On May 30, 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. delivered the following remarks to the John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army of the Republic chapter. This speech is best known for Holmes's famed quote, "in our youth our hearts were touched with fire," but the entire address is noteworthy for Holmes's moving eloquence and his ability to powerfully convey the meaning behind Memorial Day.
Holmes himself was a seasoned veteran of the Civil War, having been wounded in several engagements, including the Battle of Antietam. On the morning of September 17, 1862, Holmes's regiment, the 20th Massachusetts, was engaged in a fierce fire fight in the West Woods. Amidst the melee and confusion of battle that morning, with Confederates sweeping up the Federal flank, Holmes was wounded in the neck. His story of suffering and survival is a harrowing one, and one perhaps best told in a separate blog post. For today, Holmes's address in 1884 describing the purpose behind Memorial Day will suffice, showing how one battle scarred veteran of the war felt about remembering those who did not survive some of the worst days in the history of this nation.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935), Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, veteran of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and the survivor of a neck wound at the Battle of Antietam. Holmes Jr. is shown here in a photograph taken a few years before his death, sometime around 1930.
Not long
ago I heard a young man ask why people still kept up Memorial Day, and it set
me thinking of the answer. Not the
answer that you and I should give to each other – not the expression of those
feelings that, so long as you live, will make this day sacred to memories of
love and grief and heroic youth – but an answer which should command the assent
of those who do not share our memories, and in which we of the North and our
brethren of the South could join in perfect accord.
So far
as this last is concerned, to be sure, there is no trouble. The soldiers who were doing their best to
kill one another felt less of personal hostility, I am very certain, than some
who were not imperilled by their mutual endeavors. I have heard more than one of those who had
been gallant and distinguished officers on the Confederate side say that they
had had no such feeling. I know that I
and those whom I knew best had not. We believed that it was most desirable that
the North should win; we believed in the principle that the Union is
indissoluable; we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was
inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood
against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and
we respected them as every man with a heart must respect those who give all for
their belief. The experience of battle
soon taught its lesson even to those who came into the field more bitterly
disposed. You could not stand up day
after day in those indecisive contests where overwhelming victory was
impossible because neither side would run as they ought when beaten, without
getting at least something of the same brotherhood for the enemy that the north
pole of a magnet has for the south–each working in an opposite sense to the
other, but each unable to get along without the other. As it was then, it is now. The soldiers of the war need no explanations;
they can join in commemorating a soldier’s death with feelings not different in
kind, whether he fell toward them or by their side.
But
Memorial Day may and ought to have a meaning also for those who do not share
our memories. When men have
instinctively agreed to celebrate an anniversary, it will be found that there
is some thought of feeling behind it which is too large to be dependent upon
associations alone. The Fourth of July,
for instance, has still its serious aspect, although we no longer should think
of rejoicing like children that we have escaped from an outgrown control,
although we have achieved not only our national but our moral independence and
know it far too profoundly to make a talk about it, and although an Englishman
can join in the celebration without a scruple.
For, stripped of the temporary associations which gives rise to it, it
is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our
national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for
each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return.
So to
the indifferent inquirer who asks why Memorial Day is still kept up we may
answer, it celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act
of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies in
the most impressive form our belief that to act with enthusiam and faith is the
condition of acting greatly. To fight
out a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might.
So must you do to carry anything else to an end worth reaching. More than that, you must be willing to commit
yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to
foresee exactly where you will come out.
All that is required of you is that you should go somewhither as hard as
ever you can. The rest belongs to fate.
One may fall at the beginning of the charge or at the top of the earthworks;
but in no other way can he reach the rewards of victory.
When it
was felt so deeply as it was on both sides that a man ought to take part in the
war unless some conscientious scruple or strong practical reason made it
impossible, was that feeling simply the requirement of a local majority that
their neighbors should agree with them?
I think not: I think the feeling was right – in the South as in the
North. I think that, as life is action
and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and
action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
If this
be so, the use of this day is obvious.
It is true that I cannot argue a man into a desire. If he says to me, “Why should I seek to know
the secrets of philosophy? Why seek to decipher the hidden laws of creation
that are graven upon the tablets of the rocks, or to unravel the history of
civilization that is woven in the tissue of our jurisprudence, or to do any
great work, either of speculation or of practical affairs?”, I cannot answer
him; or at least my answer is as little worth making for any effect it will
have upon his wishes if he asked why I should eat this, or drink that. You must begin by wanting to. But although
desire cannot be imparted by argument, it can be by contagion. Feeling begets
feeling, and great feeling begets great feeling. We can hardly share the emotions that make
this day to us the most sacred day of the year, and embody them in ceremonial
pomp, without in some degree imparting them to those who come after us. I believe from the bottom of my heart that
our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments
gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of
chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of
peaceful life could be.
But even
if I am wrong, even if those who come after us are to forget all that we hold
dear, and the future is to teach and kindle its children in ways as yet
unrevealed, it is enough for us that this day is dear and sacred.
Accidents
may call up the events of the war. You
see a battery of guns go by at a trot, and for a moment you are back at White
Oak Swamp, or Antietam, or on the Jerusalem Road. You hear a few shots fired in the distance,
and for an instant your heart stops as you say to yourself, “The skirmishers
are at it”, and listen for the long roll of fire from the main line. You meet an old comrade after many years of
absence; he recalls the moment that you were nearly surrounded by the enemy,
and again there comes up to you that swift and cunning thinking on which once
hung life and freedom – “Shall I stand the best chance if I try the pistol or
the saber on that man who means to stop me? Will he get his carbine free before
I reach him, or can I kill him first?”
These and the thousand other events we have known are called up, I say,
by accident, and, apart from accident, they lie forgotten.
But as
surely as this day comes round we are in the presence of the dead. For one hour, twice a year at least – at the
regimental dinner, where the ghosts sit at table more numerous than the living,
and on this day when we decorate their graves – the dead come back and live
with us.
I see
them now, more than I can number, as once I saw them on this earth. They are the same bright figures, or their
counterparts, that come also before your eyes; and when I speak of those who
were my brothers, the same words describe yours.
I see a
fair-haired lad, a lieutenant, and a captain on whom life had begun somewhat to
tell, but still young, sitting by the long mess-table in camp before the
regiment left the State, and wondering how many of those who gathered in our
tent could hope to see the end of what was then beginning. For neither of them was that destiny
reserved. I remember, as I awoke from my
first long stupor in the hospital after the battle of Ball’s Bluff, I heard the
doctor say, “He was a beautiful boy”, and I knew that one of those two speakers
was no more. The other, after passing through all the previous battles, went
into Fredericksburg with a strange premonition of the end, and there met his
fate.
I see
another youthful lieutenant as I saw him in the Seven Days, when I looked down
the line at Glendale. The officers were
at the head of their companies. The advance was beginning. We caught each
other’s eye and saluted. When next I looked, he was gone.
I see
the brother of the last – the flame of genius and daring on his face – as he
rode before us into the wood of Antietam, out of which came only dead and
deadly wounded men. So, a little later,
he rode to his death at the head of his cavalry in the Valley.
In the
portraits of some of those who fell in the civil wars of England, Vandyke has
fixed on canvas the type who stand before my memory. Young and gracious faces, somewhat remote and
proud, but with a melancholy and sweet kindness. There is upon their faces the shadow of
approaching fate, and the glory of generous acceptance of it. I may say of
them, as I once heard it said of two Frenchmen, relics of the ancien regime,
“They were very gentle. They cared nothing for their lives.” High breeding, romantic chivalry – we who
have seen these men can never believe that the power of money or the enervation
of pleasure has put an end to them. We
know that life may still be lifted into poetry and lit with spiritual charm.
But the
men, not less, perhaps even more, characteristic of New England, were the
Puritans of our day. For the Puritan
still lives in New England, thank God! and will live there so long as New
England lives and keeps her old renown.
New England is not dead yet. She
still is mother of a race of conquerors–stern men, little given to the
expression of their feelings, sometimes careless of their graces, but fertile,
tenacious, and knowing only duty. Each
of you, as I do, thinks of a hundred such that he has known. I see one – grandson of a hard rider of the
Revolution and bearer of his historic name – who was with us at Fair Oaks, and
afterwards for five days and nights in front of the enemy the only sleep that
he would take was what he could snatch sitting erect in his uniform and resting
his back against a hut. He fell at Gettysburg.
His brother , a surgeon, who rode, as our surgeons so often did,
wherever the troops would go, I saw kneeling in ministration to a wounded man
just in rear of our line at Antietam, his horse’s bridle round his arm–the next
moment his ministrations were ended. His senior associate survived all the wounds
and perils of the war, but, not yet through with duty as he understood it, fell
in helping the helpless poor who were dying of cholera in a Western city.
I see
another quiet figure, of virtuous life and quiet ways, not much heard of until
our left was turned at Petersburg. He
was in command of the regiment as he saw our comrades driven in. He threw back our left wing, and the
advancing tide of defeat was shattered against his iron wall. He saved an army
corps from disaster, and then a round shot ended all for him.
There is
one who on this day is always present on my mind. He entered the army at nineteen, a second
lieutenant. In the Wilderness, already
at the head of his regiment, he fell, using the moment that was left him of
life to give all of his little fortune to his soldiers. I saw him in camp, on the march, in
action. I crossed debatable land with
him when we were rejoining the Army together. I observed him in every kind of
duty, and never in all the time I knew him did I see him fail to choose that
alternative of conduct which was most disagreeable to himself. He was indeed a Puritan in all his virtues,
without the Puritan austerity; for, when duty was at an end, he who had been
the master and leader became the chosen companion in every pleasure that a man
might honestly enjoy. His few surviving companions will never forget the awful
spectacle of his advance alone with his company in the streets of
Fredericksburg. In less than sixty
seconds he would become the focus of a hidden and annihilating fire from a
semicircle of houses. His first platoon had vanished under it in an instant,
ten men falling dead by his side. He had quietly turned back to where the other
half of his company was waiting, had given the order, “Second Platoon,
forward!” and was again moving on, in obedience to superior command, to certain
and useless death, when the order he was obeying was countermanded. The end was distant only a few seconds; but
if you had seen him with his indifferent carriage, and sword swinging from his
finger like a cane, you would never have suspected that he was doing more than
conducting a company drill on the camp parade ground. He was little more than a boy, but the
grizzled corps commanders knew and admired him; and for us, who not only
admired, but loved, his death seemed to end a portion of our life also.
There is
one grave and commanding presence that you all would recognize, for his life
has become a part of our common history.
Who does not remember the leader of the assault of the mine at
Petersburg? The solitary horseman in front of Port Hudson, whom a foeman worthy
of him bade his soldiers spare, from love and admiration of such gallant
bearing? Who does not still hear the echo of those eloquent lips after the war,
teaching reconciliation and peace? I may not do more than allude to his death,
fit ending of his life. All that the world has a right to know has been told by
a beloved friend in a book wherein friendship has found no need to exaggerate
facts that speak for themselves. I knew him, and I may even say I knew him
well; yet, until that book appeared, I had not known the governing motive of
his soul. I had admired him as a hero. When I read, I learned to revere him as
a saint. His strength was not in honor alone, but in religion; and those who do
not share his creed must see that it was on the wings of religious faith that
he mounted above even valiant deeds into an empyrean of ideal life.
I have
spoken of some of the men who were near to me among others very near and dear,
not because their lives have become historic, but because their lives are the
type of what every soldier has known and seen in his own company. In the great
democracy of self-devotion private and general stand side by side. Unmarshalled
save by their own deeds, the army of the dead sweep before us, “wearing their
wounds like stars.” It is not because the men I have mentioned were my friends
that I have spoken of them, but, I repeat, because they are types. I speak of
those whom I have seen. But you all have known such; you, too, remember!
It is
not of the dead alone that we think on this day. There are those still living
whose sex forbade them to offer their lives, but who gave instead their
happiness. Which of us has not been lifted above himself by the sight of one of
those lovely, lonely women, around whom the wand of sorrow has traced its
excluding circle–set apart, even when surrounded by loving friends who would
fain bring back joy to their lives? I think of one whom the poor of a great
city know as their benefactress and friend. I think of one who has lived not
less greatly in the midst of her children, to whom she has taught such lessons
as may not be heard elsewhere from mortal lips. The story of these and her
sisters we must pass in reverent silence. All that may be said has been said by
one of their own sex -
But when
the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even
despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did
I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened,
and fed without the aid of joy.
Then did
I check the tears of useless passion,
weaned
my young soul from yearning after thine
Sternly
denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to
that tomb already more than mine.
Comrades,
some of the associations of this day are not only triumphant, but joyful. Not all of those with whom we once stood
shoulder to shoulder–not all of those whom we once loved and revered–are
gone. On this day we still meet our
companions in the freezing winter bivouacs and in those dreadful summer marches
where every faculty of the soul seemed to depart one after another, leaving
only a dumb animal power to set the teeth and to persist – a blind belief that
somewhere and at last there was bread and water. On this day, at least, we still meet and
rejoice in the closest tie which is possible between men – a tie which
suffering has made indissoluble for better, for worse.
When we
meet thus, when we do honor to the dead in terms that must sometimes embrace
the living, we do not deceive ourselves.
We attribute no special merit to a man for having served when all were
serving. We know that, if the armies of
our war did anything worth remembering, the credit belongs not mainly to the
individuals who did it, but to average human nature. We also know very well that we cannot live in
associations with the past alone, and we admit that, if we would be worthy of
the past, we must find new fields for action or thought, and make for ourselves
new careers.
But,
nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its
experience. Through our great good
fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset
that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn
nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards
of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields,
the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who
come after us. But, above all, we have
learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look
downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice,
the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a
mighty heart.
Such
hearts – ah me, how many! – were stilled twenty years ago; and to us who remain
behind is left this day of memories. Every year – in the full tide of spring,
at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life – there comes a
pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death. Year after
year lovers, wandering under the apple trees and through the clover and deep
grass, are surprised with sudden tears as they see black veiled figures
stealing through the morning to a soldier’s grave. Year after year the comrades
of the dead follow, with public honor, procession and commemorative flags and
funeral march – honor and grief from us who stand almost alone, and have seen
the best and noblest of our generation pass away.
But
grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I
see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers
still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death – of life to which in
their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great
chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and
unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a
note of daring, hope, and will.
Dan Vermilya
Park Ranger
