Chronology of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Life

March 8, 1841 Born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Oliver Wendell Hol-

mes, Sr., and Amelia Jackson Holmes. He is the eldest of
three children.
1857 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., be­comes editor of the At-
lantic Monthly and begins publishing his “Autocrat of
the Breakfast Table” stories in that journal. The stories,
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and collections of them issued as books, become vastly

popular.
1857 Enters Harvard College, his father’s alma mater.
April 14, 1861 Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter, South Carolina;
the Civil War begins.
April–May, 1861 In the second semester of his senior year at Harvard
College, enlists in the Fourth Battalion of Massachusetts
Volunteer Infantry and is posted on guard duty at Fort
Inde­pen­dence in Boston Harbor.
June 1861 Resolves to return to Cambridge and take final exami-
nations after hearing that the Fourth Battalion will re-

xxxvii

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 xxxviii CHRONOLOGY

main stationed in Massachusetts. He and several class-

mates are disciplined but are eventually allowed to
graduate.
July 17, 1861 Graduates from Harvard College and is named Class
Poet.
September 4, 1861 Having secured a three-­year commission in the Twenti-
eth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry,
leaves Massachusetts for Washington, D.C., to join the
­Union Army of the Potomac.
October 20, 1861 Shot in the chest in a battle with Confederate forces
near Ball’s Bluff, Virginia. A fellow soldier squeezes out
the bullet and gives it to Holmes. He is transported to
Boston, where he remains until late March 1862. He is
promoted from lieutenant to captain.
September 17, 1862 Shot in the back of the neck as his regiment retreats
from a Confederate assault near Antietam, Maryland.
The bullet passes through him. He is transported to
Boston, where he remains until November 1862, when
he rejoins his regiment.
December 1862 Confined to a military hospital near Falmouth, Virginia,
with dysentery while the Twentieth Regiment suffers
sig­nifi­cant casualties in a nearby battle.
May 3, 1863 Shot in the heel by a shell fired from a cannon near
Fredericksburg, Virginia. He returns to Boston and re-
mains there until January 1864, when he rejoins his regi-
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ment. He is temporarily transferred to the Sixth Corps

as a staff of­fi­cer.
May–­June 1864 The Sixth Corps is engaged in some of the bloodiest
fight­ing of the war around Wilderness, Spotsylvania
Court House, and Chancellorsville, Virginia. More than
50,000 men of both sides are killed in one week. Holmes
survives and resolves to leave the army when his enlist-
ment expires.
July 17, 1864 Discharged at Petersburg, Virginia; returns to Boston.
September 1864 Matriculates at Harvard Law School.

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 CHRONOLOGY xxxix

June 1866 Graduates from Harvard Law School, where he attended

lectures only from the fall of 1864 through the fall of
1865.
March 4, 1867 Admitted to the Massachusetts bar. He had joined the
Boston law firm of Shattuck and Thayer in September
1866.
1868–1872 Be­comes a contributor to the American Law Review, a
legal journal founded by his friends and fellow Boston
practitioners John C. Ropes and John Chipman Gray.
In  1870 Ropes and Gray relinquish the editorship of
the American Law Review to Holmes and Arthur Sedg-
wick, and in 1872 Holmes be­comes sole editor of the
journal.
1869–1873 Works on the twelfth edition of James Kent’s legal trea-
tise Commentaries on American Law. The edition is pub-
lished in 1873, with Holmes iden­ti­fied as the sole editor,
though he was originally retained as an associate editor.
1870–1880 Writes a series of articles for the American Law Review,
some of which he will draw on for The Common Law.
1872 Marries Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, whom he had known
since 1851, when he became a pupil at her father’s pri-
vate school in Boston. Shortly after their marriage,
Fanny contracts a severe case of rheumatic fever and is
bedridden for several months.
1873 Relinquishes editorship of the American Law Review
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and goes into law partnership with George Shattuck

and William Adams Munroe.
1879 Invited to deliver the 1880 Lowell Lectures.
March 3, 1881 The Common Law is published by Little, Brown and Co.
Fall 1881 Offered a position on the faculty of Harvard Law School
by Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard University.
He accepts, reserving the right to consider a judgeship
should one be offered. Eliot agrees to that condition. El-
iot is mistaken about the funding for the position, and
the offer is put on hold.

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 xl CHRONOLOGY

February 1882 The faculty position is funded, and he formally accepts

the offer. He teaches courses in Torts, Agency and Carri-
ers, Suretyship and Mortgage, and Jurisprudence in the
fall 1882 semester.
December 1882 Resigns his position at Harvard to accept a position as
Associate Justice on the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC)
of Massachusetts. He accepts the offer within three
hours of its having been made, consulting with no one
at Harvard.
1883–1902 Serves as Associate Justice and, after 1899, as Chief Jus-
tice of the SJC.
1888 Amelia Jackson Holmes dies at the age of seventy. Ame-
lia Holmes Sargent, the widowed youn­ger sister of Hol-
mes, Jr., goes to live with her father in his Beacon Street
house in Boston.
1889 Amelia Holmes Sargent dies at the age of forty-­seven;
Fanny and Holmes, Jr., move to his father’s Beacon
Street house.
1889 Travels to En­gland for the summer. Fanny chooses to
remain in Boston; she will not travel to En­gland with
Holmes again until 1907. At a party outside London,
Holmes, Jr., meets Clare Fitzpatrick, Lady Castletown,
the wife of Bernard Fitzpatrick, Lord Castletown, a
member of Parliament from Ireland. Clare is thirty-­four
years old at the time of the meeting.
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1891 Privately publishes a volume of his extrajudicial address,

Speeches, and sends Clare and Bernard Castletown a
copy. Clare invites Holmes to visit the Castletowns the
next time he is in En­gland.
1894 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., dies at the age of eighty-­
five. Holmes, Jr., and Fanny inherit his house on Beacon
Street.
1895–1896 Fanny suffers a second attack of rheumatic fever. By
June 1896 she is still weak, but well enough for Holmes
to return to En­gland that summer.

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 CHRONOLOGY xli

July–August 1896 Visits London and Ireland, spending time with Clare
Castletown in London and as a guest at one of the
Castletown’s estates, Doneraile Court, in Mallow, Ire-
land. (Bernard Castletown, whom Holmes has not yet
met, is not in residence.) Holmes is at Doneraile Court
from August 14 to August 22, in the company of other
guests. He returns to Boston from Queenstown, Ire-
land.
1896–1899 Writes a series of letters to Clare Castletown that com-
bine discussions of intellectual issues with outpourings
of affection. She writes some letters to him as well, and
sends a photograph of herself. Holmes destroys nearly
all of her letters and encourages her to destroy his. She
does not; in the 1940s they are found in a room in Don-
eraile Court and are purchased by Harvard Law School.
1898 Visits London and Ireland again, meeting Bernard
Castletown for the first time in London. He is again a
guest, along with others, at Doneraile Court. He writes
to Clare on returning to Boston in September: “Separa-
tion from you is made bearable to me by the belief that
we can now defy time and distance.”
1899 Clare Castletown has a serious riding accident in Ire-
land, affecting the sight in one of her eyes. After she re-
covers she and Bernard Castletown travel to South Af-
rica to assist troops in the Boer War. They are absent
from En­gland until 1901.
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1901 Visits En­gland again, spending time with Clare in Lon-

don and as a guest at Doneraile Court.
1902 Offered the position of Associate Justice of the Supreme
Court of the United States by President Theodore
Roosevelt, acting on the advice of Massachusetts Sena-
tor Henry Cabot Lodge. His appointment is con­firmed
by the Senate on December 4. Holmes will serve as an
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court until 1932, mak-
ing him the oldest justice to serve in the history of the
Court.

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 xlii CHRONOLOGY

1907–1913 Visits En­gland in summers, traveling with Fanny in

1909, when he received an honorary degree from Ox-
ford University. He spends time in London with Clare
and visits the Castletowns at Doneraile Court during
his 1907 and 1913 visits. None of the surviving letters
from Holmes to Clare after 1903 match the intensity of
his earlier ones.
1913 Having passed the age of seventy and having served on
the Court for ten years, is eligible to retire with a full
pension. He remains in active ser­vice for two more de­
cades.
1912–1931 “Discovered” by a group of young pro­gres­sive intellec-
tuals attracted by his deference to legislatures seeking to
redistribute economic bene­fits or regulate economic ac-
tivity, and by his commitment to protecting free speech.
Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter or­ga­nizes a se-
ries of articles in the Harvard Law Review in 1916 com-
memorating Holmes’s seventy-­fifth birthday. Holmes is
the first Supreme Court Justice in history whose indi-
vidual contributions to the Court’s decisions are made
the subject of law journal commentary.
1922 Has surgery on his prostate gland in July. He is well
enough to return to his duties on the Court in October
but is not fully recovered until January 1923. He has an
elevator installed in his house in Washington, and writes
to a friend that “it is the first moment of feeling like an
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old man.”
1924 Receives the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for “distin-
guished ser­vice to the American people in the develop-
ment of public law,” at that time the nation’s highest ci-
vilian honor, from President Calvin Coolidge. Time
Magazine puts Holmes on its cover, noting that he is “as
venerable as his father.”
March 14, 1927 Clare Castletown dies of a stroke at Doneraile Court at
the age of seventy-­two. Holmes describes Clare to a
friend as “one of my oldest and most intimate friends,”

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 CHRONOLOGY xliii

adding that her death “makes a great gap in my hori-

zon.”
April 30, 1929 Fanny Holmes dies from complications after a fall in
which she broke her hip. She is buried in a plot reserved
for her and Holmes in Arlington National Cemetery,
which Holmes had secured as a result of his Civil War
ser­vice. “For sixty years,” Holmes writes to two friends,
Fanny “made life poetry for me.” Despite the loss, he
makes it clear to Chief Justice William Howard Taft that
he intends to continue on the Court.
March 8, 1931 A nationwide radio broadcast celebrates Holmes’s nine-
tieth birthday. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes,
Dean Charles Clark of Yale Law School, and Charles
Boston, the president of the American Bar Association,
offer tributes to Holmes. He responds in a brief speech
that ends, “Death plucks my ear and says Live–I am
coming,” a line from an anonymous medieval Latin
poem, “The Syrian Dancing Girl.”
August 1931 Has what he describes as “a sort of cave in,” probably a
mild heart attack or stroke, at his summer home in Bev-
erly Farms, Massachusetts, where he had been vacation-
ing since the 1880s. The episode affects his ability to grip
a pen, and his correspondence, which has been volumi-
nous since he was appointed to the Supreme Court, di-
minishes sharply. He is nonetheless able to resume his
duties on the Court in October.
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January 12, 1932 Chief Justice Hughes, after conferring with the other
justices, urges Holmes to retire from the Court. Holmes
had been having dif­fi­culty keeping up with cases in the
fall of 1931. Hughes suggests to Holmes that his Court
duties are placing “too heavy a burden” on him. Holmes
agrees to resign, writing a letter to the other justices in
which he says that “the condition of my health makes it
a duty to break off connections” with them.
1932–1935 Continues reading and being read to by his law clerks,
and taking automobile drives and brief walks. He stays

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 xliv CHRONOLOGY

in Washington for most of the year and in Beverly Farms

in the summer. On March 8, 1933, his ninety-­second
birthday, newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt
visits him at his home in Washington.
March 6, 1935 Dies of bronchial pneumonia in Washington. He is bur-
ied next to Fanny in Arlington Cemetery, his tombstone
reading, “Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brevet Colonel &
Captain, 20th Mass. Volunteer Infantry, Justice Supreme
Court of United States.” Hers reads, “His Wife.” His es-
tate is valued at more than $568,000; he leaves approxi-
mately $290,000 of it to the United States of America.
That portion is eventually used to commission the Oli-
ver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme
Court of the United States, a series of volumes covering
the successive tenures of Chief Justices, eight of which
have currently appeared in print. When Holmes’s safety
deposit box is opened after his death, the cork from
champagne he drank after the publication of The Com-
mon Law is found, along with a small paper parcel
wrapped around two musket balls. On the parcel Hol-
mes had written, “These were taken from my body in
the Civil War.”
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Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., et al. The Common Law, Harvard University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/UNICAF/detail.action?docID=3300809.
Created from UNICAF on 2022-04-18 08:00:25.