Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  The Brahmins’ politics were conservative and deferential to authority. Their Puritan ancestors’ preferred form of government was theocracy, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony had banished freethinkers like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson for their “new and dangerous opinions.” In the mid-1800s, Brahmin Boston was Republican, staunchly pro-business, and hostile to reformers, whom Dr. Holmes dismissed as “dingy-linened friends of progress.” Elite Bostonians who drifted from orthodoxy were no longer exiled, but they were firmly rebuked. The Boston Athenæum, the city’s aristocratic private library, revoked Lydia Maria Child’s access to use its collection after she published her first abolitionist pamphlet.

  The Holmes family was not wealthy, but it was “well born,” which in Brahmin Boston mattered more. Holmes was descended from Cabots, Quincys, and Eliots, among others, and had three more Brahmin dynasties in his name—the Olivers, the Wendells, and the Holmeses. On both sides of his family, Holmes had no shortage of illustrious ancestors. He was a direct descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the noted seventeenth-century Puritan poet. His paternal grandfather, the Reverend Abiel Holmes, was a prominent Cambridge minister and historian, who wrote a biography of his own father-in-law, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, as well as a history of the Mohegan Indians. Holmes’s maternal grandfather, Charles Jackson, was a justice on the Supreme Judicial Court, the highest court in Massachusetts.

  If Boston in the mid-1800s was the hub of the solar system, Dr. Holmes stood close to its white-hot center. Dubbed “the Greatest Brahmin,” he had been hailed as “the most successful combination . . . the world has ever seen, of the physician and man of letters.” As a physician, Dr. Holmes was a pioneer in early medical science, credited with discovering that puerperal fever, which struck women who had just given birth, was caused by bacteria carried by doctors and nurses on their unclean hands and medical equipment. The paper he wrote, “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” helped end the “black death of childbed,” and saved many mothers’ lives. Dr. Holmes, who was also credited with coining the word “anesthesia,” became dean of the Harvard Medical School in 1847, at the age of thirty-eight.

  In the literary world, Dr. Holmes was no less eminent. At the age of twenty-one, he wrote the poem “Old Ironsides” to protest the secretary of the navy’s reported plans to scrap the USS Constitution, which had performed heroically in the War of 1812 and was then docked in Boston Harbor. Dr. Holmes’s poem, which was widely reprinted, was often credited with saving the great ship.

  As an adult, Dr. Holmes was part of a circle that included Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In 1857, he joined a group of Boston’s leading literary men in forming a new magazine, and he thought up its name, Atlantic Monthly. Dr. Holmes went on to write a popular column for the magazine. It is said that one of his readers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, named his hyperrational detective, Sherlock Holmes, after Dr. Holmes.

  Dr. Holmes had enormous expectations for his first son. In a letter to his sister, written on the day after his son’s birth, Dr. Holmes anticipated that his newborn, who had not yet been named, might one day “be addressed as _____ Holmes, Esq. or The Hon. _____ Holmes, M.C. or His Excellency _____ Holmes, President.” The relationship between father and son, which began with such high expectations, would prove to be a complicated one.

  It was a challenge for Holmes, who was preternaturally ambitious, to grow up in the shadow of a man who was so accomplished and famous. Adding to Holmes’s difficulty was the fact that the two men shared a name, and he was forever being confused with his father, even after he joined the Supreme Court. The competitiveness ran in both directions, which made for tense relations—something not lost on those who knew them both. William James, the pioneering Harvard psychologist and a friend of the younger Holmes, noted after seeing the two Oliver Wendell Holmeses together that “no love is lost between W. pere and W. fils.” Holmes had a warmer bond with his mother, Amelia, who devoted herself mainly to home and family. He would later say that he “got a sceptical temperament . . . from my mother.”

  Holmes attended two schools that attracted students from Boston’s elite. He started out at a boys’ school run by T. Russell Sullivan, a former Unitarian minister, in the basement of the Park Street Church. Then he attended the Private Latin School, presided over by E. S. Dixwell, a lawyer-turned-classics-scholar who “had no patience with slovenliness of mind.” In the summers, the Holmes family retreated to a 280-acre family farm in the Berkshires, not far from the homes of Melville and Hawthorne.

  Holmes followed a well-worn path from Mr. Dixwell’s school to Harvard College, where he entered with the class of 1861. Harvard had been the choice of centuries of Holmes’s ancestors, who had been attending since Dr. James Oliver entered with the five-member class of 1680. Few young men had stronger familial ties to the college: a great-great-uncle had been Harvard treasurer; his maternal grandfather had been a member of the board of overseers; and former Harvard president Josiah Quincy was a cousin. For someone of Holmes’s background, enrollment at Harvard was all but inevitable. Henry Adams—a friend of the Holmes family and a member of the class of 1858—explained in The Education of Henry Adams how people like him and Holmes ended up there. “Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously,” Adams wrote. “All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.”

  In college, Holmes studied science, history, economics, foreign languages, and the classics. The instruction he received was uninspired; Henry Adams wrote that the Harvard College of his and Holmes’s era “taught little, and that little ill.” Holmes was, for his part, a solid but unremarkable student: at the end of junior year, he ranked thirteenth in a class of eighty-four. Much of his energy went into Harvard’s student organizations and clubs, including two of the most prestigious: the Porcellian Club, which was founded in 1791, and the Hasty Pudding Club, which was nearly as old. As with almost everything in his life, Holmes’s path to the Porcellian and the Hasty Pudding was eased by family members who had been there before him.

  On April 12, 1861, in the waning weeks of Holmes’s senior year, the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, and the Civil War began. As President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for seventy-five thousand militiamen to put down the Southern insurrection, Boston was quickly swept up in Union fervor. “The heather is on fire,” wrote the Harvard professor George Ticknor. “The whole population, men, women, and children, seem to be in the streets with Union favours and flags.”

  Holmes got caught up in the fervor, as many Harvard students did. He left college before the semester’s end to join the Union army, reporting for duty at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor. Holmes spent several months in training, and was allowed to return to Harvard in June to graduate with his class. He had been elected class poet, a position his father held before him, and at Class Day ceremonies his poem implored his fellow graduates to “be brave, for now the thunder rolls.”

  Holmes joined the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, which was known as the “Harvard Regiment” because so many of its officers were Harvard students or alumni. In September the Twentieth Regiment was ordered to deploy to Washington, and its 41 officers and 750 men were off to war. Holmes joined as a first lieutenant, and his rank allowed him to travel with a considerable amount of luggage and personal effects; he and another lieutenant shared a servant. On a stop in New York, Holmes and some of his Harvard friends—not liking the looks of the official army meal—went to dinner at Delmonico’s, one of New York’s finest restaurants.

  When the Twentieth Regiment arrived in Washington, it joined the Army of the Potomac. The regiment was assigned to patrol the Potomac River in Maryland, the dividing line between the Northern and Southern positions. On October 20, orders came to cross the Potomac and engage the Confederates on the Virginia side. The Union troops claimed a bl
uff on the river, which turned out to be a tactical error. The Union men were caught in an open field and fired upon by Confederate troops. The Battle of Ball’s Bluff was a rout, with losses that were among the worst, on a percentage basis, of any battle in the war. Of the 1,800 Union troops, 921 were killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or missing in action.

  In his first battle, Holmes was shot in the chest, a feeling he compared to being kicked by a horse. Writing to his mother, the twenty-year-old Holmes said that the first night after being wounded, “I made up my mind to die.” Holmes’s will to live quickly returned, and he traveled to Boston to convalesce at his parents’ home. Much of Boston’s Brahmin elite stopped by to wish him a speedy recovery, including Massachusetts’s senior United States senator, Charles Sumner, and the president of Harvard.

  In March 1862 Holmes rejoined the Twentieth Regiment as a captain. The Army of the Potomac was now trying to invade Richmond, while General Robert E. Lee was attempting to continue his drive north. That fall, on September 17, Union and Confederate troops clashed at the Battle of Antietam, and the Twentieth Regiment was on the front lines. In the fighting at Antietam, a small creek in rural Maryland, more than 23,000 were killed or wounded, making it the single bloodiest day of the Civil War.

  Holmes was once again a casualty. A bullet entered his neck, narrowly missing his windpipe and jugular vein. When Dr. Holmes got the news by telegraph, he headed south in search of his son, and eventually found him in Pennsylvania on a train arriving from Maryland. The elder Holmes later recounted his search in a famous article, “My Hunt After ‘The Captain,’” in the Atlantic Monthly. Once again, Holmes returned home to convalesce.

  Holmes was ordered back to the front lines in November 1862. He traveled from Boston with his old friend Henry Abbott, known as “Little Abbott,” who had been recovering from typhoid. Holmes’s outlook was now far darker than it had once been. He no longer believed the Union army, which struck him as badly managed and ineffectual, would prevail. “I’ve pretty much made up my mind that the South have achieved their independence,” he wrote in a letter. “Believe me, we shall never lick them.”

  Holmes and Little Abbott arrived to find the Twentieth Regiment in Falmouth, Virginia, looking tired and discouraged. Holmes was soon injured again—the third and final time. He took a bullet to the heel on May 3, 1863, in the Battle of Chancellorsville. Holmes wrote his mother that he had “been chloroformed & had bone extracted—probably shant lose foot.” He was so despondent he hoped the foot would be lost, he later said, so he could avoid another return to battle.

  This time, Holmes took his longest convalescence of the war. While he was recovering in Boston, the Twentieth Regiment fought in the Battle of Gettysburg, with grim results. Ten of its thirteen officers and half of its enlisted men were lost. Several of Holmes’s close friends were among the dead, including Henry Ropes, whose body was so badly mangled that, as his brother informed Holmes, “nothing of the face can be seen but the chin, round which is a handkerchief.”

  When he returned in January 1864, Holmes took a position as General Horatio Wright’s aide-de-camp, which kept him off the front lines. In May, at his relatively protected perch, word reached Holmes that Little Abbott had fallen in battle. The loss hit Holmes hard. Decades later, he would recall that “for us, who not only admired, but loved [him], his death seemed to end a portion of our life also.”

  In the summer of 1864, his three-year enlistment complete, Holmes left the army and returned to civilian life. The war’s brutality had taken an unmistakable toll. Holmes’s youthful enthusiasm for marching off to battle was by now long gone. He told his parents that he had witnessed “all of fatigue & horror that war can furnish.” On July 17, 1864, he was formally discharged.

  Holmes could have become an eloquent witness to the horror of war. With the passage of time, however, he became the opposite: an old soldier who romanticized the experiences he had abhorred when they happened. In middle age, Holmes gave a celebrated Memorial Day address to Harvard’s graduating class of 1895, titled The Soldier’s Faith. “War, when you are at it, is horrible and dull,” he told the graduates. “It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine.” In the most famous line of the address, he reflected that “through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.” Not everyone was persuaded by Holmes’s nostalgia for the blood-soaked battles of the Civil War. His college classmate Wendell Garrison, writing in the Nation, dismissed The Soldier’s Faith as “sentimental jingoism.”

  The Civil War’s deepest impact on Holmes may have been to instill in him a dark worldview—or deepen one already there. In a letter to his sister, Amelia, written after his neck wound, he declared that he “loathed the thick-fingered clowns we call the people.” The critic Edmund Wilson, in his study of Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore, concluded that Holmes had emerged from the war with a newfound “bleakness.” The miseries of battle contributed, in Wilson’s view, to Holmes’s cynical view of power. “The rights . . . in any society, are determined, after a struggle to the death, by the group that comes out on top,” Wilson wrote. “Holmes is always insisting on the right to kill, to establish authority by violent means.”

  • • •

  In the fall of 1864, Holmes enrolled at Harvard Law School. The decision was not unexpected. In a short autobiography that he wrote after enlisting, he had declared that if he “survive[d] the war,” he “expect[ed] to study law as my profession or at least for a starting point.” Holmes was once again following in the footsteps of prominent ancestors. In addition to his maternal grandfather, the Supreme Judicial Court justice, his paternal great-grandfather had been probate judge of Suffolk County, where Harvard Law School is located.

  When Holmes enrolled, Harvard Law School was a modest institution with a faculty of three and few course requirements. Most students were not college graduates, and many were still teenagers. Years later, when Holmes was the coeditor of the American Law Review, it ran an unsigned article, which some people suspected him of writing, that decried conditions at Harvard Law School as “almost a disgrace to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” To graduate, it said, required little more than showing up. “Just as a certain number of dinners entitled a man in England to a call to the bar, so a certain number of months in Cambridge entitled him to the degree of Bachelor of Laws.”

  In April 1865, in the final days of Holmes’s first year of law school, the Civil War ended. As Boston filled with returning soldiers, some badly wounded, there were celebrations with somber overtones. Holmes attended Class Day this year not as an eager undergraduate poet, but in his war uniform, as a battle-weary veteran. He returned to law school in the fall, but that winter, a semester short of the usual two years’ study, he left to apprentice with a lawyer in private practice. The time he had put in was enough to earn him a law degree with the class of 1866.

  In April 1866 Holmes set sail for Europe. When he arrived his Boston connections gave him entrée to the upper reaches of British society. Holmes dined at the home of Lady Belper in London and talked financial policy with John Stuart Mill. He traveled on to Scotland, where he attended a ball at the castle of the Duke of Argyll and shot grouse with the duke’s hunting party.

  On his return, Holmes joined the Beacon Hill law firm of Chandler, Shattuck and Thayer. Its leaders were Boston Brahmins who shared many of his interests. George Shattuck, who was twelve years older than Holmes, was a well-regarded litigator and a fellow Harvard Law School graduate. James Bradley Thayer would later become Harvard’s Royall Professor of Law. The firm had blue-chip clients, including the Boston Railroad Company and the National Bank of America.

  Holmes’s friends had always detected a burning ambition in him. William James, a keen observer of personalities, saw Holmes as “a powerful battery, formed like a planing machine to gouge a deep self-beneficial groove through life.” Before long, Holmes’s interest in his co
mmercial legal practice began to wane. After a few years, he accepted a part-time position as a university lecturer in law at Harvard. He was also named coeditor of the American Law Review, the periodical, started recently by some of his friends, that published the negative review of Harvard Law School.

  Holmes worked at a furious pace, on a diverse array of demanding projects. In these hard-driving years, he spent little time on frivolity—or helping the less fortunate. “It is noticeable,” an early biographer pointed out, “that in a city where ‘good works’ were a traditional obligation of the elect, Holmes gave, so far as one can discover, no time or interest to civic or charitable activities.” Holmes’s lack of altruism was something his friends commented on. “The more I live in the world, the more cold-blooded, conscious egotism and conceit of people afflict me,” William James wrote to his brother, the novelist Henry James. “All the noble qualities of Wendell Holmes, for instance, are poisoned by them, and friendly as I want to be towards him, as yet the good he has done me is more in presenting me something to kick away from or react against than to follow and embrace.” As an adult, Holmes would make no secret of his lack of charitable impulses. In a letter to a friend, he railed against the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Jr., writing, “I think charitable gifts on a large scale are prima facie the worst abuse of private ownership.”

  At the age of thirty-one, Holmes became engaged to Fanny Dixwell, the daughter of E. S. Dixwell, his old schoolmaster. The Dixwells were not wealthy, but they were Brahmins in good standing. Like Holmes, Fanny Dixwell was descended from some of Boston’s most prominent families, including the Pickerings, Ingersolls, and Sargents. Holmes had known Fanny most of his life, and in a letter at the time of the engagement he described her as “for many years my most intimate friend.” Holmes’s bride-to-be was not regarded as a great intellect, but she was attractive and had other suitors vying for her hand. She also had a saturnine demeanor that made the couple dour soul mates. One member of Fanny’s extended family said that she had no close friends and “hated” most of her sisters. Holmes once said of his wife, “She is a very solitary bird, and if her notion of duty did not compel her to do otherwise, she would be an absolute recluse, I think.”