Unraveling Oliver Wendell Holmes’ "The Soldier's Faith"
On Dec. 27, 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., then in his 15th year as an associate justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, encountered Edward Atkinson, a wealthy Boston entrepreneur who had become a pamphlet writer arguing for free trade and against “imperialism.” Atkinson was born 14 years before Holmes, and the difference in their ages affected their roles in the Civil War. Holmes and other seniors at Harvard College had enlisted in the Union army after the attack on Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861, whereas Atkinson, a more fervent opponent of slavery than Holmes, was too old for active duty, and spent the war years engaged in antislavery politics.
The choice of Holmes to deliver an address commemorating Memorial Day in 1895 was a logical one. He was not only a Civil War veteran, he liked giving extrajudicial addresses, having privately published a collection of them in 1891. By the mid-1890s he had also become slightly bored and restless in his judicial work, and welcomed other venues for public exposure. His father, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., had died the year before at 89, himself a popular lecturer in addition to being a famous writer, and founder of the Atlantic Monthly. On his death Holmes Sr. was the equivalent of a household word, and his eldest son, intense and competitive, felt obscure in comparison.