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OT a few, I think, would be of the opinion that the strongly contrasted figures of Abraham Lincoln and the second Oliver Wendell Holmes were the two most creditable and encouraging embodiments which it has been the portion of the human spirit to experience in this country. Those holding that opinion would learn with the greater interest that once, in a unique and fateful moment of American history, those two met—the one a handsome towering lad in his early twenties, the other with less than a year of his course still to run—met and had salty and characteristic words with each other.

In vain you will search the Library of Congress for any record of that colloquy, and the only life of Justice Holmes then written—an extremely unauthorized biography by Silas Bent published in 1932—was the work of a man who appears not to have known that the meeting ever took place. I have reasons, however, for believing that it did and submit those reasons here as a memorandum for the convenience of the designated chroniclers now at work on that definitive biography of the great judge for which, with such patience as we can muster, the world is waiting.

The story came to me from Professor Harold J. Laski of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Of his exceptional qualifications as a witness in any matter relating to Justice Holmes, I need say no more than that, among the letters which have been turned over to the aforesaid biographers, there are close to six hundred which Professor Laski had received from the Judge during the eighteen years of their friendship. Wherefore at a luncheon given for Laski a few years ago in New York (and in spite of Hendrik Van Loon, who was bursting with other topics) some of us guilefully led the talk to the subject of Justice Holmes and were rewarded by many stories about him. At least three of these belong, to my notion, in the schoolbooks.

Well, one of those stories concerns an annual pilgrimage which the Judge used to make to Arlington—that bivouac across the Potomac where (having shyly entrusted Justice Van Devanter with the task of wangling the privilege for him) Holmes himself now lies buried. On September 13, in each year of the years he spent in Washington, he used to take flowers to Arlington because that was the birthday of General Sedgwick—Major General John Sedgwick, who, until he was killed in action at Spotsylvania, commanded the division in which Holmes’s own 20th Massachusetts fought some of its bloodiest battles. No private of the Civil War could have published his memoirs under the morose title Generals Die in Bed.

Now on several of these memorial occasions Laski played escort, and once, by way of prodding a little war reminiscence out of the old veteran, he asked a few such primary questions as must have reminded his companion that here was an Englishman with only the most languid and meager interest in American military history. Had the rebels ever come dangerously close to Washington? They had? Well, well. How close? Where were they? From the heights of Arlington the Justice was able to gesture with his stick toward the point of the attack on Fort Stevens.

Then he laughed. “Where were they?” he repeated reminiscently. “You know, the last person who asked me that question was Mr. Lincoln.” And he told of a day long past when, Lincoln having come out from the White House to inspect the defenses, the task of piloting him had fallen to Holmes. Lincoln too wanted to know just where the enemy were, and Holmes pointed them out. The President stood up to look. Now, when standing up and supplemented by his high plug hat, Mr. Lincoln was a target of exceptional visibility. From the rebel marksmen came a snarl of musketry fire. Grabbing the President by the arm, the young officer dragged him under cover, and afterwards, in wave upon wave of hot misgiving, was unable to forget that in doing so he had said, “Get down, you fool!”

Admittedly this was not the approved style for an officer to employ in addressing the Commander in Chief of the armed forces of his country. The youthful aide was the more relieved when, just as Lincoln was quitting the fort, he took the trouble to walk back. “Good-by, Colonel Holmes,” he said. “I’m glad to see you know how to talk to a civilian.”

Well, there was the story. I heard it with something like stupefaction. Hard to believe? Very. But—and this is a rarer experience—not so easy to disbelieve, either. I soon dismissed as untenable the convenient idea that Laski had invented it. Anyone who, as a reporter, as a lawyer, or even as a juror, has had any considerable practice in estimating the veracity of testimony would recognize Laski as a witness of almost phonographic fidelity.

The Justice himself, then. Had he been yarning? Or even stretching the truth a bit? Would he have been one—even as you and I—to report as his own an experience of someone else? You know, just to make it sound more authentic. No, not Mr. Justice Holmes. No one could for a moment accept that explanation—no one, that is, at all familiar with the workings of his mind, as that mind was opened to us in his legal opinions, in his chary and fastidious speeches, and above all in his letters to young Mr. Wu, which, having recently come to unsanctioned light in Shanghai, are only a whetting appetizer for the great feast that will nourish us when all of the Holmes correspondence is published.

No, I found it unbelievable that either Laski or Holmes had fabricated the story. Then how, in the name of all that’s probable, could we be hearing it for the first time after more than seventy years? True, the only Holmes biography in print then was written with less than the decent minimum of co-operation from its subject. But one would think that even an ill-equipped and hurried biographer could hardly have overlooked so salient an episode—if it were true.

If it were true! The startled Laski, subjected at once to a stern and skeptical cross-examination, could yield no corroborative detail. He had told all he knew. Suspended in time and space—like a lighted pumpkin on Hallowe’en—his testimony had all the innocence of a child’s. He didn’t know in what chapter of the Civil War it was supposed to fit, didn’t even know the story had not long been a part of American folklore. The task of vetting it must fall to others.

Now such a meeting as Laski described could have occurred, if at all, only during the sweltering hours of Early’s raid. That swift and desperate lunge at the capital was made in July ’64, at a time when Lee was besieged in Richmond and Sherman was on his way to Atlanta. Present and unaccounted for, however, were 12,000 rebel troops held in leash in the Shenandoah Valley under the erratic command of Lee’s “bad old man”—Jubal Early. What better could they do than try to catch Washington off guard?

Only a feint? Perhaps. But there was always the wild chance that they could achieve demoralization by actually taking the city. Certainly they were encouraged by the not unreasonable hope of finding its defenses manned only by civilians or, at best, by convalescent soldiers from the Washington hospitals.

But in the nick of time Grant (in addition to hurrying the 19th Corps, then homing by transport from Louisiana) detached the 6th Corps from the siege of Richmond and sent it to the rescue by water. The old-timers of that corps swarmed down the gangplanks even as Early’s men, who had been helpfully delayed by Lew Wallace at the Monocacy, were swinging along through the choking dust of the Seventh Street Pike.

Thus it befell that, when Early was in position to open fire, the reply came from parapets manned not by clerks and cripples but by veterans in fine fettle. So that was that. He departed with all convenient speed. True, he was only half-heartedly pursued. But a few weeks down the road, Cedar Creek was waiting for him—and a man on horseback named Phil Sheridan.

Of course Lincoln would have been up to his neck in the Early raid—and was. As the re-enforcements came up the Potomac he was down on the wharves to welcome them—such reassuringly seasoned soldiers—as they piled off the steamboats. You can picture them milling around him in the midsummer sunshine as clearly as if you were seeing it all in a woodcut in an old Harper’s Weekly. Then of course he visited the defenses, and equally of course it was promptly reported (and later sanctified by Nicolay and Hay) that he had to be warned not to expose himself to the enemy fire. This is always said when distinguished noncombatants come within earshot of guns fired in anger. I have even known a war correspondent to report it of himself. By cable. Collect. My story, then, is in the great tradition—and plausible enough so long as you leave Holmes put of it.

That indeed was the oppressive burden of the reports I got back from the two specialists to whom I first took it for proper confirmation. One of these was Lieutenant Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr., U. S. M. C., a marine who not only can read and write but, as if that were not disquieting enough, can draw as well. My second expert was Lloyd Lewis, biographer of Sherman, who for years has spent so much of his spare time poring over unedited documents of the secession that his wife has been known to lament that she lost her husband in the Civil War.

Both of these consultants verified my layman’s assumption that the episode must have happened, if it did, on the second day of Early’s raid. Both of them were so affable as to agree that it was a good story. They regretted only that, even to oblige me, they could see no way, offhand, of working Holmes into it. What would he have been doing in that show? Who had ever heard him so much as mentioned in the chronicles and yarns of the Early raid? At Bull’s Bluff, Antietam, Chancellorsville—yes. But these had been mileposts in the rough road of the 20th Massachusetts, a regiment here not even remotely involved.

Curiously enough the verification was supplied all unconsciously by Mr. Bent. In his life of the Justice it is recorded that after Chancellorsville—the Captain had been shot in the heel, and during his recuperation in Charles Street, Boston, his father found it a saving of time to keep track only of the visitors who did not address the hero as Achilles—after that convalescence he did not rejoin the 20th but, marked for light duty and breveted a Lieutenant Colonel by way of consolation, was assigned instead as A. D. C. to General Horatio Wright. That was in January ’64. In May, Wright was put in command of the 6th Corps.

So much Mr. Bent reports, and I speak of the verification as unconsciously supplied because one does gather from the context that he quite failed to identify the 6th as the corps which came to the rescue when Jubal Early advanced on Washington. So Holmes was A. D. C. to the General commanding that defense. True, he was mustered out on July 17. But the Early raid was over and done with four days before that. Wherefore it seems to me we have an a priori probability that Holmes was on the parapets when Lincoln visited them, and that as the General’s aide it would have been his job, rather than another’s, to attend the President on his rounds.

I wish we might have every word of what was said between them. I think it reasonable, for example, to guess that Lincoln recognized the young officer as the son of a more illustrious father. Did he tell him there was one poem by the elder Holmes which he knew by heart? That was “The Last Leaf.” Do you suppose he made good his boast by quoting a stanza or two?

I saw him once before,

As he passed by the door,

And again

The pavement stones resound,

As he totters o’er the ground

With his cane.

They say that in his prime,

Ere the pruning-knife of Time

Cut him down,

Not a better man was found

By the Crier on his round

Through the town.

Did he recite it all? He could have.

But surely it is now no mere guesswork that once, under great provocation, Holmes did call Mr. Lincoln a fool and that, far from being offended, Mr. Lincoln felt it was the mot juste.

That, of course, leaves still in the realm of guesswork the real perplexity—the question as to why we have not all known the story all our lives. To anyone disposed to speculate on that point I can only offer the perhaps helpful reminder that the Justice’s memories of the Civil War have never found their way into print, and that when on great occasions he spoke in honor of the 20th Massachusetts, his pride was not only in its valor and its wounds but in its reticence. It is my own surmise that in after years he heard of so many high-ranking warriors having rescued Lincoln from Early’s snipers that it took him a long time to recover from his distaste. More than half a century had to pass before he could bring himself to say in effect—and then only in rare confidences—“You know, it was to me that really happened. It was this way.”

Having re-enforced the story to my own satisfaction, I promptly invited contradiction by dropping it into a broadcast and also, in table talk, tried it out on sundry listeners who, until I brought up my batteries of evidence, received it with varying degrees of incredulity. At only one dinner table was it heard without any amazement. That was at the home in Cambridge of Felix Frankfurter, then teacher in the Harvard Law School to whom Justice Holmes bequeathed, if it had to be done by anyone, the task of writing a history of his life on the bench. Professor Frankfurter admitted that he had heard the story before—a reception always disconcerting to a raconteur. Oh! From whom had he heard it? “Why,” the professor said mildly, “I heard it from Justice Holmes.”

If it has been an unconscionable time in finding its way into print, at least it can be said that the evidence has been filed at last in a court long since recognized as having jurisdiction. For an earlier and somewhat more rapidly reported episode in the life of Wendell Holmes as a soldier was first printed in the Atlantic. You will find it—if you keep your back numbers handy—in the issue of December 1862. Of course I refer to the article called “My Hunt after ‘The Captain,’ ” wherein, while they were still a vividly fresh experience, the elder Holmes described his own adventures after the telegraph brought the news to Charles Street that his first-born had been shot through the neck at Antietam.

The article recounts his woeful search in the hospitals and through all the shambles of the roads radiating from the battlefield. That search was unduly prolonged because, in Hagerstown, the sightly casualty had been picked up by a household of pretty Maryland girls and by them had been so hovered over and fed and played to that it was quite five days before he felt equal to being evacuated. It was on a train bound thence to Philadelphia that the anxious father caught up with him at last. Dr. Holmes reported that meeting thus:

“How are you, Boy?” “How are you, Dad?” Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those natural impulses that made Joseph, the prime minister of Egypt, weep aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard—nay, which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he fell on his brother’s neck and cried like a baby in the presence of all the women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast with sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture.

Thus the Autocrat long ago. John Palfrey, the Boston lawyer who is at work on the life of Holmes off the bench, will, I assume, include that famous report and probably needs no reminder that the subject of it did not regard it highly. Everywhere the article was read with admiration, Holmes, Jr. dissenting. We may guess he felt his father had rather prettified the facts. That colloquy at the end, for instance. In response to the greeting, “How are you, Boy?” the son had not, as it happens, said, “How are you, Dad?” After all, he was already a scarred veteran of several battles. What he had really answered—or so I’ve heard—was, “Boy, nothing.”

Then there is a sequel. Are we to have that, too? More than half a century later, one of the girls called him up. Yes, one of the Hagerstown girls. And, in a great flutter, the old judge—

But that is another story. After all, it’s not my job to write the biography. That’s up to a couple of other fellows.