Oliver Wendell Holmes

by Stephen Budiansky

  Three days later Holmes was making his way up a street in the outskirts of Hagerstown “in a pretty groggy fashion,” with a bandage around his neck, when a little boy ran out from a house and inquired “if the ladies” who had sent him could do anything to help. Holmes asked for water, and was invited in to rest for a few minutes.

  “I spied around and observed a grand piano and one of my father’s books,” he recalled, telling the story fifty years later, “and decided it looked like a pretty good thing.” When a box of “excellent cigars” was brought out, “I decided it was an adventure worth seeing through,” and accepted the family’s invitation to stay. The head of the house was a widow, Frances Kennedy, whom Holmes would thank on his return to Boston for her “womanly kindness and motherly tenderness.” There was also an attractive young cousin visiting from Philadelphia who, over the following week, would be his constant companion and “would discourse on the universe or play the piano, to my choice.”66

  Hoping to avoid another embarrassing reunion with his father, Holmes delayed sending word home of his whereabouts. “Finally, they told me I really must communicate with my family.” His arm temporarily incapacitated by the nerve damage to his neck, he dictated the letter, beginning with a line in Latin explaining that his “beautiful amanuensis” was writing for him. (It turned out she could understand Latin, and “she cautioned him that he was becoming a little too personal concerning herself in mood and tenses.”) Holmes sharply informed his father that he planned to start for home in a day or two “& I may remark I neither wish to meet any affectionate parent half way nor any shiny demonstrations when I reach the desired haven.”67

  Holmes never forgave his father not only for once again making a spectacle of himself, but for subsequently writing up a sentimental account of his “Hunt for the Captain” in a long article for the Atlantic Monthly that appeared just a month later. The climactic scene of Dr. Holmes’s tale was encountering his son at last on the train at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and their heroically stoic greeting:

  From Holmes’s Civil War scrapbook

  “How are you, Boy?”

  “How are you, Dad?”

  “Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century,” Dr. Holmes explained.68

  His son told at least two different versions of how their meeting had actually unfolded. He apparently told a writer for the New Republic to whom he agreed to speak off the record for a rare profile of him in 1926 that his real reply had been, “Boy, nothing.” But the account he gave his secretary Chauncey Belknap a few years earlier rang truer: that his father, remembering the withering response he had received on the previous occasion, had been chastened into an artificial show of restraint, which his son ironically echoed. “This was play-acting,” Holmes explained to his secretary, “and we both knew it.”69

  The war had physically distanced him from his sometimes overbearing father, but it had done something more: it had given him the moral claim, earned in the hard experience of battle, to directly confront his father in a way he had never quite done before. And yet, as he had lain on the floor of the Nicodemus house, worried that he might lose consciousness and no one would know who he was if he fell prisoner, he had scrawled a penciled note: “I am Capt. O. W. Holmes 20th Mass. Son of Oliver Wendell Holmes M.D. Boston.” Like the bloodstained handkerchief he had dropped on Harrison’s Island and that was returned to him by a relic collector a few months after Ball’s Bluff, he carefully preserved it for the rest of his life.70

  CHAPTER 4

  The Wilderness

  Antietam was a tactical draw, but just enough of a strategic victory for the North to halt British and French thoughts of extending official diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy, and to provide Lincoln the favorable moment he had been waiting for to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. McClellan’s failure to pursue Robert E. Lee’s forces as they withdrew back to Virginia, and his increasingly open alignment with the Democratic Party in opposing the proclamation and Lincoln’s war policies, convinced the president to relieve him of his command on November 7.

  Another casualty of the battle was the Twentieth Regiment’s commander, Colonel Lee. After being taken prisoner at Ball’s Bluff, Lee, Major Revere, and five other Union officers were selected as hostages to be executed in retaliation if death sentences against the crew of a captured Confederate privateer were carried out. For four months all seven Northern men were confined to a seventeen-by-eleven-foot cell in Henrico County Jail. Through the two tiny barred windows of the cell they could see local slaves led to a lashing post in the yard and whipped for various misdemeanors. The first was a young woman, who screamed until she lost consciousness. Revere at first thought the scene had been staged as “a contrived indignity” to the Northern prisoners, but it turned out that every Saturday was “whipping day.”1

  Lee was exchanged before the Peninsula Campaign and seemed to recover, but after the slaughter of his men in the West Woods he fell to pieces, unable to “do any thing,” Abbott reported. Two days after the battle he mounted his horse and rode off without a word to anyone. Macy found him later that day in a barn in Keedysville, blind drunk, his clothes covered in his own excrement.2

  Dunker Church at the edge of the Antietam battlefield

  Two months later Lee resigned his commission. A farewell letter Holmes composed on behalf of the regiment’s officers offered a tribute to what their colonel had shown them in his nobler days. “Your example taught us more perfectly than we could learn elsewhere to strive not only to acquire the discipline of soldiers but the high feelings and self-sacrifice of chivalrous gentlemen.”3

  Devoted to McClellan and scornful of Lincoln, most of the officers of the Twentieth were profoundly demoralized by the turn of events. “The president’s proclamation is of course received with universal disgust,” Abbott wrote his aunt that winter, “particularly the part which enjoins officers to see that it is carried out. You may be sure that we shan’t see to any thing of the kind, having decidedly too much reverence for the constitution.”4 Holmes recalled talking during the war with a fellow Massachusetts officer, Charles Russell Lowell, about who from the war would be remembered as a great man; “he mentioned Lincoln, but I think we both smiled.” Holmes’s own assessment of Lincoln changed only many years later. “Until I reached middle age I believed that I was watching the growth of a myth about Lincoln,” he told Lewis Einstein in 1924. “In the war time like other Bostonians I believed him a second rate politician. But later I saw and read things that convinced me that I was wrong.”5

  In the middle of November, Abbott, who also had been at home in Boston on sick leave, joined Holmes to head south to return to the regiment. They were on the road together for a week, crossing at times through “debatable land” where they were cautioned Confederate guerrillas were on the loose.6

  It was a small adventure, and they enjoyed each other’s company. “Have been more or less blue of course but Abbott has made the journey easier & pleasanter,” Holmes wrote home on November 16. Looking back on their trip a year later, Abbott wrote his friend, “That was after all a devlish pleasant journey to look back on. I have felt a sort of brotherhood ever since.”7

  Holmes found Washington a “modern Gomorrah,” with its dram shops and brothels, and “vulgar, selfish & base” political types. From Washington they headed fifty miles west to Warrenton, Virginia, where the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac had moved, only to “find the Corps is the Lord knows where. . . . Hunting up a Regt isn’t what it’s cracked up to be and everyone seems to hold that you are a nuisance for not having stayed at home.”8

  They finally learned that the regiment had been ordered the day before to Falmouth, Virginia, just across the Rappahannock River from the still Confederate-held city of Fredericksburg. That meant reversing direction and heading fifty miles to the southeast. A train would take them about a dozen miles east to Catlett’s Station, but the rest of the way woul
d be on foot.

  They walked over twenty miles one day, finding a decent house to stop at overnight, “with a motherly old gal who advised us to go home & get stronger.” The Virginia woman was courteous to her guests but swore that “the South will stick it out to the end.” They finally found their regiment on the nineteenth.9

  Reading of the physical hardships soldiers were enduring in the trenches in World War I, Holmes once remarked to Einstein regarding his own experiences in the Civil War, “I know I expected dysentery to begin every time I went back.”10 The disease killed more men than enemy bullets over the course of the Civil War.

  This time was the worst. It was bitterly cold in Falmouth, and on December 11, the day the Twentieth was sent forward into the streets of Fredericksburg in yet another of the most horrific slaughters of the entire war, Holmes lay in the hospital tent too weak even to stand as he suffered the agonies of bloody diarrhea. A man who had just died from the illness was being carried out as Holmes was brought in, and another lay groaning near death next to him. He could hear the battle raging and knew that for the first time his regiment was going into a fight without him, “a feeling worse than the anxiety of danger.” But he was too honest with himself not to admit the mixed emotions of the moment. “I cried, and yet knew that my hide was safe.”11

  The Twentieth had been sent to cross the river and clear the town of rebel snipers who were still firing from the rubble of buildings leveled by a massive cannonade. Union engineers had been working since before dawn to lay pontoon bridges, but all day the sharpshooters prevented them from completing the uppermost of the three crossings. In midafternoon, taking matters into their own hands, the men of the Twentieth filled the pontoon boats, the Nantucket whaling men of Macy’s Company I manning the oars, and rowed across the Rappahannock under murderous fire, then stormed into the tight street grid of the town that rose sharply from the river’s edge. In the desperate house-to-house fighting that followed, the companies of the Twentieth engaged in the fiercest part of the battle once again suffered half their number killed and wounded in a few hours.12

  Holmes left an indelible tribute to Abbott’s courage that day in an extended passage in his most-well-known public speech, his Memorial Day Address delivered in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1884.

  There is one who on this day is always present to my mind. He entered the army at nineteen, a second lieutenant. . . . His few surviving companions will never forget the awful spectacle of his advance alone with his company in the streets of Fredericksburg. In less than sixty seconds he would become the focus of a hidden and annihilating fire from a semicircle of houses. His first platoon had vanished under it in an instant, ten men falling dead by his side. He had quietly turned back to where the other half of his company was waiting, had given the order, “Second platoon, forward!” and was again moving on, in obedience to superior command, to certain and useless death, when the order he was obeying was countermanded. The end was distant only a few seconds; but if you had seen him with his indifferent carriage, and sword swinging from his finger like a cane, you never would have suspected that he was doing more than conducting a company drill of the camp parade ground. He was little more than a boy, but the grizzled corps commanders knew him and admired him; and for us, who not only admired, but loved, his death seemed to end a portion of our life also.13

  In the fighting that day was also Captain Dreher, who had incredibly survived his wounds at Ball’s Bluff to return to the regiment and even to serve briefly—to the disgust of Abbott and the other “gentlemanly” officers—as its temporary colonel following Lee’s incapacitation.

  Dreher was by his own description “a half cripple” by then, his jaw permanently smashed, his hearing gone on one side, the shock to his nervous system leaving him prone to bouts of angry and incomprehensible outbursts. Deeply bitter over the machinations that had removed him from command, he had nonetheless insisted on leading his company in the street battle on December 11. He was hit in both legs. Gangrene set in, and his right leg was amputated, but too late to save him. He died four months later.14

  Two days after clearing the town, the regiment was again at the lead in a wave of assaults launched against the indomitable position Confederate general James Longstreet had occupied atop Marye’s Heights overlooking the town to the rear. The brigade-sized Union attacks—fought uphill, over stone walls and a canal, across a field on which Confederate artillery on the heights above poured canister shot—were “as courageous and hopeless as anything in the war,” wrote the historian James McPherson. The Confederate lines held, and the Union forces suffered thirteen thousand casualties. “It can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor, or generals to manifest less judgment,” a newspaper correspondent reported. Forty-eight members of the Twentieth Regiment were killed or mortally wounded, its greatest loss of any battle in the war.15

  “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it,” Lincoln said when he heard the news of the disaster at Fredericksburg. A few weeks later General Ambrose Burnside, who had commanded the failed Union attack, rode out to review the troops at Falmouth. The men of the Twentieth remained sullenly silent as the divisional commander called out, “Now, three cheers for General Burnside!” Henry Ropes wrote to his brother describing the humiliating scene, reporting that when the general passed another corps, calls of “Butcher!” greeted him from the ranks.16

  Abbott sent a despondent letter home. “All the evening the regiments were groaning Abe Lincoln & cheering Jeff Davis,” he wrote, then wrote again a few days later imploring his father to burn his last letter, for fear it would be considered treasonable. “The state of the army is terrible,” he nonetheless confessed. But then he added, “Thank God we can trust our regiment perfectly!”17

  Little Abbott’s end would come a year and a half later, in the Battle of the Wilderness; by that time he seems to have acquired the same kind of suicidal contempt for the war that would mark the bitter heroism of Britain’s First World War generation. The greater the folly of the generals, the less his belief in the cause he was fighting for, the more Abbott flaunted his indifference to his own safety.

  Holmes never reached that suicidal edge himself. Nor did he ever nurse hatred for the enemy. But after Fredericksburg he made it clear that he did hate war. He also grew disdainful of the high-minded talk of people at home who did not grasp that any good the war might still accomplish was being threatened by the evil it had itself become. Many years later, mentioning his oft-repeated formula that rights are merely “those things a given crowd will fight for,” he remarked that he still “would fight for some things” to make the kind of world he wanted.18

  But he was growing increasingly annoyed with his father’s jingoistic armchair generalship and his inability to see that the other side was just as convinced that theirs was a cause worth dying for. This was one argument where he felt he undeniably had the upper hand, and the chance of evening the score for all the times he had dutifully submitted to his father’s pontifications and domineering manner was too much to resist. With mounting irritation, he told his father that he was no longer going to be lectured to on matters that he knew far more about than his father possibly could. Although the letter from Dr. Holmes that prompted one particularly exasperated reply has not survived, its tone was apparent from the letter Holmes fired back on December 20. Referring to some articles by John Motley on the conduct of the war that his father had enclosed, Holmes wrote just a week after the shattering events of Fredericksburg,

  I never I believe have shown, as you seemed to hint, any wavering in my belief in the right of our cause—it is my disbelief in our success by arms in wh. I differ from you & him—I think in that matter I have better chances of judging than you . . . I see no farther progress—I don’t think either of you realize the unity or the determination of the South. I think you are hopeful because (excuse me) you are ignorant. But if it is true that we represent civilization wh. is in its nature, as well as slavery, diffuse
& aggressive, and if civn & progress are the better things why they will conquer in the long run, we may be sure, and will stand a better chance in their proper province—peace—than in war, the brother of slavery—brother, it is slavery’s parent, child and sustainer at once. . . . I am, to be sure, heartily tired and half worn out body and mind by this life, but I believe I am as ready as ever to do my duty—But it is maddening to see men put in over us & motions forced by popular clamor . . .19

  In expressing his continued readiness to do his duty, Holmes held fast to the one ideal that had survived contact with the enemy. As he told Mark Howe many years later, there was a feeling of “real horror” while it was going on, but “you simply do it because you have to.” In a war where romantic chivalry, high-minded zeal for a great cause, and even heroism in the conventional sense of the word had lost its meaning in an orgy of almost random death, duty was one thing he could cling to. “I hate to hear old soldiers telling what heroes they were,” Holmes said at a gathering of veterans of the Twentieth Regiment thirty-five years later. “We did just what any other American, what the last generation would have done, what the next generation would do if put in our place.” Even winning was no longer the purpose; the only meaning left to the war was to do one’s job.20

  In January 1863, after a few weeks of sick leave spent as usual with the Hallowells in Philadelphia, where his parents visited him, he was appointed provost marshal overseeing the occupation of Falmouth.21

  In late March, referring to a further tense exchange of views he had apparently had with his father, Holmes wrote home, “My Dear Old Dad I had my blowoff in one of my last and now let bygones be bygones—if you will.” Reflecting his newfound determination to treat the war as a bad job to make the best of, he expressed pride in the Twentieth’s disdain for attention-getting and in the cool and unflashy professionalism with which it went about its work. The commander of the brigade the Twentieth had been attached to at Fredericksburg, he noted, had told him approvingly, “The 20th have no poetry in a fight.” Holmes ended the letter saying he was a bit melancholy but it was “just a passing cloud.” And then he got in one small last dig at his father’s attempts to instill him with high-minded thoughts. “It’s very well to recommend theoretical porings over Bible & Homer,” he said. “One’s time is better spent with Regulations & the like.”22