MARK TOOLEY : Quite a Love Letter
Young, Robin
books In RevIeW I n the end, it is not even Kripal’s selective synchronicities that necessarily bar our conversion to the Esalenian way. The narrative is overblown. Kripal is a gifted and...
...Whatever survived from the family was dispersed or destroyed...
...Ballou’s regiment easily chased off advance Confederates in Fairfax Court House, from which he hurriedly penned another note to his wife...
...Union doctors quickly seized the church as the battle’s first field hospital...
...No original copy of “The Letter” survives, however...
...While Ballou lay dying, his trunk, with “The Letter,” was delivered promptly to his wife in Rhode Island...
...He would die two days later from “exhaustion” after surgery...
...O if I could only hear the cry of victory, I would be content...
...Although moving only 30 miles, down roads now too familiar to exasperated Northern Virginia commuters, the Union Army’s regiments spent most of six days trying not to clog each other...
...Decorative versions were published, and it may have been used for fundraising for veterans’ causes...
...His men applied a tourniquet and moved him beneath a fence, from which he continued to shout encouragement...
...Sarah, do not mourn me dead...
...But it would last only several weeks before the army was ordered onto the “sacred” soil of Virginia...
...He was already speaker of the Rhode Island state legislature when he enlisted in the Union Army at the war’s start...
...Their camp, which also included views of Georgetown, Arlington, and the Potomac, sounds almost bucolic, as Ballou described it in letters...
...Meanwhile, the initial Union advance instead became a rout, thanks partly books In RevIeW to a steadfast resistance by Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson...
...The Letter” seems to have become public knowledge by 1870...
...But unlike the others, he was mysteriously interred in a casket, a privilege unavailable even to senior Confederate officers...
...Picture further a band of “five people, including Joan Baez and three Doberman pinschers,” running the same attackers out in what is known in Esalen lore as the Night of the Dobermans or a party where Esalen luminaries schmoozed with the likes of Rock Hudson, Shirley MacLaine, and Dennis Hopper, while Perls derided Natalie Wood as “a spoiled little brat” and gave her a public spanking over his knee during an encounter session...
...Several years after the war, Ballou’s remains were reburied, under an impressive obelisk...
...Nearly 30,000 men crowdedly maneuvered through Washington’s dusty streets and across the Long Bridge (where 14th Street Bridge is today) into the countryside...
...Like other patients who died, Ballou was quickly buried nearby...
...By candlelight on the evening of July 14, aware of his impending departure for battle, Ballou wrote two letters...
...As with Abraham Lincoln, his last direct descendant died decades ago...
...Some doctors, a chaplain, and others courageously remained with the wounded...
...It’s the pseudo-intellectualized philosophizing that breeds real mistrust...
...The Georgians had mistaken the graves...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 75...
...Robin Young’s For Love and Liberty: The Reviewed by Mark Tooley Untold Civil War Story of Major Sullivan Ballou and His Famous Love Letter describes a man who was every bit as magnificent as the writer of such a letter would be expected to be...
...But as he would have hoped, even this desecration ultimately served the Union cause...
...At age 34, Ballou was a self-made man who had risen from near poverty as a fatherless boy to become a successful lawyer, abolitionist, and ascending star in the new Republican Party...
...Thousands thronged to pay respects in Philadelphia and New York, as the remains headed home to Rhode Island...
...Lincoln, whom the politician Ballou had undoubtedly met before, joined other dignitaries in visits to the camp...
...The Letter,” which remarkably expressed Ballou’s love of his wife, For love and liberty: two little sons, his country, The Untold Civil War story and his God, moved the of Major sullivan Ballou and nation...
...An ambulance wagon carried Ballou to Sudley Church...
...She became secretary to a local school board, lived comfortably, endured until age 82, and died in 1917 in New Jersey...
...Senator Charles Sumner proposed a committee to investigate the outrage...
...After arriving at Sudley Church, a slave girl told the Union delegation that the body of a Rhode Island colonel had been dug up by vengeful Georgia troops and burned...
...But “The Letter” still lives on: “But O Sarah...
...Think I am gone and wait for thee—for we shall meet again...
...Should it spark something more in especially enlightened readers, the Esalen Institute continues to hold hundreds of workshops every year...
...It concluded: “My dear Sarah I should become crazy if I should see you—at least for an hour...
...The oldest son, who had been five when his father was killed, died in 1924 in Pasadena...
...An experienced surgeon already known to Ballou amputated his leg below the knee...
...The next day, about five miles from Manassas, Ballou wrote—on a drumhead—his final letter...
...They were encamped in then rural northeast D.C., about one mile from the still uncompleted Capitol, of which they had a superb view from their elevated site...
...The final interment was in Providence...
...All the while, national headlines blazed against the Confederate desecration of Ballou’s body...
...on July 21, the Union Army approached Bull Run creek toward battle...
...On the evening of July 14, aware of his impending departure for battle, Ballou wrote two letters...
...And yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield...
...O it is [a] magnificent cause,” one soldier quoted him as saying...
...Union forces retreated past Sudley Church...
...However blithely ridiculous the metaphysics of Esalen may be, though, Kripal’s colorful narrative nonetheless delivers any number of priceless scenes...
...They expect to fight at Manassas,” he wrote...
...His second letter, later to become so famous, he did not mail, but stowed in his trunk, to be sent home to Rhode Island if he did not return from Virginia...
...But the skull was missing...
...The While Ballou lay dying, his trunk, with “The Letter,” was delivered promptly to his wife in Rhode Island...
...Neighbors confirmed that the Georgians had beheaded the body and kept the skull as a macabre souvenir...
...His second letter, later to become so famous, he did not mail, but stowed in his trunk, to be sent home if he did not return...
...The indignant Rhode Islanders recovered some of Ballou’s charred bones...
...The cortege, which marched down Broadway, was escorted by honor guards and bands...
...I rather think they will run...
...Kripal is a gifted and energetic writer, so it may be beautifully overblown, but overblown it is nonetheless...
...Over the next week, hundreds of bleeding men, including Ballou, would be bandaged or have limbs amputated there...
...It would take a peyote-fueled vision quest to divine Kripal’s meaning when he describes one Esalenian’s transformation from mindset of “sublimated homoerotic orthodoxy to an expressed heteroerotic (and so heterodox, if not heretical) mysticism” or posits “the shameful fruit of the Garden of Eden can be redeemed by the shared gnosis of unorthodox psychoanalysis and Indian tantra...
...Actually, Esalen’s history itself is to him “a kind of encoded tantric transmission...
...Ballou’s widow, a “very tall and a remarkably well-proportioned woman with noble features,” never remarried...
...As a result, at 800 pages the book is much longer than it should be...
...When discussing the mystical massage techniques of Ida Rolf, Kripal adds his own explication, “neurologically speaking, the spine is a serpent-like channel of bioelectrical energy and tiny arcing lightning bolts that connect the genitals to the brain...
...On it, words from “The Letter” were inscribed: “I wait for you there, come to me and lead thither my children...
...The hearings fueled even greater national indignation, added luster to Ballou’s already sterling reputation, and stoked support for the war...
...Midway through the battle, a six-pound cannon- ball smashed Ballou’s leg...
...The younger son, who had been two at his father’s death, died in 1948 in New York...
...His coffin had been thrown into the frigid waters of Bull Run...
...He would live another week, at first under a tree, and then in a nearby house, much of it lying next to a wounded Alabama colonel, with whom he struck a cordial acquaintance...
...What, if any, family artifacts she had, including possibly “The Letter,” have been lost...
...Only one picture of Mark Tooleydirects the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C...
...Thankfully, many of his wonderful wartime letters to his wife survived, thanks to their early donation to a historical society...
...Her two sons grew to “honorable manhood,” as her husband had envisioned in “The Letter...
...books In RevIeW I n the end, it is not even Kripal’s selective synchronicities that necessarily bar our conversion to the Esalenian way...
...Frustratingly, few of Ballou’s papers survive...
...B allou’s rhode island regiment was among the first to arrive in Washington, D.C., after President Lincoln summoned 70,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion in April 1861...
...Young’s description of the Battle of Bull Run is refreshingly crisp...
...Yet Ballou’s story is sufficiently compelling that sifting through the volume is still worthwhile...
...Richmond Dispatch complained that Yankee newspapers were “entertaining their readers with all sorts of legends” gathered from “farmers and old ladies” in Manassas...
...Eight months later, the Confederates having withdrawn, the wealthy governor of Rhode Island organized a military expedition to retrieve the bodies of Ballou and other Rhode Island officers...
...My darling wife goodbye...
...He would die two days later from “exhaustion” after surgery...
...Well, yes, technically…but there are a few other stops along the way that perhaps shouldn’t be completely ignored...
...B allou would not remain peacefully in his grave...
...Quite a Love Letter M aJor sullivan ballou became a national celebrity three times after he died of his wounds on Bull Run Battlefield in July 1861...
...Finally, starting at 2 a.m...
...The first was more conventional, about his finances and his family’s housing during his year of army absence...
...He impressed all recorded witnesses with his forbearance and concern for others...
...His most recent celebrity was in 1990, when the opening episode of Ken Burns’s Civil War series closed with Ballou’s poignant goodbye to his wife on the eve of battle: “Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break...
...Young tries to fill the gap in knowledge about Ballou with lots of Rhode Island social history in the first half of the 19th century...
...And surprisingly, His Famous love letter it has taken 16 years for a by Robin Young major book to be published (tHUnder’s MoUtH press, 830 pages, $35) about Ballou...
...Worshippers were gathering on a Sunday morning at Sudley Methodist Church, near the banks of Bull Run, when the first Union units hurried by...
...When Confederates arrived, they “paroled” the Union doctors so they could continue their work, with aid from local civilians, who helped “an enemy whom they might slay justly in honest combat, but whom as Christians, they felt it their duty to minister to...
...Instead there are many handwritten and published copies dating to when it was first publicized in the 1870s...
...The atrocity committed was headlined in the New York Times and in papers across the North...
...Most of the men would not eat or sleep again for another 36 hours, when the survivors would trudge miserably back into Washington...
...Imagine, for example, a “young, billy club–toting” watchman named Hunter S. Thompson so sullen over a beating he took at the hands of a rowdy gang of gay men down at the baths that he ensconced himself in his room, “where he spent the next day sulking and shooting his gun out a window, which he never bothered to open...
...Afterwards, they were laid on the lawn to recover or die...
...Both are marvelous, but the first was more conventional, with comments about his finances and 74 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 his family’s housing during his expected one year of army absence...
...Ballou’s remains received the equivalent of a state funeral...
...Sadly, Ballou’s only grandchild died as an elderly indigent in 1972...
...Unfortunately, Ballou first came to the nation’s attention not due to his beautiful missive but because of the horrible fate of his corpse after the Confederates’ victory at Bull Run...
...Ballou, now revealed as an exemplary writer and romantic, was a celebrity again...
...What Esalen does to recommend countercultural Taoism, altered states of consciousness, cow pie aliens, or the religion of no religion is not at all clear, but, like a neighbor’s psychiatric report, it does make for interesting reading...
...Someone in the neighborhood of Sudley Church, probably a civilian, esteemed Ballou so highly that they miraculously procured or rapidly constructed a proper coffin...
...If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you… always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, or if the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by...
...The Rhode Islanders found the coffin, but the shirt inside it belonged to Ballou, not the colonel, whose body they found still securely buried...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 73 books In RevIeW Ballou is extant, and none of his wife...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
