As he wrote to his friend Briggs, "I am back again to the place I love best. I am sitting in my old garret, at my old desk, smoking my old pipe ... I begin to feel more like my old self than I have these ten years." Shortly thereafter, in May, he left "The Atlantic Monthly" when James Thomas Fields took over as editor; the magazine had been purchased by Ticknor and Fields for $10,000 two years before. Lowell returned to Elmwood by January 1861 but maintained an amicable relationship with the new owners of the journal, continuing to submit his poetry and prose for the rest of his life. His prose, however, was more abundantly presented in the pages of the "North American Review" during the years 1862–1872. For the "Review", he served as a coeditor along with Charles Eliot Norton. Lowell's reviews for the journal covered a wide variety of literary releases of the day, though he was writing fewer poems. As early as 1845, Lowell had predicted the debate over slavery would lead to war and, as the Civil War broke out in the 1860s, Lowell used his role at the "Review" to praise Abraham Lincoln and his attempts to maintain the Union. Lowell lost three nephews during the war, including Charles Russell Lowell Jr., who became a Brigadier General and fell at the Battle of Cedar Creek. Lowell himself was generally a pacifist. Even so, he wrote, "If the destruction of slavery is to be a consequence of the war, shall we regret it? If it be needful to the successful prosecution of the war, shall anyone oppose it?" His interest in the Civil War inspired him to write a second series of "The Biglow Papers", including one specifically dedicated to the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation called "Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line" in 1862. Shortly after Lincoln's assassination, Lowell was asked to present a poem at Harvard in memory of graduates killed in the war. His poem, "Commemoration Ode", cost him sleep and his appetite, but was delivered on July 21, 1865, after a 48-hour writing binge. Lowell had high hopes for his performance but was overshadowed by the other notables presenting works that day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. "I did not make the hit I expected", he wrote, "and am ashamed at having been tempted again to think I could write "poetry", a delusion from which I have been tolerably free these dozen years."