CHAPTER 25

The Hunt After the Captain

By this time the war was changing many minds and hearts in ways that the abolitionists would never understand or approve. More and more, it became apparent that the chief motivation of most of the men in the armies of the North was the preservation of the Union. One of the best historians of the Civil War has recently devoted a book to this phenomenon.1

Early in the war, the shrewd politician William Seward wrote a memorandum to President Lincoln urging, “we must change the question before the public from one upon slavery or about slavery for a question upon Union or Disunion.” By the fourth year of the war, the wisdom of this observation had become apparent. Lincoln did not run for reelection as a Republican. He ran with a Democrat—Andrew Johnson of Tennessee—on a “Union” ticket.

Again and again, in diaries and letters, soldiers revealed that the Union was the chief reason for their decision to join the war and endure its appalling bloodshed. William Bluffton Miller, a sergeant in the Seventy-Fifth Indiana Infantry, was typical. In his diary he noted mournfully, “There are thousands now sleeping in unknown graves, and many more will have to die yet to perpetuate the best government in the world.” In the perspective of this book, all these men were paying tribute to the power of George Washington’s central message in his Farewell Address: the crucial importance of the Union to America’s hopes for prosperity and peace.2

Along with this positive motivation, there was a tendency as the war dragged on to divide the blame for the conflict between slave-owning “southern oligarchs” and abolitionists. There was a saying in the army General William Tecumseh Sherman led through Georgia that most men were more inclined to shoot an abolitionist than a rebel. They learned on that march that only a small minority of Southerners owned slaves. For the rest of the Confederate soldiers, it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” But very few understood why the southern poor men were fighting so ferociously: their fear that black emancipation would be a prelude to a race war.

One of the first evidences of this phenomenon was an article in The Atlantic Monthly, “My Hunt After the Captain,” written by one of New England’s most popular authors, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Dr. Holmes was famous for his witty, often sardonic essays, issued by the so-called Autocrat of the Breakfast Table in books with variations on that original title. He had never been an abolitionist, and when his handsome Harvard-educated son, Oliver Jr., declared his intention to join the Union army, the father had urged him not to do so.3

The son had disagreed with his famous parent and had become a captain in the Twentieth Massachusetts regiment. At the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, another Union rout several months after Bull Run, Oliver Jr. had received a wound above his heart. As soon as he recovered, he had gone back to his regiment. A day after the battle of Antietam, Dr. Holmes received a telegram informing him that the captain had been wounded again. Holmes immediately set out by train and wagon for Antietam. His journey across the battlefield, less than a week after the dying had ended, was told with the careful eye for detail of the trained physician.

Antietam had replaced Shiloh as the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil up to that time. Most of the thousands of dead bodies had been buried by the time Dr. Holmes arrived, but everywhere he saw patches of caked blood and bullet-torn hats and fragments of bloody uniforms. A crude sign announced that a rebel general and eighty of his men were all buried in “this hole.” Tens of thousands of wounded writhed in makeshift hospitals in churches and private houses, overwhelming the Union army’s exhausted doctors. No one Holmes spoke to knew anything about his son.

A friendly fellow physician took Holmes through one church hospital, constructed of boards laid over the tops of pews. The wounded lay on bundles of straw on this improvised floor. The escort held a lantern over each man, but none was Captain Holmes. The process was repeated far into the night at other crude hospitals. One sufferer was a captured Confederate officer from North Carolina. Holmes found him “educated, pleasant, gentle, intelligent.” It only took a few minutes of conversation with such an enemy to wipe away “all personal bitterness toward those with whom we or our children have been but a few hours before in deadly strife.”

At another point in his search, Dr. Holmes found himself in a camp for rebel prisoners. He asked them why they were fighting. “For our homes,” several said. The doctor turned to a Mississippi officer, “about twenty, with a smooth boyish cheek.” He told Holmes he “liked the excitement of it” and added he had read many of the doctor’s books. Soon Holmes was in “magnetic relation” with him. Although he had become a public denouncer of the rebellion, Holmes had not let opposition diminish his “human sympathy” for all the young men trapped in the carnage.4

Finally, the wandering doctor caught up to his wounded son. He had been shot in the neck this time. A single expert glance told Dr. Holmes he would survive the wound. “How are you, Boy?” he said.

“How are you, Dad?” the Captain coolly replied.

Holmes realized he was speaking to a son who would never again be a boy. Oliver Jr. had become a man in his own right.

Captain Holmes soon returned to the war. He rejected an offer to be a major in a black regiment. Back in the Twentieth Regiment, he was greeted by his best friend and fellow captain, Henry Abbott, who told Holmes how pleased he was that he had decided to remain a captain and stay with them. Abbott and most of the Twentieth regiment were totally disillusioned with the war. Only their sense of honor as soldiers kept them in uniform. Above all else they detested the abolitionists, who had gotten them into this murderous nightmare.5

Holmes’s letters from the front explain this angry disillusionment. “It is singular with what indifference one gets to look at dead bodies,” he wrote. “As you go through the woods you stumble constantly and if after dark, as last night on picket, perhaps tread on the swollen bodies already fly blown and decaying, of men shot in the head, back or bowels—many of the wounds are terrible to look at—Well, we licked ’em.” In 1863, in a slide into total discouragement, he thought he and his fellow soldiers were “working to effect what never happens—the subjugation (for that is it) of a great civilized nation.”6

Abbott was killed leading his company in the chaotic Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. A heartbroken Captain Holmes anonymously published a poem to his memory in the Boston Evening Transcript. Its last two lines summed up his admiration:

Noble heart, full soon we follow thee

Lit by the deeds that flamed along thy track.

After the war, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. rose in the legal profession to become an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. For seventy years, he repeatedly condemned the abolitionists and others who claimed they had a message from some higher power that everyone had to obey. Above all he voiced his contempt for people whose claim to certitude often persuaded other men to kill each other.

In a letter to the British radical Harold Laski, Holmes wrote, “You put your ideals or prophecies with the slight superior smile of a man who is sure he has the future (I have seen it before in the past from the abolitionists . . . ).” In another letter, he said, “Communists show in the most extreme form what I came to loathe in the abolitionists—the conviction that anyone who did not agree with them was either a knave or a fool.”7

Perhaps his most devastating postwar comment was one that cut through a hundred years of mythical American history to one of the central truths about the war. Holmes said he now realized he had been fighting for the United States—the Union. He thought he had been fighting for Boston.8

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