N 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 impossible to imagine a current Supreme Court justice being forged in such circumstances—with the survival of the nation, as well as of the multitudes fighting, so uncertain. In part because of changes that Holmes himself brought to the law, and ultimately to the Court, it is now a very different institution from the one he served on. The lives of the justices appear distant from the experiences of their fellow citizens. Yet there are important parallels between Holmes's era and the current one, and between the challenges for the Court in his time and now. A century ago, as today, politics splintered the nation and inequality segregated it. The Court was subject to ideology, unchecked partisanship, and the kind of political warfare expected only in high-stakes campaigns.
In these circumstances, Budiansky's new Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas—coming during the centennial year of Holmes's most momentous opinion, which was a visionary dissent about free speech—is especially consequential. It's the latest in a considerable library of biographies and studies. Many scholars have recognized the war's critical influence on Holmes. Yet Budiansky, whose previous books include six on military history, renders Holmes's war, and how it lodged in his psyche, as no writer has before.
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