Beau Sabreur

by FERRIS GREENSLET

1

CHARLES RUSSELL LOWELL, JR., scholar, mechanic, traveler, railroad treasurer, ironmaster, commander of a fighting brigade of cavalry, all before he was thirty — beau sabreur to the eye, but one with first-class brains and a gentle heart — was born in Boston in a house that stood a few doors from the Common, in Winter Place. In him the élan of the Russell-Lowell-Spence line was mingled with the Jackson verve, and, at least so his cousin Henry Higginson thought, a touch of the Irish fighting spirit of his great-great-grandfather Patrick Tracy. He prepared for college at both the Latin and English High Schools in Boston, as usual first scholar, and entered Harvard at fifteen, the youngest member of the Class of 1854. One classmate recalled his “boyish beauty, his rosy-tinted complexion, his wavy hair, his bright eyes that could flash with merriment or glow with intense conviction.” Another wrote: —

“He was unusually boyish in appearance, with a ruddy countenance overflowing with health and animal spirits, and a manner somewhat brusque. He did not win popularity at once; but as his powers and character developed, and toned down the rather boisterous life and manner of the body, he came to be proudly acknowledged, without a dissenting voice, as the foremost man of the Class.

“Plato was his constant study and his most valued authority; he also often referred to Lucretius, whose writings he read carefully in college; and he was familiar with the thought of the English and American transcendentalists. He loved mysticism.”

All his short life, “By Plato” was his favorite oath, but his mysticism was the shrewd, practical, patriotic Yankee mysticism of Emerson. Notably in his Emerson-fed generation he made good his uncle James’s line: —

And what they dare to dream of, dare to do.

Just before his graduation, when Anthony Burns, fugitive slave, was escorted down State Street to the wharves by militia and a “mob of merchants,” Charles and Henry Higginson followed. As Burns was put on the ship Henry said, “Charlie, it will come to us to set this right!”

After vowing sometime to set slavery right, and telling his audience at Harvard’s Commencement of the Reverence due from Age to Youth, he spent six months in the counting-room of John Murray Forbes to learn business methods. His employer noted that “he penetrated the mysteries rapidly” and became a warm and helpful friend.

In the spring of 1855, still in pursuit of practical knowledge, the twenty-year-old transcendentalist became a common workman in the Ames Company’s mill at Chicopee, filing iron and cleaning old chains, studying every process and detail of ironmaking, particularly the kick of the gun, the reaction of the trade on the men in it — workmen, boss, and manager. No other member of his family so early developed so keen a social conscience. He believed in the discipline that makes character, but his interest and his sympathy lay rather with the hands than with the head office. As a present measure he started a singing class, and begged his friends to give him books that he could lend his fellow workmen to read in place of the wretched trash they had.

In the autumn, he left Chicopee to take a promising head-office position in the rolling mills at Trenton, New Jersey. Here it seemed he had found his appointed work; but in the spring the endemic New England disease of tuberculosis, which at one time or another threatened all the members of his immediate family, laid its pale finger on him. Doctor James Jackson, his wise medical uncle, diagnosed the case as curable. Ironically, as it turned out, he ordered him to avoid all strenuous action till after the age of thirty.

Mr. Forbes, his ever-thoughtful patron, appeared promptly on the scene and took him South by ship to the West Indies and New Orleans. In that soft southern climate his health improved, but it was evident that a longer time under sunny skies was needed to effect a permanent cure. Through the generosity of his grandmother, Mrs. Patrick Tracy Jackson, and Mr. Forbes, it was made possible for him to embark on a fast sailing ship of eight hundred tons for Gibraltar.

During his two years abroad he sent home the most perceptive and enjoyable travel letters to be found among the hundreds of good lettres de voyage produced by five generations of touring Lowells. He landed at Gibraltar and applied himself with force and originality to the task of restoring his health. He bought a horse and hardened himself to the saddle on the mountain roads of Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Germany, and Algiers. He had to study the capacity and needs of the horse, and achieved a kinship with that noble animal that helped to make him the centaur that he became.

Charles attended the maneuvers of the Austrian and French armies, chiefly, as it seemed at the time, for their picturesqueness and intellectual interest. For exercise in Algiers he took lessons in swordsmanship from an eminent French maître d’armes. He made friends with French, Germans, and Italians, learned to speak their languages well, and so acquired understanding of men as well as horses. Few beaux sabreurs were ever as civilians better prepared for cavalry command. He arrived back home in July, 1858, brown, hard, and healthy, uncertain as to his future, though he had been corresponding with Henry Higginson about the possibility of the two of them settling in Bleeding Kansas and doing something about it.

For the time being dis aliter vision. He spent the month of August at Mr. Forbes’s island principality of Naushon, riding, fishing, sailing, and coaching young William Forbes in algebra and history. There he was offered by Mr. Forbes — and accepted — the post of assistant treasurer of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad. September found him established on the banks of the sullen Mississippi at Burlington, a town with “an unfledged look, its pin feathers being still very apparent.”

He set up housekeeping in a small white brick house with an acre of land on the outskirts of the town, with, as companions, a young Bohemian, Leo Carker, who enjoyed the title of general freight and ticket agent, and later young Charles E. Perkins, who at a salary of thirty dollars a month had come from Ohio to assist the assistant treasurer as cashier, and was to rise to the presidency of the great C. B. & Q. In addition to his financial responsibility, the twenty-three-year-old treasurer had charge of a land grant of three hundred thousand acres given by the government to assist in the construction of the road across the state. As the territory granted was far in advance of the point reached by the rails, the lands were proving unsalable and a headache of a gigantic acreage. He was, Mr. Perkins records, a tireless worker, often staying in his office till midnight. Yet with a steady eye to his health he managed a daily ride on a little sorrel mare he had bought, and squeezed out somehow a half-hour a day for scholarly reading. Two months after settling in the unfledged town, he writes his mother: —

“Put me in the first 200 pages of Peirce’s book which was overlooked in the upper drawer of my bureau, also his Curves and Functions. Item, one pair of thin boots I left, as there may be gay doings among the Germans. If Uncle James has Child’s Chaucer, perhaps he will lend me his Tyrwhitt’s.

“I see Froude has launched a history of Henry VIII. He will never be able to manage him, the men are so unlike.

“. . . If Anna will lend me her little Pilgrim’s Progress, I should like it, also your Pascal’s Provincial Letters, — and my Amts German Grammar, if there is room, for I fancy even a box from home has limits of capacity. I should like my Spanish, English and my Greek Dicks.”

He concludes: “You say you have a cough: If you don’t get over it, I shall come home and take care of you; you must remember, when you are well I am well; you are the very root of my life now and will be perhaps forever.”

A year later, Mr. George Ashburner, of the house of Russell and Company of Hong Kong, turned up in Burlington, was entertained in the little white brick house at a supper including champagne, and a few days later wrote offering the young man a post in the Orient promising early position and wealth. It was declined in a letter that reveals the quality of the writer: —

“A sound man feels that he has a right, himself, to dispose of himself, but a fellow who has been ill feels that his kindred have a new claim on him. My mother’s hold upon me has increased tenfold within four years — and she must be included in my plans for the next ten years. She takes great comfort in my present position in Burlington, believes in the climate, and means to make her home with me a part of each year. I cannot disappoint her — and I know from my own feeling that, apart from the anxiety, the long separation would be very hard upon her.”

2

As the months passed and the thunderheads on the political horizon rolled up blacker and closer, the mood of his letters became graver. In May, 1860, he wrote to his classmate and brother-in-law, George Putnam, “How does the Chicago platform and nomination please the Puritans — it shows pluck, and that, in an American, generally argues strength. Deliberately I prefer Lincoln to Seward, especially since the latter’s Capital and Labor speech which shivers a little in the wind’s eye.”

Just before the November election he made an important change of base. He had never, he says, got over the “iron-fever.” Though the pecuniary prospect was no better, he accepted an offer that came to him, again through the good offices of Mr. Forbes, to become an ironmaster at the works in Mount Savage, Maryland, a post of responsibility at the head of a small city of workmen.

There, in a border state, he became more acutely aware of the irrepressible conflict. In December, he made a business trip to New Orleans and saw the unfurling of the Pelican Flag when the news was received of South Carolina’s secession. “It was an instructive spectacle. I wonder whether the signers of the Declaration of Independence looked as silly as those fellows.” In February, 1861, he wrote to Mr. Forbes, who had gone to Washington as a commissioner from Massachusetts to the so-called Peace Conference, that if the Commonwealth stood where Charles Francis Adams had put her she would look all right in history. “We had,” he tells him, “a Union meeting in this county some three weeks ago that was more anti-slavery than Faneuil Hall dares to be — but this is by no means the feeling throughout the state.”

Two months later, the real feeling of Maryland flamed into action. In Baltimore, where forty years before Federalist friends of his great-uncle John, opposing Mr. Madison’s War and held in protective custody, were murderously attacked by a mob, Massachusetts troops were fired on. Instantly resigning his place as ironmaster, all “ Charleynesses,” as he called them, forgotten, our beau sabreur made his way to Washington, arriving on foot, after communication with the North had been cut off. Foreseeing that the struggle to preserve the Union would be a long one, he saw in the army at once a call and a career. He wrote to his senator, Charles Sumner: —

“I speak and write English, French, and Italian, and read German and Spanish; knew once enough of mathematics to put me at the head of my class in Harvard, though now I may need a little rubbing up; am a tolerable proficient with the small sword and single-stick; and can ride a horse as far and bring him in as fresh as any other man. I am twenty-six years of age, and believe that I possess more or less of that moral courage about taking responsibility which seems at present to be found only in Southern officers.”

Sumner passed the letter to Secretary Cameron, who had a look at the applicant and forthwith set steps in motion that gave him an unusual trust for a civilian, a captaincy in the Third United States Cavalry.

The young captain wrote his mother that he was too old to be tickled by a uniform. He felt the issues too gravely to be one of those of whom Melville wrote: —

but he was in high spirits throughout the summer and fall he spent recruiting for the cavalry in the Western Reserve. It was in the true spirit of Boots and Saddles that in the early spring, in command of a thoroughly drilled squadron in a crack cavalry regiment, he set sail with a motley transport fleet of tugs, barges, canal boats, three-storied river steamers, and clipper ships to the Federal beachhead at Newport News for the capture of Richmond.

It was not long before the regiment knew that, in the captain of the squadron composed of Companies K and E, they had a real Leader of Horse. At the end of the war his orderly, Frank Robbins, wrote an account of his first important engagements at Hanover Court House and Slatersville: —

“Our Regiment was advance-guard from Yorktown to Williamsburg”; at Fort Magruder “Gen. Stoneman ordered us to draw in line and charge . . .” but “the Rebs’ cavalry charged us first. We fell back, and as we were crossing a swamp the Rebs overtook us. Capt. Lowell had charge of Companies K and E. The Rebs charged Company E first, and the Captain joined that Company with our Company K, and fought them with the sabre for about ten minutes — then we retreated out of the swamp. Our Captain ordered six men to go out as skirmishers from the right of the first platoon. I was one of the six that was sent out, and Sergeant R. was ordered to take charge of us. The Sergt. had been drinking too freely, and he said that every one of us that didn’t charge and kill twenty Rebs, he would put in the guard-house. Our Capt. told R. he could go to the rear and consider himself under arrest; then he said he would lead us himself. When we got to the swamp, he ordered two of us to dismount and take saddles off the dead horses, while he and the other men skirmished. He laughed at us for dodging when we heard the shells whistle past; he said there was no use to dodge after we heard it whistle. . . .

“After the battle [of Williamsburg] we were advance-guard. . . . Major Williams ordered our Capt. to go through a path that led through a pine forest, with his two companies, and see what he could see. When we had got pretty near through, the rear guard came in and said that there was one hundred dismounted Rebs in our rear. Our Capt. said: ‘We are not going backwards, we are going forwards, — they will not trouble us.’ We went a piece farther, when our advance-guard came in and said that there was a thousand in advance of us. Our Capt. said: ‘We shall not turn back: I would rather fight one thousand fair than one hundred in ambush — we will go and see the thousand.’

“When we came out of the woods, the Rebs were formed in line. One squadron of the Rebs fired on us and one squadron charged us with the sabre. Before they got down where we were our Capt. charged us on another squadron of theirs and charged five times until we made the big road. Our Captain was the first man through the rebel lines every time we charged through them that day. While we were fighting our Capt. rode after a retreating Reb with a shot-gun on his shoulder: our Capt. rode to his side and ordered him to surrender, — the Reb threw the gun across his arm and fired it at our Capt.; the shot lodged in his overcoat that he had on the saddle behind him. Our Capt. ordered Lt. W. to form the men in line on the road: he staid to see the men all off the field. Lt. X. was thrown from his horse in the first charge and when our Capt. was leaving the field to join his squadron he found him hid behind a stump, — he cried out, ‘Captain! Say Captain, have you seen my horse?’ Our Capt. said, ‘I am not hunting your horse — you had better come and get on behind me, for you cannot stay there long.’ When they got to the squadron, the Rebs were making a charge on us, — then we could see our Regt. coming up behind us. Our Capt. charged the Rebs and we took a great many prisoners.”

Charles’s brother James wrote home a fuller account of the affair of the overcoat: —

“I heard yesterday of a narrow escape which Charley had. He was charging, and came upon a man who aimed a double-barrelled carbine at him. C. called out to him, ‘Drop that!’ and he lowefed it enough to blow to pieces C.’s coat which was strapped on his horse behind him.”

Charles never mentioned the matter, but, being asked by the girl who became his wife if it was true, replied, “You can usually make a man obey if you speak quickly enough and with authority.”

3

IN the bitter slogging battles of the Seven Days with the army insecurely astride the flooded and bloodied Chickahominy, McClellan made his cautious change of base to a defensive position on Malvern Hill. On the thirtieth of June, Charles’s brother, Captain James Jackson Lowell, was shot at Glendale, while re-forming his company’s line. His friend Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, a hundred yards away, looked along the front and waved to him, looked again and he was down. Charles and his sister Anna, “a good little girl,” who was a nurse on a hospital steamer at Harrison’s Bar, were both within a few miles, but neither could get to him before he died the following day. The officer of his regiment who went to Nelson’s Farm, which had been converted into a hospital, to bid him farewell told of the warm firm grasp of his hand, and the composure of the smile on his pale scholar’s face. Two surgeons who were left with the Northern wounded after the retreat from Glendale told the Confederate officers to talk with him if they wished to know how a Union soldier thought and felt.

After the Union Army, stopped within sight of the steeples and sound of the bells of Richmond, had retreated back down the Peninsula or been transported by water to Washington, Captain Charles Lowell, “for distinguished services at Williamsburg and Slatersville,” was brevetted major and chosen by McClellan the personal aide who, as it proved, was to serve him in the great battle of Antietam. Through the months of July and August, McClellan went into a temporary eclipse, but in September, following Pope’s disaster at the second battle of Bull Run and Lee’s advance across the upper Potomac into Maryland threatening the Northern capital, McClellan in the hour of dire emergency was again given the command. His aide, though devoted to him personally, saw both his strength and his weakness with a clear eye. To Henry Higginson, who encountered him in the field during the march to the meeting of the armies, he said, as they lay in the grass during an idle hour: —

“ He is a great strategist, and the men have faith in him. He makes his plans admirably, makes all his preparations so as to be ready for any emergency, just as the Duke of Wellington did, but unlike the Duke of Wellington, when he comes to strike he doesn’t strike in a determined fashion; that is, he prepares very well, and then doesn’t do the best thing — strike hard.”

A neat preview of the judgment of history!

A week later, on the second day of the bloody struggle back and forth across the shallow fords and arched stone bridges of Antietam Creek, Charles, mounted and conspicuous, rode with orders from McClellan to his hard-pressed right flank. In the midst of a driving hail of lead, which is still to be dug out from tree trunks and fences, he encountered a brigade of Sedgwick’s division, broken and in full flight. Happy as a lover, he exerted his native power of command, checked the rout, re-formed the line, and rode back with it into the deadly woods by the Dunker Church. He escaped injury, but his favorite bright sorrel battle charger, Berold, that had carried him through the engagements of the Peninsula and the Seven Days, was less lucky. Let Frank Robbins tell the tale: —

“ The first I saw of Berold was at Fortress Monroe. There was where he was when the Colonel sent me to get him. I may be mistaken but I think he was seven years of age then. We went back to Washington, from there up into Maryland. The Colonel was on General McClellan’s Staff. There was a fight the day before the battle of Antietam. I cannot remember the name of it. The Colonel rode Berold through it and at the Battle of Antietam he rode him, I think till about one o’clock when he went with some orders to General Hooker on the right. When we got over there the men was coming back in disorder. The Colonel (or he was captain then) went in and helped rally them. There was a solid shot, or I always thought it was, struck the captain’s scabbard and shivered it to pieces. He told me before we got back to Headquarters that he did not think Berold was worth much, that he thought he was soft and was giving out, he could only trot. When we got to Headquarters he told me to take the saddle off of Berold and saddle Bob, a colt that was sent to him. When I took the saddle off there was a great lump on each side of him as large as a hen’s egg. I thought the Ball went in behind the Colonel’s right leg and lodged just in front of his left leg just behind Berold’s shoulder blade. It was a Minie Ball and was just under the hide. I took a knife, and cut through the hide and took the ball out and there was some splinters of the scabbard too, sticking in his side. If you examine the horse you will find the scars. At the same time his tongue was hurt. I do not know how it was done. He did not fall to hurt it, but when the colonel came into Headquarters Berold had his mouth wide open and I always thought he was shot in the mouth. You look at his tongue and it will show for its self that it was hurt terribly. He had his hoof split. It was always the opinion that it was a shell that struck it. The colonel told me to shoot him, that he would never be of use, but I could not. We moved camp and I went back four or five days to him. I put wet bags around him and the fourth or fifth day I took him to camp, led him twelve or fifteen miles. In about three weeks after, I turned him out in a field where General McClellan’s horses was and he would run and lead them all around the field.”

Writing the following day to Mr. Forbes, the Major (soon to be colonel) reported with characteristic understatement, “We had a severe fight here Tuesday and a battle on Wednesday. . . . I have had my usual luck but shall have to buy a new sabre, and shall have one horse less to ride for a month or two.”

After the all but drawn battle — the Confederates had lost 14,000 men, the Fcderals 28,000, but Lee had retreated across the Potomac — Charles was chosen by General McClellan for the honor of carrying to Washington and presenting to President Lincoln the thirty-nine regimental standards captured at South Mountain and Antietam.

In the War Between the States it was still the custom, except on the sea and in the Deep South, to go into winter quarters when cold weather came, and delay offensive action until spring. It was suggested to Charles that he go home for the winter to raise in Boston a “regiment of gentlemen.” “Gentlemen?” he asked. “What do you mean gentlemen, drivers of gigs?” But when the qualification was liberalized, he accepted the assignment and went North to organize the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, which he was to command. Its nucleus was a battalion of wild-riding young men from California, but the other two battalions, recruited in Boston with some difficulty, were soon in camp at Readville.

During this interlude in the fighting there were notable incidents. He went as a guest to a meeting of the Saturday Club, where he sat beside his philosopher and friend, Emerson, and listened with delight to the verbal sword play between the Professor and the Autocrat.

On the ninth of April, 1863, Charles attended as a charter member the first meeting of the Union Club. The meeting concluded with a two-hour speech by Edward Everett that contained most of the material he delivered seven months later at Gettysburg. Perhaps some of his auditors felt, as Emerson did as he listened to a sermon by the same gentleman forty years earlier and scribbled: —

4

WHILE the Colonel was living in Burlington, his mother had written him that all he wanted now was “a wife.” He replied, “A wife. I would as soon think of applying the indefinite article to a mother. If ever I meet the wife, the matter may have some interest for me.” It was early in this same winter that he met her.

Josephine Shaw was the younger daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Francis George Shaw, of Staten Island, close friends of the Colonel’s Uncle James and Aunt Maria White Lowell. In 1863, she was nineteen years old. She was a slender, graceful girl, a fine horsewoman, with, as Richard Watson Gilder was to say in his memorial poem, not very poetically but truly, “a thinking, inward-lighted countenance.” The resolute fine profile of her brother Bob, riding beside his colored troops that in Saint-Gaudens’s bronze march steadily forever down Beacon Street past the State House, was hers, too. Like him, she had the daily courage of humor.

Charles had known her casually as a friend of the family. Coming home from the bloody scenes of Antietam, he saw her with new eyes. She was beyond all doubt or question the wife. They seem to have become engaged almost at once. Adams Hill wrote him in March, “I hear the arrow sped swiftly. In such matters haste is not waste.”

We get lively pictures of Josephine Shaw in letters from two notably diverse observers. After her death in 1905, William James wrote to her daughter, Carlotta: —

“She was surely one of our noblest and freest. I saw her first when she was eighteen years old, and had come with your Aunt Nellie to pay a visit at the Tweedys’, in Kay Street, Newport. She seemed to me then superior to any young woman I had ever seen. A little later, as I was watching ‘dress parade’ of the 54th regiment, she and your father, then just engaged I think, came whirling up on horseback, and drew up close behind where I was standing among the crowd of spectators. I looked back and saw their faces and figures against the evening sky, and they looked so young and victorious, that I, much gnawed by questions as to my own duty of enlisting or not, shrank back — they had not seen me — from being recognized. I shall never forget the impression they made.”

Forty years after the war, one of the Colonel’s troopers wrote to Mrs. Lowell herself: —

“ I remember you well, when you came to Camp at Vienna the bride of our gallant Colonel. I can see you today in my mind’s eye, making your daily trip to the hospital, in wet weather equipped in a waterproof and little gum boots; the boys appreciated that and it was fully commented on in quarters.”

After Charles went back to the wars, leaving her Berold to ride as his parting gift, his letters to her became as constant and delightful as they had been in earlier years to his mother. He writes of Ruskin and Wordsworth, of amusing incidents of army life, of plans for travel together après la guerre, of the hazy beauty of the Blue Ridge, of the death of her brother in the assault on Fort Wagner: “The manliness and patriotism and high courage of such a soldier never dies with him; they live in his comrades, — it should be the same with the gentleness and thoughtfulness which made him so loveable a son and brother and friend. . . . I am thankful they buried him ‘with his niggers.’ They were brave men and they were his men.”

To his deep regret Colonel Lowell, now protecting Washington in command of a brigade of cavalry, consisting of the Second Massachusetts and two New York regiments, missed the decisive battle of Gettysburg and saw nothing of the subsequent campaign, except in the protection of Meade’s line of supplies in his advance into Virginia. From this it developed that for nearly a year after his marriage, October 31, 1863, he was occupied with operations against the elusive guerrilla leader John Singleton Mosby, “an old rat who has many holes,” who specialized in the capture, looting, and destruction of Federal wagon trains. Yet, despite the clamor in the North that Mosby’s men when captured should be hanged, the Colonel wrote to his wife, “Mosby is an honorable foe and should be treated as such.” After the war, the Old Rat said that Colonel Lowell’s Second Massachusetts had given him more trouble and killed or captured more of his men than any other unit of the Northern Army. These excursions and alarms, however, though frequent, were not of long duration, and had an agreeable sporting flavor of the chase that was not without its appeal to the Colonel. Perhaps they intensified rather than interrupted the half-year of happiness in the little house at Vienna, just south of the Potomac.

5

IN the summer of 1864, as the war’s penultimate big push got under way in Virginia, Josephine went home to Staten Island, where her daughter, Carlotta, whom the Colonel was never to see, was born. What a soldier’s wife she was is revealed by a note in her diary after she received a letter from her brother two years before: “All the account of brave deeds, bayonet charges, calmly receiving the fire of the enemy and withholding their own, and all the stirring accounts of courageous men, make one so long to be with them. I should of all things enjoy a forlorn hope (I think). Well put in, I suppose, but still I really do think so, for I’m not an atom afraid of death and the enthusiasm of the moment would be sublime.”

Meanwhile, the Colonel took the field with his brigade, now armed through his personal efforts with the new Spencer repeating carbine. In his first reconnaissance he led his command one hundred and ten miles in forty-eight hours. He himself, light, active, and tough, seemed incapable of fatigue. After seventy hours without sleep he was fresh and cheerful. and annoyed his officers by laughing at their woebegone countenances. His boy bugler said, “The only fault I ever could find with the Colonel was the places he led me into.” A sergeant stated, “We always felt sure in however bad a place we were, that the Colonel could get us out all right.” When asked why, when scouting in country of bushwhackers whose long hunting rifles were death to Federal officers, he always wore the crimson sash of an officer, he answered, “It is good for the men to have me wear it.”

The end of July found him at Harper’s Ferry looking for trouble, and ready either to take or make it.

Early in August, Grant, who was fighting it out all summer on the line of the Wilderness with a heavy loss of expendables, decided that something must be done about the Valley. For three years that rich and lovely terrain, watered by the Shenandoah and commanded by the Massanuttens, had been a thorn in Federal flesh. It was the breadbasket of the Confederacy, and Grant’s right flank and Washington in his rear were constantly threatened by divisions of infantry and brigades of cavalry in ragged gray pouring down out of it through the staggered mountain passes of the Blue Ridge, or across the Potomac into Maryland. He gave Sheridan command in the Valley with orders to turn its fruitful fields into scorched earth.

The Colonel at once took to his new C.O.

“I like Sheridan immensely,” he wrote his wife. “Whether he succeeds or fails, he is the first general I have seen who puts as much heart and time and thought into his work as if he were doing it for his own exclusive profit. He works like a mill-owner or an iron-master; not like a soldier. Never sleeps, never worries, is never cross, but isn’t afraid to come down on a man who deserves it.”

Four days after Sheridan took command, Lowell led the advance that met the enemy advancing north of Winchester, and after a sharp fight turned them about and drove them pell-mell through the town. Five weeks later, in the same terrain, against a whole division he repeated the performance, and he did it yet again, in early October, in what was known in Union circles as the Woodstock races, in which he was on the heels of the Confederates for twenty-six miles. During these weeks it was with difficulty that he was kept mounted. Thirteen horses, including his favorite, Ruksh, so named for Rustum’s steed in Matthew Arnold’s poem, were shot under him, and one, Atlanta, was stolen. Berold, who had come back to the war, proved uncontrollable under fire, and was sent back to grass at Staten Island, where he lived honored and petted to a great equine age.

In the first weeks of the Valley campaign, Jubal Early, not a military intellectual giant but a faithful fighter, had a considerable numerical superiority over Sheridan. Battles raged back and forth, up and down the Valley between Winchester and Harper’s Ferry. Alternately the Colonel spearheaded attacks and fought bitter unfamiliar rear-guard actions. With his own eyes Sheridan saw him leaping rail fences to get at the foe, and once, when a stone wall proved too high for leaping, actually riding along it whacking their rifles with his saber. He said, “Colonel Lowell is a brave man,” and he knew of the administrative ability the Colonel had shown in the previous spring, when in four weeks he had completely reorganized the systems of supply for the great cavalry depot near Washington. He gave him a new command, the Reserve Brigade, composed of the First, Second, and Fifth United States Regular Cavalry with his own Second Massachusetts, and a battery of horse artillery.

In mid-September, Lee, under heavy pressure at Richmond and Petersburg, withdrew the veteran divisions of Anderson and Kershaw from Old Jubilee Early’s command. Sheridan, learning from prisoners and his scouts that Early no longer had the advantage in numbers, took the offensive, and the issue in the Valley was no longer in doubt.

This was in the third week of September, 1864. Within the fortnight the Colonel for the first time gave evidence of doubt as to his invulnerability to bullet, saber, and solid shot. His cousin, William Putnam, had been killed at Ball’s Bluff in 1861, his own brother, James, at Glendale, and his brother-inlaw to be, Robert Shaw, at Fort Wagner in 1863. By 1864, few of his intimate friends had escaped death or grievous wounds, yet he had believed in his heart, or by constant reiteration to his men had made himself believe, that death would not touch him. He had acted on his belief, in the front of the battle, yet with the valor that stops just short of foolhardiness. He felt, as he wrote to General Barlow, who was slowly recovering from dangerous wounds, in September, in the heat of the Lincoln-McClellan election, “There are better things to be done in this country than fighting, and you must save yourself for them too. . . . There are as many campaigns for a fellow as there are half years to his life.”

Early in October, he wrote Josephine, Effy as he called her: “I don’t want to be shot till I’ve had a chance to come home. I have no idea that I shall be hit, but I want so much not to now, that sometimes it frightens me.”

On the seventeenth, he wrote her from his camp on Cedar Creek, his last letter to her: “Good Morning. Such a night’s sleep as I had — ten hours strong, only interrupted a few minutes at reveille, waking up and reflecting cosily that it was not yet time to turn out.” He wrote young Charles Perkins in Iowa: “I hope, trust, and believe you are doing all you can for Lincoln. I believe McClellan’s election would send this country to where Mexico and South America are.” He wrote to Mr. Forbes about the death of Billy, a horse belonging to young William Forbes that had been lent to him and killed under him in a charge a day or two before: “He was a dear little horse and was improving to the last day of his life.” He wrote his mother: “There is really nothing to tell here. We are in a glorious country, with fine air to breathe and fine views to enjoy; we are kept very active, and have done a good deal of good work; I have done my share, I think, — but there is nothing to make a letter of. I only write this to make you write to me.” It was one of the good days, and the eighteenth was another.

6

MEANWHILE, Old Jubilee, encamped a few miles away to the southeast, had an idea for a use of his depleted force that might more than fulfill the highest hopes of Lee, his beloved leader — a surprise attack at dawn. Sheridan was known to be absent on a trip to Washington.

At two o’clock in the morning of the nineteenth, he called his generals together and ordered a concerted attack at five-thirty, before daybreak. The sun rose at six-fifteen in late October.

Providentially for the Northern Army, the Colonel got out of bed at four-thirty and started on a reconnaissance in force in front of the right wing at five-fifteen. He encountered the enemy’s advancing cavalry well out in no man’s land, fought a sharp engagement with carbine and saber, and set them back upon their heels. On the left flank three miles to the north the case was otherwise. The Nineteenth Corps, aroused from sleep by the shots of their pickets as they were driven in, were scarcely out of their blankets before their ears were affronted by the Rebel Yell and the company volleys of the foe. It was a foggy morning in the lowland along the creek, and soon the mixture of fog and the smoke of gunpowder made a darkness lighted by the flashes of fire from the muzzles of muskets. It was a scene truly infernal. The left flank crumbled and fled, though the Sixth Corps contrived to hold briefly a series of backward positions. Stragglers so blocked the roads to Winchester that Sheridan, galloping towards the sound of firing, had to take to the fields. The Confederates, rank and file alike, collected rich booty from the Federal tents.

The Colonel’s Reserve Brigade, still holding stoutly on the right, was ordered to the extreme left, where the situation was now desperate. They rode for three miles along the front of the retiring battle, often under heavy fire. After the battle, General William Dwight, commanding the First Division of the Nineteenth Corps, wrote: —

“They moved past me, that splendid cavalry; if they reached the Pike, I felt secure. Lowell got by me before I could speak, but I looked after him for a long distance. Exquisitely mounted, the picture of a soldier, erect, confident, defiant, he moved at the head of the finest body of cavalry that to-day scorns the earth it treads.”

Arriving at the village of Middletown, the Colonel dismounted part of his brigade, placed them with their repeating carbines behind a stone wall, and with the rest made two vicious charges that checked the advance of the lines of gray. When Sheridan cantered his foam-flecked horse in from Winchester, just before noon, he found Lowell’s cavalry and part of the Sixth Corps the only troops actually engaged with the enemy. Sheridan sent an aide to ask the Colonel if he could hold the position. He sent back word that he could and would. The situation seemed in hand, though there was considerable annoyance from a Rebel battery near-by and sharpshooters on the roofs of the houses in Middletown. As he was riding out to reconnoiter, a conspicuous and easy target, the bullet with his number at last found him, breaking his arm and striking him on the chest, without penetration but with such force as to collapse “his poor lung” and cause faintness, bleeding, and loss of voice above a whisper.

He lay on the ground, covered by his overcoat, till mid-afternoon. Then Sheridan, his army re-formed and reinspired, ordered, “Boys, turn back. I’m going to sleep in that camp tonight or in Hell.” In front of the Reserve Brigade was a destructive battery that must be captured. Against the urging, even the orders, of his division commander, the Colonel, by whispered commands to his aides, re-formed his brigade, had himself lifted into the saddle, drew his saber, and charged, not as brigade commander in the rear of the line, but as colonel in front. Almost at once he was struck by a bullet and fell. The brigade rode on to the battery, was repulsed, but re-formed and took it on the second attempt. The Colonel was carried forward behind his charging cavalry into the village of Middletown and to an old house that was serving as a hospital.

7

THE surgeon of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry tells the story of the Colonel’s last hours: —

“There were four or five that night in the room. Lowell lay on the table, shot through from shoulder to shoulder; the ball had cut the spinal cord on the way. Of course, below this he was completely paralyzed. Four others were lying desperately wounded on the floor. One young officer was in great pain. Lowell spent much of his ebbing strength helping him through the straits of death. ‘I have always been able to count on you, you were always brave. Now you must meet this as you have the other trials — be steady — I count on you.’ When he heard the groans of the Rebel wounded that were brought into the yard, he sent me away to look after them. As the night wore on and his strength failed, I said: ‘Colonel, you must write to your wife.’ He answered that he was not able, but I said it could be managed; so, putting a scrap of paper on a piece of board, I held his arm above him, putting a pencil between his fingers, and holding the hand against the paper, told him I thought he would find that he could use his fingers. And thus he wrote a word or two of farewell to her.”

He was twenty-nine years old when he died. He had done for a year the full work of a brigadier general. His commission to that rank was signed by Abraham Lincoln in Washington as he was making his last charge at Cedar Creek. When a day or two later, an aide arrived with this, and another for his immediate superior, General Merritt, as a major general, Merritt said, “I would gladly give up this if he could only take that.”

When Sheridan arrived on the scene of battle from Winchester, twenty miles away, the officer he first encountered was Captain William McKinley, of Ohio, worried but going strong. A few minutes later, he saw Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes of the same state, bruised from a fall when his horse was shot from under him, but carrying on. Our beau sabreur, to whom he sent his first inquiry, he never saw alive. After the war he wrote to Josephine, sending her the originals of her husband’s dispatches: “Had General Lowell lived, it is my firm belief that he would have commanded all my cavalry and would have done better with it than I could have done.”

Suppose the eye or trigger-finger of some unknown Southern soldier had been a little off on the afternoon of October 19, 1864. Brigadier General Charles Russell Lowell, soon to be promoted to major general, and in command of all Sheridan’s cavalry and doing better with it, would have come out of the war a popular hero. With his high social aims he would assuredly have applied himself to those better things than fighting of which he wrote Barlow. With his administrative ability he would have done them brilliantly well. With his personal magnetism and gift of leadership, what could have kept him from leadership? Ben Butler’s drooping eye might never have looked out over the governor’s desk beneath the Golden Dome at the top of Park Street. He had not the advantage of birth in Ohio, but he was born of the best stock in Massachusetts. There were no grocery kings or coal barons to be his political backers, but some of the solidest and ablest financial interests in Boston and New York would have been behind him. It is not impossible that either Major McKinley or Colonel Hayes might never have been a tenant of the White House and that Massachusetts would have had a President midway between John Quincy Adams and Calvin Coolidge.

What a beau sabreur of moral as well as physical courage and prompt decision, inspired by the teachings of Emerson and practiced in handling men individually and in the mass, would have made of the job can be left confidently to the historical imagination of the reader.