Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. survived a near-fatal wound at Ball's Bluff. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was a prominent American jurist who is among the most cited US Supreme court justices. He was a legal historian and philosopher who encouraged judicial restraint. He advocated the concept of “clear and present danger” as the basis for limiting free speech. Also known as 'The Great Dissenter,' he served as an 'Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932, and 'Acting Chief Justice of the United States from January to February 1930. Oliver Wendell Holmes twice escaped death as a young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls missed his heart and spinal cord by a fraction of an inch at the Battles of Ball's Bluff and Antietam. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt at age sixty-one, he served for nearly three decades, writing a series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting opinions that would prove prophetic in securing speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court's reactionary resistance to social and economic.
Shortly after graduating from Harvard University, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. secured an assignment as a Lieutenant in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Army. Holmes and his fellow officers in the 20th Massachusetts were Harvard graduates and close friends, and the regiment later became known as the "Harvard Regiment". Holmes suffered his first serious injury in the fighting at Ball's Bluff - the first engagement of the 20th Massachusetts. Holmes' regiment accompanied Devens across the Potomac and arrived on the morning of October 21. At about 4 o'clock. 30 minutes into the afternoon, Holmes was shot in the chest, a near-fatal wound. Holmes recovered, only to be wounded later at Antietam and again at Chancellorsville. Holmes went on to serve as one of America's most influential and longest-serving Supreme Court Justices, holding a seat until the age of 90. His miraculous survival became one of the facts about the Battle of Ball's Bluff.
