John Codman Ropes

It would be difficult to find a combination of more attractive qualities in any one man than those existing in John Codman Ropes, who died in Boston last October universally lamented. As a member of a distinguished firm of lawyers, which has contributed to the Faculty of Harvard and to the Bench of Massachusetts, he stood in the foremost rank of the Boston Bar. But he will perhaps be better remembered as a competent military critic and as the historian of the Civil War. Although debarred by physical reasons from service in the field, while his friends and contemporaries were at the front, his ardent, patriotic impulses found vent in services to those engaged in active military operations, to the wounded in hospitals, and in care of the soldiers’ families, while he followed every movement of the contending armies down to the minutest detail, and was universally admitted to be the best informed civilian in the country about the military situation throughout the War.

He contributed to Scribner’s series of the histories of its campaigns a volume entitled “The Army under Pope,” following it by a detailed study of Napoleon and the Waterloo campaign, the results of which were publications entitled “The First Napoleon,” “The Waterloo Campaign,” and an Atlas of Waterloo. He had published two volumes of his “History of the Civil War,” which was conceded a prominent place among the histories of the United States, when his untimely death closed his useful and brilliant career.

He was a fine type of the product which Harvard University has contributed to the country; ripe in scholarship, thoroughly equipped in the principles of his profession, widely accomplished, a leader in intellectual, social companionship, who always wore the roses of youth upon him, and was a gentleman to his fingertips. He was especially fond of young society, and it was his custom to entertain weekly at dinner undergraduates of Harvard, who retain, with all his acquaintances of a lifetime, a sweet and loving remembrance of him, and sadly exclaim in unison:

“Come back, oh! friend whose life is ended,

Come back with all that light attended

Which seemed to darken and decay

When you arose and went away.”

Henry E. Howland
1900 Century Association Yearbook