Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  He can claim another singular distinction as well: he is reported to have been the model for the Civil War monument on Cambridge Common.

  Above a bronze sculpture of Abraham Lincoln by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a young, good-looking rifleman with a handsome mustache stands erect, arms crossed, rifle in hand. He appears to be watching the horizon for his country’s enemies or for whatever adventure the war would bring next. It might be just imagination, but there seems to be something about the pose and the soldier’s features that suggest an attitude of resignation to his fate. Whatever approaches, pleasure or pain, life or death, our hero will play his role in the drama.

  First Lieutenant Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 20th Massachusetts Volunteers, shortly before he left Boston for war.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Touched with Fire

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an aristocratic idealist, was disillusioned and ennobled by the Civil War.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1861 A YOUNG lieutenant in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry scribbled a brief, cheerful note to his mother describing his journey. During an overnight stay in New York, en route from Boston to Washington, he had “dined with some of the fellows at Delmonico’s” and eaten “breakfast next morning in Philadelphia.” Although he complained that the regiment’s progress had been slow and rest and nourishment were not as plentiful as he would have liked, he confessed he had “rather enjoyed” himself nevertheless. He laments the damage done to his trunk when a wagon wheel rolled over it, and the loss of a brandy flask. He is confident that having reached their destination, the officers of the 20th Massachusetts had “seen the worst in the way of hardships unless on special occasions.”

  By “special occasions” our correspondent presumably meant battles. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would see plenty of those. The 20th Massachusetts was known as the “Harvard Regiment” in recognition of the number of Harvard men who served in it. By the time Holmes fought his last battle, his letters home were as altered in attitude and content as the man himself. The young idealist who, out of noblesse oblige, had volunteered as soon as shots on Fort Sumter were fired was changed by war, changed forever.

  His father was famous. His family, particularly his mother’s side, was an old and prominent one, if not the locus of eminence and wealth some have suggested. The poet Anne Bradstreet was an ancestor. Forebears had fought in the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars. The family lived comfortably, though not luxuriously, on Beacon Hill. Their friends were distinguished. Holmes Sr. was a physician and Harvard professor of anatomy, who became one of the most popular poets, essayists, and lecturers of his day. His collections of essays, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and The Professor at the Breakfast Table, gained him an international reputation. His friends included Emerson (whom the Holmes children called “Uncle Waldo”), Longfellow, Hawthorne, and other leading transcendentalists. He cofounded the literary magazine Atlantic Monthly. He invented or at least popularized the term Boston Brahmin to describe that city’s elite. He was garrulous and charming and accustomed to being the center of attention. Holmes Jr., Wendell to his family, lived much of his accomplished life as the less distinguished Holmes. Like many sons of famous fathers, he was both awed by his father and craved his own prominence, beyond the shadow of his father’s reputation.

  Wendell was a high-spirited and cheerful boy, when “the Boston of my youth was still half-Puritan,” he recalled. Holmes Sr., although modern and liberal in outlook, still expected his son to conform to the manners and conventions of his half-Puritan society. Young Wendell read avidly, relying on Walter Scott’s and others’ tales of chivalry to inspire his imagination. He was spared much of the physical brutality commonly used to educate young children in those days, which his father had suffered at his age. His first school was a school for girls.

  He was as talkative as his father, and as insistent, and the rivalry between father and son was conducted most often in conversation. Holmes’s love and respect for his son is implicit in the enjoyment he took from engaging with him on equal terms. But he would tease him often, usually about one or another physical shortcoming, which seems to have at times stirred Wendell’s resentment. Friends recalled a frequently noticeable tension between father and son and the son’s reluctance to express openly his admiration for his father. Yet he began an autobiographical sketch for his Harvard senior yearbook with just a line identifying his date and place of birth before he summarized his father’s life and detailed his genealogy. Near the end of the sketch he proclaimed, “The tendencies of the family and myself have a strong natural bent for literature.”

  His relationship with his mother, Amelia Lee Jackson Holmes, appears to have been warmer and uncomplicated. He was her acknowledged favorite; she doted on him and was a steady moral influence on the idealistic young man. Holmes Sr. was not an abolitionist, but his wife was. She enlisted Wendell in the cause and encouraged his admiration for Boston’s leading radicals. She communicated her expectation that the issue would be settled by war, and any man who paid attention to his conscience, including her son, would embrace his duty.

  Harvard College in 1857, when Holmes enrolled there, was a small school run by Unitarian ministers. It enjoyed a national reputation, but there were fewer than a hundred students in Holmes’s class. Most were from New England, but a number hailed from other regions, including southern states. Norwood Penrose Hallowell, a Philadelphia native, a Quaker, and a militant abolitionist (his family’s summer home was a stop on the Underground Railroad), was Holmes’s closest friend at Harvard. A widely admired member of his class, Hallowell was elected president of the Hasty Pudding Club, which Holmes served as secretary. Outspoken and assured in his convictions, he had enormous influence on Holmes, who was nearly two years his junior. For the rest of his life Holmes would consider “Pen” the most gallant man he had ever met.

  As an underclassman, Holmes was socially successful, academically undistinguished, and occasionally unruly. He joined his father’s dining club, the exclusive Porcellian, as well as the Hasty Pudding. He edited Harvard Magazine and was elected class poet. Few of his classes excited his interest, however, and while his grades were acceptable they were beneath his abilities. He improved his class standing by his junior year and wrote an essay on Plato his senior year that won a prize. But his conduct was wanting often enough that he stood fifty-fourth in his class by the time he graduated. In his final year he did manage to find a cause that excited not only his interest but his passion and chivalry: abolitionism. But in this instance it wasn’t so much his mother’s opinion that inspired him as it was the example of Pen Hallowell, who had become Holmes’s beau ideal and who, Quaker or not, was ready in the spring of 1861 to kill for his ideals.

  Their southern classmates did not return from winter holidays that year, and as one southern state after another announced its secession from the Union, Hallowell and Holmes left Harvard in April, before their final examinations. They joined the 4th Battalion of Massachusetts Volunteers, expecting to march south soon afterward as part of the commonwealth’s contribution to the new Union Army. Instead they donned exotic Zouave uniforms, drilled regularly, and guarded Boston Harbor.

  His mother approved of his decision. His father did not, but neither did he strenuously object. After it became clear the 4th Battalion wouldn’t be leaving Boston, Holmes Sr. persuaded Harvard authorities to let Wendell, Hallowell, and others take their final exams and graduate. He also seems to have intervened with the governor to help Wendell secure a commission in a volunteer regiment that would join the Army of the Potomac. Holmes Sr. would later write, no doubt with his skinny, bookish son in mind (who as a child had often been teased by his father about his unimpressive physique), “Even our poor ‘Brahmins’—pallid, undervitalized, shy, sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an aptitude for learning . . . count as full men, if their courage is big enough for the uniform that hangs so loosely about their slender figures.”

  Young Holmes had no trai
ning and little native ability or physical prowess for the profession of arms. His intelligence would scorn the many absurdities of military life, the inadequacies of some commanders, and the long stretches of boring inactivity that are an inevitable part of war. But he would show courage too and self-sacrifice and the ability to command other men in extreme circumstances as death breathed down their necks.

  Before he left Boston for Washington and the war, his father handed him a full bottle of laudanum and advised him to drink it all should he be mortally wounded to spare himself a lingering, painful death.

  The 20th Massachusetts was organized in the summer of 1861 not by a Harvard graduate but by a West Pointer, Colonel William Raymond Lee, who had received an honorary degree from Harvard in 1851. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Winthrop Palfrey, had a Harvard pedigree, Class of 1851. Other Harvard men and scions of venerable Massachusetts families received commissions in the 20th. Henry Livermore “Little” Abbott, whose snobbery made him implacably hostile to the cause of abolition, proved to be an exceptionally able officer, whose composure in battle became legendary. He would be promoted to major, serve briefly as second-in-command of the 20th, and die in the Battle of the Wilderness. Charles Cabot, F Company’s captain, was killed at Fredericksburg. William Lowell Putnam died at Ball’s Bluff. His cousin, James Jackson Lowell, was wounded in the same battle and killed in action the next year, at Frazier’s farm. Edward Hutchinson Revere, grandson of Paul Revere and a surgeon in the 20th, was shot and killed at Antietam. His brother, Paul Joseph Revere, would eventually serve as the regiment’s colonel and fall at Gettysburg. Their fates gave authority to the regiment’s eventual sobriquet, “the Bloody 20th.”

  Most of the regiment’s enlisted and noncommissioned officers were working-class German and Irish (two entire companies, officers and enlisted, were German speakers), but some Harvard men were found in the ranks as well. William Francis Bartlett, a handsome and popular member of the Class of 1862, had been sympathetic to the South’s cause. Yet when the war came, he enlisted in the 4th Battalion as a private. Like Holmes and other Harvard contemporaries in the 4th, when it became clear the battalion would remain in Boston, Bartlett sought a commission in the 20th. He became one of the regiment’s most admired officers. He lost his left leg in the Peninsular Campaign and returned to his studies at Harvard. After graduation he accepted command of a new regiment, the 49th Massachusetts Infantry, and went into battle mounted, on account of his missing leg, which made him an obvious target for Confederate marksmen. He was wounded in the wrist and right ankle at the siege of Port Hudson in Louisiana and was shot in the head while commanding the 57th Massachusetts in the Battle of the Wilderness. When he recovered, he was given command of a brigade consisting of several Massachusetts regiments. While fighting in the deathtrap known as the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg, Virginia, his wooden leg was shot away and he was taken prisoner. He became gravely ill and nearly died while a prisoner, and although he was exchanged two months later, he didn’t recover for many months. Bartlett survived the war, “a wreck of wounds,” according to the historian Richard Miller, and his ruined health finally claimed his life in 1876.

  Holmes was commissioned a first lieutenant in Company A in August 1861. His classmate, Charles Whittier, served as the company’s second lieutenant. Hallowell had received his commission a month earlier, as first lieutenant in Company H. The regiment was encamped at Camp Massasoit, on a plain in Readville, a few miles outside Boston, where Colonel Lee, a distant cousin of Robert E. Lee, undertook, mostly successfully, to impose good order and discipline on a disparate, disorderly group of recruits—German and Irish immigrants, seamen from Nantucket, roughnecks from Boston’s waterfront—who had pre–Civil War notions about the obedience they owed the inexperienced, young blue bloods who ordered them about.

  Those blue bloods were advised by more experienced officers to disabuse themselves quickly of the conceit that the regiment was the property of their class. They would discover the wisdom of that advice on the battlefield. Decades later Holmes would tell a friend that one of the many lessons the war had taught him was “to know however fine a fellow I thought myself . . . there were situations . . . in which I was inferior to men I might have looked down upon had not experience taught me to look up.”

  The 20th was one of the last Massachusetts regiments to leave for the front. While they waited their turn, the Harvard men still dined well, enjoyed each other’s company, kept a lively social calendar when off duty, and managed to learn the rudiments of their new profession. Holmes, aping British military custom, grew an enormous mustache, which he kept for the rest of his life. Most of the officers had personal servants, and he and Whittier shared a servant. The regiment finally received orders to join the Army of the Potomac and on September 4 boarded cars on the Boston & Providence Railroad for Washington and war. The regiment’s twenty-five-wagon baggage train carried, among other necessities, officers’ bathtubs, bedsteads, and mattresses.

  The 20th arrived in Washington on September 7, 1861, and after Colonel Lee had reported to General George B. McClellan, Commander of the Army of the Potomac, marched to Camp Kalorama in Georgetown, where a large part of the army was bivouacked. On September 12, abuzz with rumors that they were soon to go into action, the officers and men of the 20th began a three-day march to their new camp near Poolesville, Maryland, about thirty-five miles from Washington. Camp Benton was on high ground a mile east of a bend in the Potomac River. The 20th and 19th Massachusetts had joined to form a brigade under the command of Brigadier General Frederick Lander in a division under the command of General Charles Stone, headquartered at Poolesville.

  The Army of the Potomac had suffered a disaster at Bull Run in July, and it was now seized with speculation that a large force of Confederates was planning to cross the river and attack Washington. McClellan had ordered General Stone’s Corps of Observation at Poolesville to monitor Confederate activity on the other side of the river and oppose an enemy crossing, but to exercise great caution before taking offensive action. Three days after the 20th arrived at Camp Benton, General Lander ordered companies A and I, the latter commanded by William Bartlett, to stand a post upriver from a ford in the Potomac called Edwards Ferry and prepare for an enemy attack. The men arrived at night. When the sun came up they could see Confederates across the river. Holmes would write his mother another short letter describing his eventful week: “It seems so queer to see an encampment & twig through a glass & think they are our enemies & hear some of our pickets talking across & so on.” He signed off, “Goodnight my loveliest and sweetest.” His next letter to her would be less cheerful.

  Companies A and I remained at their post for five days. After they were relieved and returned to Camp Benton, they waited a little less than a month before they finally saw their first action. It was hardly the kind of battle they expected.

  Neither General McClellan nor Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, was interested in launching an offensive that autumn. McClellan was ever cautious, habitually overestimated enemy numbers, and was still preoccupied with reorganizing the army. Johnston believed correctly that his army was outnumbered. On October 18 he consolidated his forces in Centerville, leaving one brigade and some cavalry in Leesburg, Virginia.

  An important railroad terminus near several critical river crossings, Leesburg lay just across the Potomac from Poolesville. Although McClellan had initially instructed Stone to exercise great caution when considering an attack across the river, he now believed that with only a single enemy brigade in Leesburg, the town was too far from the main body of the Confederate Army and too close to the Army of the Potomac to remain in rebel hands. He thought the Confederates would quickly vacate it if pressed, and he ordered Stone to make “a slight demonstration” of his division’s presence.

  On the afternoon of October 20 most of the division took up positions at three river crossings: Edwards Ferry, Conra
ds Ferry, and Harrison Island. Stone ordered artillery to begin shelling Confederate pickets across from Edwards Ferry. The rebels withdrew, and three boats carrying about a hundred soldiers of the 1st Minnesota rowed to the Virginia bank. They met with no resistance and returned later that night to the Maryland side.

  That could have sufficed for the small demonstration McClellan had ordered, but Stone ordered another small reconnaissance party, about twenty men from the 15th Massachusetts, to cross the Potomac at Harrison Island, four miles north of Edwards Ferry. They landed at the foot of Ball’s Bluff, a steep, rocky, wooded height with a narrow switchback path. There were no enemy pickets there. No Confederate thought it likely the Federals would attack at a place where the river was too deep to ford and they would have to scale a hundred-foot bluff.

  The scouting party reached the top of Ball’s Bluff and took cover in the woods that surrounded a grassy field. Through the foggy moonlight the soldiers saw what they believed to be Confederate tents about a mile beyond their position. They returned to Harrison Island and reported their observations to their regimental commander, Colonel Charles Devens, who dispatched the information to General Stone. Stone ordered four companies from the 15th, around three hundred men, to attack the enemy encampment the next morning and either return to Harrison Island or hold ground in Virginia until reinforced. The 20th Massachusetts was to act in reserve on Harrison Island, while the remaining companies of the 15th Massachusetts and the 1st California were positioned on the Maryland bank across from the island.