Oliver Wendell Holmes

by Stephen Budiansky

  On the morning of May 3, the Twentieth was sent back across the bridges to Fredericksburg, retracing its assault on Marye’s Heights where the Confederates remained dug in. Waiting to cross the canal at the base of the hill, the Union forces came under heavy artillery fire from the heights. Holmes’s company was exactly in range. The men hit the ground as shells of case shot burst overhead. Shrapnel from the second incoming round tore Holmes’s knapsack supporter to shreds. The third sent an iron ball through his shoe and into his heel.23

  His ironic thought this time about receiving an inglorious wound was realizing, a minute later, that “it could have been worse”: not just his lower legs but his posterior had been exposed above the rock he had tried to take cover behind.24

  A battle-hardened Holmes, in April 1863

  But “to show how much he hated the war” by that point, he “was praying that his foot might be cut off so that he wouldn’t have to go back.” Holmes’s comrade Charles Whittier sent a jocular letter teasing him about his big feet having given the enemy such a large target and kidding that “I do believe that it was an arranged thing.” But he also reported that “Dr. Hayward said ‘Holmes seemed to be rather sorry that he wasn’t going to lose his foot.’ ” Instead, Haywood chloroformed him and extracted a piece of shattered bone, and told him he would probably be able to keep his foot after all.25

  THOUGH NOT CRIPPLING, and hardly as dramatic as his first two wounds, the injury to his heel was slow to heal; it would keep him at home for eight months. Back in Boston this time, he took a small cynical satisfaction in describing the war as “an organized bore”—“to the scandal of the young women of the day,” he later recalled, “who thought that Captain Holmes was wanting in patriotism.”26

  His father did not make life easier with his nonstop levity. The surgeon treating the wound had used a plug from a slice of carrot to keep it open, which prompted Dr. Holmes one day to pinch his son’s heel and ask him what vegetable he had turned it into.

  No response.

  “Why a Pa’s nip!” Dr. Holmes gleefully declared.27

  The wounded soldier also found himself cringing in advance whenever a visitor entered the room, anticipating the inevitable remark: “Ah, Achilles!” (“I early acquired . . . conviction of the mechanical action of the human mind,” he later recalled, “by seeing the self-congratulatory smile with which man after man would say ‘Achilles’ to me when I was wounded in the heel. Each thought he was being and manifesting a personality.”)28

  But for all the minor irritations of his convalescence, Dr. Holmes reported in a letter to Dr. Hunt, his son seemed “in excellent spirits, not at all nervous, as when he was last wounded.” Holmes had received a letter from Hallowell offering to recommend him for a commission as major in one of the first black regiments being formed in the U.S. Army, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. To Abbott’s satisfaction, Holmes, for whatever reasons, declined the opportunity. Abbott remained disgusted with Hallowell’s decision to join the new regiment, as its lieutenant colonel: he wrote Holmes that Hallowell “has written me a letter that I should have expected from any abolitionist except him. . . . I thought at first that he must have been joking . . . but since I have made up my mind that he was drunk, as the letter is dated from the Parker House.”29

  Owing to his seniority, Holmes remained in line for promotion within the Twentieth, but the situation was complicated by senior officers who had been sidelined with injuries and whose places had been temporarily filled by acting commanders. Although Holmes was commissioned a lieutenant colonel by Governor Andrew later that summer, he could not be mustered into the Twentieth at that rank as long as the current officer of the same rank in the regiment remained on the rolls. After Revere was killed and Macy wounded at Gettysburg, Abbott became the acting commander of the regiment, a position he would hold until his death a year later, yet still unable to advance beyond the rank of major. Holmes offered to step aside so that Abbott could receive the lieutenant-colonelcy, but Abbott refused to hear of it, telling his father, “Holmes is one of the best friends I have. & I assure you I should a thousand times rather see him in the place his rank entitles him to have, than to have him offer it me, for of course I should only return it to him.”30

  His injury kept him from Gettysburg, where the Twentieth was again in the maelstrom, positioned front and center on the line atop Missionary Ridge that received the full force of Pickett’s Charge on July 3. But this time it was the Union army that had the high ground and the murderous artillery commanding the long, uphill field the enemy had to traverse. “The moment I saw them,” Abbott told his father afterward, “I knew we should give them Fredericksburg. So did every body. We let the regiment in front of us get within 100 feet of us, & then bowled them over like nine pins.”31

  Even so, the Twentieth’s losses were again horrific. Three of its thirteen officers were killed and seven wounded; of its 231 enlisted men, more than half, 117, became casualties.32

  One of the dead was Henry Ropes, one of Abbott’s dearest friends. He was the brother of John Ropes, who after the war founded the Boston law firm of Ropes and Gray with John Chipman Gray, who was to become Holmes’s lifelong friend. Henry was hit by a prematurely exploding shell fired by a Union artillery gun behind him as he sat on a hillside the morning of the battle, quietly reading Dickens. “His men actually wept when they showed me his body,” wrote Abbott, “even under the tremendous cannonade, a time when most soldiers see their comrades dying around them with indifference.” He quoted the words of another officer, who said, “Henry had the real flame of patriotism & not the newspaper stuff.”33

  The coffin arrived in Boston on July 7. John Ropes wrote Holmes asking if he would serve as a pallbearer, describing in gruesome detail the glimpse he had had of his brother’s mutilated body.

  My dear Wendell,

  The body arrived this morning. It is, I am grieved to say, not in a state to be seen. It would not do to open the coffin. All that can be seen through the glass-plate is the breast, which is bare, and in which is a fearful wound in the region of the heart, which must have caused instant death. I think I can discern a fragment of shell imbedded in the breast. It is a sad & shocking sight. Nothing of the face can be seen but the chin, round which is a handkerchief.

  If you would take any satisfaction in seeing what can be seen of poor Henry’s mortal remains, you can do so by coming at 10 a.m. at the house of Lewis Jones, undertaker, rear of St. Paul’s Church.34

  Two weeks after Gettysburg, on July 18, Pen Hallowell’s brother Ned, who had accepted the position of major in the Fifty-fourth that Holmes had turned down, was badly wounded in the colored regiment’s famous assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. The regiment’s colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, was killed; infuriated by the sight of black men under arms, the Confederate defenders gave no quarter. After the battle a Confederate officer rebuffed a request for Shaw’s body to be returned, replying, “We have buried him with his niggers.”35

  “What an awful month July has been for us. I mean you & me,” Ned Hallowell wrote Holmes in August from Philadelphia, where he was recuperating from his wounds. “I feel at least one year older since I left Boston. Do you ever see John Ropes? How completely broken he must be.”36

  Anticipating his promotion to field rank, Holmes began taking riding lessons that summer. Abbott wrote to express his pleasure that Holmes had declined another approach from Pen Hallowell, who was now the colonel of a second colored regiment, the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts, formed to absorb the flood of black volunteers. “I haven’t time to tell you how much I am delighted at your decision to stick to the old mother,” Abbott told him. “I believe you have done not only what is agreeable to yourself & us, but what is thoroughly right and proper, instead of absurdly wasting yourself before the shrine of the great nigger.” The Twentieth, by contrast, Abbott told his father after Gettysburg, was now a solidly “Copperhead regiment. . . . Not an abolitionist in it, with the exception of one officer.”37
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  Abbott also assured Holmes that he should not think of resigning out of concern that he was taking another deserving officer’s place during his extended recuperation, and not to feel pressure to return before his wound was fully healed. “If any impudent stay-at-home wide-awake asks you when you are coming back,” Abbott told him, “punch his head.”38

  Charles Whittier now wrote Holmes with another possibility: Whittier was now on the staff of General John Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps, and he assured Holmes it would be an easy matter to obtain a detail for him to the headquarters of one of the corps’s divisional commanders, General Horatio C. Wright. Back in March, Whittier had told him that Sedgwick had been impressed by Holmes when he had stopped by to visit his friend at headquarters, saying afterward, “Tell Capt. Holmes he must come over again soon I want to hear him talk.”39

  Being able to ride was a necessary skill for a staff officer, and Whittier, when he wrote in August, said, “I am glad that you are about to parade your equestrianism.”40 In early January 1864 Holmes once again headed south, and for the war.

  “Farley,” headquarters of the Sixth Corps near Brandy Station, March 1864

  YEARS LATER, HOLMES often remarked to New England friends that though the fall colors of Virginia could never quite rival the blazing red brilliance of the sugar maples of home, springtime in the South was incomparable.41 Spring of 1864 found him in one of the most beautiful spots of the Virginia Piedmont, along the Hazel River about eight miles from the town of Culpeper and a few miles up the old Winchester Turnpike from Brandy Station, a tiny stop on the Orange & Alexandria Railroad. Holmes would forever after express an abiding love for the glories of the Virginia countryside awakening from winter: the “misty blurs” of browns and grays that filled the woods as the first trees budded in March; then carpets of bloodroot and crocuses and windflowers, and the blooming red and pink dogwoods; finally the immense white flowers of the magnolias bursting forth with the first fireflies and the smell of honeysuckle that filled the evenings of late spring, along with a deafening chorus of frogs from hidden ponds that would suddenly fall silent as one approached.42

  Farley, the headquarters of the Sixth Corps, was an elegant plantation manor house, perched in a shallow bowl on a hillside that rose gently over the surrounding countryside, with a sweeping panoramic view of the Blue Ridge to the west. Throughout the quiet months when both sides had waited for the muddy roads to become hard enough to send hundreds of thousands of men on the march, the Sixth Corps had rested in its winter camps spread across the rich farmland and apple orchards that covered the area northeast of Culpeper, its pickets guarding the fords and pontoon bridges across the Hazel River.

  As an officer on a division general’s staff, Holmes would no longer be leading infantrymen directly into the face of enemy fire, but the position was anything but cushy or a safe billet in the rear. Junior staff officers had the responsibility to scout out roads ahead of troop movements; to deliver messages and orders, which not infrequently risked running into enemy cavalry patrols; and to reorganize the front lines in the midst of battle. In fact, he was about to enter the most intense and nightmarish episode of the entire war for him, nine weeks of nonstop moving, fighting, and killing that would find him often falling asleep in the saddle from sheer fatigue, escaping death by inches, and witnessing carnage on a close-up scale that eclipsed even his own previous experiences on the front lines at Ball’s Bluff, Antietam, and Fredericksburg.

  Crossing the pontoon bridges at Germanna Ford

  On May 3, Holmes bought a mare from another officer for $150 and next morning “at 4 a.m., nominally, we started on the Spring Campaign,” Holmes noted in his diary.43

  Three years into the war the Union army had reduced moving men across obstacles to a science. The country that the Army of the Potomac was about to enter in its relentless pursuit of Lee’s army was traversed by swamps, deeply cut rivers, and tangled woods. But where McClellan had spent days arduously constructing bridges in his slow movement up the Peninsula, Ulysses S. Grant’s army of two years later had river crossings down to a choreographed sequence that could throw a span across a deep waterway in a couple of hours.

  By 5:30 a.m. the day the army began to move, a train of wagons carrying canvas and wooden pontoon boats had already arrived at the first crossing, Germanna Ford on the Rapidan River. The boats were quickly anchored parallel to the stream as other wagons brought up long wooden stringers that were placed over the boats from shore to shore, and then wooden cross boards to fill in the bridge decking. The Sixth Corps crossed at midday, part of an unbroken stream of troops pouring over the two temporary spans.44

  As they headed south, the Union troops sensed there was something different this time, that this at last might be the decisive campaign that would end the war. The new spirit came from the top: in Grant, Lincoln had finally found the commander he had been vainly seeking for three years, one who understood that the only way to win was to force Lee into a fight and to keep doing so without letup. “Lee’s Army will be your objective point,” Grant instructed his army commanders. “Wherever Lee goes, there will you also go.” On the second day of the campaign, a twenty-four-year-old cub reporter from the New York Tribune volunteered to ride back to Washington with the first news accounts of the clashes with the enemy. When Grant heard he was going, he stopped him and said, “If you see the president, tell him for me that, whatever happens, there will be no turning back.” When Lincoln received the message, his deeply lined face broke into a huge grin, and he kissed the man’s cheeks.45

  The Wilderness took its name from the nearly impenetrable tangle of second-growth thickets, deadfall, and brush that had filled in woods cut down for years to supply fuel for local iron- and gold-smelting furnaces and to corduroy the surface of the plank roads that intersected from the north and west at a tiny inn known as the Wilderness Tavern. Visibility was rarely more than a few hundred feet. “As a battleground,” remarked one Union officer, it “was simply infernal.”46

  By daybreak on May 5 the Sixth Corps was advancing down the Germanna Plank Road just north of the crossroads. “At one point . . . were very accurately shelled from the left,” Holmes recorded, “one struck within a yard of quite a number of us who were sitting on horseback & bounced under the horses—Others threw fragments round constantly for a few minutes & as a Regt. was filing by to the right a shell or roundshot striking in it covered many of the staff with brains.”47

  In a pitched battle the following day Grant managed to put seventy thousand men into action to the west of the plank road. Sedgwick’s corps held the right end of the line, and as the fighting died down at day’s end the men were cooking their evening meal when four brigades of Longstreet’s men came crashing down on their unguarded flank. They had made their way along the unfinished roadbed of a railroad unmarked on any map, but which the local Virginians knew well. Two of Sedgwick’s brigades panicked and ran. “There was a stampede of these Brig-s. back to plank road,” Holmes wrote in his diary. “Up all night in the saddle—establishing new line.”48

  Years later, Holmes recalled “one who taught me a lesson when our right was turned in the Wilderness.” Henry R. Dalton was assistant adjutant of the corps, and later a North Shore neighbor of Holmes’s. “He had the coldest head on the spot and reasoned as serenely among a lot of half crazy men as if he were discussing it now,” Holmes wrote Clara Stevens after returning from Dalton’s funeral in September 1914. “He had no complex views of the cosmos, but I learned to take off my hat to many a simple minded man like him.”49

  In the fiercest of the fighting earlier in the day, the Twentieth had been ordered to mount a desperate charge to shore up the Union position in the face of a powerful counterattack by Longstreet. A third of the regiment fell in the first hail of Confederate bullets. Abbott, leading the charge, ordered his men to lie down and continue firing; he alone remained standing, walking the line as enemy bullets literally rippled the edge of his clothing. This was so madly c
ourageous that it crossed over the line to suicidal. A minute later he was struck in the abdomen, and died a few hours later. Holmes learned the news the next day.50

  “My brigade lost in him its best soldier,” Abbott’s brigade commander said in his official report. Holmes never mentioned Abbott by name again in anything he wrote. But it was Abbott whom Holmes undoubtedly had in mind in his speech “The Soldier’s Faith” that he delivered thirty-one years later on Memorial Day of 1895 to the Harvard graduating class. He spoke of the pure and simple faith of the soldier that impels him “to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.” Abbott’s madly heroic death affirmed for Holmes the idea that had been fermenting in his mind ever since he had come to hate the war and doubt the ideals that had fired him: that a man can still achieve something great and beautiful even without a cause, without belief, without even a worry for what he was accomplishing, just by giving his utmost to the job at hand, with magnificent indifference to fate.51

  In every previous battle, the exhausted armies withdrew to lick their wounds and slowly regroup. But now Grant did not hesitate to press on, at once. When a panicked brigade commander insisted that Lee had outwitted them, Grant snapped back, “Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.”52