ABSTRACT
The Civil War was, for Oliver Wendell Holmes, unfinished business. That was not entirely due to the trauma of the experience, although it certainly was traumatic. In later life, Holmes sometimes used its physical trauma as a psychological prop, a means of converting misfortune into a source of satisfaction. Holmes apparent silence on the subject was partly because his Civil War experiences were so disjointed. Over the three years that he was with the Twentieth Massachusetts, almost a third of that time was spent away from it, either recovering from injury or on recruitment drives. He had ample opportunity, therefore, to discuss in person with friends and family back in Boston at least some of the issues that other soldiers committed to paper and thereby to posterity. Exacerbating the difficulty for scholars searching for evidence of Holmes' thinking is the fact that Holmes undertook some fairly rigorous post-war editing of his correspondence from the front and his diary.
