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The Nature of Sacrifice

A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2005
ISBN: 978-0-374-12077-1, ISBN10: 0-374-12077-3,
6 x 9 inches, 560 pages, Includes Black-and-White Illustrations, Notes, and an Index,
Hardcover, $35.00

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Categories and Subcategories

See All Categories History United States: 1860 to 1900 United States: Colonial to 1860

Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., led a brief, intense life: born in 1835 to a Boston family that for more than a century was a guiding force in the history of New England, Lowell died in 1864 during the battle of Cedar Creek, mortally wounded before the crucial Union victory there. In this intimate portrait of a privileged young Yankee who became a battle-hardened soldier and revered officer, Carol Bundy draws on a wealth of family papers and unexamined public archives to display the lasting influence Lowell had on his own and subsequent generations. With his almost unerring ability to understand the implications of a situation and to act accordingly, Lowell came to symbolize the perfection of a gentleman officer and, with his death, the lost promise of New England.

The Nature of Sacrifice offers a lively history of abolitionist Boston and of Lowell's remarkable family; his grandfathers were larger-than-life figures who represented quintessential Yankee elements of business brilliance and spiritual energy. Lowells were at the heart of the American Anti-Slavery Society; Louis Kossuth came to call at the Lowells' house; Longfellow and Emerson were family friends. But the unexpected bankruptcy of Charlie's father altered the family’s fortunes, and before the son was out of Harvard, he had determined to redeem the family name.

After a bout with tuberculosis and a recuperative stay in Europe, Lowell turned to the business of making money. In 1858 he went out West, involving himself in the vital new industry of railroading, until his career was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War. The rich tapestry of Bundy's narrative shows the many threads that made this war such a climactic experience for Charlie Lowell. His family and circle had, after all, been instrumental in fashioning it into a war against slavery.

Bundy masterfully demonstrates how Lowell was transformed as he served on General McClellan's staff, helped to form the fabled Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment of black volunteers (led by his cousin, Robert Gould Shaw), fought Colonel Mosby's guerrillas, and implemented Grant’s ruthless strategy in Virginia. These experiences were shadowed by the battlefield deaths of his brother, cousins, and many friends. What were they dying for, and was the sacrifice worth it?

As Lowell and the others faced the continuing horrors of war, a new concept of self-sacrifice evolved, and Lowell, who championed this principle in life, became in death his generation’s symbol of American idealism in action.

Praise

"Our Civil War literature is rich and addictive but too often satisfied with the depiction of schematic maneuvers and stick-figure warriors. No such conventionality mars Carol Bundy's biography of her great-great-great-uncle, Charles Russell Lowell, a Union cavalryman who was killed at the Battle of Cedar Creek, Va., in October 1864. It ranks in quality with the better pages of such masters as Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton . . . Her grasp of the grand strategy of the war is lucid . . . This distinguished work will and should find a significant place on anyone's Civil War bookshelf.”—Edwin M. Yoder Jr., The Washington Post Book World

"In her fine biography . . . Carol Bundy has rendered a great service to general readers and Civil War scholars alike by redeeming one of those enmarbled names and restoring the man—Charles Russell Lowell, Jr. . . . Bundy does a superb job of conveying her subject's struggles with the shadowy world of guerrilla warfare. The boundaries between legitimate warfare and criminality were often crossed by both sides. Fortunately, there is a wealth of primary sources that enables Bundy to ably probe Lowell's side of these encounters. The result is a worthwhile exploration of how one prominent 19th-century figure coped with a warfare that was veering towards a totality that became depressingly familiar to later generations . . . [A] skillfully written biography."—Richard F. Miller, Civil War Book Review

"Between 1861 and 1865, hundreds of thousands of Northern men volunteered to fight in the Civil War and died in the bloody struggle. Why they went, how their contemporaries viewed them, how their attitude evolved as the war became one of emancipation and utilized a scorched-earth policy, and what impact their deaths had upon their families and communities are questions that continue to interest modern readers. This book addresses such questions as it examines the life of Charles Russell Lowell Jr., a Boston aristocrat and abolitionist, Harvard valedictorian, and businessman who became a Civil War soldier and commander. This readable and well-researched book, the author's first, offers much on the social and cultural life of Boston as well as Lowell's battlefield experiences in many of the war's most significant eastern battles."—Library Journal

"A stunning biography of a young man from one of American's most celebrated families who quickly rose to the rank of colonel in the Union cavalry and died, at age 29, from wounds suffered in a charge at Cedar Creek. At the funeral of Charles Russell Lowell (1835-64), nephew of poet James Russell Lowell, were some of the greatest names in American letters: Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes. Hawthorne would have been there, too, had he not died himself a few months earlier. Bundy has examined an abundance of evidence in her reconstruction of the life of this most remarkable fellow—family letters and diaries, published histories of the Civil War (and of its individual encounters), and biographies of key figures in the story."—Kirkus Reviews

About the Author(s)

Carol Bundy

Carol Bundy, a writer for film in the United States and Britain, became interested in her great-great-great-uncle Charles Russell Lowell when his worn saddlebags, rusted sword, and spurs turned up after her grandmother’s death in 1983. She lives with her two sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts.