Oliver Wendell Holmes

by Stephen Budiansky

  After a week at the camp’s field hospital near Poolesville and then at a hotel in Washington, Holmes arrived on October 31 in Philadelphia to stay with his Quaker abolitionist friends the Hallowells and continue his recuperation. A few days later a local doctor, William Hunt, sent Holmes’s father a report on the patient. The wound was improving, he found, though still separated by only “a very thin partition” from the vital organs. “Now Sir you can judge from this description what a narrow escape your son has had from immediate death.”38

  Although Dr. Hunt advised that there was no need to come to Philadelphia, Dr. Holmes rushed there at once. Holmes was deeply embarrassed and irritated by his father’s overly emotional greeting on his arrival, and, as he recounted to his secretary Chauncey Belknap in 1915, “I showed my young soldier’s contempt for his lack of restraint.”39

  But Dr. Holmes was in his element, bustling about with arrangements. After a stopover in New York, Dr. Holmes reserved six seats on the train to Boston and had a bed placed on them so the wounded soldier could make the rest of the trip in more comfort. They left at eight in the morning on Saturday, November 9, arriving in Boston at a quarter to five that afternoon. A carriage Dr. Holmes had ordered was waiting at the station to take them home.40

  Dr. Holmes had recently moved to 21 Charles Street, a house overlooking the Charles River. Mrs. Holmes kept a guest book recording all the “Visitors to the Wounded Lieutenant” who came to the house. There were 133 during the month of November.41 Charles Sumner came twice; Anthony Trollope, on a visit to the United States, stopped in; most often there was a virtual pack of pretty young girls surrounding the wounded lieutenant’s bedside. Fanny Dixwell called twice, bringing flowers on one occasion.

  Dr. Holmes, having quickly recovered his sarcastic equanimity, described the scene to his friend the historian and diplomat John Lothrop Motley. “Wendell is a great pet in his character of young hero with wounds in the heart, and receives visits en grand seigneur. I envy my white Othello, with a semicircle of young Desdemonas about him listening to the often told story which they will have over again.”42

  By the end of the month he was up and walking. He paid a call to Harvard’s curator of engravings, Louis Theis, who “opened his arms and embraced and kissed me and produced a bottle of wine and cigars,” and then “let me have some ripping A. Dürer woodcuts and his St. Jerome in a room and other things,” which became the start of Holmes’s own small but well-chosen collection of prints. And from the Athenaeum library he checked out a raft of books, on political theory, philosophy, and military history, which he read as he finished his amazingly brief recuperation.43

  IN THE AFTERMATH of Ball’s Bluff, the enmities within the regiment that had been temporarily set aside reemerged with venomous spite. Besides the two hundred Union troops killed and wounded in the battle, more than seven hundred of the seventeen hundred men who had crossed the river were taken prisoner, Colonel Lee among them. The Twentieth had sustained a staggering 281 casualties, including four of its ablest German officers. In their absence, the political differences within the regiment quickly resurfaced in rivalries and maneuverings for promotion that threatened to tear the unit apart.

  In early December, Governor Andrew received an explosive letter from one of the regiment’s officers—Andrew subsequently cut out the signature to protect the writer’s identity, but called him “a reliable source.” The writer complained that “the Complection of the regiment was different before the battle. Then we had Schmitt, Dreher, Babo, Putnam, Wesselhoeft, Lowell, Holmes,—Anti-Slavery heroes all, Abolitionists most. None of our Anti-Slavery officers, save one, returned unhurt from Ball’s Bluff.”44

  More damagingly, the writer reported an incident in camp that added a sensational new charge to already smoldering rumors that General Stone was not just a bungling commander, but was actively aiding the enemy. In the first week of December two black men had come into the camp to sell cakes and pies to the soldiers. Lieutenant George Macy, a member of a wealthy family from Nantucket, promptly ordered the men arrested, and, according to the report Andrew received, sought out the Maryland slave owner whose property they were and returned the fugitives to him, under an armed guard.

  Pen Hallowell was livid. “By what authority do you make New England soldiers do such work?” he angrily asked Macy.

  “In pursuance of my orders from Gen. Stone,” Macy replied.

  Hallowell said, “I didn’t think that any New England gentleman would do such dirty work.”

  In February, following a congressional hearing into his conduct at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Stone was arrested and held for six months, without formal charges, on suspicion of treason. Macy had meanwhile successfully promoted himself for the vacant captaincy of Dreher’s Company B, nearly setting off a revolt among the German troops. For months Macy kept up a campaign of petty harassment of the German officers and men, ordering them to perform menial personal tasks for him and imposing collective punishment when they refused. Macy also refused to speak to Hallowell, deeming his honor as a gentleman insulted by their exchange of words.45

  But Holmes’s friend Abbott, though he despised abolitionists as fiercely as any of the gentlemanly clique of the Twentieth, had a very different reaction. It went to the heart of what to both men would come to be the overwhelming meaning of the war for them. “I was a coward before I went & now I ain’t,” Abbott told his sister. His first experience in battle had led him to rank courage above everything else. In a letter to his father after Ball’s Bluff, Abbott praised Hallowell’s bravery, and later strongly defended his claims to promotion.46

  Abbott’s friendship with Holmes was cemented by their shared sense that they had stood up to the ultimate test of war. Abbott would tell his father later in the war that though “one can’t help despising” Dr. Holmes—“a miserable little mannekin, dried up morally & physically, & there is certainly nothing more aggravating than to have such a little fool make orations & talk about traitors & the ‘man who quarrels with the pilot when the ship is in danger’ &c, &c”—the son was a different man entirely. “He is a devlish fine fellow & a devlish brave officer”:47

  Oliver Junior, though you have an instinctive dislike to his speculative nature, is infinitely more manly than the little conceited doctor. . . . A man here in the hardships & dangers of the field can easily detect what is base in a man’s character, & it is particularly trying to Holmes, who is a student rather than a man of action.

  But since I have seen him intimately, he has always been most cool, cheerful, & self sacrificing. . . . He is considered in the army a remarkably brave & well instructed officer, who has stuck to his work, though wounded often enough to discourage any but an honorable gentleman.48

  On March 25, 1862, Holmes rejoined his regiment in Washington. Lieutenant Colonel Francis W. Palfrey—to whom Governor Andrew had sent a sharp rebuke over his part in the fugitive slave incident—was acting commander. “Don’t like the looks of things under Palf. wish Lee was here,” Holmes wrote home the same evening he arrived.49

  Two days later, the regiment boarded ships for Fortress Monroe at the mouth of the James River. During the first week of April they trudged forward toward the Confederate defenses near Yorktown, the site of the last battle of the Revolutionary War. McClellan’s grand plan was to flank General Robert E. Lee’s army, which blocked the most direct route from Washington to Richmond, and move up the peninsula formed by the James and York Rivers to reach the Confederate capital from the southeast. It was a huge logistical feat: the Twentieth was part of a force of 100,000 men, 300 artillery pieces, and 25,000 horses carried on 400 ships.50

  It was also the first but not last demonstration of McClellan’s limitless capacity for self-delusion and blaming others for his failures. Always convinced that the enemy outnumbered him, he always demanded more reinforcements before moving against the enemy. Lincoln had been dubious about the entire plan, telling McClellan he would “find the same enemy, and the same, o
r equal intrenchments” whichever route he took. As McClellan settled into a prolonged siege of the Confederate trench works at Yorktown, Lincoln kept urging him to strike before the enemy could shift his army and block his entire plan. “You must act,” Lincoln wired finally, which prompted McClellan to write in disgust to his wife that if the president wanted an immediate attack “he had better come & do it himself,” and complained of “the rebels on one side, & the abolitionists & other scoundrels on the other.”

  When Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston inspected the defenses at Yorktown in late April he was appalled by their inadequacy. “No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack,” he informed Robert E. Lee. After McClellan spent a month emplacing his heavy siege guns, the Confederates evacuated their trenches overnight and slipped back to a well-prepared line around Richmond.51

  Nothing happened fast. Roads churned to mud under the heavy artillery and horses, bridges swayed and flooded under pouring rain, and all of the men of the Twentieth suffered under filthy conditions. “It’s a campaign now & no mistake—No tents, no trunks—no nothing,” Holmes wrote home. The dysentery that would be a constant companion to life in the army added to the misery. “While on picket my bowels played the Devil with me owing to cold & wet and want of sleep,” he reported. By June nearly all of the officers of the Twentieth discovered they had body lice (“caught perhaps from the men, perhaps from the dirty places we have been forced to live in or enter”) and symptoms of scurvy were starting to appear as a result of their inadequate rations, often little more than hard bread and coffee day after day.52

  The three-month long Peninsula Campaign was a more sobering introduction to the uglier realities of war for Holmes and his fellow officers than the brief skirmish at Ball’s Bluff had been. At the Battle of Fair Oaks on May 31 and June 1, Holmes had had to pull out his revolver and threaten some of his own men—“Swore I’d shoot the first who ran or fired against orders.” Toward the end of the fight some of the rebel troops panicked and threw down their guns; the Twentieth continued to fire on them until Hallowell ordered them to stop. “Remember Ball’s Bluff!” a man shouted. “I told him that was just what I did remember,” the Quaker officer replied.53

  During the Seven Days Battle fought on the outskirts of Richmond at the end of June, Holmes remembered “looking at the sun and saying God why can’t it go down faster so that we can rest.”54 At the start of the Battle of Glendale on June 30, as the Twentieth stood ready to advance, the officers standing at the head of their companies, Holmes looked down the line and saw his cousin James J. Lowell. “We caught each other’s eye and saluted,” Holmes recounted in his famous address on Memorial Day twenty-two years later. “When next I looked, he was gone.” Shot in the abdomen, Lowell fell mortally wounded.55

  By then the Army of the Potomac was in retreat, McClellan having abandoned the operation, blaming the politicians for his failure. Some of the officers of the Twentieth who had shown their bravery at Ball’s Bluff began to crack under the strain. Holmes himself later acknowledged, “I was a devilish sight more scared in later engagements than I was in the first when one was keyed up to meet the unknown.”56

  But he at least managed to keep his fears to himself. All the way down the peninsula, the captain of Company A, Henry Tremlett, kept predicting that “we must surrender or be cut to pieces within 36 hours.” Years later Holmes recounted to one of his young Washington friends this encounter with defeatism, remarking that if he had been older he would have known that “the proper thing to do was to throw something in the fellow’s face” and challenge him to a duel on the spot. “It is best after all never to admit in public the things which in your heart you all too tremulously feel may happen.”57

  By the start of September the regiment was back in Washington where it had started five months earlier, and about to face an even greater ordeal.

  “I REMEMBER JUST BEFORE the battle of Antietam,” Holmes wrote to his young Chinese friend John Wu in 1923,

  thinking and perhaps saying to a brother officer that it would be easy after a comfortable breakfast to come down the steps of one’s house pulling on one’s gloves and smoking a cigar to get on to a horse and charge a battery up Beacon Street, while the ladies wave handkerchiefs from a balcony. But the reality was to pass a night on the ground in the rain with your bowels out of order and then after no particular breakfast to wade a stream and attack the enemy. That is life.58

  The Battle of Antietam remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the United States Army, its casualties on that hot September day in the Maryland countryside twice those it would experience even in the D-Day landings against Nazi-occupied France.59 The morning of September 17, 1862, found Holmes’s regiment encamped on the east side of Antietam Creek a few miles outside the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. By seven thirty they were on the move, part of a huge second wave of two divisions being sent to reinforce the Union attack that had begun at dawn and which had ground to a halt under a massive Confederate counterattack. Crossing the large cornfield that had been the scene of intense fighting an hour before, the men of the Twentieth tried to avoid stepping on the wounded men who lay amid the dead and the litter of war—dismounted cannon, broken caissons, abandoned guns and knapsacks.

  Although later in the war infantry assault formations employed looser tactics, with individual soldiers using available cover to advance, most battles of the first years of the war were fought with soldiers in closely spaced lines, marching ahead in lockstep. That was partly to keep men moving forward unquestioningly amid the chaos and din of battle but it also reflected tactics suited to the older era of smoothbore muskets, which had an effective range of at best eighty yards and whose inaccuracy could only be compensated for with concentrated fire. The horrific casualties suffered by attacking forces throughout the Civil War was largely a result of the collision of traditional tactics with the vastly increased firepower of newer weapons: rifled muskets that could be accurately aimed to five hundred yards and lethal to a thousand yards, and cannon that could sweep the field with curtains of canister shot.60

  To make matters worse for the men of General Edwin V. Sumner’s Second Corps, under which the Twentieth Regiment was now assigned, Sumner was a former cavalry officer whose ideas of how to space his lines reflected tactics more suitable for men on horseback. The Twentieth was on the far left of the second of three lines that advanced across the cornfield; the men of the five regiments of the second line, stretching across a front some four hundred yards wide, practically touched shoulders, while scarcely thirty yards separated them from the lines in front and behind, making it all but impossible for the reserve ranks to fire.61

  Entering the grove known afterward as the West Woods, they halted on a slight rise at the far edge of the tree line. A cart path, well concealed by limestone ledges and woods, ran along the base of the hill just to the south, connecting the A. Poffenberger farm and the Dunker Church on the Hagerstown Pike.

  A few minutes later, the entire Second Corps was hit by a murderous flank attack from five brigades of Confederate troops that had moved up stealthily along the path. The Twentieth was by this point bunched up so close to the Massachusetts Fifteenth just in front that “we could have touched them with our bayonets,” Holmes recounted, and “could do nothing” but retreat with alacrity when Sumner gave the order.62

  The Second Corps took twenty-two hundred casualties in twenty minutes, nearly half its numbers. Holmes was running to the north with the rest of the regiment—he was probably about a hundred yards to the northeast of where the Fifteenth Regiment’s majestic “fallen lion” monument now stands—when a bullet tore through his neck. He managed to walk the rest of the way to the small field hospital in the Nicodemus farmhouse, a few hundred yards to the north of the woods. Hallowell was already there, lying on the floor with a shattered arm.

  One of Holmes’s first thoughts was another ironic flash about romantic notions of war: he recalled how after Ball’s Bluff an
article in Harper’s Weekly had made much of Lieutenant Holmes’s being struck “in the breast, not in the back; no, not in the back. In the breast is Massachusetts wounded, if she is struck. Forward she falls, if she fall dead.” “Chuckling to myself,” Holmes wondered what the papers would make of him this time, “hit in the back, and bolting as fast as I can.”63

  The Nicodemus house for a while lay between the two lines and its windows were shattered by shellfire that, in Hallowell’s description, “ploughed up the wounded in the yard.” But the house itself was miraculously unhit. Late that afternoon ambulances carried the wounded off to the Union field hospital at Keedysville, a few miles to the east.64

  William G. Le Duc, a staff officer, wired Dr. Holmes with the news; he later told the doctor how he had found his son lying unattended at the hospital, and had importuned a surgeon to tend to his wound. But the surgeon “shook his head,” and “said his duty was to try to save those who had a chance of recovery.” Le Duc asked if there was anything he could do for the wounded man. “Wash off the blood, plug up the wound with lint, and give him this pill of opium, and have him keep quiet,” the surgeon impatiently replied. But the patient, Le Duc reported, was full of black-humor wisecracks. “I’m glad it’s not a case for amputation, for I don’t think you’d be equal to it, Le Duc,” Holmes said, and joked that being shot in the neck—which was army slang for being drunk—was “disgraceful for a temperance man.”65