Description:

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Writes Friend Admiral Bunce

"I...only wish that the time might come when we could go afishing together once more."

This warm letter from Massachusetts Supreme Court and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to Admiral Francis M. Bunce regrets not seeing him while he was in Boston and wishing they could go fishing or for a drive together.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR., Autograph Letter Signed, to [Francis M. Bunce], September 2, 1895, Boston, Massachusetts. 2 pp., 5" x 8". Expected folds; very good.

Complete Transcript
My address is / Court House, Boston
Beverly Farms
Sept. 2, 1895
My dear Admiral
I must send you a line to say how sorry I am that you should be so near and yet I fail to see you. I knew that it would be no use to ask you here and so did not go through the form. I am more than glad to know of your rise in the service and only wish that the time might come when we could go afishing together once more, or for want of that, could drive together and have a talk.
If I had known your address I should have bored you with a speech or two of mine before this.
Sincerely yours
O. W. Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935) was born in Boston to prominent writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and abolitionist Amelia Lee Jackson. He graduated from Harvard College in 1861, and in July received a commission in the 20th Massachusetts Infantry. He saw considerable combat, was wounded three times, and nearly died of dysentery. He was promoted to colonel while recovering from his third wound but thereafter served as an aide to General Horatio Wright. He mustered out in July 1864 and entered Harvard Law School, graduating and gaining admission to the bar in 1866. He traveled in Europe and then established a law practice in Boston. In 1872, he married his childhood friend Fanny Bowditch Dixwell (d. 1929), but they never had children. He frequently visited England during the social season and formed several romantic friendships with women of the English nobility, including Lady Clare Castletown of Doneraile Court in Ireland. He practiced admiralty and commercial law in Boston for fifteen years and edited the new American Law Review. He published The Common Law, a series of lectures, in 1881, a volume that remains in print. After briefly serving as a professor at Harvard Law School, in December 1882, he was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Eight months later, he became Chief Justice. In December 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Homes as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. When he resigned in 1932, he was the oldest justice in the Court's history. Holmes was known for his pithy opinions and embodiment of the common law; he is frequently considered one of the greatest justices in American history. Although he wrote 852 majority opinions and only 72 separate opinions, he became known as "The Great Dissenter" for his prescient dissenting opinions.

Francis Marvin Bunce (1836-1901) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1857. He was promoted to lieutenant by the beginning of the Civil War and participated in the Union blockade of the Confederacy as part of the Gulf Squadron and then served as executive officer of the gunboat USS Penobscot during the siege of Yorktown in the Peninsula Campaign. He later supported the attack on Morris Island and Fort Wagner outside Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. In 1863, he participated in the siege of Charleston aboard the monitor USS Patapsco. He later served on or commanded several other monitors for the remainder of the war. After the war, he commanded the monitor USS Monadnock in its voyage around Cape Horn to San Francisco, the first extended ocean voyage by a monitor. Over the next three decades, he alternated land and sea duty and gained promotion to captain (1883), commodore (1894), and acting rear admiral (1895), when he took command of the North Atlantic Squadron. He favored training ships to act as a squadron rather than individually and the outbreak of the Cuban War of Independence heightened tensions with Spain. In 1897, he took command of the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn, from which he sent the battleship USS Maine to Key West, Florida, from which it was deployed to Havana, where its explosion triggered the Spanish-American War. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1898 and retired from the Navy at the statutory retirement age of 62 on December 25, 1898.

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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