Northerners who wanted to preserve the union did not wish to see slavery extended into the territories We think of the Civil War as a war to save the union and to abolish slavery, but before the fighting began most people regarded these as incompatible ideals. To understand the road Holmes had to travel in order to write those opinions, we have to go back to one of the worlds the Civil War made obsolete, the world of prewar Boston. But it is the idea that underlies many of the opinions he wrote, long after the war ended, as an associate justice on the United Times, a cynicism that have occasionally repelled people who have studied his life and thought. This idea he stuck to, with a grimness and, at It impressed on his mind, in the most graphic and indelible way, a certain idea about the limits of ideas. He had gone off to fight because of his moral beliefs, which he held with singular fervor. The effects of the mental ordeal were permanent. Those glasses of wine were toasts to pain. Many of his friends were killed in battle, some of them in front of hisĮyes.

He hoped the foot would have to be amputated so he could be discharged, but it was spared, and he served out his commission. He was wounded three times in all, the third time in an engagement leading up to the battle of Chancellorsville, when he He fought bravely and he was resilient,īut he was not strong in a brute sense, and as the war went on the physical ordeal was punishing.

He was twenty years old and weighed just 136 pounds at the time of his first battle, at Ball's Bluff, where he was shot through the chest. Every year he drank a glass of wine in observance of the anniversary of the battle of Antietam, where he had been shot in the neck and left, briefly behind enemy lines, for dead.īut Holmes hated the war. The war was the central experience of his life, and He didn't mind being referred to good-naturedly as Captain Holmes and he wore his enormous military mustaches until his death, in 1935, at the age of ninety-three. In later life, he loved to use military metaphors in his speeches and his conversation He stood six feet three inches tall and had a soldierly bearing. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was an officer in the Union Army.

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