“Get down, you fool!” shouted Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 150 years ago today—July 12, 1864—as he pulled President Abraham Lincoln himself down behind the parapet at Fort Stevens, located just within the limits of the District of Columbia, during the fighting there amidst sharpshooter musketry. However, this exchange between a sitting president, who would be one of the most famous at that, and a future Supreme Court Justice is almost certainly spurious. Indeed, it was only exposed to a wider audience in a 1928 article in The Atlantic Monthly after Holmes had gained his prominence. Moreover, its source is what Holmes, who had volunteered predominantly to demonstrate his masculinity, told his friends. This apparent motivation to join and fabricate seems to have stemmed from that infamous masculine insecurity that still bedevils western society, something similar to false claims in the United States of having fought in Vietnam. On the contrary, the overwhelming evidence, both primary and contemporary, is that Major General Horatio Gouverneur Wright, the commander of the Army of the Potomac’s VI Corps to whom Holmes was an aide, implored him to seek cover. Also, the fact that it took much imploring to get him to comply, Lincoln, in the spirit of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt, was possibly seeking martyrdom that day. After all, he suffered from depression, and the summer of 1864 prior to the fall of Atlanta was very depressing for him as well as for much of the northern public, with no recent significant Union successes and the Kentuckian thinking he wouldn’t be reelected in November. Holmes and Lincoln were two great men with two great flaws. #AmericanCivilWar #militaryhistory
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 23:10:09 +0000
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