Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn and The Civil War | Page 9

William Lowell Putnam (1841-
1861) (left), Charles Russell Lowell,
Jr. (1835-1864) (below, left), and
James Jackson Lowell (1837-1862)
(below, right). From a photomechan-
ical by an unknown photographer,
no date. From Portraits of American
Abolitionists. Photograph number
81.422.Massachusetts Historical
Society.
abolitionism (rare among the upper classes), fused with his
idealism and youth to symbolize a purity of righteousness
that was deployed among Boston’s moneyed classes to
support the war effort.
Almost exactly three years later, the oldest of the cousins,
Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., was killed leading the final
charge at the Battle of Cedar Creek. This fighting too had
started as a fiasco—a surprise pre-dawn Confederate attack
that overran the sleeping Yankees. Thanks largely to Lowell’s
actions leading the Reserve Brigade of Union Cavalry,
however, this near-defeat turned into a resounding Union
triumph that destroyed the Confederate Cavalry, won the
Shenandoah Valley for the Union, and, on the eve of the
presidential election, provided Lincoln with a much-needed
victory. Charles Lowell became the martyr for that victory.
His body was escorted back to Boston with solemn fanfare
and his public funeral was attended by the official dignitaries
of the city, its major industrialists, and its key literary figures.
Only after the tragedy had been milked for its political
value did a smaller procession of intimates bring the body to
be buried in Mount Auburn, alongside Lt. William Lowell
Putnam.
Perhaps seeing the plot thus populated, Charles Lowell’s
father, Charles Russell Lowell, Sr., determined to have his
other son’s body brought to Mount Auburn. James Jackson
Lowell had been mortally wounded in the Seven Days
fighting on the Peninsula. Like his cousin, James took a
wound to the stomach, and he understood immediately
that his injury too would be mortal. Unable to join his
unit’s retreat that evening, he was given morphine and left
to die among strangers.
The difficult task of finding his body was given to an
elder sister, Anna Lowell, who had volunteered for the
Union cause as one of the nurses trained by Dorothea Dix.
As her brother lay dying behind enemy lines, she had tried
unsuccessfully to get a pass to re ach him. Anna then served
out the rest of the war at the Armory Hospital, nearest the
docks, where the worst cases were brought. When her father
wrote to ask that she try to locate James’s remains, she
was not encouraging: she had seen enough to know what
became of those who died in field hospitals. But her father
would not be dissuaded. In his second letter, he explained
that Elmwood, the family house at the end of Brattle Street,
had been a hospital during the Revolution. Whenever they
widened the road or did work in the garden, they dug up
the bones of dead soldiers. “I do not want Jimmy’s remains
to be treated so,” he wrote. Her father’s wish could not be
refused. Anna Lowell found a body—perhaps her brother’s,
perhaps not even that of a Union soldier—which was brought
to Cambridge and laid to rest between the two cousins.
Elmwood is now the home of Harvard’s President. But at
the time of the Commemoration Ode, James Russell Lowell
still lived there. From a bedroom window, he could look
over rolling fields across what is now the maze of Route
16 traffic and a housing complex, to see on the far bank of
a pond the three graves side-by-side, looking back at him.
Perhaps this was his view as he penned the Commemoration
Ode:
many loved truth…
They followed her and found her
…beautiful, with danger’s sweetness round her;
Where faith made whole with deed
Breathes its awakening breath
Into the lifeless creed,
They saw her plumed and mailed,
With sweet, stern face unveiled,
And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.
Carol Bundy has written for film and art publications in both
the UK and the US. She has two sons and lives in Cambridge,
MA. She became interested in her great-great-great uncle, Charles
Russell Lowell, when his worn saddle bags, rusted sword and spurs
turned up after her grandmother’s death in 1983.
Winter 2015 | 7