Justice oliver wendell holmes biography of christopher

In the spring of 1864, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was fighting in the Civil War as a Union Army captain. He had enlisted three years earlier, soon after the war began, when he was 20 and in his last term at Harvard College, in the class of 1861. As an infantry officer in Virginia, he had received a near-fatal wound at Ball’s Bluff in his first battle, where he was shot through the chest in a Union raid that backfired. He had proved his valor by rejoining his men after he was shot, defying an order to have his wound tended. At Antietam a year later, where he was briefly left for dead on the bloodiest day in U.S. Army history, a bullet ripped through his neck. At Chancellorsville, in another eight months, an iron ball from cannon shot badly wounded him in the heel. Near there in winter, “Holmes lay in the hospital tent too weak even to stand as he suffered the agonies of bloody diarrhea,” Stephen Budiansky, M.S. ’79, writes in a new biography of Holmes: “The disease killed more men than enemy bullets over the course of the Civil War.”

That spring, generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met on the battlefield for the first time. Grant, the newly appointed commander of the Union Army, had shifted its main target from Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, to Lee and his roving Army of Northern Virginia. The Battle of the Wilderness was the opening fight. In fierce encounters over two days, of 119,000 Union soldiers, one of seven died or was injured; one-sixth of Lee’s 65,000 troops were casualties. Holmes filled a new role as an officer on horseback in the Wilderness. As Budiansky recounts, he faced “the most intense and nightmarish episode of the entire war for him, nine weeks of nonstop moving, fighting, and killing that would often find him falling asleep in the saddle from sheer fatigue, escaping death by inches, and witnessing carnage on a close-up scale that eclipsed even his own previous experiences.”

It is impossibl

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Chapter One

To Alice Stopford Green

October 14, 1911

My dear friend,

Your letter was forwarded to me here and has warmed my heart. Bless your flattering Irish tongue! No matter, I always believe you mean the dear things you say, and gain confidence from them. You have done me no little good in that as well as other ways—for the American public does not waste much time in praisingjudges, though I have no right to complain. I had expected to end a fatiguing week by a laborious conference of the judges this p.m. but this morning Harlan the Senior Justice died and everything is put off. The old boy had outlived his usefulness—but he was a figure the like of which I shall not see again. He had some of the faults of the savage, but he was a personality, and in his own home and sometimes out of it was charming. On my 70th birthday who but he bethought himself to put a little bunch of violets on my desk in Court? He dissented alone in the Standard Oil and Tobacco cases and showed most improper violence towards his brethren, but I regarded it as partly senile. Peace to his ashes. This is a year of a

by CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN

15

SEPTEMBER,1864. A young man walks up the steps of Dane Hall on Harvard Square, up between the white columns, through the wide doors, and takes his seat in the lecture room of Judge Joel Parker. He is eager, but he is also more than a little confused. He is by no means sure of himself. He has only the stubborn, hazy conviction that the law is what he is going to do next and do with all his might. Within the boundaries of this conviction he is slated for hours, days, years, of doubt and bitter uncertainty.

“Law student,” Holmes had written with a flourish three years ago in his army identification papers. On his return from the war in July of 1864 he would have liked to go over to Cambridge immediately and enroll in the Law School. But he hesitated. It was a serious step. Was the law really his objective in life — not merely the “starting point” he had called it in his class autobiography? There was one other p

US Supreme Court justice from 1902 to 1932

For his father, see Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. Holmes is one of the most widely cited and influential Supreme Court justices in American history, noted for his long tenure on the Court and for his pithy opinions—particularly those on civil liberties and American constitutional democracy—and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures. Holmes