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Outstanding Biography with multiple connections!, April 11, 2012
The Nature of Sacrifice is far more than a
well-written, well-researched biography of Charle R. Lowell, Jr. It is an
amazing exploration of the spirit of the Civil War participants who sacrificed
so much in this terrible struggle. Carol Bundy brings together some amazing
regional connections and ties the whole tale together in a way that brings
greater understanding of the struggle, of the personal tribulations endured by
those men and women whose lives intersected socially and in the realm of
action. She brings to life an amazing series of stories - of contemporaries who
endured the hardships of this period in our history. Bundy explores the depths
of sacrifice and the "good death" that is also explained in
Gilpin-Faust's "This Republic of Suffering." In fact, I would
recommend a close reading of both books as they complement one another so well.
Bundy's research was so thorough and her writing so clean and eloquent that one
comes to know the characters and to feel for their hardships. Somehow she
conveys, in this great tragedy, a sense of victory ... an understanding that
war can bring out the best and worst in us and leave us both saddened and somehow
comforted as well to know that sacrifices MUST be remembered - that they who at
the end of the day gave the last full measure of devotion in a cause did not
die in vain. In this, our most horrible national conflict, Bundy seems to make
us recognize the value of sacrifices made long ago, to make us see that the
victory is not so much in the winning of a war, as in the surviving of the
storm, the enduring with fortitude and valorous commitment to stand tall in the
face of fear which makes the story of Lowell and his comrades so endearing and
enduring. This work is not merely a biography, but rather a tale for all times
full of the tragedy and triumph of humanity.
Well Told Story of a Brief yet Magnificent Life, February 5, 2011
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.
'a child of the(19)sixties living in the 1850s and not the
Brahmin snob that I thought I would encounter., March 9, 2007
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.
harrowing, powerful, biography, March 31, 2006
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.
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Death Stains Cedar Creek,
October 22, 2005
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.
Well written but too many factual
errors, September 23, 2005
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.
When young men died for a purpose,
August 8, 2005
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.
Wonderful bio of an obscure Civil
War figure, July 19, 2005
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.
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