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

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 solider 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 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 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.
Bundy 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 guerillas, 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.