Oliver Wendell Holmes

by Stephen Budiansky

  Higginson, a thirty-year-old Harvard graduate and Unitarian minister who personally led the charge with a battering ram in his hands, changed forever any ideas about Unitarian confidence in the sufficiency of moral suasion. He would go on to command the first black regiment in the Union Army during the Civil War, the First South Carolina Volunteers. For the rest of his life he bore a scar across his chin from the courthouse raid.61

  In response, President Franklin Pierce ordered Marines, cavalry, and artillery to Boston. “Incur any expense to insure the execution of the law,” he telegraphed. A week later Burns was marched down State Street, guarded by a thousand federal troops, to a revenue cutter that Pierce had dispatched to stand by to carry him back to Virginia, and slavery. Fifty thousand Boston citizens lined the streets and rooftops in ominously silent witness, as the city’s church bells slowly tolled the death knell. For the first time, Boston’s merchant elite joined the protests. Black bunting draped the offices of the financial district; on the side of one building hung a coffin with the word “Liberty” on it. The return of Anthony Burns to slavery cost the United States $100,000, about $3 million in the currency of the early twenty-first century.62

  “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs,” the textile heir Amos A. Lawrence wrote a friend in the wake of the shattering show of force on behalf of slave power, “& waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”63

  Still, there were many—Dr. Holmes among them—who feared more than ever where militant abolitionism would lead. Speeches on both sides in Boston became more inflammatory, marked by catcalls, brawls, and outright violence. In 1855 Dr. Holmes gave a speech arguing that slavery was a “physical fact,” against which it made no more sense to rail than the Allegheny Mountains. He said that the white man “must be the master in effect” of the black races “whatever he is in name,” and that having made its pact with the South in the adoption of the Constitution, the North had forfeited any right to criticize its morals:

  Shall we of the North feel and act to these Southern men as equals and brothers; shall we treat them always in the spirit of Christian love; or shall we proscribe, excommunicate, anathematize, vituperate and irritate them until mutual hatred shall ripen into open warfare?

  For this he was loudly hissed by part of the audience.64

  His son felt no inclinations to temporize. Holmes would later recall being “deeply moved by the Abolition cause” in his years at Harvard before the war. In his sophomore year “a Negro minstrel show shocked me” with its demeaning representation of blacks.65 When Wendell Phillips was scheduled to address the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Tremont Temple on January 24, 1861, Holmes readily volunteered to serve on his bodyguard.

  The threat of violence was not theoretical: four days earlier a huge antiabolitionist mob had set upon Phillips as he made his way to the Music Hall to deliver a speech. Phillips, the most radical of the Boston abolitionists, who advocated complete equal rights for all races—and who now carried a gun whenever he left his house—made it to the hall thanks only to a phalanx of one hundred brawny German and Yankee supporters who cleared the way for him through the streets of downtown Boston.66

  Nor were the issues at stake for the country theoretical anymore: by then half the Southern states had declared their secession from the Union in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s election.

  “Pen” Hallowell

  The older brother of Norwood Penrose Hallowell, who was Holmes’s close friend, classmate, and housemate at Danforth’s, sent Holmes a note confirming the arrangements for the twenty-fourth. The Hallowells were Quakers, whose antislavery furor would lead them to place their Quaker principles aside and take up arms in the coming war. Richard Hallowell told Holmes to come by the family’s store to pick up a “William”—that was a jocular term for a billy club—but added, “I do hope you will not receive personal injury tomorrow and trust you will not use a weapon except as a last resort.” In the end Holmes’s services were not required; after a raucous confrontation between the speakers and a shouting mob in the balcony the afternoon before Phillips’s speech, the mayor sent the police to shut the hall and lock the doors.67

  “Little” Abbott

  On April 14 the surrender of Fort Sumter put an end, at least for the moment, to the divisions between Unionists and abolitionists in Boston. Dr. Holmes announced his full-throated support for the war, and for the abolition of slavery. His son had friends at Harvard who had been on both sides; all now enthusiastically volunteered. By the twenty-fifth of the month Holmes had withdrawn from Harvard and enlisted as a private in the Fourth Battalion of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia.

  Joining him were Henry Abbott and Pen Hallowell, the two men who would become his closest comrades in arms, as well as the most enduring symbols to him for what the war had meant.

  Abbott, who had been a year ahead of Holmes at Harvard, never had anything but contempt for the cause he fought in—deriding the abolitionists and Lincoln, dismissing Dr. Holmes as “a little fool” for his newfound jingoism. Yet his courage in action, Holmes would recall, was “sublime.” His death in the Wilderness apotheosized for Holmes the heroism of doing one’s duty heedless of its end, a luminous picture of transcendent greatness that would survive even his darkest disillusionments with the war.68

  And Hallowell, whose idealism never died—after the war he carried on the heartrending fight for the rights of the freed slaves to his very end—was always to Holmes the embodiment of a youthful ideal that even his later realism could not gainsay. When Hallowell, “my oldest friend,” died in 1914, Holmes eulogized him to Lewis Einstein as “a savage abolitionist, a fighting Quaker who blushed at his own militancy, intolerant of criticism or opposition, but the most generously gallant spirit and I don’t know but the greatest soul I ever knew. . . . He gave the first adult impulse to my youth.”69

  On April 25, the young men from Harvard arrived at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor to begin training for the fight that, all were confident, would be over by summer’s end.

  CHAPTER 3

  Harvard’s Regiment

  Of the 578 Harvard men who served in infantry units in the Union Army during the Civil War, 124 died and 86 were seriously wounded, a staggering 36 percent casualty rate. The regiment many of those Harvard graduates would join, the Twentieth Massachusetts, saw more men killed than only four other regiments in the entire Union Army. At Gettysburg, more than half of the “Harvard Regiment,” including ten of its thirteen officers, were killed or wounded. By then it had earned another nickname: the Bloody Twentieth.1

  By the time the war was over, 260 of the men and officers of the Twentieth Massachusetts had died in battle, including its colonel, lieutenant colonel, two majors, its adjutant, and its surgeon; another 149 had succumbed to fatal illnesses; and hundreds more had been seriously wounded or taken prisoner, a casualty list that far exceeded its entire original strength of 750.2

  In the spring of 1861, however, war still seemed a lark and an adventure, especially to the young Harvard men who had eagerly dropped their books in the surge of excitement following the firing on Fort Sumter. Within days, regular life on campus came to a standstill. “Very little studying going on,” noted the college librarian. In all, fifty-one of the eighty-one members of the Class of 1861 would take up arms in the fight. On April 25, many stood in the ranks of the 120 young men—Holmes, Abbott, and Hallowell among them—who boarded the ferry boat Nelly Baker for the two-mile voyage across Boston Harbor to Castle Island, where Fort Independence waited to receive them.3

  The vigorous outdoor life they enjoyed there for the next month had all the release of a sudden holiday. “I’m in bully condition and have got to enjoying the life much,” Holmes wrote his mother a few days after his arrival. It was an escape not only from the classical subjects that few of Holmes’s fellow Harvard students ever had much real interest in, and from the college’s oppressive atmosphere of paternalistic rules and regulations, but
also from a sense of aimlessness and uselessness that had burdened many of these young men of privilege.4

  Henry Abbott, whose Harvard career had consisted of little more than an unbroken string of punishments culminating in two temporary expulsions—his violations included “neglect at mathematics,” “indecorum at prayers,” “tardiness at recitations,” “throwing articles from a window of a college building,” and “visiting sundry freshmen at a late hour for the purpose of annoying them”—confessed to his mother that before enlisting, “I felt that I had never done any thing or amounted to any thing in the whole course of my existence. . . . And what is more, that seemed to be the opinion of every body else. I couldn’t help concurring with every body else, & so got disgusted with being nothing & doing nothing.” Despite being “constitutionally timid,” he decided that “nothing could possibly be so good for me” as to “do what so many other young men were doing.”5

  Getting up at dawn, drilling six hours a day, parading in formation every evening at six, learning to handle a musket in regulation fashion, even tending to the mundane duties of camp life gave a flush of competence to men who had never had to do much of anything for themselves. “Yesterday I made a pretty good omelet,” Holmes’s friend Henry Ropes of the Class of 1862—who would die at Gettysburg—proudly reported to his brother a few months after joining up. William Francis Bartlett, also of the Class of 1862—he would end the war a brigadier general, after losing a leg during the Peninsula Campaign—wrote on his return from Fort Independence, “I value the knowledge acquired in the last month more highly than all the Greek and Latin I have learned in the last year. . . . I look back on the past month as one of the pleasantest and most useful that I remember.”6

  By the time Holmes returned home on May 25 from his month of militia drill, preparations for war had already begun to take a more serious and ominous turn. Immediately after Fort Sumter, Lincoln had issued a call for 75,000 militiamen for ninety days’ service. In May the Confederacy authorized the enlistment of 400,000 men, in addition to 100,000 already called up.

  Ceremonial state militia units like Massachusetts’s Fourth Battalion were going to be a sideshow in this kind of a war, and the northern states were already forming new regiments in anticipation of the expected call for mass mobilization. When Congress returned in July it did just that, authorizing a million men for three years’ service. Holmes and anyone else looking to be sent into the fight began seeking commissions in one of the newly organizing volunteer regiments.

  Crossing Harvard Yard one day in June, Holmes spotted Colonel Henry Lee Jr., the governor’s aide-de-camp, and immediately went up to him to ask for a commission in the Twentieth Regiment. Lee was a cousin of Dr. Holmes’s. The colonel’s first assessment of the gangly six-foot boy was “pity for your youth and delicacy,” as he told Holmes many years later, but agreed to help.7

  As far as Holmes was concerned, he was done with college life. He was the only one of his class who did not even bother to receive permission from the college authorities before departing.8 When Harvard announced it would allow the seniors who had gone to Fort Independence to come back so they could graduate, Holmes ignored the offer of clemency. So did his friend Hallowell. On June 10 the faculty voted that “Hallowell and Holmes, Seniors, be informed that they must return to College and pass the usual examination of their class as a condition of receiving their degrees.” Once again President Felton found himself writing to Dr. Holmes to plead with him to intercede with his hardheaded son, expressing surprise that he had “not rejoined his class since he was relieved of duty at the Fort.” He added, “Not knowing where he is at present, I must rely on you to communicate this notice to him.”9

  Apparently the doctor did. At the Class Day exercises on June 21, Hallowell was the Class Orator, Holmes the Class Poet. Dr. Holmes remained incensed, however, that the faculty had insisted on deducting from his son’s academic score the penalties he had incurred from missing class for a month, which not only disqualified him from a part on the program of the official commencement exercises on July 17 but reduced his class standing from the top twenty to the bottom half. Though his son had never uttered “a word of complaint” or even gave “any thought upon the matter,” Dr. Holmes wrote Felton on July 24, for his part he considered it unpatriotic for the college to stick to its rules when the future of the nation hung in the balance:

  He left college suddenly, no doubt, but if he did not stop to kiss his Alma Mater, neither did many other volunteers stop to kiss their mothers and wives and sweethearts. . . .

  His case was entirely exceptional. Revolutions do not follow precedents nor furnish them. The enforcement of the scholastic rule in this instance seems to me harsh and unworthy of the occasion. If a great General receives an L.L.D. for military services [General Winfield Scott had been awarded an honorary degree at the commencement exercises], it seems hard that a poor private or Lieutenant should be publicly humiliated,—or his friends through him,—for being too prompt in answering the call of the Commander in Chief.10

  (President Felton replied, “With the most kindly feeling towards your son, who is to an unusual degree a favorite of mine, I must still think that the course of the Faculty was right.”)11

  The younger Holmes’s final act of farewell to his Alma Mater was to submit a biographical sketch for the Class Album. “The tendencies of the family and of myself have a strong bent for literature, etc., at present I am trying for a commission in one of the Massachusetts Regiments, however, and hope to go south before very long,” he wrote. “If I survive the war I expect to study law as my profession or at least for a starting point.”12

  Dr. Holmes was meanwhile pulling his own strings to help his son secure a commission and obtained from the governor’s military secretary a letter of introduction to Colonel W. Raymond Lee, the commander of the Twentieth Regiment, whom the doctor proceeded to visit in person at the regiment’s training camp in Readville, southwest of Boston.13

  On July 23, two days after the Battle of Bull Run dashed any lingering illusions for a ninety-day war, Holmes and Hallowell received their commissions as first lieutenants. Holmes had just borrowed Hobbes’s Leviathan from the Athenaeum library and was walking home past the State House when an acquaintance told him his commission had just been issued by the governor. He turned around, returned the book, and prepared to leave for war.14

  THE TWENTIETH REGIMENT of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was riven with unusual tensions from the start.

  Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts was a populist and an abolitionist, but he was also an experienced politician who recognized the importance of solidifying the support of Boston’s conservative old guard behind the war effort.15 The officers he chose for the Twentieth read like a page from Boston’s social register: Cabot, Crowninshield, Revere, Lowell, Putnam, Palfrey, Whittier, Macy. One half of the regiment’s officers literally were Harvard graduates, and in all at least two-thirds were drawn from the city’s social elite. None had military experience. But none believed that mattered. They all shared the belief—as did Governor Andrew—that being a gentleman was more important when it came to commanding men in battle.

  The enlisted men, by contrast, were working class, and mostly non-Yankee. One half were foreign-born, mostly Irish and German.

  Ironically, a number of the Germans, “gentlemen” or not, did have real experience on the battlefield, having fought in the Prussian Army—or against it, as an Achtundvierziger, a “Forty-eighter”—during the failed democratic uprising in the Revolution of 1848. Ferdinand Dreher, one of the small minority of non-Yankee officers of the regiment, was a thirty-nine-year-old, barrel-chested carriage painter from Baden who had broken out of a German prison after the rebellion and made his way to the United States.16 He commanded Company C, one of the three predominantly German companies of the regiment, and among his noncommissioned officers were many similarly experienced veterans of the European wars, well versed in modern infantry and artillery t
actics. After Ball’s Bluff, he would complain bitterly about the “young men, belonging to a certain aristocratick clique” who were lording it over the regiment despite their patent military incompetence. “I would take all the military Science out of [these] gentlemen and put them in a Private, it would not make the best Sergeant we have,” he complained to Governor Andrew.17

  Another German officer of the Twentieth agreed: when it came to the traits that make a good officer, the difference between “those that style themselves gentlemen” and “those that earn their bread by the labor of their hands,” he emphasized, is “not perceptible to the unprejudiced observer of men.” He too thought that many of the sergeants had more of a grasp of “military science” than the “gentlemen” officers.18

  The other fault line in the regiment was political. The Germans were passionately opposed to slavery. The working-class Boston Irish, however, made it clear from the start that they were fighting to preserve the Union, and not from the least sympathy for the “nigger-worshippers” and the abolitionist cause. Conspicuous among the troops that had marched Anthony Burns to the wharf was an all-Irish militia artillery unit. Strongly Democratic in their political leanings, Boston’s Irish had cast their votes overwhelmingly for Lincoln’s rival Stephen Douglas in the 1860 presidential election. The Roman Catholic Church for its part had been conspicuously silent on the issue of slavery, and Boston’s weekly Catholic newspaper warned in June 1861 that “not one volunteer in a hundred” from their community had stepped forward in order “to liberate slaves.”19

  Most of the Twentieth’s Brahmin officers agreed. Besides Holmes and Hallowell there were only a handful of officers (one was James Russell Lowell’s nephew James Jackson Lowell) with any kind of Republican and abolitionist leanings at all. Henry Abbott’s father, a state judge, was the leader of the state’s Democratic Party and Henry in his letters home regularly derided the radical Republicans, dismissing Governor Andrew as “that miserable old lying, bloated, bragger of the State House” and Charles Sumner as “that miserable old humbug.” Bartlett openly sympathized with the South, admitting that in joining the army he “would be fighting rather against my principles, since I have stuck up for the South all along.”20 Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Twentieth would be known as one of the leading Copperhead regiments in the Army of the Potomac, opposing Lincoln and siding with his hapless but charismatic commander General George McClellan in seeking peace with the South.