Final Thoughts

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The accepted narrative of the Civil War of War Between the States can only survive if  a vast number of material facts are hidden and people dutifully think only according to the paradigms they have been taught.  It would be easy enough to write a couple paragraphs on this and move on but the life of Supreme Court Justice and former Union soldier Oliver Wendell Holmes and his evolving views of the war expresses it all much better.

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Holmes is remembered for an event that may have been partially fictional where he is said to have instructed Abe Lincoln to get down (or possibly knocked him down) while he was visiting Fort Stevens, which provided a panoramic view of a battlefield, to protect him from Confederate fire and supposedly said something like “Get down you damn fool”. The full story of his war experience, however far transcends one singular event and crosses numerous historical events and people like a sort of Forrest Gump story although in this case involving a brilliant man.  Holmes was from Massachusetts and as a young man roughly in the mold of Emerson.  His father, R. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., knew Emerson and had a falling out with him when he criticized some of Emerson’s more radical positions.  While at Harvard he was associated with radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips and even served as his bodyguard on at least one occasion (1 pp. 97-98). As opposed to adopting this sort of progressive thought, Holmes grew to be a pragmatist. In the book, The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand explains that the “lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence.”

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Coming from New England many would assume that, to the extent there were radical progressives and abolitionists in the Union Army, he would have been amongst them but most of the troops he knew wanted nothing to do with abolitionism and were not enthusiastic supporters of Lincoln or the Republican Party. Many openly expressed sympathy and respect for the Southern cause and Confederate soldiers which would lead to the question of how they could fight for the Union, the answer to which only a professional soldier could readily understand. One of Holmes’ biographers wrote, “The regulars did not serve in order that they might contribute to the achievement of certain defined objectives, whether political or humane, but because they were professional soldiers who had chosen the career of arms.” (1 pp. 00-100)

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As to exactly why he chose to fight in the war, it may be hard to fully answer the question but he later regretted the war and its destruction. One biographer observed, “The longer he was in the war, the more he was convinced that not death was the horror, but the loss of a young man’s chance to live” (1 pp. 99-100).  After the war he never again wanted to be part of a movement to compel one culture to conform to another. Although born a Yankee in the strictest sense of the word, he had come to renounce the fundamental underlying concept of Puritanism.

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During the War Holmes was critically injured three times. On one occasion he was shot directly through the chest but the bullet passed through without hitting his heart, lungs, or spine. Holmes’ closest friend in the 20th Massachusetts was Henry Abbott who was referred to as “Abbott the copperhead”.  He didn’t even believe in the goals of the war yet he wound up dying for them.  Still Holmes never wavered in his admiration for the skills and bravery of the Southern soldier. He saw Northern and Southern soldiers as being a class above bureaucrats and politicians and sons of privilege who paid substitutes to fight in their place. (1 pp. 110-115)

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When Holmes personal writings were released to the public for the first time recently, potential biographers were anxious to find material that could support the standard narrative by showing him to be a champion of racial equality and strong supporter of President Lincoln and Unionism but they were disappointed and generally abandoned their projects (1 p. 110).  Holmes is a somewhat complicated character and religiously was a confirmed unbeliever but, in the context of New England Evangelical Protestantism of the time, that provides some measure of objectivity. His story in the end contradicts all major aspects of the mainstream narrative of the war.

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Bibliography

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1. White, D. Jonathan. Northern Opposition to Mr. Lincoln's War. Waynesboro, Virginia : Abbevuille Institute Press, 2014.