The Boy General

The Life and Careers of Francis Channing Barlow

Richard F. Welch

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612774381

The biography of an ambitious Civil War soldier

Drawing heavily on primary-source material, The Boy General is the first full-length account of Francis Channing Barlow, one of the most successful combat officers in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War.

Although his clean-shaven, youthful appearance earned him the nickname "the Boy General, " his fighting capabilities resulted in frequent promotions and greater responsibilities.

Born in October 1834 in Brooklyn, New York, Barlow's professional, military, and political careers were all in the service of his native state. Intelligent, ambitious, and confident, Barlow graduated as valedictorian of the 1855 Harvard class and launched a legal career in New York. When Lincoln sent out a call for volunteers following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Barlow dropped his practice and entered the U.S. Army as a private.

He transformed himself from a privileged young lawyer into one of the most formidable combat leaders produced by either side during the Civil War. Rising from private to major general, Barlow served in most major operations in Virginia and was increasingly entrusted with assignments of crucial importance to the success of Federal arms. He cleared out the deadly sunken road at Antietam, where he was badly wounded, and led a division at Gettysburg, where he suffered another serious wound. He and his men often spearheaded the Army of the Potomac's assaults during Grant's bloody Overland campaign. Following the war, Barlow resumed his law practice and entered the political arena. He served as New York attorney general in 1871 and as Grant's personal representative in the Florida recount following the contentious 1876 election.

This book will be welcomed by Civil War historians and buffs alike.

1

The Apprentice Warrior

THE FUTURE “BOY GENERAL” SPRANG FROM AN IMPECCABLE YANkee lineage. The American branch of the Barlow line probably began with George Barlow, who arrived in Sandwich, Massachusetts in the seventeenth century.¹ His father, the Reverend David Hatch Barlow, the son of David and Sarah Hatch Barlow, was born on 31 January 1805 in Windsor, Vermont. David Hatch Barlow’s began his career auspiciously. He graduated as first scholar in his Harvard class of 1824, and completed divinity school as an ordained Unitarian minister in 1829.² In addition to his preaching duties, Hatch Barlow wrote verse—he had been his class poet at Harvard—and composed hymns as well.³ One of his musical creations was sung at the ordination of Ralph Waldo Emerson as junior pastor of the Second Church of Boston.⁴ At about the same time he was completing his theological education, he met and wooed Almira Cornelia Penniman of Brookline. Almira, born in 1810, was widely regarded as “a famous beauty” whose good looks were matched by an engaging personality and taste for expensive fashions.⁵

The couple wed on 10 May 1830. At first the marriage went smoothly and David and Almira were “regarded as the handsomest couple that had been seen in town.”⁶ Their first son, Edward Emerson (named for Edward Bliss Emerson, a close college friend of David’s) was born 5 August 1831 in Lynn, Massachusetts where David had a parish.⁷ Possibly exhibiting early signs of a troubled personality, Barlow left his position at Lynn and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where, on 17 September 1834, he began his tenure as pastor of the First Unitarian Church.⁸ It was there that Francis Channing Barlow was born on 19 October 1834. Francis Channing Barlow’s New York birth proved a portent of his future as his professional, military, and governmental careers were all in the service of his natal state. Nevertheless, Francis would spend his formative years in the Bay State. When he was two years old, his parents returned to his mother’s hometown, where he was raised. Here, another boy, Richard D., was born in 1838.

The Barlow family was solidly entrenched in the Unitarian-Transcendentalist circle, which dominated social and intellectual circles in the Boston area during the antebellum years. Unitarianism, a rationalist variation of Christianity, originated in Boston around 1800 and quickly spread through the Congregational churches in eastern Massachusetts, supplanting what was left of the traditional seventeenth-century Calvinism that had so long dominated New England. David Hatch Barlow’s own clerical career personified this theological transformation. Transcendentalism arose among the heavily Unitarian intellectual elite around 1836. Taking its name from Immanuel Kant’s “transcendental” ideas, it was heavily influenced by German and English Romantic thought. Critical of industrialization, the Transcendentalists believed the divine was present in both man and nature. Moving away from Unitarian rationalism, they maintained that human intuition was the highest form of knowledge. Its optimistic attitude towards human development led the transcendentalists to emphasize individualism, self-reliance and human progress. The transcendentalists were also committed to social reform and embraced the abolitionist movement. The influence of transcendentalism proved strongest in literature. Followers of the movement included essayists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and novelists Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Perhaps the most ambitious attempt by the New England transcendentalists to put their beliefs into action was the founding of Brook Farm in West Roxbury. Operating between 1841 and 1847, Brook Farm was an attempt to establish a self-supporting commune based on a union of labor and culture.⁹ The Farm was founded by George Ripley, a former Unitarian minister who had been forced to give up his church due to his passionate advocacy of Emerson’s transcendentalism.¹⁰ Despite the conscious intent to combine work and thought, the community’s intellectual activities life proved far more significant and enduring than the experiments in communal living or cooperative agriculture. Hawthorne, Charles A. Dana, and Isaac Hecker were among Brook Farm’s members, while Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Horace Greeley, and Orestes Brownson visited frequently. The Brook Farm commune also ran a school, officially titled the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Knowledge, which operated along the principles later advanced, for good or ill, by John Dewey. Students who attended school in the morning were expected to carry out their farm chores in the afternoon while students who studied in the afternoon worked in the morning.

The Barlows’ deep New England roots and membership in the Unitarian-Transcendentalist network proved no defense against personal and family disintegration. By the time of the Barlows’ return to Brookline, David was exhibiting signs of emotional instability. His behavior, which may have been belligerent at times, quickly affected his family and career.¹¹ He was forced to give up his pulpit in Brooklyn due to “mental stress”¹² and, as one chronicler delicately phrased it, “his habits became irregular [and] he remained but a short time in any place.”¹³ In 1840, two years after the birth of their youngest child, Almira and David separated. David remained in the Boston area for a few years and then drifted south to Pennsylvania, abandoning any of his paternal responsibilities. While it is not clear whether Almira legally divorced David, the two had little contact after their separation, and none once he left Massachusetts sometime after 1844.

When David Hatch Barlow left Massachusetts he also turned his back on his children, who apparently never saw him again. Towards the end of the Civil War, Francis, by then a well-known Union general, discovered his father’s whereabouts near Philadelphia and attempted to make contact with him. Before the two could meet, however, David Hatch Barlow was killed, and whatever chance existed for a father-son rapprochement died with him.

Almira Barlow rose to the challenge of keeping herself and her three sons in the social milieu to which they were accustomed. Moreover, she was determined to see that her sons’ prospects remained open. Shortly after her husband’s desertion, Almira and her children became boarders at the Brook Farm commune. Almira’s immediate reason for making the trek to West Roxbury was her desire to have her children continue their education under Ripley’s tutelage. Edward, Francis, and Richard had been enrolled in Ripley’s Boston school, and when he moved it to Brook Farm Almira followed him to West Roxbury.¹⁴ She and her sons lodged in two rooms on one side of “The Hive,” the large farmhouse which was at the heart of the community.¹⁵ As enrollees in the school, Francis and his brothers were introduced to some of the foremost thinkers and writers in antebellum America. The Brook Farm experience seems to have made a great impression on young Frank—as he was known to his friends and family—and he felt a sense of affection for the commune and its members for the rest of his life. His sentiments were reciprocated, and many of Brook Farm’s luminaries, such as Emerson, retained a fondness for the fatherless boy and an interest in his future.

Almira Penniman Barlow, possibly by Francis Alexander. Courtesy Don Richard Lauter, “Winslow Homer and Friends in Prince George County, Virginia, 1864.”

In addition to securing a first-rate education for her sons, Almira was probably drawn to Brook Farm by the frequent presence, and possible encouragement, of her old friend, Margaret Fuller. Fuller was the preeminent woman writer-intellectual of her day. An ardent feminist, Fuller had begun her career by giving lecture seminars to—mostly—female audiences in Cambridge and Boston, and went on to establish herself as a writer, editor, book reviewer and, ultimately, foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. Almira, whose beauty masked a keen intellect, had become acquainted with Fuller before her marriage and according to one source, the two vied for the leadership of a coterie of young intellectuals, “Margaret claiming it by right of intelligence [Almira] by right of beauty.”¹⁶ The two remained in contact with each other after Almira’s marriage, visiting and corresponding. On 9 March 1834 Fuller, feeling somewhat isolated at her family’s farm in Groton, Massachusetts, wrote to Almira who was then living in Brooklyn. The letter, composed as a mock-classic lament, not only sheds light on the women’s friendship—and, Fuller’s presumption of preeminence—but also reveals Almira’s own forays into public discourse:

To Mrs. Almira B.

Are you not ashamed o most friendshipless clergywoman not to have enlivened my long seclusion by one line? You can write to Mistress Mary Hedge, forsooth! to her you confide the history of your intellectual efforts, of your child’s mental progress and various maladies, and of your successes in Brooklyn society. . . . Can the Brooklyn Society have exercised so depraving an influence on your heart and tastes? Or does the Author of the ‘Lecture delivered with much applause before the Brooklyn Lyceum’ despise and wish to cast off the author of ‘Essays contumeliously rejected by that respected publication the Christian Examiner?’ That a little success should have the power to steel the female heart to base ingratitude! O Ally! Ally! Wilt thou forget that it was I (in happier hours thou has full oft owned it) who first fanned the spark of thy Ambition into a flame? Think’st thou that thou owest nought to those long sweeps over the insignificant, inexpressive realities of literature, when thou wert obliged to trust to my support, thy own opinions, as yet scarce budding from thy heels or shoulders. . . . Still remains enveloped in mystery the reason why neither you nor my reverend friend came to bid me good-bye before I left your city according to promise. . . . I had treasured up sundry little anecdotes touching my journey homeward, which, if related with dramatic skill, might excite a smile on your face, O laughter-loving blue stocking. . . . My love to your reverend husband, and four kisses to Edward, two on your account, one for his beauty, and one abstract kiss, symbol of my love for all little children in general. Write of him, or Mr B’s sermons, of your likes and dislikes, of any new characters, sublime or droll you may have unearthed, and of all other things I should like.¹⁷

Despite, or because, it was so heavily patronized by intellectuals, Brook Farm had its share of incongruities. Among these was a whistled greeting/recognition signal. The “Brook Farm Whistle,” begun among the children and adopted by the adults, functioned like a fraternity sign and young Frank’s was noted as “shrill and trill like a fife.”¹⁸ Towards the end of the Civil War, John van der Zee Sears, who knew Barlow from the farm (and who claimed to have introduced the whistle to the commune) caught sight of then General Barlow striding down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington “at his usual breakneck pace.”¹⁹ Rather than call out a greeting, Sears gave out with the “Brook Farm Whistle.” “[Barlow] came to an abrupt halt,” Sears recalled, “answered my greeting [with the counter whistle] and dashed across the Avenue with both hands extended. Neither of us had more than a short allowance of time, but we could do no less than adjourn to a convenient resort for a good hearty talk about the old days in West Roxbury.”²⁰

Almira and her brood were gone from Brook Farm by 1844 when Ripley tried to convert it into a socialistic “phalanx,” a type of organization devised by the French theorist Charles Fourier.²¹ The problem was not disagreement about the Farm’s possible new direction, but Almira’s beguiling effect on the male members and visitors. The recently separated Mrs. Barlow was well-known as “a famous beauty in Brookline and of a lively and attractive disposition.”²² Almira enjoyed the attentions of men drawn to her “vivacious” personality and soon acquired a circle of admirers.²³ Among these was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who may have based the character of Zenobia in his Blithedale Romance on Almira.²⁴ Shortly after meeting Almira at Brook Farm in the wintry early months of 1841, Hawthorne wrote Sophia Peabody that she looked “as if her ample person were stuffed with tenderness, as if she were all one kind heart.”²⁵ Almira certainly invited masculine attentiveness and often praised the work of Hawthorne in a style which can only be characterized as flirtatious.²⁶ While male members and visitors to the Farm were first attracted to her physical beauty and charm, they soon found she was well capable of holding her own in conversation with Ripley, Fuller, Orestes Brownson, Hawthorne, and the other members of the literati.

Almira had an especially devastating affect on Isaac Hecker, who worked as a baker in the “Hive’s” kitchen where Almira also labored. Hecker, who later converted to Catholicism and founded the Paulist fathers, placed notes on Almira’s plate to which she responded on perfumed stationery of her own. Nevertheless, as seems to have been her usual style, Almira’s notes were less ardent than Hecker’s.²⁷ Hecker confided his love for Almira in his diary, but apparently she deflected any overt protestations of affection on his part. In the end, Hecker proved more attracted to spirituality than erotic attachments and he drifted off into a friendship with Thoreau before following a religious vocation.

The most besotted of all Almira’s admirers was John Sullivan Dwight, who was on his way to becoming a noted promoter of music, especially that of Beethoven. After leaving the Farm he founded Dwight’s Journal of Music, which became the nation’s most influential periodical of music. Six years Almira’s junior, Dwight’s lovesick attentions became embarrassing, and Almira finally told him that he had become too attached to her. She tried to let him down gently by telling him she valued him as a friend. Dwight asked if s...