Old Ironsides

In “Old Ironsides,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, despite his relative youth and lack of military background, or even a memory of the Constitution’s greatest moments in battle, presumes to direct his audience to the right course of action when it comes to the ship’s fate. It makes perfect financial sense to strip the weathered ship for parts. The problem, the speaker argues, comes from “the harpies of the shore” (Line 15), the Navy Department accountants too engaged, too fascinated by money to understand the wider, spiritual implications of wealth. In this, “Old Ironsides” epitomizes the elevated philosophy of a tight group of wealthy, conservative Boston families, among them Holmes’s, whose lives of privilege and influence directed much of New England culture in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Holmes himself in an 1860 article in The Atlantic actually coined the term “Boston Brahmins” for the city’s powerful elite class. Educated at the finest schools, these tightknit families developed a lifestyle that reflected their admiration for the trappings and affectations of British aristocracy without all the titles and rituals. However, Holmes’s term for this class drew on his study of Eastern thought—Brahmins, in Hindu society, were the elite class of religious thinkers and spiritual philosophers.