Justice Holmes and the Civil War

Abstract

Justice Holmes and the Civil War Editor’s Note'. The following is a trans­ cription of a panel discussion that took place at the Supreme Court on May 8, 2014, as part of the Supreme Court Historical Soci­ ety’s Leon Silverman Lecture Series. Scott Harris, the Clerk of Court, introduced the panel and Professor Brad Snyder acted as moderator. Historians James M. McPherson and G. Edward White were the distinguished panelists. Remarks by Professor James M. McPherson about the Civil War: Everyone who knows something about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is familiar with the famous passage from his Memorial Day address in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1884. “Through our great good fortune,” said Holmes on that occasion, “in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing... We have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.” The fire that touched Holmes’ heart was of course his service in the Civil War two decades before he delivered this speech. At the age of twenty, in 1861, Holmes had been commissioned a first lieutenant in the Twentieth Massachusetts volunteer infantry. He rose to captain in this regiment, one of the best in the Army of the Potomac and one that suffered the fourth-highest number of combat deaths in the entire army. Holmes twice came close to being numbered among those dead, from serious wounds he re­ ceived at the battle of Balls Bluff in October 1861 and at Antietam in Septem­ ber 1862. His third wound, a piece of shrapnel in his heel at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, appeared less serious at first but required the longest period of convalescence before he could return to his regiment—to the Sixth Corps in March 1864. By then he had transferred to staff duty with General Horatio Wright, a safer post than as a line officer in an infantry regiment but one that proved more exhausting and dangerous than he had anticipated. On one occasion he was almost captured. PANEL DISCUSSION ON HOLMES AND THE CIVIL WAR 315 At the end of his three years enlistment, Holmes mustered out in July 1864 and enrolled at Harvard Law School. Holmes’ youth was, therefore, certainly “touched with fire.” And his experience in the war did indeed teach him that life was a profound and passionate thing that could come to an end at any moment. As it happened, however, he lived another seventy-two years after the third of his Civil War wounds. During those seventytwo years, he alluded to his war experiences on several occasions in conversations with friends, but rarely in public. In fact, his Memorial Day address in 1884 was his first public reference to the war since shortly after he had had been mustered out twenty years earlier. Thousands of books appeared about the Civil War during Holmes’ lifetime, but he read almost none ofthem. He did notjoin any of the veterans’ organizations like the Grand Army ofthe Republic or the Loyal Legion of the United States or the Twentieth Massa­ chusetts Veterans Organization. He did not attend any of the many reunions of soldiers who wore the blue that took place during the postwar decades. He showed little passion or activism toward the issues ofnationalism and freedom that had motivated his enlistment in 1861 and for which he had periled his life for three years. During his time as a student at Harvard College from 1857 to 1861, Holmes had been an abolitionist. He was a distant cousin of Wendell Phillips, one of the most militant of Boston abolitionists. Holmes’ best friend in college was Norwood Penrose Hallowell, a fervent abolitionist from a Philadelphia Quaker family. Holmes and Hallowell formed part of Wendell Phillips’ bodyguard during the abolitionist riots in the winter of 1860-1861. They enlisted together in the Twentieth Massachusetts after graduating from Harvard, when Hallowell’s antislavery convictions trumped his Quaker pacifism. In February 1863, Hallowell accepted a com­ mission as lieutenant...