oliver wendell holmes and civil war experience and edward white and antietam and injury

I am beginning to enjoy White's book, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (1993). Though he has a tendency to overrread texts, trying to coax too much meaning at times out of a letter or a statement, he presents in ch. 2 a precisely-told and methodologically acute discussion of Holmes' Civil War experience. White arranges the chapter under three heads: (1) the chronology of Holmes' wartime service; (2) his contemporaneous reflection on that service; and (3) his subsequent reflections, on five occasions from 1864-1911, of the "meaning" of the War. This essay will follow White's outline, but I will, as always, feel free to put my spin on things.

Holmes' Civil War Service

Holmes graduated from Harvard in 1861 in military uniform, having spent the last few months training for the War and then mustering out with the 20th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers in late summer 1861. His first engagement was at Ball's Bluff in October, that most unfortunate of encounters which saw the death of a former US Senator from OR and the loss or wounding of nearly 1/2 of the Union's 1700 forces. Holmes was seriously injured by being shot in the chest. He returned to Boston to recuperate, and rejoined the battle in VA for a planned assault on Richmond in Spring 1862. The assault never materialized, and Holmes faced some grim experiences in seeing comrades killed around Fair Oaks (near Richmond) in June.

Then he was sent to Antietam, that great and gory battle, which saw more casualties on one day (Sept. 17, 1862) than on any day in the War. He was injured there, but in the neck from behind while retreating. In this instance his father came to meet him, writing an article for Atlantic Monthly on the "search for the captain" (Holmes having now attained that rank). He returned to War for two more campaigns. In late 1862-mid 1863 he was at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, suffering dysentery during he former and being injured a third time after the latter (early May 1863). This wound, a gunshot wound to the heel, actually took more time to heal, and he was out of action until late 1863. Finally, he returned as a staff member for General Wright in the first half of 1864, finishing his tour in July 1864 and returning home to Boston. If there is one reaction that seems to capture the chronology of his experience it is from a letter he wrote home in 1864, that he "started in this thing as a boy [but] I am now a man." War made him grow up very quickly.

Contemporaneous Reflections

What White skillfully shows in this section of the chapter is how Holmes' view of what he was doing changed during the course of the War itself. This change is, from one perspective, completely explicable, even if the end result cannot be predicted from the beginning. Like many young men, he went off to the War with high chivalric ideals. He would be fighting to liberate the slaves, to participate in a great 19th century "crusade." But the ideology of war soon encounters its brutal reality. In this case that reality consisted of two things: confusion and terrible loss. Most readers tend to ignore the first, but that is because we tend to "read" the history of the War with our interpretive template provided by scholars of the War--battle A led to battle B which led to battle C and here is the strategy of each battle, etc. One experiencing war, however, sees it differently. Often there is simply a mixture of confusion, inaudible orders, panicked retreats, uncertain plans. The terrible loss, on the other hand, is quite known to all who study the War sympathetically. Still, Holmes' accounts are jarring:

"Today it is pleasant and hot--It is singular with what indifference one gets to look on the dead bodies in gray clothes which lie around..As you go through the woods you stumble constantly, and, if after dark, as last night on picket, perhaps tread on the swollen bodies already fly blown and decaying, of men shot in the head back or bowels..." (66).

And so, over the course of the three years in which he was engaged, Holmes' feelings changed from a grand feeling of ideological commitment to the cause, to a gradual sense that he must do his duty, to a grim realization that so much meaningless suffering was taking place, to, finally, a sense that he had had too much and that he had to get out of the War. This final feeling was his overwhelming sense in Spring 1864--that War had sapped every ounce of his bodily and mental strength, and he simply had to get out. Fortunately for him, and us, he did.

Later Reflections

Holmes addressed the subject of the War's "meaning" on five occasions over the next 50 years. But this is a little deceptive because the first two were in 1864, when the wounds were still fresh and the battle still raged. Mature thought only was evident in his 1884 Memorial Day reflections, his 1895 "Soldier's Faith" address and a 1911 speech at his 50th graduation reunion from Harvard. In the first he utters his line which Ken Burns picked up on in his epic TV series on the Civil War: "the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire" (49). War was, therefore, not simply a time in which he matured quickly, but was a sort of gift to that generation, a lesson that life was a deep and profound and passionate thing, and that the person who would approach life best would be one who would attack it passionately.

It is this lesson--living life passionately--that seemed to be the most vivid one for Holmes. Certainly there were other "meanings" of the war, such as that duty is noble, or that the "crusade" was worthwhile, but all of the small shards of experience, consisting of guilt as well as noble activity, seemingly were fused together in the one overriding message of the War for Holmes: that "one of the elemental truths of life [is] to feel passionately about a subject, and to act in carrying out that passion" (85-86).

Conclusion

One of the ways the War stayed with Holmes when he wasn't explicitly speaking about it was through the use of military or warlike imagery. When FDR had just been elected in 1932 and asked him for advice, Holmes, then 91, supposedly responded, "Form your ranks and fight." A fitting valedictory for a man whose heart was touched with fire in his youth.

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