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Lincoln’s Bixby Letter, The Inspiration for Saving Private Ryan

In the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, Gen. George Marshall reads a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to a Boston widow who lost five sons fighting the Civil War. Known as the Bixby Letter, scholars consider it one of Lincoln’s finest literary efforts.

The missive has won praise as a masterpiece of the English language and comparable with – even better than – the Gettysburg Address. It’s been called the “finest condolence letter in the English language.”

Delivered to Lydia Bixby around Thanksgiving in 1864, the Boston newspapers published copies of it. The original has never been found.

It may well be the most controversial condolence letter in the English language. Some say Lincoln never wrote it. Historians argue over exactly how many sons Mrs. Bixby lost fighting for their country. It certainly wasn’t five. And Mrs. Bixby herself has been reviled as a whorehouse madam who sympathized with the South.

We’ll probably never know the truth, but the letter speaks for itself.

Abraham Lincoln and his two secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay

The Bixby Letter

Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln.

Lydia Parker Bixby

In September of 1864, Lydia Bixby climbed the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse to visit William Schouler in his office. She was just one of many anxious mothers and wives who thronged Schouler’s anteroom seeking help. She came to apply for a widow’s pension.

Lydia Bixby

Schouler, as adjutant general of Massachusetts, had already received several visits from Mrs. Bixby. She was around 60 or older, poor, lightly educated and careworn. She had married Cromwell Bixby, a shoemaker, in Hopkinton, Mass., on Sept. 26, 1826. They had at least six sons and three daughters before Cromwell died in 1854. Sometime before the Civil War, the family moved to the Dorchester section of Boston. After the war broke out, five of her sons enlisted in Massachusetts regiments.

She made her first known visit to Schouler In October 1862.

The Massachusetts Statehouse in 1860

She asked him to discharge her young son Edward. He was only 16 when he enlisted, she said, and given to “bouts of insanity” from time to time. Mrs. Bixby may not have revealed — or even known — that Edward had deserted from the Army five months earlier. If she did know, perhaps she thought she could spare him a likely death sentence if caught.

In 1862 she also asked him for help to visit another son in Maryland, wounded at the Battle of Antietam. Schouler helped her get $40 from Gov. John Andrew so she could nurse him in a Maryland hospital.

However, war records show none of her sons wounded at Antietam.

Two years later, she went to see Schouler again. She told him five of her sons had died fighting for their county. Could he help her?

Schouler then told Andrew, who asked the War Department if Lincoln could write a letter of condolence to the grieving widow.

The Bixby Boys

Sloppy staff work or perhaps the fog of war explain why Lincoln thought five Bixby boys died fighting for the Union cause. The War Department sent Schouler information that all five had been killed in the war. Lincoln – or Hay – wrote the letter to Mrs. Bixby based on that information.

But only two died for sure in battle, maybe three. Another son may have deserted as well.

The penalty for desertion

One reason for the mix-up: Bixby’s five sons had four cousins who came from the same towns and served in the same Massachusetts regiments, according to Kendall Banning, writing in The Bookman in 1922. ”In the confusion that attended the large engagements of the war, it is possible that the records of these nine Bixby boys became mixed,” he wrote.

Perhaps Mrs. Bixby herself thought all five had been killed, given the confusion of war. “Even if only two of Mrs. Bixby’s sons were killed, that was not a light sorrow,” Lincoln scholar Rev. William Barton observed in the New York Times on Aug. 6, 1925.

Gossip Rears Its Ugly Head

In addition to losing her sons, Mrs. Bixby suffered the contempt of her betters, both during her lifetime and afterward.

Sarah Cabot Wheelwright, a Brahmin philanthropist, brought charitable aid to Mrs. Bixby during the war. In a letter to her daughter in 1904, she wrote she had heard gossip that Mrs. Bixby “kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be.” Wheelwright wrote the letter in 1904, 26 years after Mrs. Bixby died a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Even later than that, the Rev. William Barton visited Mrs. Bixby’s neighbors still living in Hopkinton He reported they remembered her sons as tough. Some of them liked drink too much, and one may have served time in jail.

True or false, the dimly remembered hearsay of Mrs. Bixby’s acquaintances lived on as hard fact in the historical record.

“The Mrs. Bixby to whom it was addressed was in fact a Confederate sympathizer who ran a whorehouse.,” Michael Burlingame wrote in American Heritage in 1999. Many others repeated the characterization.

William Schouler

William Schouler, who had met Mrs. Bixby several times and visited her at home, had a different opinion. “Mrs Bixby is the best specimen of a true-hearted Union woman I have yet seen,” he wrote on Sept. 24, 1864.

We’ll never know.

What did happen to the Bixby boys?

Historians have pieced together the records of the Bixby boys, though some are inconclusive.

The youngest, Pvt. Arthur Edward Bixby (“Edward”), enlisted at 16 and then deserted from the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery at Ft. Richardson, Va., on May 28, 1862. He returned to Boston after the war.

Sgt. Charles Bixby, 20th Massachusetts Infantry, killed in action on May 3, 1863 near Fredericksburg.

Cpl. Henry Cromwell Bixby, 32nd massachusetts infanty, captured at Gettysburg, sent to Richmond, Va., and paroled on March 7, 1864. Died seven years later of tuberculosis contracted as a soldier.

Pvt. Oliver Cromwell Bixby, Jr., 58th Massachusetts Infantry, wounded at Spotsylvania, killed at Petersburg.

Conflicting military reports make the fate of Pvt. George Way Bixby unclear. Captured at Petersburg, he either died in Salisbury Prison as a POW or deserted to the Confederate Army.

The Original Bixby Letter

The original letter to Mrs. Bixby doesn’t seem to exist any more. Forgeries, however, have floated around since 1891. Christie’s auction house apparently gets about six every year.

Some of her descendants have said she sympathized with the South, hated Lincoln and tore up the letter.

Mrs. Bixby’s great-grandson recalled, “I was advised by my Father that my Great-Grandmother was an ardent Southern Sympathizer, and when she received the letter, she destroyed it in anger … shortly after receipt without realizing its value.” Other grandchildren and great-grandchildren heard the same stories.

But again, it’s all hearsay.

Questions of Authorship

Some scholars say it’s likely his secretary, John Hay, wrote the Bixby letter. Hay, a talented mimic, penned many letters for the overburdened president, And according to scuttlebutt that filtered down over the years, he told friends he had written it.

John Hay, by John Singer

In 2017, a team of linguistic researchers concluded Hay almost certainly wrote the letter. They based their conclusion on a computer analysis of word sequences in the letter to Mrs. Bixby and comparing it to other writings by Hay and Lincoln.

Others say the letter is pure Lincoln. Further, Hay’s own children said he never claimed the famous letter as his. The president’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, wrote in 1917 letter that Hay told him he had no knowledge of the letter at the time.

The Bixby Letter

A passage from the letter appears chiseled in stone at the base of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. It reads, “”the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”

Then in 1998, Harve Presnell as Marshall reads the letter in Saving Private Ryan. Tom Hanks stars in the film about saving the fourth b rother after three died in battle.

Ten years after the September 11 attacks, former president George W. Bush read the letter to Mrs. Bixby during a memorial service.

Click on the image to buy the ebook from Amazon. Paperback version coming soon.

If you really want to know what a president and first lady were like, find out what they ate. The New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President, tells you about the six New England presidents, their servants, their families, their friends and how they struggled to make the White House presentable for public entertainment. Click here to buy the ebook; the paperback version is coming soon.

Execution of a deserter, By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/3c/36/30789bfbc464742dc7c3ef6baa7d.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0041826.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-04-03): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/zev3bpgb CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36647109. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Mercer Girls: When New England Girls Went West to Find Husbands

On Jan. 26, 1864, a young man from the Pacific Northwest gave a talk to unmarried girls in Lowell, Mass., about a land of opportunity. Seattle, said Asa Mercer, desperately needed teachers, and he urged the young women to return with him to the Pacific Northwest. A dozen took him up on his offer and became known as Mercer Girls, remembered less for teaching the untutored than for marrying the unwed.

Mercer’s cargo of wives-to-be succeeded so well he decided to bring back a second, much larger tranche of marriageable women. That venture didn’t work out so well. Still, the two shiploads of New England maidens became a civilizing influence on the rough logging town so recently carved from the wilderness. Mercer himself got a wife out of it.

Asa Mercer

The story of the Mercer Girls eventually made it on to the small screen in 1968 as Here Come the Brides. The TV comedy starred Joan Blondell and launched Bobby Sherman and David Soul to pop stardom. The original story of the Mercer girls had its own share of comic elements.

The Mercer Girls

Asa Mercer’s older brother Thomas had left Illinois in a wagon train with his family, arriving in Puget Sound in 1853. He prospered and gained local prominence as a judge. The community began to thrive and attract other young men to work in the burgeoning fishing and lumber industries.

But the supply of marriageable young women did not keep up. By the late 1850s, Seattle had about 200 mostly male residents — nine males, in fact, for every female. It also had no school of any kind.

Charles Prosch, publisher of the Puget Sound Herald, ran an editorial on Aug. 26, 1859 appealing to women. “Here is the market to bring your charms to, girls,” he wrote. “Don’t be backward, but come right along — all who want good husbands and comfortable homes in the most beautiful country and the finest climate in the world.”

A lumber camp around 1910, Bellingham, Wash.

In 1861, Judge Mercer’s brother Asa arrived, a newly minted graduate of Franklin College in Indiana. He was also the only college graduate in the vicinity. So he was named president of the Territorial University—once he’d cleared the stumps from the land set aside for the school.

Asa quickly joined the campaign to attract the fairer sex, which aligned with his own interests as a bachelor. Washington’s territorial governor, William Pickering, then appointed young Mercer “commissioner of immigration.” And so the young man headed east.

Washington Territory Gov. William Pickering

Mercer Girls

Asa Mercer knew that New England educated its young people. In January 1864, he stopped in Lowell, Mass., where he’d heard of a large surplus of marriageable, unemployed females. Lowell had 40,000 people dependent on the cotton mills, but the Civil War had starved them of cotton. The war had also taken many eligible young men – at least the ones who hadn’t gone west in search of gold, timber or fish.

In Lowell, Mercer spoke at the Unitarian Church. Flora A. P. Engle, who later became a Mercer Girl, remembered his pitch. He painted visions of a land of plenty on the shores of an American Mediterranean. Puget Sound offered magnificent scenery and delightful charm, he said. It had a salubrious climate and an atmosphere so charged with pure ozone that disease was rare and death was kept away.’ (Two Mercer Girls died within five years of their arrival.)

Flora’s two older sisters, Josie and Georgia, decided to go. So did their father, Daniel Pearson, who suffered ill health and believed Mercer about the salubrious climate. Flora would join them later.

Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast by Albert Bierstadt, 1870. Courtesy Seattle Art Museum.

Along with the Pearson girls and their father, six other Lowell women boarded a train for New York. There, three young women from Pepperell, Mass., joined them, along with a fourth from Boston.

The women had to pay for the trip themselves, somewhere around $200. But Mercer had described lucrative job opportunities for anyone who could teach school. He didn’t mention the marital possibilities. He didn’t need to.

They sailed from New York Harbor in March of 1864, crossed the Isthmus of Panama and then took a bark to Port Gamble. From there they boarded the sloop Kidder, arriving in Seattle on May 16, 1864 at 11 pm. The few households that had women welcomed the newcomers. Within weeks they had teaching jobs. Within months all but one, Lizzie Ordway, had husbands.

The Second Trip

Asa Mercer viewed the experiment as such a success that he tried again, only instead of a dozen women he pledged to bring 700.

The Civil War was winding down, and he figured he could get help from the federal government. He knew political leaders wanted to settle the West, and they had concerns about the economically depressed East. He also thought the government had idle ships and seamen on its hands.

A Civil War-era transport steamship on the Tennessee River

So Asa Mercer left for Washington, D.C., with his big plans. His first stop would be the White House, where he expected to see Abraham Lincoln, an old family friend. But when Mercer arrived in Washington on April 15, 1865, he got his first hint that his plans might go awry. The city was draped in crepe. Lincoln had just died.

So he went to Massachusetts to gain support from Gov. John Andrew, who introduced him to the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. Hale, alarmed by the surplus of women driving down the wages of men, advocated on his behalf.

Natural Distrust

Back to Washington he went, where Gen. Ulysses S. Grant liked what he heard and ordered a steamship, coaled and manned, to take 500 people from New York to Seattle. Mercer then traveled to New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, rounding up hundreds of war widows and educated single ladies.

The press caught on, and began to raise questions—and eyebrows. Then the federal government withdrew its support, and women began to back out.

“A natural distrust of the man’s intentions seemed to prevail,” wrote Roger Conant, a New York Times reporter.

Mercer fell into debt, but finally found a wealthy patron, Ben Holladay, to help out. Holladay bought an old military transport ship, the S.S. Continental, and agreed to pay for 75 women to travel to the Pacific Northwest.

But instead of 700 Mercer Girls, there were 13 couples, with and without children; 10 widows; 17 children; 36 single women; 14 single men; and one woman coming to join her husband.

“No more curious or suggestive exodus ever took place,” opined Harper’s Weekly.

Parboiled Beans

Flora Engle belonged to the group of 36 Mercer Girls, and she wrote an account of the voyage around Cape Horn aboard the Continental. The vessel had only been partially fumigated and the food was abysmal, she recalled. They were served fried salt beef and tea steeped in saltwater. For 17 straight days they ate parboiled beans.

Harper’s Weekly illustrations of the second Mercer Girls voyage.

“To add to our provocation, a mast, only, separated the common dining table from the captain’s, which was loaded with all sorts of delicacies for the delectability of the officers,” wrote Flora. “Mr. Mercer at first took his seat at the captain’s table, but afterwards, considering the righteous indignation of the passengers, concluded ‘discretion was the better part of valor’ and took his place with them at table.”

Flora did find a husband in Washington, marrying William Ballinger Engle in 1876.

Conant, a 32-year-old unmarried Times reporter, was assigned to cover the voyage. He thought highly of the Mercer Girls. They came, he wrote, from New England’s middle class, “respectable, well-meaning people.” Their conduct “would have called forth strong expressions of praise from their stern old Puritan ancestors.”

Asa Mercer, not so much.

Asa Mercer

Conant reported that the passengers found Mercer bossy. He tried to keep the Mercer Girls from playing cards and flirting with the ship’s officers. “He even tried to make them go to bed at ten o’clock,” wrote Conant.

In his book, Mercer’s Belles: The Journal of a Reporter, Conant reported that Mercer grew enamored of “a young maiden of good report and fair to look upon. “Without giving her “the slightest intimation of what he was about to do, not even so much as a tender look, or an evening’s courtship,” Asa invited her to his stateroom. Then he told her he loved her enough to marry her, and “opened his arms and smiled fondly upon her. The maiden laughed right in his face.”

Mercer tried again, with Anna Stephens of Baltimore. This time, the Mercer magic worked, and they married.

San Francisco

When the Continental arrived in San Francisco, police officers had to keep the men away from the Mercer Girls. One young man had agreed to pay Mercer $300 for a specific girl from back home, according to Dorothy Johnson in Some Went West.

San Francisco Harbor around 1850

“She hadn’t come, but another girl by the same name had, from another state,” wrote Johnson. “The young man introduced himself to her: ‘I’m the feller that sent three hundred dollars by Mercer to bring you out for my wife. I suppose you’re as willing to get married this afternoon as any other time, and I have to be home by sundown to milk the cows and feed the pigs’.”

She called him impertinent, said she paid her own fare and hadn’t come to get married but to work as a tailor.

Another man, a farmer, came to town to look over the newly arrived Mercer Girls. He chose a widow with three sons, proposed and married her three hours later.

Twenty of the Mercer Girls stayed in San Francisco.

Lizzie Ordway

Lizzie Ordway, 35 when she left Lowell, was the oldest Mercer Girl. She was a schoolteacher, not a mill girl, and she didn’t intend to marry. Lizzie came from a well-to-do family and had been educated at the Ipswich Academy. She spoke five languages and believed women should have the right to vote.

Lizzie Ordway

She went to the Pacific Northwest to “carry the educational standards of New England to the new community beyond the Rockies.” In that, she succeeded. With a reputation as the best teacher around, she turned around troubled schools throughout the Seattle area. She started Seattle’s first public school and won election as superintendent of the Kitsap County schools. Lizzie also founded Seattle’s Female Suffrage Society with Susan B. Anthony, who visited Seattle and shared a platform with Lizzie.

In 1891, she helped prepare the state’s educational exhibit at the Chicago World Exposition—a surprise to Eastern educators. When Lizzie died in 1897, the number of Kitsap County schools had grown from three to 20.

Mercer Girls’ Legacy

Like Lizzie, the Mercer Girls spread their civilizing influence throughout the Pacific Northwest. Unlike Lizzie, they contributed to the population growth by marrying and having families.

Fifteen years after the first Mercer Girls arrived, Seattle had evolved from a western logging town to a civilized metropolitan center, according to Paul Hagen in his paper, How the Civil War Civilized Seattle. The Mercer Girls, he wrote, “brought New England culture to Seattle, which served as a civilizing force.

As for Asa Mercer, he and Annie had three sons, two daughters and many grandchildren. They moved to Wyoming, where Asa published a newspaper called Northwestern Livestock Journal. He eventually wrote a book exposing the dirty tactics of the cattle cartels called Banditti of the Plains. The cattle barons suppressed the book, had his printing press destroyed and Mercer arrested and jailed. He died in 1917.

Images: Asa Shinn Mercer By unknown – Found at http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/portraits/id/102/rec/3, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=848418

With thanks to Some Went West by Dorothy M. Johnson. And How the Civil War Civilized Seattle, by Paul Hagen. The Story of the Mercer Expeditions by Flora A. P. Engle from The Washington Historical Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 4, 1915, pp. 225–237. JSTOR

This story last updated in 2022.

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In 1863, Capt. Charles Russell Lowell Shot His Own Soldier. Murder or Duty?

At the outset of the Civil War, Capt. Charles Russell Lowell thought a benefit of being an officer was that he didn’t have to kill anyone.

The enlisted men did the killing, he thought.

In the spring of 1863, Charles Russell Lowell found out how wrong he had been. He would not only kill, he would kill a Union soldier right in downtown Boston.

And the killing of an Irishman by a wealthy Brahmin would worsen tensions between Boston’s ruling Yankees and its poor immigrant population.

Charles Russell Lowell

Charles Russell Lowell was descended from Percival Lowell, who had come to America in the Great Puritan Migration. His uncle James Russell Lowell was a famous poet. His great-uncle, Francis Cabot Lowell, made a fortune manufacturing textiles in a city that took his name: Lowell, Mass.

Charles Russell Lowell

Young Lowell graduated first in his class at Harvard, spent several years exploring Europe and worked for John Murray Forbes as treasurer of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad. Then he ran an iron foundry in Maryland.

When war broke out in 1861, 26-year-old Charles Russell Lowell used his family’s influence to wangle a commission as a captain in the 3^rd U.S. Cavalry.

The war didn’t go well for the Union in 1863, and in March Congress enacted a national draft. It allowed a draftee to hire a substitute or buy an exemption for $300. In other words, the army only drafted poor men, and in Boston that meant the Irish.

To the Irish, the draft represented more pious hypocrisy from the Yankee abolitionists. Already they had to work to death for slave wages, and now they had to risk their lives to free enslaved Africans.

But Boston’s aristocratic Brahmin officers viewed the Irish as rough, undisciplined, devious and disorderly. And Charles Russell Lowell had a horror of disorder.

Irish soldiers

Melee or Mutiny?

Charles Russell Lowell was taking a break from the battlefield in the spring of 1863 to recruit a new cavalry regiment. He had seen action at the horrific battle of Antietam, and his younger brother James Jackson Lowell died at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff.

Lowell arrived at his recruiting office at 2 City Hall Ave., near the Old State House, at 8:30 a.m. on April 9, 1863. A melee had broken out in the basement, which served as a barracks.

Sgt. Anson Burlingham tried to arrest a recruit for drunkenness. Another recruit named William Lynch shouted, “You shan’t do that to any man in this place.” Then an 18-year-old shouted, “Kill the son of a bitch of a sergeant!”

The men rushed the sergeant, punching him in the face and head.

Burlingham escaped and ran upstairs to tell his lieutenant and the recruiting officer. Lt. Archibald McKendry ran back downstairs, and he began to control the situation. Then the police arrived, summoned by the recruiting officer.

The men rushed the police with swords and curses. The police fled upstairs.

Then Charles Russell Lowell arrived on the scene. He led the police downstairs and ordered the men to halt. Then he ordered Lynch to step forward and the police to handcuff him. With fearful oaths, the men swore he should not be handcuffed.

Mutiny

Lowell asked for a weapon. Someone handed him a Colt revolver.

1860 Colt Army revolver

He told the men they were in a state of mutiny. They would probably face a court-martial and could even hang.

“The order must be obeyed. After it is obeyed, I will hear what you have to say, and will decide the case on its merits, but it must be obeyed first,” Lowell said. “God knows, I don’t want to kill any of you, but I shall shoot the first man who resists.”

It didn’t work. The men waved their sabers, cutting a corporal on the head and slashing the recruiting officer on the wrist.

Somehow Lynch was handcuffed, which infuriated the men even more. A 23-year-old soldier named William Pendergast then lunged for McKendry. Lowell stepped forward and shot Pendergast. He fell to the floor without a word and died in four minutes.

John Andrew

Charles Russell Lowell: Coward or Hero?

The furious recruits called Charles Russell Lowell a “son of a bitch” and a “coward.” Lynch, in handcuffs, stepped up to Lowell and vowed he would avenge Pendergast. Sgt. Burlingham dragged Lynch away to jail.

Lowell left the recruiting office, walked the few blocks to the Statehouse and entered Gov. John Andrew’s office. He saluted Andrew and said, “I have to report to you, sir, that in the discharge of my duty, I have shot a man.” He saluted and left.

Andrew said to the men gathered around him, “I need nothing more. Colonel Lowell is as humane as he is brave.”

Word of the shooting spread quickly and a crowd gathered around the Statehouse.

The Massachusetts Statehouse in 1860

Aftermath

An inquest was held the next day. The jury found Lowell “shot the deceased in the discharge of his duty, and in defense of the life of one of his officers, the company being at the time in a state of revolt.”

Five of the recruits were confined and court-martialed. William Lynch was executed.

Opinion then divided along predictable lines. The Boston Courier opined the officers were too officious, had contempt for enlisted men and got their commissions through their influence. The editors also argued Lowell killed Pendergast because of his prejudice against the Irish.

Edward Emerson, the son of Ralph Waldo Emerson, reflected the Brahmin view in a biography of Lowell. He had “showed the rough characters once for all the kind of man with whom they had to deal,” wrote Emerson.

The Battle of Cedar Creek

And he quoted Anna Lowell, mother of Charles Russell Lowell: “The whole incident was very painful to Colonel Lowell, especially because he had always regarded it as one of the privileges of an officer that he did not have to kill with his own hand.”

Charles Russell Lowell died at the Battle of Cedar Creek. William Pendergast, the man he killed, supposedly had a wife in New York. Lowell’s wife tried to find her after her husband died, but didn’t succeed.

With thanks to The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1855-64 by Carol Bundy. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Irish soldiers Gardner, A., photographer. (1862) Harrison’s Landing, Va. Group of the Irish Brigade. United States Virginia Harrison’s Landing, 1862. July. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2018666201/. Colt revolver By Rama – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=450901.

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