Oliver Wendell Holmes Read online

  As an undergraduate Holmes was serious, but he was not a prig. If nothing else he was too gregarious and cut too striking a figure to play the part of the brooding intellectual, much less a monkish one. Passing Emerson and his daughter on the street in Cambridge one day during his sophomore year, he ran back to pay his respects; Emerson afterward commented to his daughter, “He was a handsome stately fellow, it was pleasant to see him.”27

  For his whole time at Harvard, Holmes lived in a private rooming house near the Yard, Danforth’s, that was filled with other young New England men of his social class; if he avoided there some of the more puerile undergraduate high jinks of window breaking and other pranks that characterized life in the dormitories, he also avoided some of its constraints on conviviality.

  His family position in Boston society and his own conversational gifts, social ease, and commanding looks guaranteed his entry into Harvard’s most exclusive social clubs and organizations, Porcellian, Hasty Pudding, Alpha Delta Phi, none of which placed their ostensible literary or intellectual ends above their fundamentally social purpose.28 (Porcellian was the most exclusive. Holmes’s father had not been invited to join during his time at Harvard, though was later made an honorary member; Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not make the cut, either, in his day. But among its members would be a number of men who would come to play important parts in Holmes’s life, including Theodore Roosevelt, Massachusetts’s senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and the writer Owen Wister.)

  When Alpha Delta Phi gave a dinner in Holmes’s honor in 1912, he recalled how that club more often than not met in his room in Danforth’s, “which had the advantage of being outside of the College Yard. . . . In those days the Club used to listen to essays by its members before the business of the bottle began.”29

  And yet, as the literary critic Louis Menand astutely observed, “It is a mistake to discount—even when he was still a student—the severity of his character as an intellectual.” This, Menand noted, “is a side of the young Holmes’s personality it has proved easy to miss.” But there was a “chastity about his intellectual style,” which Holmes had modeled directly on Emerson, that revealed an underlying deadly seriousness.30 It was chastity not in the sense of moral innocence, but in a kind of austere purity and rigor about the process of thought itself.

  In his “Books” essay, Holmes spoke admiringly of Emerson’s breadth and depth of reading, his rejection of “the authority of others” that led most people to scorn the teachings of Confucius, or the sacred texts of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, sight unseen; Emerson insisted on seeing for himself. Emerson consistently warned against subordinating individual integrity of thought to the tyranny of prefabricated ideas. That applied equally to the conventional wisdom of organized religion and the pat moralizing of the new reformers; conformity was the enemy of conscience. (“Each ‘Cause,’ ” Emerson said, however “subtle and ethereal” at first, quickly becomes “a little shop” where the article is “made up into portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers.”)31

  An etching by Holmes, made while a student at Harvard

  In his essay on Dürer, Holmes had not only thought for himself about art and philosophy and religion but had gone into some detail on the technical aspects of engraving. Building on his earlier studies of drawing, he actually executed several etchings of his own during his time at Harvard; a surviving print of a man and a goat, after the seventeenth-century Dutch master Berchem, shows considerable technical mastery.

  In the fall of his senior year Holmes published a paper on Plato in the University Quarterly, an intercollegiate journal; it won a twenty-dollar prize for the best undergraduate essay of that year. Many years later Holmes recounted to one of his young lawyer friends in Washington the advice and inspiration that Emerson, “who fired me into reading Plato,” had given him on approaching his subject.

  He said, “You must hold him at arm’s length. You must say, ‘Plato, you have pleased the world for two thousand years; let’s see if you can please me.’ ” I read Plato and I wrote my first article in the short-lived University Quarterly, and I laid it at Mr. Emerson’s feet. About a year later when I saw him, he said, “I have read your piece. When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” Weren’t those fine things for the old fellow? Of course, it made me feel damn bad at the time. But I always thought they were a model of what the old can do for the young.32

  The day he ran back to pay his respects to Emerson on the street, Holmes remembered telling him in a burst of adolescent enthusiasm, “If I ever do anything, I shall owe a great deal of it to you.”33

  He may or may not have actually said that, but it was clearly what he felt. Emerson remained one of the few enduring heroes of his life, long after the Civil War had caused the moral world of Emerson and Holmes’s own youth to crumble. “The only firebrand of my youth that burns to me as brightly as ever is Emerson,” he remarked when he was almost ninety. Emerson, he said, “had the gift of imparting a ferment. . . . That gift is genius.”34

  HOLMES GOT IN more trouble in his senior year.

  President Felton informed Dr. Holmes that the faculty had voted to issue a “public admonition” to his son for “repeated and gross indecorum in the recitation room of Professor Bowen.”35

  As the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Francis Bowen taught all Harvard seniors two required courses, “Philosophy” and “Ethics.” They offered an ever-so-slightly more sophisticated version of the arguments that God was a Christian that his students had already endured in their mandatory freshman courses in religious instruction. The first semester of his class used Bowen’s own book The Principles of Metaphysical and Ethical Science Applied to the Evidences of Religion as its principal text; the second, his even weightier, 546-page tome The Principles of Political Economy.36

  Orthodox in his religious views and conservative in his politics, Bowen was described as “dogmatic and unpleasant in controversy,” and “one of the abler men of the nineteenth century . . . who managed, because of his orthodox and conservative bias, to be wrong about almost every important intellectual tendency of the age.” He dismissed as self-evidently absurd the new scientific theories that man shared “fraternity, or a common pedigree, with the reptile and the brute,” and ridiculed Emerson for believing—in Bowen’s words—that a “vague conception of virtue takes the place of religion as a guide of life.”37

  If Bowen was an orthodox Christian, his orthodoxy was still that of a Harvard Unitarian, and much of what he taught his class reflected the optimism and Boston parochialism of the time. “Francis Bowen inferred the benevolence of God from the overwhelming happiness of the human race, and this overwhelming happiness he inferred from the contented situation of his own social class. He apparently could not believe that any sufferings bourgeois Bostonians did not experience were a very important part of human existence,” Daniel Howe wrote in his history of Harvard Unitarianism.38

  In his textbooks, Bowen proved that the laws of laissez-faire economics were ordained by Providence for the benefit of mankind. He asked how many of his readers had suffered “famines, inundations, earthquakes, the assassination of friends, robbery, ravenous beasts, tyranny, the necessity of slaying a fellow creature for sustenance, or the like,” suggesting that the answer verified the conclusion that the Earth was in the hands of a benevolent power.39 Exactly what form Holmes’s “gross indecorum” took during the spring semester when Bowen’s class was reciting back such passages was not spelled out in the letter to Dr. Holmes, but it is not hard to imagine the later Holmes’s reaction to such simpleminded moral reasoning.

  And yet, just as Holmes once told Morris Cohen that he had absorbed a sense of Darwin’s ideas and “the scientific way of looking at the world” from something that “was in the air” in his college days, so he absorbed more than he later acknowledged of the Unitarian outlook that was most assuredly in the air of the Harvard of 1860. He reread Bowen’s political economy book at leas
t once, right after finishing law school, and throughout his life his library contained the works of other leading Unitarian thinkers, notably William Channing’s.40

  Cohen had no difficulty tracing Holmes’s powerful sense of duty, work, self-improvement, and recognition of the higher claims of society to “his Calvinistic faith.” That was true enough in the way Cohen meant it, though it was really Calvinism as reinterpreted by Unitarianism. Holmes’s obsessive practice of maintaining a list of the “worthy books” he had read was something he shared with nearly all of the Boston Unitarian moralists of the first half of the nineteenth century.41 So was his relentless drive, even as a man of ideas, to take his part in the “the practical struggle of life,” and resist the temptation to retreat to his library “to enjoy a certain mild delirium of the mind, regardless of the claims of society,” as one early nineteenth-century Boston Unitarian minister cautioned against. (The Reverend Channing admitted that in his early years he had succumbed to that error himself, being a “dreamer” and “castle builder” before duty called him back).42

  In fact, Holmes’s admonishment to Frankfurter in 1913 that the academic life

  is a withdrawal from the fight in order to utter smart things that cost you nothing except the thinking them from a cloister. . . . Business in the world is unhappy, often seems mean, and always challenges your power to idealize the brute fact but it hardens the fibre and I think is likely to make more of a man of one who turns it to success

  echoed almost exactly the warning Channing had issued a century earlier to the man of letters: a strong character could only be developed in contact with society, and it was only action that gave ideas meaning. “The revolving of elevating thoughts in our closet does little for us,” wrote Channing. “We must bring them home to the mind in the midst of action and difficulty.”43

  One of the things Unitarian moralists like Bowen objected to about Calvinism was that it fostered divisive theological controversies on theoretical points of doctrine. Bowen frequently criticized a reliance on “abstract reasoning” over empirical knowledge, the “abuse of general theories” by “the logician” and “the specularist” without “respect for the limitations suggested by experience,” the “habit . . . of dwelling on first principles and abstract truths.”44 That was equally a threat in politics as in religion, he stressed. For the same reason, the Unitarian moralists rejected absolutist notions of rights in law, emphasizing that social harmony and integration were always more important than individual interests.

  It is striking how many of Bowen’s statements of Unitarian principle on these points—not just in their substance, but even in their precise wording—resemble many of his disrespectful student’s later famous aphorisms about logic, rights, law, and the danger of taking “isms on faith.”45

  HOLMES

  BOWEN

  General principles do not decide concrete cases.46

  Absolute certainty belongs to the proposition, only when couched in general terms. It can be applied to particular cases only by approximation.47

  The felt necessities of the time . . . have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.48

  [Laws] are not contrivances of human wisdom, but are necessary products of men’s habits and wants.49

  The provisions of the Constitution . . . are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil.50

  The most important provisions . . . constitute the original inheritance of the American people, which they brought over with them from England. . . . Constitutions are not made, but they grow by an inherent law of progress and adaptation to changing circumstances.51

  [All rights] are limited by . . . principles of policy which are other than those on which the particular right is founded . . . Limits [are] set to property by other public interests.52

  Property is a social institution and must therefore be subject to those limitations and instructions which increase its tendency to . . . the general welfare.53

  The most fundamental of the supposed preexisting rights . . . is sacrificed . . . whenever the interest of society . . . is thought to demand it.54

  If he prefers to live with others, the rights of the society take precedence of his rights as an individual.55

  A trouble with a system of religious and moral teaching based on challenging the very idea of doctrine and authority was that it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. It was a losing proposition to tell a bright nineteen-year-old that he must cultivate his own sense of reason and conscience, then punish him for “indecorum” and “disrespectfulness” when he did so. Holmes’s skepticism about human certainty would be powerfully reinforced in the cataclysmic events that were about to close in on him and his fellow members of the Class of 1861. But the seedbed was prepared. In challenging the received wisdom of Harvard’s Professor of Natural Religion, Holmes was applying one of the first lessons of Boston Unitarianism’s moral thought.

  IT WAS THE looming confrontation over slavery that would throw Boston’s humane, patient, tolerant, and optimistic worldview into the crisis from which it would never recover.

  Slavery divided Boston. Its conscience was on one side, its financial interests the other. The mills that had made the Lawrence and Lowell families their fortunes ran on Southern cotton. Nearly all of Boston’s moral leaders opposed slavery, but Unitarianism’s abhorrence of social strife, and its optimistic faith in the power of moral suasion and steadily advancing enlightenment, offered the comforting hope to Boston’s financial leaders that they could keep their consciences without losing their fortunes, or vice versa. Slavery would end of its own accord when the South recognized its moral error; until then it would only stir “passion” and contention and risk hardening Southern opposition to fan political flames, as the more wild-eyed abolitionist preachers were beginning to do. Channing was typical of Boston’s Unitarian leaders in associating the abolitionist movement with the excesses of religious revivalism; they viewed the Boston Brahmin abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, with his fiery portrayals of the horrors of slavery and the evils of slave owners, as little more than an aristocratic demagogue.56

  The alternative to continued patient compromise was immediate disunion, and most of Boston’s civic and moral leaders, Francis Bowen and Dr. Holmes among them, supported the Compromise of 1850 that held the Union together by acceding to Southern demands on the status of slavery in the new territories and the capture and return of escaped slaves.57

  The bias in favor of not upsetting the status quo that was inherent in Unitarianism’s opposition to political activity was fundamentally conservative, however liberal its underlying moral views. The convenient hypocrisy of that straddle was growing increasingly untenable as the national crisis over slavery intensified following the Compromise of 1850. Emerson, already disenchanted with the cold rationality of Unitarianism, sardonically observed that “Boston or Brattle Street Christianity” consisted of “the best diagonal line that can be drawn between Jesus Christ and Abbott Lawrence.”58

  The provisions of the new fugitive slave law that the South had insisted upon as its price for remaining in the Union brought matters to a head. The Constitution required that any “person held to service or labor in one state” shall be “delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due,” but did not specify how it was to be enforced. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 permitted owners to cross state lines to recapture escaped slaves and bring them before a local magistrate or federal court to establish their ownership, yet gave slaves no right to habeas corpus, trial by jury, or the opportunity to testify in their own behalf. In response to the obvious abuses this invited, many Northern states enacted personal liberty laws designed to protect, in particular, free blacks whom slave hunters sometimes unscrupulously attempted to kidnap to the South under cover of the law.

  The new fugitive slave act went much further, establishing throughout the North a new office of federal commissioners
who could order a slave returned on an affidavit from a Southern state, without hearing evidence at all. Commissioners would be paid ten dollars if a certificate of approval was issued, five dollars if it was denied. Anyone aiding a fugitive or interfering with his return was subject to a fine of up to a thousand dollars. Federal marshals and deputies were required to assist in recapturing and returning slaves, with all expenses to be borne by the United States government.

  On April 19, 1851—the anniversary of the shots at Lexington and Concord that began the American Revolution, a grim coincidence not lost on Massachusetts—a black man named Thomas Sims who had been seized in Boston with the assistance of a huge force of police and troops arrived back in Georgia. He had stowed away from there on a ship a month earlier in a bold bid for his freedom. In Savannah’s public square, Sims was whipped thirty-nine lashes across his bare back.59

  “I do not think the blood of even Boston merchants could bear it,” said the Boston abolitionist leader and Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson. A week later, the Massachusetts legislature chose a fiery antislavery candidate, Charles Sumner, to fill the U.S. Senate seat of the retiring Daniel Webster, the moderate Whig who had engineered the Compromise of 1850. It was the first crack in the “State Street power” of Boston’s financial captains that had been holding back the abolitionist tide.60

  Four years later, another overwhelming display of federal power on behalf of the slave owners sent Boston over the edge. Anthony Burns, an escaped slave from Virginia, was arrested in the city on May 24, 1854. This time Higginson organized a group of militant abolitionists in a desperate bid to free the captive. Armed with axes and pistols, a storming party broke down the doors of the courthouse before being driven back by a line of club-wielding policemen.