Flag at the Peak

A Holmes Letter recalled by Catherine Drinker Bowen

In February, 1931, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the United States Supreme Court had a letter from President E. O. Holland of the State College of Washington. The boys out there wanted, it seemed, to celebrate the Justice’s approaching ninetieth birthday. Would the Justice be kind enough to write a word of greeting for the occasion?

The Justice would. Sitting at the desk in his upstairs study on I Street, in Washington, D.C., facing the mantel over which hung his sword with the colors of the Twentieth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, Holmes wrote a few lines in that strong, too swift handwriting that is the despair of his biographers.

I do not know of a more magnificent message. Nor does it detract from the message to recall that when the Justice wrote it he was alone in the world; his wife had died the year before, his friends were gone. There was no one, he said, to call him by his first name. Even the work he loved, the daily routine of the Court, must soon, he knew, be relinquished because of his failing powers. Here is what the Justice wrote: —

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES WASHINGTON, D. C.

February 24, 1931
For March 8
MY DEAR SIR:
On the eighth of March, 1862, sixty-nine years ago, the sloop Cumberland was sunk by the Merrimac, off Newport News. The vessel went down with her flag flying — and when a little later my regiment arrived to begin the campaign on the Peninsula I saw the flag still flying above the waters beneath which the Cumberland lay. It was a life long text for a young man. Fight to the end and go down with your flag at the peak. I hope that I shall be able to do it — and that your students may live and die by the same text.
Very sincerely yours,
(signed) O. W. HOLMES
E. O. Holland
President, State College
of Washington