School of War - Ep. 11: John Matteson on the Civil War's Cultural Impact

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

John Matteson, Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, joins the show to discuss how the Civil War—and in particular the fall of 1862—left its mark on the nation's culture and on some of its most famous citizens. Times 01:25 - Introduction 03:28 - Fall of 1862 09:19 - Matteson's selection of Americans included in A Worse Place Than Hell 12:17 - Oliver Wendell Holmes and the 20th Massachusetts 16:13 - John Pelham 18:23 - Holmes, Pelham, and the battle of Antietam 23:56 - Holmes, Pelham, and the battle of Fredericksburg 27:23 - Valor and luck in battle 30:22 - The 20th Massachusetts in the battle of Fredericksburg 36:38 - Walt Whitman 40:17 - Oliver Wendell Holmes Recorded December 7, 2021

The fall of 1862 was one of the most harrowing periods in our nation's history, a period of furious maneuver between the armies of the Potomac and of Northern Virginia. It was bookended by the Battle of Antietam in September and the catastrophe of Fredericksburg in December, a loss that sapted Abraham Lincoln's political capital and endangered the overall cause of union. But these higher order effects of the war's progress were entangled with the consequences the fighting had for countless Americans, some obscure, some famous, and others to become famous in time, very famous. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, and others whose names we know for entirely different reasons than the war were directly engaged or deeply affected

by the Falls campaigns. These were individuals who would form the nation as the century moved on. How did the war form them? It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. School of War. Today, we are joined by John Madison. He is Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He's a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, which he received for Eden's outcasts, the story of Louisa May Alcott and her father. And he is most recently the author of A Worst Place Than Hell, How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg changed a nation. John, thanks so much for joining us today. Oh, I'm delighted to be here. Thanks so much.

You're a professor of English. How did you come to have an interest in the Civil War and write a book about the Civil War? I became interested in Civil War when I was 11 or 12 years old. And so it's kind of been a background obsession in my life for a very long time, but not something that I've previously concentrated on in my published work. So this for me was really very exciting to take the opportunity to explore a kind of lost love in a sense in getting this book project put together. I'd say also that I kind of may have grown up in the last 19th century household in America.

My parents were midwesterners. They were born in Minnesota and Wisconsin. My mother was a great collector of sort of Victorian memorabilia. She was really into that. And my parents also subscribed to the Christian science religion, which was founded right after the Civil War. And so I kind of grew up steeped in a lot of sort of 19th century. influences, 19th century ideas. Curiously enough, I think both of their children were really deeply influenced by that.

My sister is the curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, and her initial focus, really was on 19th century. So we're kind of a Victorian-era bunch, and so that's really manifested itself in all the biographies have written and of course in a worse place than hell. The book is, you know, it's difficult to describe, and I mean that in a complimentary way. I mean, besides the fact that it's really beautifully written, it is a kind of military history. It goes into some detail at the sort of officer level, a junior officer level, I should say, of what happens at TTIM and Fredericksburg and other places along the way in the fall of 62.

But it's, you know, much more than that, it's a group biography. It's a kind of cultural history. of the war. And you follow these, some of them quite prominent Americans through that fall and explore the effects that the war has on them and thus sort of on America beyond. And I want to get into those details. Before we do, though, maybe you could give listeners just a kind of sketch of the fall of 1862 in the Civil War. What, you know, kind of what happened at Antieta? What happened at Fredericksburg? Very big picture to orient us. The fall of 1862 is an important. moment in the Civil War, not only for military reasons, but also for political reasons.

It's the time in which Abraham Lincoln makes the decision to promulgate the Emancipation Proclamation. And obviously, you know, the freeing of the slaves was, you know, at, you know, at the core of the conflict between North and South. And so it was for Lincoln a very controversial, very risky endeavor. And in order to support that effort, that decision, he wanted very much to have a military victory for the Union forces so that he could really illustrate that he wasn't just talking through his stove by Pat, that he really was going to be able through the force of the Union arms to liberate the slaves in the South. So Lincoln is putting pressure on his then commander George B. McClellan to win a significant victory for the Union armies. And that doesn't

really happen. What happens is the Battle of Antietam, which takes place just across the Potomac River in Maryland. And it's the final conflict of Robert E. Lee's brief first invasion of the North. And Antietam is a battle that takes place during only one day, the 17th of December, 1862. It is the bloodiest one day in the Civil War. There are multi-day battles that are bloodier like Gettysburg, but for concentrated carnage, there's nothing that compares with Antietam. The battle really works out to be sort of a bloody draw. Lee does retreat back into southern ground, but

but it's not a resounding victory. It's just enough of a victory for Lincoln to be able to announce the coming of the Emancipation Proclamation. He announces it shortly after Antietam, but it's not going to be signed and it's not going to take effect until January 1st of 1863. So after Antietam, Lincoln is very frustrated with McClellan. McClellan had a great opportunity to defeat Lee and to pursue him into Virginia and to perhaps even bring the war to an earlier finish. McClellan fails. He's very timid. He complains at one point that he can't pursue Lee because his horses are fatigued.

And Lincoln famously writes back and says, well, what have you been doing that fatigues anything? And so McClellan gets fired. And he is replaced by a general named Ambrose Burnside, who's probably most famous now for his facial hair. because it's from the name Birdside that we get side burns. You know, need a little bit of fun. But Burnside takes over with this mandate to act more aggressively against Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. And Burnside concocks a plan that basically focuses on the city of Fredericksburg, which is between the U.S. Capitol in Washington and the Confederate Capitol.

Richmond. It's a railway center. It is of tremendous strategic importance. And so Burnside believes that if he can take Fredericksburg, then he can place the future of the Confederacy in immediate peril. And unfortunately, what happens is that Burnside, despite his aggressive tendencies, is slowed down for various logistical reasons in putting his battle plan together. And as a result, The battle of Fredericksburg turns out to be a complete disaster for the Union armies. They are slaughtered on moss attempting to charge up a hill called Maurice Heights. The Confederate infantry is poised behind a stone wall that is just the right height to place a rifle on for an infantryman. They also have their cannons blazing away from farther above on the hill, and it's a disaster.

And it's so much of a disaster that Lincoln afterwards is forced to reconsider briefly, whether he should even proceed with the Emancipation Proclamation. And he is so depressed over the outcome of Fredericksburg that he says, if there is a worse place than hell, I'm in it. And it's from that line, of course, that the title of the book has taken. And through this period and beyond, you follow these principally these five Americans, a couple of whom, I think, you know, more or less everyone will recognize their names, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Jr. Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, a couple others, John Pelham, Arthur B. Fulor, who were not as well known. Why are these five? Well, there are a couple reasons. One is that each of them represents a kind of moment in my intellectual growth. I became really interested in John Pelham, even when I was a kid, you know, of 12 or 13. John Pelham is a Confederate artillery officer who is utterly fearless and has a preternatural gift for artillery tactics.

And he becomes, he's referred to as Lee's boy artillerist. He probably never shaved a day in his life. He looks even younger in his pictures than he actually was. And at the Battle of Fredericksburg, he's still only 24 years old. So he is kind of a kind of a dashing. heroic seeming figure, despite the fact that, of course, he's fighting for a cause that, you know, a cause that, you know, everyone now regards as, or almost everyone regards as contemptible. So Pellon was kind of the first one I was interested in.

But then I went to law school, developed an interest in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. And his legal theories, which still really permeate American legal education to this day. after a few years as a lawyer, I gave up on that and became, as you know, an English professor specializing in 19th century America. And so, you know, very naturally developed an interest in Walt Whitman and later in Louisa May Alcott, who was the subject of my first biography. And so the last of the five kind of to come into my mix was the least well-known of the five, who's the Reverend Arthur B. Fuller, who's the younger brother of Margaret Fuller, whom a few more people at least know.

She was a prominent early American feminist, writes a book called Woman in the 19th century and is the most intelligent, educated woman of her time in America, possibly for a brief time, the most famous woman in America. But Fuller is interesting because he grows up in this prominent family, but is in something of a, he's a dreamer. He's not particularly assertive in the way that he lives his life. And when the war comes around, he's almost 40 years old

and still kind of having to prove himself as a man and as someone worthy of the Fuller family name. And so he joins the Union Army as a chaplain with, you know, eventually tragic consequences. But I've always found him really, you know, quite interesting in the role of that person who's really kind of not naturally cut out for what we would call heroism, but finds it within himself to join the army to become an outstanding chaplain and an astounding leader within the Union army. And at the very end of his life, this man of extraordinary courage.

Maybe let's start with Oliver Wendell Holmes. He makes a nice contrast, as you obviously know, with John Pelham in the sense that similar in age come from remarkably different kinds of American elites. So his regiment is the 20th Massachusetts. Let's talk about them. Let's talk about his world. What is the Boston of Holmes like? And how does it go to war? This is great to talk about it.

Yeah, the 20th Massachusetts, which sustains a higher percentage of casualties than only a handful of regiments in the entire war is actually known, as the Harvard Regiment, because so many of its officers are fairly recent graduates of Harvard College. And in fact, Holmes graduates from Harvard the same year the war begins. He graduates in, I guess, May of 1861 and is enrolled in the regiment just a few months after that. And Holmes is the definition of a Boston Brahman, right? And to explain that idea, you know, the intellectual, aristocratic, very old-line, very traditional Bostonian. In fact, the phrase Boston Brahman is coined by Holmes's father, Alvindal Holmes Sr., who is both a member of the medical faculty at Harvard and one of the most respected post. poets and authors in America at this time. So Holmes grows up being surrounded by the New England

intelligentsia. He's on good terms with Ralph Waldo Emerson. He's tied in with the rest of the Cocker crowd. His father is, you know, having dinner every Saturday night with people who now fill up, you know, the Norton Anthology of American literature. So Holmes, Jr. appears to be groomed for this very, you know, rarefied, sedate, comfortable life within the confines of aristocratic Massachusetts. And all of those expectations are thrown out the window when the Confederates fire on Fort Sumter. And so even having been raised to understand that the best thing that you can be is a kind of detached, somewhat wealthy intellectual, Holmes finds himself thrust into this really different role, which he's eager to get into. He's very excited about joining

the army, but then has just a horrendous career in the army, in which he's wounded at three different battles, in which essentially every one of his friends in the regiment is either killed or maimed sooner or later. And he comes to have a very different idea because of all of these tragedies about the nature of duty. And that turns out to be important in my book because Holmes as a legal scholar writes a lot about the kinds of duties that people owe to one another in society. It's at the basis of tort and negligence law, for instance. And so Holmes, you know, spends much of his intellectual life, although it's a very extremely varied intellectual life, thinking about the extent of duty. Is there a moment at which a person can simply say, uh-uh,

I've had enough no more. And Holmes reaches that point as a soldier. He writes home in 1864 to his parents saying that he feels that he has actually done enough. And it's very difficult for him to say this. But his experiences, and particularly at Fredericksburg, which we may want to talk about, convince him that duty is a somewhat different animal than the concept that he grew up with. I want to talk about him at Antietam and at Fredericksburg, but maybe first, let's do John Pelham. And tell kind of the same sort of story about Alabama in his world.

So Pelham also is a college man like Holmes, but Pelham goes to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which quite possibly at that time enjoyed a better reputation as a school than did Harvard. And perhaps justly so. Pellam wants desperately to graduate from West Point, and he is scheduled to graduate in that same spring of 1861, but then Alabama secedes. And it becomes impossible for him to remain at West Point. He feels that his greater obligation is to his home state. And so he departs from West Point just a matter of weeks away from the diploma that would have mattered so very much. to him. But for Pelham, aristocracy doesn't depend on intellect. It depends a great deal more on sort of chivalric values. He's much more a creature of what at least then would have been called

honor. He shows his aristocratic background in his athleticism, in his horsemanship, you know, all of these attributes that are not, you know, part of the northern idea of the elite, but are very much part of the southern elite. And so Pelham is a man who is seemingly from childhood, almost, you know, being prepared for a military life, you know, because he's out in the country more, because he knows how to shoot, because he knows how to ride. And, you know, had it not been for the Civil War, Pelham probably would have had a very quiet, career in the Army, possibly out on the frontier. But his innate genius for artillery tactics and for leadership might never have been tested, have been tested in the way that they were in the Civil

War. So Holmes and Pellum face each other, not literally, but in the sense of their armies facing each other at both Antietam and Fredericksburg. So how does Antietam go for the two of them? Well, Antietam for Holmes is a horrible moment because his regiment gets caught in an area of the battlefield called the West Woods, in which before they know it, they're basically being attacked on three sides by Confederate forces. And I've walked through those woods, which are well preserved. They're probably, presumably about the same now as they were that. And these are not woods you go into for a picnic. They're kind of creepy and there are a lot of vines on the ground. And there are poisonous snakes here and there. And it's also a place where you can't really see very well what's coming at you. And so what happens with Holmes's regiment is that they break ranks and they run. And Holmes runs.

And Holmes is, as he's running, is kind of laughing to himself. And the reason he's laughing to himself is that he was wounded once before. He was shot in the chest at a battle called Balls Bluff in 1861. And the Northern Press was trying so hard to make things look good and to put a bold, positive face on really every union skirmish in battle. Points to Oliver Wendell Holmes shot in the chest and saying, You see, the brave young boys of Massachusetts are shot in the chest because they are moving forward.

Never will they turn their back upon the enemy. And now Holmes has absolutely turned his back on the enemy. He's running for his life and he's wondering, you know, how is this going to look in the newspapers? And then an instant later, as he's running and sort of laughing in the slightly mad way to himself, a bullet fired by a Confederate soldier passes directly through his neck and miraculously manages to miss everything significant. It doesn't hit the windpipe. It doesn't hit the jugular. doesn't hit the spine. And Holmes is knocked unconscious for a while, but he's actually able to walk

off the battlefield. And for, I think, many of Holmes's fellow soldiers, this experience might have been an experience of the religiously miraculous. I was spare, you know, et cetera, and it must have been the hand of God. And Holmes is a little too much of a natural skeptic for that. And he realizes that if he had been, if his head had been turned in another direction, he would be a dead nap. And he has no way of accounting for this kind of randomness. And the lesson that Holmes learns is that there is a lack of logic in the natural universe. And there's a lack of logic in human relations. How could a rational species create, you know, such a, you know, a terrible situation as the Civil War? And so part of my claim about Holmes is that he becomes a lawyer because he's looking for something in the world that

makes sense, that has logic, that has form, that has a kind of intelligence to it. And he looks at the law and he doesn't find it there either. And so Holmes becomes this sort of lifelong skeptic, someone who is a non-believer in almost everything except randomness and force. And it's out of those ideas of randomness and force that he concocts his own personal legal theory. So it's really pretty interesting. It's a bringing order out of something that he perceives and acknowledges to be chaos.

So that's Holmes at Antietam. You asked also about Pelham at Antietam. Pelham at Antietam adds to an already strong reputation as an excellent artillery officer. And what he does is that his gunfire basically begins the battle. He sets up on the far left side of the Confederate formation and is very deft at moving his cannons. He doesn't have very many cannons. It's a small unit that he has, but his men are exceptionally trained, and they are, you know, Pelham at West Point, I should add,

was a boxer, and he knew something about floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee, and the importance of movement when you're battling an adversary. And so Pelham has this unit called the Stewart Horse Artillery that relies on rapid movement as well as concentrated force. And so at Antietam, he does this so well that the famous Confederate General Stonewall Jackson says, if I had a Pelham on each flank, I could beat the world. And Pelham actually, you said that Holmes and Pelham were not really opposed to each other.

Actually, at Tatum, for a while they are. The shells that are being fired into Holmes's regiment as they're advancing toward the Westwoods are coming from Pelham's guns. So in that instance, you have the Southern doctor's son, Atkinson Pelham's father was a doctor, trying to kill the son of the Union doctor. Let's stay with these two and skip forward to Fredericksburg. And Teatim, as you described earlier, is a bit of a stalemate. The North claims it for a victory a few months later.

It's December. They're facing each other. These two armies are facing each other across the Rappahannock. Maybe we can start with Pelham, who has one of the most famous episodes of his career a few days into this battle, correct? Right. Yeah. If you are reading a sort of general history of the Civil War, there's a very important. there's a good chance that John Pelham will be mentioned once and maybe twice.

And the first time he will be mentioned typically is at the Battle of Fredericksburg. And the reason for this is that, for one thing, you know, Pelham's engagement with the Union forces begins the fighting on the 13th of December 1862. But it's in this very kind of theatrical, almost operatic sort of way in that the left flank of the Union Army, what was called the Left Grand Division, is advancing toward the area where Stonewall Jackson's men are lined up and entrenched. Jackson's men need more time to prepare themselves for the Unionist assault. Pelham volunteers to take a single cannon out to a really almost unprotected spot, at least unprotected by other Confederate troops. The terrain is somewhat in his favor. But he takes this one cannon and using the kind of rapid fire

speed that his well-trained men are able to employ. And by moving the cannon judiciously from moment to moment, he's able to create the illusion on the part of the Union troops that they're being attacked by an entire battery, by, let's say, eight cannons instead of by one. And the move is so audacious and so surprising that it so's great consternation in the Union ranks and causes a delay in their advance of something around about an hour, which is a crucially important, you know, interval of time for Jackson's infantry to prepare themselves finally for the coming assault. And Pelham is told repeatedly by his commanding officer, Stuart, come back, come back, don't you cut off the assault. And Pelham keep sending messages back saying, I am doing first rate,

I can hold my ground. And finally, when an order comes from Jackson himself, Pelham withdraws. And the leader of the Army of Northern Virginia, the famous General Robert E. Lee, observes this action through field glasses and says, you know, quite famously, it is wondrous to see such courage in one so young. And from that moment, Pelham becomes known as the gallant Pelham. That becomes the nickname that follows him for the rest of his time on the war, which is sadly quite short. And so he becomes this kind of matinee idol hero for this very brief moment. And it is by far the pinnacle of his career.

You express throughout the book admiration for his obvious courage, but you also at times, you seem skeptical of the reputation that you just described that comes from it. And you sort of confront this question of valor and luck and military efficiency in luck. maybe is another way of describing the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the thing um things that are assumed to be brilliant because they succeed might easily not have succeeded yeah that's that's really good point in fact one of my if i can pat myself on the back for a second one of my favorite lines in the book is can a man have a genius for rolling dice um and and you know there's there's a lot of divided

opinion about pelham uh in particular as to whether he was just ordinarily lucky, or whether it was the training of his men and his preternatural skills, as I've mentioned, as a master of artillery tactics, that the really gets him through these situations. I tend to come down on the side of skill because he is, you know, he rolls the dice quite a few times. He's always very audacious. And yet the people who know him best argued that, or who knew him best, argued that the risks that he took were generally very measured risks and that he understood on a kind of fundamental level, you know, what he was getting into and how he was going to get himself out of it and the kind of effect that he was going to have in a given engagement.

Of course, we know with Pelham that his luck runs out dramatically just three months after the Battle of Fredericksburg when he's cut down by a union shell fragment at the Battle of Kelly's Ford. And Pelham hasn't had a scratch up until that point, and it's remarkable because most of the other people that I talk about at length in the book have either been killed or suffered considerable injuries. even within the first two years of the war. And so when Pelham is lost, it comes as a great shock because he had built up this kind of aura of invincibility that people around him seemed to observe and kind of extended in their minds to the Confederate cause in general.

And once Pelham was gone, there's a kind of exuberance that goes out of the Army of Northern Virginia and certainly Stewart's cavalry, to which Pelham is attached. A big hole gets punched in the idea that the Confederate victory is inevitable. That hole gets bigger at the beginning of May when Stovald Jackson is also killed. Switch to the Union side of Fredericksburg. I mean, this is for a phase of the battle.

Urban warfare of a kind that probably most people don't associate with the silver war in their in their minds eye. You know, you think of the big grassy fields and fences and things like that, but a lot of the fighting happens right in the center of the town. So let's talk about the 20th Massachusetts and in the union at Fredericksburg. The idea of the Burnside's battle plan was that he was going to have engineers build pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock. It was going to send his infantry across on these pontoon bridges. It doesn't work out for him at all because the the riverfront on the Fredericksburg side of the river is occupied by the Confederacy and is infested with sharpshooters from windows, from doorways, from anywhere that they can fire from. And the

engineers can't get more than about a third of the way across the river with their bridge building. And so Burnside, his subordinates at least, decide that the way to accomplish the plan is to train a lot of Union artillery, not on traditional military targets, but on the town itself. And we think in the Civil War about Sherman's March to the Sea and the targeting of civilian locations. Fredericksburg is really the first time when the Union Army concentrates an assault on a town. And it has a military objective is to drive out the sharpshooters. But it's really the first time that the war starts to turn away from, you know, the kind of battle we usually think about, as you mentioned, with the open fields and the forests and the trees and the hills and so forth. And it becomes this door-to-door guerrilla fight that's been preceded by this bombardment of a town.

So that's kind of the first of the first that takes place on the 11th of December. Another has to do with the fact that the attempt to build the pontoon bridges becomes for the moment abandoned. They get completed later. But essentially it gets decided that the way to get Union troops across is not to use the boats under the bridges as pontoons, but rather to use them as troop transport. And so these very awkward, boxy, hard-to-steer boats get turned into the vehicles for the first riverine crossing under fire in the history of United States Warfare,

the crossing of the Rapid Hennon, to Fredericksburg. And then the final first that takes place is this door-to-door fighting in the town of Fredericksburg, house to house, in which nobody really has any experience whatsoever. And so this effort is carried out at first at least by three union regiments. It's the 7th, Michigan, the 19th Massachusetts, and the 20th Massachusetts. The 19th Massachusetts that day has somebody tagging along, and that's the Reverend Arthur Fuller, who was the chaplain of the 16th, Massachusetts.

But on the day of the battle, Fuller actually, he's been ill, he's had malaria, he's about to be sent home, well, sent to basically a non-combat assignment because he just can't physically handle the wear and tear of being on the front lines. But Fuller now realizes this is his last chance to prove himself. And so he puts on a captain's coat,

He picks up, you know, a gun. He hasn't fired a gun since he was a teenager. But he kind of, he sneaks on board one of these boats. The 19th Massachusetts crosses the river. And there's a, you know, a captain of that regiment who suddenly sees this, this man who doesn't look like a soldier next to him saying, sir, I must do something for my country. What shall I do? And, and the, the captain says, well, you know, you.

you're here and knock yourself out. There's a spot over there. And so the Reverend Arthur Fuller, who by the way, has only one eye, he lost an eye as a child. So you've got this one-eyed, malarial man of the cloth doing what he can for the union. And we talked about, you know, luck versus expertise with Pelham. There's a similar debate over Fuller, was this courage of falling. And Fuller actually doesn't fare well in that moment. But the other story, concerns the 20th Massachusetts, as you said. And we know that this was Holmes's regiment. And Holmes writes later and gives a speech about

the courage of another of the officers in his regiment, somebody by the name of Henry Livermore Abbott. And in his speech about Abbott, Holmes says, if you had seen him out in front of the troops, dangling his sword as if it were came, and showing none of me no fear, you would know the meaning of courage, et cetera, et cetera. What's ironic about it, of course, is that Holmes wasn't there. He didn't see it happen because he was in a hospital tent with a horrible case of dysentery

and basically never crossed the river at the Battle of Fredericksburg, which was one of those, you know, engagements in which the 20th Massachusetts got other reslaughtered. In fact, the officer who stood in Holmes' place, essentially at this battle was shot dead in the street fight. And so Holmes emerges from Fredericksburg with these doubts about the nature of duty, with these doubts about the nature of destiny, and with this oppressive guilt of the survivor that follows him, I would argue, for the rest of his life. It's a very long lie that goes into the 1930s. Let's come back to Holmes in just a minute, but in the few minutes we have left before that. Let's

Let's zoom out and talk about Walt Whitman, who is, I guess we could generously say he's working as a journalist in New York at the time. It might be a little more accurate to say he's bumming around. But as you document, he is in a way pulled into the war by Fredericksburg. How does that happen? Walt, you know, at the beginning of the war, doesn't really know what to do because he's a somewhat older man. He's really not fit for combat. And he ends up spending the first year and a half of the war, as you say, doing journalistic work, but spending a lot of time in a dive bar in lower Manhattan, really not knowing what to do in defense of his beloved country,

his nation of nations that he regards as the greatest in the world, but for whom he now has no skill set to be helpful. He has, however, a younger brother, about 10 years younger, George Washington Whitman. And George Whitman is the anti-Walt. George is not literary. He's barely literate in terms of his ability to spell and so forth. So he writes some entertaining letters. And George is a hero at Antietam. He leads his regiment, the 51st, New York, across the structure known as Burnside's Bridge at a critical

moment in the fighting. And George is also with his regiment, the 51st, at Antietam, or rather at Fredericksburg as well. And at Fredericksburg, George is wounded. And it turns out to be a superficial wound, but it gets reported in the New York papers, and there are no details given. Walt, a couple of days after the battle, sees a listing of a wounded officer from the 51st who has identified as George W. Witt Moore. Walt says that's got to be a misspelling. That's got to be George. In fact, it is. And so Walt immediately throws some belongings into a police, heads off to the train station, goes down to the battlefield, gets his pocket pick in Philadelphia. He ends up actually not an issue at the battlefield, but stuck in Washington, D.C., with no money going from hospital

to hospital desperately trying to find George. He encounters a couple of friends, who stake him to some money, get him a pass so he can go down to Falmouth, which is where the Union Army is across the river from Fredericksburg. And he's reunited with George. But what matters most is that Walt now gets an understanding of what he can do because he sees wounded there and he reads to them and he writes letters for them. And he discovers, hey, the way that I can help is as a nurse. he goes back to Washington, D.C., right around New Year's, 1863, gets himself a subsistence job in the government,

and spends almost the rest of the war giving aid and comfort to the sick and wounded in the Washington hospitals. And his notebooks become filled up with things that look like a Santa Claus list, right? Some jam for this guy, some apples for this guy. Oh, this guy wants some tobacco. This fellow would really like something good to read. And so he becomes kind of the Santa Claus of the union hospitals. And in that way fulfills whatever destiny he may have had in support of his beloved union. So I want to finish with Holmes.

Maybe you could help us think through the broader effect of the violence of the war. With Holmes, I mean, you've painted this picture for us briefly of a man who, you know, you're a lawyer and you've given serious thought to the law, the man who gets this kind of bleak metaphysics almost out of out of the war and then applies it in a very influential and important career. Is that a phenomenon that goes beyond Holmes? Is the trauma of the war is something that affects America for the worse? I mean, obviously, we were all grateful for the political outcome of the war and think that affected America for the better. But is there something dark that lasts past the war as well? Yeah, I would argue that there definitely is.

And you could talk about it in terms of, you know, a kind of national loss of innocence. National innocence is something that is curiously renewable, by the way. America has lost its innocence many times over. But I think never with so much force and in such a jarring way as resulted from the Civil War. You look at American writing before the Civil War. and so forth. And it's the period of transcendentalism, this period of, you know, this kind of emersonian optimism and a belief in progress and in the power of the unseen and the power of the ethereal. And the civil war changes the American understanding of the nature of power,

that it is now understood that wars are not won by principles, they're won by firepower. and that God tends to favor the larger battalions. And God also, it seems, favors the wealthy and the powerful in civilian life as well. And so the era following the Civil War is one of kind of widespread cynicism. And there are people like Whitman who still try to hang on very powerfully to this sense of ideal. And the ideal is not dead in Holmes either. He can talk very, very rapturously about the kind of courage and nobility that is required to march according to orders that you don't understand that may very well lead to your death. He loves and reveres the kind of courage that he saw on the battlefields. But he also realizes that courage is not a ticket to an easy life. Courage is not even a ticket to survival. Okay. What he now, understands, as I mentioned earlier, is that there is no benevolent logic to the universe, that things do take place more or less at random, and outcomes are determined by power, much more than

they're determined by good intentions. And this general idea becomes the foundation, or one of the foundations of Holmes' ideas as a lawyer and much more importantly as a judge and as a legal scholar, because he has seen that there is immense pain and evil in the world and he knows that it cannot be eliminated. The only thing that you can do about that pain is try to reduce it somewhat and spread it around in a way that is socially optimal. And so Holmes's jurisprudence is not one about doing right. It's a bit it's much more pragmatic than that you know he writes that the life of the law has not been logic its experience and and shot through Holmes's understanding of how a society functions you know is this you kind of you know you in some ways a little bit repellent strand

of of you know honoring power above principle and we see this most most prominently perhaps in a case I don't discuss in the book, which is Buck v. Bell, which is the eugenics kicks for which Holmes is now somewhat reviled and understandably so. It's the one in which he says from the United States Supreme Court bench, three generations of imbeciles is enough. And unfortunately, that seems to be the quotation that follows him now through history. One of the many great American figures who has unfortunate blind spots when it comes to some fundamental principles of humanity. John Madison. This was absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for joining. It has been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

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