By 1860, after an interlude in Europe recovering from tuberculosis, he was managing an iron foundry, west of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Voting Republican in the presidential election, he watched the secession crisis from western Maryland. The attack on Massachusetts troops by a Baltimore mob in the spring of 1861 brought him into the ranks of the Union army as a cavalry captain.

By 1863, after seeing action on the Peninsula and serving on McClellan's staff during the Sharpsburg campaign, Charlie Lowell commanded the 2nd Massachusetts cavalry in what he considered a 'backwater' assignment, Mosby's Confederacy. It was difficult and distastefull duty for him but one at which he excelled. Lowell collected near missed throughout the war; on the Peninsula he shook out his bedroll from behind his saddle and minie balls dropped out. At Antietam, he discovered his horse to be winded and removed the saddle and found the beast hit several times under it. As a colonel of a brigade during the 1864 Shenandoah campaign, he participated and rationalized the destruction of civilian farmsteads. He finally received a wound from a ball that clipped his elbow, traveled up his sleeve,crossed his shoulder, traveled down and cut a small portion of his spine. He died within 24 hours; he was survived by his wife whom he married in 1863 and was seven months pregnant.

The nature of Charles Russell Lowell's sacrifice was multi-faceted: the happy bachelor who left a wife and child, the workplace manager with a heart for the workers, sleight twenty-somenthing who had become a leader of cavalrymen, and the intellectual who became a anti-guerrilla fighter.

This biography surprises in many ways. Charlie Lowell is put in the context of a family on economic decline, of a social conscience within the environment of the empheral ideas of Transcendentalism, and of a top achieving Harvard student who condemns the college's curriculum of constant mind-numbing rote memorization. In 1861, few would have picked Charlie Lowell become a successful leader of cavalrymen. Appreciated by McClellan, Stanton, and Mosby, Lowell became a hero. The nature of Lowell's sacrifice was the loss of a future earned by a man who believed that there are no problems, only solutions and seized his duty to find a way to succeed.

Drawing her story from hundreds of family letters, Carol Bundy describes with vivid detail the life and death of Charles Russell Lowell. She is a fine writer, and this, her first book (amazingly), is a remarkable achievement. I found it totally absorbing. Yes, Bostonian readers especially will discover many familiar names, but Bundy's viewpoint is neither partisan nor provincial. I highly recommend this book as one of the best I've read in a long time. Just one caveat: it is very, very sad.

It is safe to say that Charles Russell Lowell, Jr. is not a household name outside of New England and even then his memory is probably confined to those with a love of history and place. What a shame! As this book well tells, he packed a huge amount of living into his short life that ended on a Virginia Civil War battlefield before his 30th birthday. This is a very good read for anyone with more than a casual interest in the generation of young Harvard educated Boston Brahmins, like Lowell's brother-in-law Col. Robert Gould Shaw, who largely perished between 1861 and 1865. Those few who did survive, such as Col. Lowell's cousin, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, were never the same afterwards. At nearly 500 pages this is not a short book - in fact many a shorter biography has been written about longer living and more accomplished individuals - but there is ample reward for staying the course. There are a few niggling errors such as when the author cites at least one place name (Reston, Virginia) that did not exist until long after the war was over but these are rare and inconsequential. It is readily apparent that she is focused on the terrain as it was; what is there now or what she calls it is mostly immaterial and shouldn't shake the reader's confidence in the author's overall command of the facts. I'm sure you'll enjoy this fine book as I did.

Excellent bio and history of young Bostonian who had a vision of things that needed changing (slavery). Great details of day to day fighting in the Civil War. Especially interesting to Boston/Cambridge residents, some great local history.