Part I
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Chapter 1
An Antebellum Adolescence
âBut now, look around, my historyâs everywhere
And Iâm my own environment.â
(Norman MacCaig, âDouble Life,â Riding Lights, 1955)
In the final chapter of Patriotic Gore, a study of the literature of the Civil War era, Edmund Wilson opened his discussion of âJustice Oliver Wendell Holmesâ by merging father and son into the âOliver Wendell Holmeses.â This confluence between one generation and the next, and by extrapolation between an antebellum Union and the post-Civil War nation, offers an appropriate starting point for a study of the son whose life extended well into the twentieth century but was, arguably, influenced by âhis struggle to distance himself from his famous fatherâ and overshadowed by his nationâs mid-nineteenth-century civil conflict.1
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was born into the âhighly cultivated, homogeneous worldâ of antebellum Boston. Arguably he was its âconsummate product: idealistic, artistic, and socially committed.â But, at least as historian Louis Menand put it, his was a world that bled âto death at Fredericksburg and Antietam, in a war that learning and brilliance had been powerless to prevent.â2 It is important to emphasize, however, that the Boston of Holmesâ youth was no static Christmas card caricature of a pre-war world, shaded in subtle sepia hues and inhabited primarily by the privileged progeny of its Puritan past. Antebellum Boston was neither Europe before the First World War, nor was it Eden before the Fall. It was, however, very much the world of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. And in many respects, to get to the son, we must first go through the father.
Although not quite as long-lived as the son to whom he bequeathed his name, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.âs life (1809â1894) nevertheless spanned the greater part of the nineteenth century. However his life was deemed by one of his earliest biographers to be âso uneventful that the utter absence of anything in it to remark became in itself remarkable.â Certainly, with the exception of two years spent in Europe, largely in Paris studying medicine, and a short return visit there in later life, Dr. Holmes rarely ventured far from Boston whose State House he famously designated the âHub of the Universe.â His affection for Boston was, as noted author William Dean Howells observed, akin to âthe patriotism of men in the times when a manâs city was a manâs country.â There was âsomething Athenian, something Florentineâ about it. This did not mean, however, that Dr. Holmesâ national influence or cultural impact was insignificant; far from it. He was living proof âthat identification with a locality is a surer passport to immortality than cosmopolitanism is.â A notable âman of letters,â as contemporary parlance put it, the output from his pen covered many more miles than he could have managed in person had he been an inveterate globetrotter. In part this was down to the inclinations of Holmes as an individual, but in large part, too, it derived from the specific circumstances of his time and place.3
When Dr. Holmes was born in 1809, the same year, indeed, as Abraham Lincoln, Boston was still designated a town, although it was in fact the fourth largest city in the nation at that time. Boston legally became a city only in 1822. In 1809, it was just one part of a post-Revolutionary, post-colonial, if not yet entirely post-Puritan world, but it already possessed a strong sense of its own significance. Much of this was predicated upon the past; not merely the brief past that Boston had in national terms, but the far longer past that had preceded this, all the way back, indeed, to the earliest European migrations into what became Massachusetts. Its origins lay in the Puritan exodus, the âGreat Migrationâ from England that began in 1629. More specifically, it derived from Puritan leader John Winthropâs now famous sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, preached either on the eve of departure or possibly actually en route to the then New World. For Winthrop, as for his congregation, the venture was a new beginning, albeit driven by a much older religious imperative. In establishing a settlement across the Atlantic, Winthrop reminded the colonists that âwe must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.â4
Over the course of the two centuries between John Winthropâs arrival and Holmesâ birth, New England was largely understood, at least by its elite residents who were descendants of the first Puritans, to have achieved Winthropâs initial ambitions as far as matters cultural and clerical, educational and economic were concerned. By the nineteenth century, New Englanders dominated the writing and therefore public dissemination of American history. This did little to contradict what was, in effect, a distinctly sectional slant on the national story that elided most of the brutal and exclusionary realities of the colonial past. As Americaâs most famous poet, Walt Whitman, noted in 1883, for much of the nineteenth century, Americans had been overly influenced âby New England writers and schoolmaster,â too accepting of âthe notion that our United States have been fashionâd from the British Islands only, and essentially from a second England only.â This, Whitman argued, was âa very great mistake.â5
New Englandâs writers were not entirely to blame for this state of affairs. Boston, by Dr. Holmesâ time, already lay at the core of the national narrative as a city whose patriotic credentials had been confirmed by the central role that the city had played in fomenting the American Revolution. To live in Boston, as the Brahmin historian Henry Adams recalled, was to live âin the atmosphere of the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and the Boston Massacre.â By the turn of the nineteenth century, therefore, even before New England historians put pen to paper, Bostonâs reputation was already secure. Its reality, of course, had altered considerably. Colonial Boston had been a settlement constructed, as the New England colonies as a whole were, around the rule of the elect; not in a political sense, but in a religious one. By 1809 the dominance of those who had experienced public conversion, termed âVisible Saints,â was long over, but in their place a new secular elect had emerged. As Adams later described it, until â1850, and even later, New England society was still directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors, merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they were clergymen and each profession were a church.â6
This nineteenth-century social and economic elite âutilized an elaborate web of kinship tiesâ that provided it with âcohesion, continuity and stabilityâ in a rapidly changing world. And although Bostonâs elite perceived its authority as stemming ânot from hereditary privilege but from personal achievement,â lineage had a great deal to do both with how it saw itself and how it was seen by outsiders. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Holmesâ first biographer, in noting that his subject was descended from solid âNew England stock,â bemoaned the fact that âthe name of New England is now a mere geographical title rather than, as it used to be, an implied expression of racial and social characteristics.â7
For much of the nineteenth century, however, the ideals of the city on a hill were deemed largely to inhere in that part of its population later labelled by Holmes as the Brahmin class. This ârepublican aristocracyâ perceived itself as the contemporary social and economic exemplar for the nation. It reinforced its position through âa highly articulated social order which not only set standards but encouraged and enforced right conduct,â and thereby reassured its members that stability could be maintained. Boston Brahmins largely profited from many of the strongest forces for change in mid-nineteenth-century America encapsulated in the urbanization, industrialization, and immigration paradigm. But their connection to these changes did not automatically ensure their confidence in the result. Fearful that rapid social change in Boston and elsewhere would produce âa chaotic individualism,â elite families carefully constructed cultural and commercial channels through which both individual and national character could be constrained and controlled.8
Their fears, naturally, have to be placed in the context of Bostonâs rapid growth. âPossibly no city in the world,â observed an early-twentieth-century study of Bostonâs development, âhas altered more the physical conformation of its site.â9 In 1814, when the senior Holmes was just a child, the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation began the gradual land reclamation of the Back Bay. In time this transformed what had been marshland into fashionable residential streets. After the Civil War, both Dr. Holmes and his son would live there, on the newly-created Beacon Street. This was only one of many such projects. Over the course of the nineteenth century Bostonâs physical footprint increased some tenfold. This was just as well since its population, too, trebled from around 34,000 in 1810 to around 93,000 by 1840; by the eve of the Civil War it was almost 178,000. It was now the fifth largest city in the nation, and one of Americaâs major seaports whose population comprised an increasing number of foreign-born or native-born in-migrants. By the middle of the century, indeed, only around 35 percent of the cityâs inhabitants had been born and raised there.
If any of those who came to Boston had done so in the hope of making their fortune, however, they would have likely been disappointed. Equally, the fears of any Boston Brahmin for the financial future proved equally unfounded. Fortunes in antebellum Boston âtended not to fall overnight but rather to persist.â To those who had, the likelihood was that more would be given. Doubtless, the fact that the egalitarian ethos of the American republican experiment failed to disturb the economic equilibrium was a comfort to Bostonâs elite citizens. At the same time it left them increasingly isolated within a growing city that was hardly as homogeneous as they liked to believe, and in which the social, as well as the physical, distance between the parallel planes of poverty and privilege was growing ever-greater.10
By the early nineteenth century New England society had âlost something that was central to the cohesiveness of Puritan culture: a meaningful and functioning sense of community.â11 In this context it may be no surprise that such social stability as was to be found in nineteenth-century Boston had almost as much to do with ancestry as with assets. In 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge became one of the nationâs first Rural or Park cemeteries, but for contemporary Bostonians Mount Auburn was only one of the sites of memory as much as of mourning that fixed their world.12
The publication, just after the Civil War, of a history of the city that devoted no fewer than nine chapters to detailed descriptions of individual burial grounds and their many âinteresting associations of the pastâ emphasized this centrality of the cemetery in nineteenth-century New England culture. For some, such as future Unitarian minister, author, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the cityâs cemeteries were sites of curiosity as much as of historical âassociations.â He recalled how as a child he had âdelighted to pore over the old flat tombstones in the Old Cambridge cemetery, stones ⊠on which even the language was deadâ but nevertheless invoked past âvirtues,â stones from which the âleaden coats of arms had been pried out to be melted into bullets for the Continental army ⊠and so linked us to the past.â And this was the crucial point. In 1838, as Massachusetts Governor Levi Lincoln observed in his dedicatory address at the Worcester Rural Cemetery, there was a danger of the past being âall but forgottenâ by the generations then living. There are few left, he noted, who âcan now claim affinity to the tenants of that ancient churchyard.â For those few who could, however, such cemeteries represented public expressions of private success, places quite literally ârich with memories from the pastâ that validated the values of the present and held out hope that such values had a place in the future.13
This, then, was the world in which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. lived. It was one in which âthe ethic of individual responsibility married moral duty to the calling of trade,â in which the family represented âthe hub of the domestic universe.â And the city of Boston, in its physical constructions as much as in its personal associations, both living and dead, expressed the outward, public ambitions and apprehensions of an inward-looking, essentially private class.14
Dr. Holmesâ father had been a Calvinist clergyman and he himself studied law and then medicine. In this period, however, there was no expectation that medicine would represent the whole of his public life, and nor did it. Ultimately, he became better known as a ...