Oliver Wendell Holmes

by Stephen Budiansky

  What Grant did was send his whole army marching south, aiming to flank Lee and again force him into an open fight. The weary Union troops pulled back to the east toward the Wilderness crossroads, anticipating the usual defeated withdrawal. But when they turned south instead of north at the turning, cheers went up as they realized that this time they were going to stay on and finish the job.53

  What followed truly began to take on a nightmarish quality for Holmes as days of no sleep and endless galloping back and forth blurred into one. Over the nine weeks of Grant’s Overland Campaign the Sixth Corps marched over two hundred miles, but Holmes must have easily covered twice that distance on horseback.

  Throughout the night of May 7 the entire Army of the Potomac filed south, traveling in huge parallel columns to maximize the speed of the movement. A little after noon the next day, a few miles after passing the Piney Branch Church northeast of Spotsylvania, Holmes saw “woods afire & bodies of Rebs & our men just killed & scorching.” Holmes was ordered to gallop ahead and notify Sedgwick of orders to hurry the Corps forward. He searched in vain for the general at the Army of the Potomac Headquarters “& got snubbed by Gen. Meade” but finally located him, returning to the front “so tired I could hardly sit up.”54

  Confederate entrenchments near the “Bloody Angle”

  On May 9 he was on horseback next to Sedgwick; a minute after he left him Sedgwick was chaffing a man for ducking at the shots from a rebel sharpshooter concealed in the woods—“Why man they couldn’t hit an elephant here at this distance,” the general scolded him—when a bullet struck Sedgwick in the head, killing him instantly. He was the highest-ranking Union officer to die in the war. “Today is the 7th day we have fought,” Holmes wrote his mother two days later, “averaging a loss I guess of 3000 (three thousand) a day at least.”55

  Both sides by this point in the war had learned to immediately start digging trenches and felling trees to throw up ramparts whenever they stopped. The worst of the fighting in the Battle of Spotsylvania took place on May 12 at the notorious “Bloody Angle,” where the Confederate trench lines came together at a vulnerable right angle at the edge of a long sloping field. In the midst of the fight Holmes was sent to place a New Jersey regiment into the line. In “The Soldier’s Faith” he recalled the horror of the scenes he witnessed. Those in his audience would understand what he was speaking of, he said,

  if you had ridden by night at a walk toward the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spotsylvania, where for twenty-four hours the soldiers were fighting on the two sides of an earthwork, and in the morning the dead and dying lay piled in a row six deep, and as you rode you have heard the bullets splashing in the mud and earth about you . . .56

  Trees at the edge of the field had been reduced to slivers from the bullets. In one space twelve by fifteen feet between two lines of trenches at the angle lay 150 bodies, Holmes noted in his diary.57

  On May 16 he wrote to tell his parents that he had seen enough of war.

  Before you get this you will know how immense the butchers bill has been—And the labor has been incessant—I have not been & am not likely to be in the mood for writing details. I have kept brief notes in my diary wh. I hope you may see some day—Enough that these nearly two weeks have contained all of fatigue & horror that war can furnish—The advantage has been on our side but nothing decisive has occurred & the enemy is in front of us strongly intrenched—I doubt if the decisive battle is to be fought between here & Richmond—nearly every Regimental off[icer] I knew or cared for is dead or wounded—

  I have made up my mind to stay on the staff if possible till the end of the campaign & then if I am alive, I shall resign—I have felt for sometime that I didn’t any longer believe in this being a duty & so I mean to leave at the end of the campaign as I said if I’m not killed before. . . .

  The duties & thoughts of the field are of such a nature that one cannot at the same time keep home, parents and such thoughts as they suggest in his mind at the same time as a reality—Can hardly indeed remember their existence—and this too just after the intense yearning which immediately precedes a campaign. Still your letters are the one pleasure & you know my love.

  Your Aff. Son

  O W H Jr58

  Again Grant pressed on, pulling his entire army out of the line and turning south. Again Holmes found himself in the saddle around the clock, riding past the Massaponax Church in the dead of night as the Sixth Corps swung far to the east to flank Lee’s army, now joining the race southward.59 They were now in rough and uglier country, the beauty of the Piedmont far behind, their view hemmed in by dark woods surrounding swampy bottomlands, the winding lanes cut by innumerable creeks.

  Holmes reached Jericho Mill on the North Anna River late at night on the twenty-third. He recorded in his diary the next day, “A nasty hot dusty day devoted to what was called rest but wasn’t. . . . Ev’g severe lightning & thunder just as we changed our H.Q. across the ford.” After a brisk but fierce battle they were again on the move, this time to Hanover Court House thirty miles to the southeast. “A stunning night’s rest—The loveliest morning we have had,” he finally recorded on May 29.60

  Late the following afternoon General Wright handed his junior staff officer an urgent dispatch for General David Russell, whose division was ahead leading a large Union probe toward Confederate lines, “& told me not to spare my horse.” The Sixth Corps had its headquarters west of Hanover Court House, near the town of Studley, at the Jones house, a former home of Patrick Henry. About a mile north of the plantation, where the farm lane turned onto a road, a scout came tearing back to warn him he had just been shot at. Holmes decided he must go on, pushed his horse into a gallop, and ran directly into a line of twenty horsemen, who called on him to surrender.

  At first thinking it was a mistake and that they were friends, he started to pull up—but then saw the gray uniforms, and instead spurred his horse right for them. Holmes started to draw his saber, but the thought then crossed his mind that as cavalrymen the Confederates were probably much better swordsmen than he. He pulled his pistol instead. One rider came alongside and was unslinging his carbine when Holmes clapped his pistol to his breast and pulled the trigger, but the gun misfired. Ducking down on the side of his horse he “did a Comanche” and galloped through the line unscathed.61

  The bracing episode—“my narrowest escape,” he called it—helped to reassure Holmes he was not giving in to simple fear in deciding to leave the army at the end of the current campaign, which in the normal course of events would end by winter. “Fortunately I have a jewel in the head of this campaign in the shape of my adventure,” he boasted to his mother.62

  The next day he wrote another long explanation to his parents, apparently in response to a sermonizing reproval his father had sent in reply to his first letter:

  recd y’r letters of 21st 22d the latter fr. dad, stupid—I wish you’d take the trouble to read my letters before answering—I am sure I cannot have conveyed the idea, rightfully, that I intended resigning before the campaign was over . . . I must say I dislike such a misunderstanding, so discreditable to my feeling of soldierly honor, when I don’t believe there was a necessity for it—I shall stay on the staff and wish you’d notify the Governor to commission new field officers to the 20th I waive promotion—I am convinced from my late experience that if I can stand the wear & tear (body & mind) of regimental duty that it is a greater strain on both than I am called to endure—If I am satisfied I don’t really see that anyone else has a call to be otherwise—I talked with Hayward the mentor of the Regt & told him my views on the matter—I am not the same man (may not have quite the same ideas) & certainly am not so elastic as I was and I will not acknowledge the same claims upon me under those circumstances that existed formerly. . . . We are going to have another of those killing night marches as soon as we can start out of a country worse than the wilderness if possible.63

  On the back of the envelope he wrote, “Write as often as poss.
It is still kill—kill—all the time—”64

  HOLMES YEARS LATER admitted having doubts about whether he was quite as justified as he felt at the time about leaving the army.

  “It is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived,” he declared in his Memorial Day Address. No one could say he had not done that. But he was honest enough with himself to recognize that behind his strident insistence that he had fulfilled his duty was a desperate yearning to live and have his chance at life. At the start of the brief Spanish-American War in 1898, he wrote Lady Pollock that he thought old men should fight instead of the young. “If you are killed as a young one you feel that you haven’t had your chance,” he wrote. “The real anguish is never to have your opportunity,” he remarked to Frederick Pollock in a similar vein. “I used to think of that a good deal during the war.” When Felix Frankfurter mentioned his own plans to join the Army if America entered the First World War, Holmes replied that he hoped he would not suffer too much of a disruption to his legal career, but added, “I agree, on the other hand, that now I should allow less than I did in my own case 50 years ago to the consideration of the special faculties that one may attribute to oneself as a ground for not taking the chances of war.”65

  On June 3, Grant ordered a frontal assault on the Confederate earthworks at Cold Harbor, an attack that cost the Union forces seven thousand casualties in two hours. “I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered,” he said afterward.66 In a harbinger of the grinding trench warfare of the First World War, the two sides remained locked in a ten-day stalemate at Cold Harbor, in the brutal heat.

  Burial party at Cold Harbor

  A few days later Holmes wrote his mother a more measured letter about his intentions. He allowed himself another small boast about his run-in with the cavalry patrol—his fellow officers “intimated that they thought it rather a gallant thing,” he said—then continued,

  The campaign has been most terrible yet believe me I was not demoralized when I announced my intention to leave the service. . . . I started in this thing a boy I am now a man and I have been coming to the conclusion for the last six months that my duty has changed—

  I can do a disagreeable thing or face a great danger coolly enough when I know it is a duty—but a doubt demoralizes me as it does any nervous man—and now I honestly think the duty of fighting has ceased for me—ceased because I have laboriously and with much suffering of mind and body earned the right which I denied Willy Everett [a fellow Harvard student who had left to spend the war in England] to decide for myself how I can best do my duty to myself to the country and, if you choose, to God— . . .

  I hope that this will meet your approbation—you are so sure to be right—at all events I have tried to decide conscientiously & I have decided.67

  At Cold Harbor he again deliberately exposed himself to danger, perhaps to test himself one more time, going out “on the front line of works drawing them & dodging bullets. . . . Sharpshooters put a bullet wherever you show a head.” He wrote a girl he knew in Pittsfield—she later married his old captain, William Bartlett—“how often in these weary nights and days when the sun seemed to have stopped a second time to prolong the fighting, have I thought of those peaceful and most happy days at Pittsfield.”68

  Grant’s final move of the Overland Campaign was a prodigy of logistics. Traversing the route the Army of the Potomac had followed three years earlier, the entire army of 100,000 men, with 50,000 horses and mules and 5,000 wagons, cut across the Peninsula to Wyanoke Neck, where engineers in seven hours constructed a 2,100-foot bridge on 101 pontoons spanning the deep water of the James River. The Sixth Corps’s headquarters and two divisions boarded boats that carried them to Bermuda Hundred, a neck where the river abruptly narrows a few miles southwest of Richmond. “These last few days have been very bad,” Holmes wrote his parents June 24. “This morn’g I spent on the picket line it was being pushed forward—hot & nasty as Orcus. . . . Father’d better not talk to me about opinions at home. . . . I tell you many a man has gone crazy since this campaign begun from the terrible pressure on mind & body. . . . I hope to pull through but don’t know yet.”69

  Three weeks later the Sixth Corps was rushed north to Washington to defend the northern capital from Jubal Early’s raiders, taking it out of Grant’s campaign against Lee’s army. Holmes’s last taste of enemy gunfire came at Fort Stevens, where he saw Lincoln standing precariously conspicuous in his stovepipe hat atop the ramparts, watching the action.70

  On July 23, his three-year enlistment expired, he received a mock farewell order from a Massachusetts comrade:

  Dear Holmes

  . . . I now send the “ultimatum” of the US Govt. in yr case. The final discharge.

  Take it, young man, and as you become again a citizen of Massachusetts, remember us kindly, and omit to enquire why the Army of the Potomac dont move.

  I see you in spirit (too deeply in spirit I fear) at Parkers and I would I could see you there in body also.

  Hail and Farewell

  Francis A Walker.

  ADC

  2nd Corps71

  By then he was home, with his life and his chance to do something with it intact.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Society of Jobbists”

  In the letters and diaries of the soldiers of Holmes’s generation who survived the Civil War, one very seldom finds expression of the belief that their lives had been spared for a purpose. Death had been too promiscuous and capricious for the survivors to see their fate as anything but the chance fortune of a kind of mad lottery. But Holmes spoke to the heart of what many of his fellow veterans felt when he said that the war had set them apart. No words about the meaning of the Civil War to the men who fought and survived it have been more quoted than the passages in Holmes’s two Memorial Day speeches in which he spoke of how the war had forever changed them, instilling them with the courage—and the drive—to live life to its fullest.

  “You know your own weakness and are modest,” he told his fellow veterans; “but you know that man has in him that unspeakable somewhat which makes him capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided. . . . We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.”1

  And probably his most famous words of all, which he spoke on Memorial Day in 1884:

  Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.2

  The boys who had become men, in Holmes’s words to his mother, had done a lot of growing up in a few short years. “When I was twenty-one,” Holmes could not help boasting to the twenty-one-year-old son of a Boston lawyer friend who once called to visit, “I had taken my degree, received a commission, and had been wounded in battle.” If it made them serious before their time it also made them unusually confident for their age. He frequently told friends that the great lesson of the war for him had been that it taught him early on to face with courage and calmness the inevitable hardships of life—the setbacks, the moments of tedium and boredom, the self-doubt that everyone experiences at times. Fanny Holmes more bluntly once told Felix Frankfurter’s wife that if it were not for the Civil War, “Wendell would have been a coxcomb.”3

  Holmes, being the kind of thinking man he was, was able to wrap the horrors of war quickly in a kind of intellectual scar tissue. Holmes often recalled how Dr. Hayward, the Twentieth’s surgeon, had divided the world into internal men and external men—or, as Holmes himself later humorously termed them, ideasts and thingsters. Holmes was an ideast, an internal man, and he looked upon his searing experiences of the war much as he looked upon the physical scars left by his three physical wounds: they were trophies of what had tried to kill him but could not.4 “I am converting misfortune into a source of satisfaction,” he told Laski in 1917, fifty-five years after Antietam, when he began experiencing a pain in the left side of his face that bro
ught back the neuralgia he experienced right after the bullet had passed through his neck. The doctor had told him that sooner or later some such nerve trouble was to be expected to recur from his old wound. “So I at least can pretend to myself that my discomforts came from that source—and inwardly swagger,” Holmes boasted.5

  If he steadfastly refused to read any of the thousands of books that most of his fellow veterans devoured to relive the great adventure of their lives, he also by all appearances managed to avoid reliving its nightmares. He never suffered from any of the traumas that later generations would call shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder. Throughout his life he got seven or eight uninterrupted hours of sleep most nights. He had promptly put the war in a glass case, and like the note he had written on the floor of the Nicodemus farmhouse he kept it there the rest of his life, to display on his own terms.6

  His limitless capacity for work was undoubtedly an emotional escape but it was also a need that he shared with many who had been through the intense experiences of war: civilian life just did not seem that exciting by comparison, without the constant stimulation of new challenges. “If I should pursue simpler amusement for a week I should feel as if I had eaten too many chocolates,” he once told Lewis Einstein. His emotional self-control and intellectual detachment struck some as cold, but to Holmes they reflected the paramount emotional and intellectual lesson of his war experience. To the Wendell Holmes who returned to Boston in the summer of 1864, the war, in other words, had become both a metaphor and a lesson for life. “Repose is not the destiny of man,” he observed. Life is a struggle, and it is the struggle that gives it meaning. The only thing to do was to give one’s all, and leave the consequences to fate.7