CHAPTER III

AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRAT

Oliver Wendell Holmes belonged to one of the most aristocratic families of Boston, and he seemed proud of it. But he was an aristocrat of the right sort. Said he: “I go for the man with the family portraits against the one with the twenty-cent daguerreotype, _unless_ I find out that the latter is the better of the two.” He said also: “I like to see worthless rich people yield their places to deserving poor ones, who, beginning with sixpence or nothing, come out at last on Beacon street and have the sun come into their windows all the year round.”

He inherited good blood through three lines, each of which was represented in his own name. The Oliver represents his Boston “blue blood,” which came to him from both his father’s and his mother’s family. One of his ancestors was Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Oliver, the distributor of stamps in Boston, whom the people hated so, though he was one of the richest of the old Bostonians, had coaches, a chariot, and negro slaves, as well as good sterling silver plate that exists in the Holmes and Oliver families to this day.

The Wendell stands for the old Dutch family of Wendells, who had moved from Albany to Boston, and who came originally from Embden, in East Friesland, just on the border line between Germany and the Netherlands. The Wendells are still a wealthy and influential family in Albany, solid old Dutch burghers. Two of Dr. Holmes’s Dutch ancestors were shoemakers; one was a fur trader.

Another of Holmes’s forefathers on his mother’s side was Governor Thomas Dudley, of whom the famous Cotton Mather wrote these verses:

“In books a prodigal, they say; A living cyclopedia; Of histories of church and priest, A full compendium, at least; A table-talker, rich in sense, And witty without wit’s pretense.”

Governor Dudley’s daughter, Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, from whom Holmes was descended, was the first American poet. In 1650 she published the first volume of verse ever written by an American. It came out in London, and was entitled “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America,” and so popular was it that it went through eight editions. Among the other descendants of this first American poetess were William Ellery Channing and Wendell Phillips.

The first Holmes in the genealogy was a lawyer of Gray’s Inn, London. John Holmes was born near Boston, and went in 1686 to help settle Woodstock, Connecticut. Holmes’s great-grandmother Bathsheba, the wife of David Holmes, was a most remarkable lady. She was famous as a doctor and nurse.

They tell a fine story of her daring, how once, in 1717, when the snow almost buried the houses after a terrible storm, she climbed out of the upper window of her house in Woodstock and traveled on snowshoes over hill and dale to Dudley, Massachusetts, to attend a sick woman. She was accompanied by two men, who held the ends of a long pole, while she held on in the middle.

There is another remarkable story told of her. Those were the days of Indian massacres. When the men went out to work they took their guns with them, leaving the women in the fort or garrison house.

Once the women when alone asked, “Who will go to the garden for vegetables?” Bathsheba Holmes alone dared venture out. She got her vegetables and came back, but not until years afterward did she know in what danger she had been. Then a solitary, decrepit Indian, broken in spirit, called at her door to beg for cider, promising to tell her a story if he got his drink.

She gave him the cider and he told his story. It related to the brave lady herself. He said that when she went to the garden for vegetables, on that occasion long ago, he had been hidden in the woods and had seen her, and had determined to kill her. He had bent his bow and aimed his arrow well, and in a moment he would have let it fly; but a mysterious power stayed his arm; he couldn’t shoot. When she had gone safely into the garden he called himself a coward and determined to have her life when she came out. But, as she passed on her way back to the fort, the same power stayed his arm again, and he wondered that he could not kill a squaw. He had always thought that it was the Great Spirit who held his arm and saved her life. It was in this mysterious way that God preserved the line that was finally to give us the “genial autocrat,” the “good doctor.”

Our poet’s grandfather Holmes was a captain in the French and Indian war, and a surgeon in the Revolution, dying a year or two before the close of the latter war.

So you see what a thorough aristocrat, of the true American kind, Oliver Wendell Holmes was.