JOSHUA LAWRENCE CHAMBERLAIN CALLS FOR THE BAYONET

FROM BILL WHITTLE…

Hi everybody. Well the response to America’s Forgotten Heroes has been absolutely astonishing. The series reached #2 worldwide in all categories on Apple Podcasts. If you have not heard the audio version, then you really should listen to that first: The Daily Wire crew did an AMAZING job with music and sound effects.

Listen to America’s Forgotten Heroes on Apple Podcasts

Listen to America’s Forgotten Heroes on Google Podcasts

However! When The Daily Wire asked me to do a third series for them, there had to be a reasonable time limit for each segment: generally, right around one hour. I think every single one of my first drafts was at least twice that length, and some were three or even four times as long.  We shot this on video, expecting it to be released that way; however, notwithstanding the additional cost of video post production, the folks at Daily Wire decided it just played better with audio only, as theatre of the mind. Unfortunately, there were several references to photos built into the script that we shot, and they really do help tell each story. So here, as a Members-Only benefit, we will be posting the original versions of each of the seven segments, with key photos embedded where absolutely necessary. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. BW

This is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and his actions on July 2, 1863 form what is perhaps the greatest horseshoe nail story in American history. For those of you who haven’t heard it before, here’s little proverb called “For Want of a Nail…”

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

You can make the case — and I’ll try and do that a little later on — Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain saved the United States as we know it. Chamberlain was the horseshoe nail that was not wanting. The great “what if” goes something like this:

Chamberlain is killed in action early in the Civil War.

Someone else is leading the 20th Maine Regiment at Gettysburg.

That person does not have the calm courage to steady his men at Little Round Top.

Without that example, when the Confederates attack in force the 20th Maine breaks and runs

Because the 20th Maine breaks and runs, Confederates take Little Round Top

Because the Confederates take Little Round Top, their artillery defilades — that means, plows right down the length of — the entire Union line.

The Confederate bombardment causes the Union line to scatter.

The Union line scattering leads to Confederate victory at Gettysburg.

Confederate victory at Gettysburg means the Confederates march unopposed into Washington.

The capture of Washington brings Britain into the war on the side of the Rebels.

The British break the Union blockade of the South, the Confederacy wins the Civil War and gains their independence.

And old people can’t travel fro New York to Miami each winter without a passport.

All for the want of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

Now all of that may sound ridiculous, and maybe it is, but every link in the chain seems a near certainty. So now the question is, would the want of a Chamberlain have made a difference. Exploring this question takes us to the very essence of history, and not just the history of Lawrence Chamberlain, or the history of the Civil War, or the history of the United States.

This is the first episode in this series on America’s Forgotten Heroes, and if Colonel Chamberlain will forgive me, I would like to use his story to address a more important issue, and that issue is this:

Would there have been a United States without George Washington — him alone, that specific individual? Would Britain have sued for peace with Adolph Hitler after the catastrophic fall of France if it had not been for Winston Churchill? Would America have won the Cold War if Ronald Reagan had lost to Jimmy Carter?

This entire idea is known as the Great Man Theory, and it’s best described by the Scottish Philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote:

Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

This theory, this idea that the Napoleonic period would have been very different if Napoleon hadn’t… you know… been there, seems simple and obvious. And because it is so simple and so obvious, the entire idea has to be destroyed. In this cynical and unheroic age of ours, the competing theory is History From Below, very popular with left-wingers in general and Marxists in particular.

History From Below, also known as “people’s history,” is a term coined by French intellectual and historian Lucien Febvre. He was actually speaking in praise of another French historian, one Albert Mathiez, who had written a Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution. He commended Mathiez on writing “The history of the masses and not of starlets.” History From Below focuses on the people not mentioned in history: the disenfranchised, the oppressed the poor, etc., and argues that it is this enormous tide of the masses that makes things happen, then rich and famous people go in and steal the credit. What History From Below essentially argues is that if Adolph Hitler had been killed in World War One then the masses of disaffected Germans would have simply found someone else to lead them inevitably towards Fascism. Maybe without Hitler the Swastika would have had three legs instead of four, but it would have been more or less the same thing.

Now, History From Below appeals to collectivists, who think that historical figures are merely the flotsam carried along atop the unstoppable wave of the masses. The Great Man theory appeals to individuals, who feel that they are masters of their own destiny and what they may do, or not do, can change the world. Individual achievement, personal heroism, physical courage — all of that has to be removed in a collectivist world: deconstructed is the term. That’s why Howard Zinn, who described himself as “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist” wrote his enormously influential “A People’s History of the United States,” in which he says the Founding Fathers were just self-serving elitists interested in nothing other than, quote, “guns and greed,” unquote. That book sold over two million copies and made the anarchist socialist a ton of money. “A People’s History of the United States,” is now essentially the only history book to appear in American Schools and Universities.

And this is why the case of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is so interesting. I believe in the Great Man Theory, and I believe that Lawrence Chamberlain was one of those great men. But many modern historians claim that the entire horseshoe nail idea is nonsense, that if he had not been on Little Round Top that day then things would have continued pretty much as before. So before I present the case that Lawrence Chamberlain did indeed change the course of history, let’s take a look at evidence to the contrary.

I am often asked if there was a single event that launched my consuming fascination with history.

There was. It was 1990, and my friend had asked me if I wanted to come over for a viewing party of a new PBS documentary that was getting rave reviews. I had nothing else to do, so I said I’d love to.

The documentary was called The Civil War, by Ken Burns. The very first words spoken by the Narrator, David McCollough, tell the story of one Mr. Wilbur McClean. The opening major battle of the Civil War, First Bull Run, had occurred in the fields surrounding his house. An artillery shell had exploded in his kitchen. McClean knew there would be a lot more fighting to come on this axis between the two capitals of Washington and Richmond, so for safety sake he sold the house in Manassas and purchased one far away from the war, in a remote southern town called Appomattox Courthouse. Three and a half years later, that second house would be chosen as the site of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to US Grant. MoCollough said, “Wilbur McClean could rightfully say ‘the war began in my front yard, and ended in my front parlor.’”

And that was it. That story hit me so hard it took my breath away. How could it be possible that something that unlikely could be actually true?

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was the first person I chose for this series. I chose Chamberlain for holding the line with the 20th Maine at the Battle of Gettysburg; I chose him for his leading the charge down the hill to save the position, the battle, the war and the Union when all seemed lost. I chose him because my single favorite moment of Ken Burns’ Civil War series was when the first-person voice, under a photo of Chamberlain, says “Stand firm, ye boys from Maine, for not once in a century are men permitted to bear such responsibility for freedom and justice, for God and humanity as are now placed upon you.” And I thought, my God, to have been able to have the genius to see that in the moment, in the heat of battle. I swore to myself I would stand on that spot, and I have, many times.

I went looking for that quote from Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find it because Chamberlain didn’t say it. The entire passage is from a book called Army Life: A Private’s Reminiscences of the Civil War, by Theodore Gerrish a soldier in the 20th Maine, recalling his own thoughts at that moment nineteen yearsafter the fact. Certain that I had remembered it from Ken Burns’ documentary, I went back and looked at the episode. Even though Burns strongly insinuated that it was Chamberlain speaking, he never actually claimed it as a direct quote.

I did some more reading. I found historians who said that he not only did not lead the charge, he did not even orderit… the source cited being Chamberlain’s own letters to his wife. I read historians saying that if the men of the 20th Maine had broken and ran then the exhausted and decimated Confederates would have been stopped by the next regiment, the 83rd Pennsylvania, of the 44th New York, or the 16th Michigan. I read a history that concluded that Chamberlain and the 20th Maine’s contribution to winning the was by killing 100 Confederate soldiers who would not be able to fight in the future. I read that his order for his Union soldiers to “carry arms” and salute the defeated Confederates at Appomattox simply never happened, that is was all glory-seeking on the part of Chamberlain.  I read a great deal of history that said, in essence, that the Chamberlain myth was invented by author Michael Shaara for his novel, The Killer Angels, published in 1974, a hugely influential book that impressed Ken Burns enough to feature it in his Civil War documentary, and that would cause the myth to be further enlarged in the movie Gettysburg, which features Chamberlain’s stand at Little Round Top, and so on.

I thought about this very hard. Despite contemporary accounts, Frank Luke did not kill seven Germans with his pistol before being gunned down. John Paul Jones may not have said “I have not yet begun to fight!” but rather, as one historian asserts, “I haven’t as yet thought of surrendering, but I am determined to make you ask for quarter.” Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Airmen — the famed Red Tails, the only fighter escort squadron to never lose a bomber, did, in fact, lose about 25 of them.

And it left me wondering: is all of this kind of a… joke? Are the cynics right? Is this all just make-believe? The heroism, the imagery, the quotations, the story… all of it. Is all just a lie we invent for ourselves, so that we can feel good about how amazing we are? In our cynical age where every scarlet act of courage and heroism is deconstructed into grey ash, are any of the things that so inspire and move us actually true?

Yes, by God those things are absolutely true! And these men and these events become more amazing, not less, the deeper you look into them.

[aside]

Thank you for your patience, Mr. Chamberlain. I would like to tell you this man’s life story, without any falsehoods or embellishments, because the actual, undisputed things he said and did is a flashing saber to hack away at absurdity of History From Below and the single best example I know of to deconstruct deconstructionism.

Now if you’re trying to make the case that the Great Man Theory of history is correct, the first thing you have to do is determine if some individuals are, in fact…well, you know: great. So before we get to the actions on Little Round Top at the battle of Gettysburg, let’s look at Lawrence Chamberlains’s life both before and after that afternoon, to look for signs that might set him far enough apart from the run-of-the-mill 19th Century gentleman to affect the course of history.

First, we need to define what a “great man” is. My personal definition of “a good man” is someone who continually strives against temptation in order to increase the safety, prosperity and happiness of his family and friends. A Great Man is a person who does this on a much larger scale, influencing not only those around him but those people yet to come. It seems pretty obvious that goodness, and therefor greatness, is a measure of morality.

Back in 590 AD, Pope Gregory released his list of The Seven Deadly Sins. This was not something to be taken lightly. These seven attributes were not just bad for Catholics; and they weren’t just bad for Christians. These are universally evil behaviors; they’re just plan bad in every language, anywhere in the world and throughout all of history. After a great deal of reading and reflection, Pope Gregory managed to distill negative behavior into seven categories, leaving nothing out nor leaving any one of them to be more finely sliced. They are:

Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth (or laziness in modern usage), Wrath, (that would be uncontrollable anger), Envy, and Pride — the bad kind of pride. You could substitute arrogance if you want. Indulging in Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy or Pride would make your life worse, and it would make life worse for everyone around you. Just coincidentally, since I live in Los Angeles, I have heard of individuals who have managed to score a perfect seven out of seven, just over the hill in Hollywood. These behaviors were so egregious that continuing to practice them without confession, remorse and most of all a change in behavior would send you straight to hell. That’s why Catholics especially refer to them as Mortal Sins.

Fortunately, there are antidotes for each of the Seven Deadly Sins, and these are known as the Seven Cardinal Virtues: Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness and Humility. They are correlated to the Seven Deadly Sins on a one-to-one basis. Practicing Chastity eliminates Lust. Temperance, or self-restraint, is the cure for Gluttony. Charity negates Greed. Diligence, meaning the willingness to work carefully and persistently, is the antidote to Sloth. Patience mitigates Wrath, Kindness defeats Envy, and Humility curbs Pride.

If human happiness is our goal, then good men will — most of the time — practice the virtues and resist the sins. Great men will have those qualities in such abundance that they will inspire virtue in other people.

Oh, and one last thing: it should be very clear to everyone that practicing sin is much, much, much easier than practicing virtue.  Lust is easy; Chastity is hard. Sloth is natural; diligence is not. It’s easier to be angry than it is to be patient, and so on. Extreme virtue — the virtue of Great Men — requires enormous self-discipline. Virtue is a slog. Sin rolls downhill.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born on September 8th, 1828 in Brewer, Maine, just across the Penobscot River from Bangor. His mother, Sarah Brastow Chamberlain, was a great beauty, filled with warmth and tenderness. She would be the one to teach him how to listen to the sound of the wind blowing through the trees, and how he could identify each species by the sound of their rustling leaves. She would be the influence that would kindle his quick mind and sensitive nature, his remarkable powers of observation, his inner thoughtfulness and skill with language. He would go for long walks in the forest, taking a rifle with him, just as an excuse. He never killed for sport; it’s just that going out hunting was a lot less difficult to explain than a soft-minded stroll filled with introspection.

In a surviving photograph, Lawrence’s father, Joshua Chamberlain, Jr. looks like the Assistant Principal at Seventh Hell High School, holding spiked and electrified paddles in both hands, just out of frame. He was not the kind of father who would see he son crying, walk over, I’ve him big hug and ask, “Hey, what’s the matter buddy?” “Flinty” is a term sometimes used to describe these severe men from the severe weather of Maine, and it describes him perfectly. Lawrence Chamberlain’s father was a cold, hard man… but also the kind you could strike sparks from. He named his son after two warriors: Joshua, the great Hebrew general, and, as he wrote in the family bible, “for Commodore Lawrence of the American Navy,” an American hero from the War of 1812, famous for his dying words, “Don’t give up the ship!” Lawrence’s warrior heritage had been drummed into him from birth, and don’t give up the ship! was so deeply internalized by the young man that it became what was essentially the single standing order on that July afternoon at Gettysburg.

As I said, you could strike a spark from such a father, but that doesn’t mean it was a pleasant experience. One day his father told Lawrence and his brothers to head out into one of their fields and “clear some rocks.” This they did, until they came upon a boulder so large that all three of them together could not get it to budge. When the told their father that this was more than they could handle, he replied in his gentle, softhearted and sentimental way “Move it!”

A similar situation occurred a few years later. Lawrence was pitching freshly mown hay into a an ox-drawn wagon — backbreaking work, by the way — and his father was following some distance behind raking and gathering the scraps. As Lawrence took the wagon across a small brook, he accidentally managed to wedge one of the front wheels tightly into the gap between two large stumps, and then the back wheels started to sink into the sand. “Clear that wheel!” Commanded Joshua, the Elder, from back on the other side of the stream. But this wagon was well and truly stuck, and his father clearly had no idea how badly. “How am I going to do it?” he shouted back. This job would require at least two strong men, if not more.

And then he immediately realized his mistake as he saw the storm clouds gathering upon the countenance of Father Joshua: “Do it! That’s how!” Now a lesser person — such as myself, for example — would have tried to use the power of the two massive animals, each one of which was as strong as an ox…on account of them both being Oxen. But that would only have wedged it in tighter. So he jumped down off the cart, grabbed hold of the hub of the wagon wheel, and lifted with everything he had. As the wheel came up, it caused the tongue of the wagon to prod one of the oxen in the rear, and, yoked together, they both immediately bolted up the creek bank, bringing up the wagon and the hay with them for good measure. You would think that would have been worth a “good job,” or at least a [SNORT] “See?” but when his father walked passed him he did not say a word. The Patriarch did not believe in unnecessary talk.

Now this kind of father will breed either strong, self-reliant sons or psychopathic murderers wasting away in opium dens. Certainly young Lawrence saw something deeper inside his father than just raw orneriness and spite. “He had a chivalrous strain of blood in his composition,” he would later write. And while he was certainly severe, he was not a hypocrite: the feet Lawrence’s father held most closely to the fire were his own.

These seeds took root in the young boys mind. “‘Do it, that’s how!’ Was a maxim whose value far exceeded the occasion,” he would later write. It would go on to describe it as “an order for life,” far more valuable than any number of years of empty lectures and traditional study. It’s inconceivable to think that faced with that impossible situation on Little Round Top, out of ammunition, under seemingly endless waves of determined Confederate attack that grew closer to him with each successive wave, he didn’t simply say to himself, “This is hopeless; it can’t be done. I don’t know how to hold this position…” only to hear the voice of his father shouting to him, “Do it! That’s how!”

When the war came, Lawrence Chamberlain left his position as a Professor of Rhetoric at Bowdoin College. Rhetoric is the art of persuasive speaking or writing, which was a problem for him since he entered college with a significant stutter. Certain sounds and consonant sequences would cause him to trip over his own tongue; they were like large rocks in a field and they had to be cleared. During one important event the stuttering became so pronounced that Chamberlain feared he might actually faint. He would look for these triggers when reading aloud, and prepare for them, and when writing a speech he would avoid them completely. “Obstacles irremovable can be surmounted,” is how he would later put it.

Back in 1854 he had married Miss Francis Caroline Adams, known to her friend and family as “Fanny.” He had been absolutely smitten by her, but Fanny made it clear she they meant to set herself up as an independent woman, and that effort would take time. She would not be able to marry for three years. “Think, honey-bee,” he wrote to her upon receiving the news, “only three years! Why it’s a dream— three years will go by in a flash.” 

They had been happily married for seven years when the real flash came in the form of cannon fire directed by secessionist South Carolina and aimed at the Federal Fort Sumpter, in Charleston Harbor. By September of 1862 the young Chamberlain had exchanged his black professorial robes for the blue tunic of a Lt. Colonel in the Union Army, determined to fight against the Rebels that had interrupted his domestic tranquility by transgressing upon the Great Republic they had inherited. The Twentieth Main Infantry Regiment left Portland by train and headed south, under the command of Colonel Adelbert Ames, with Lt. Colonel Lawrence Chamberlain as his immediate subordinate..

Chamberlain and the 20th Maine would be present at many of the most horrific battles of the 19th Century. Their ordeal would begin with nothing less than the single bloodiest day in American history: Antietam. As they advanced toward the battlefield, the green boys from Maine began to get a taste of what they were in for: men wounded in the Battle of South Mountain, fought on September 14th, just a few days before, were everywhere: red-stained white bandages covered amputated arms and legs, those severed arms and legs would be stacked like cordwood outside of the hospital tents. A great deal of the open areas were marked with mounds of dirt where the dead had just been buried. South Mountain had been bloody business, but that be a pale overture of what was coming the next day, September 17th, at Antietam creek just outside of the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia had launched the first of his two invasions of the North; Chamberlain and the 20th Maine would be largely spectators for this first encounter but would be in the hellish, fiery center of it when he returned to tray again the following year.

Many bloated, stinking corpses had yet to be buried, and this certainly served to harden these fresh troops to what was waiting for them. Chamberlain noticed a young boy, “of scarcely sixteen summers,” he would later write, sleeping in his Confederate Uniform, holding a small bible in his hand. “This was my enemy — this boy!” he would later recall. “Oh God, forgive those who made it so.” He dismounted and approached the young Rebel, and as he did he could see that his eyes had lost their glisten and were staring not at the Bible in his hands but at the dirt by his feet. He then saw the red blood inside the grey tunic, and the realization of it disgusted him to the core. “He was dead — the boy, my enemy; but I shall see him forever.”

They were up before dawn on the morning of September 17th, 1862. As part of two divisions making up the Unions Fifth Army Corps, the 20th Maine would be held in reserve, guarding the endless see of wagons and horses required to move the 38,000 Union troops that had Lee’s 12,000 Confederates pinned with their backs against Sharpsburg, and just beyond, the Potomac River. Aside from the occasional “over” on the part of the Confederate artillery, Chamberlain and his men were about as safe as they could be on that bloody field.

They had heard the musketry rising in frequency and volume as the Union attacked through the cornfield by the Dunker Church, soon reaching such intensity that it sounded like the ripping of a huge sheet of canvass. Much closer, and more ominously, they watched Union General Ambrose Burnside hurl regiment after regiment across a narrow stone bridge, where they were massacred by the confederates as they walked by twos and threes across that awful bridge, over a creek so shallow that they could have easily waded across it had Burnside thought to check it’s depth. That was grim business, watching men marching directly into their own murder. It would give the boys from Maine something to think about for the next eighty-five days. The next time Union troops would be fed into such a meat grinder they would be the meat. 

By all accounts, Ambrose Burnside was a good man: loyal, affable, and genuinely concerned about the safety of his men. But after McClellan allowed Lee to escape at Antietam — McClellan not only had three times Lee’s numbers; he also had Lee’s entire battle plan recovered from a Confederate officer who had used it to wrap a cigar which then fell out of his pocket. Command fell upon McClellan’s friend, the amiable Burnside, who protested he was not qualified for the job. At a small hearing Burnside restated his objections; wags would later say that he not only admitted he was incompetent: he swore to it. Nevertheless, Lincoln, who was already at his wit’s end, sacked McClellan and command of the Army of the Potomac passed to Burnside, whose extravagant mutton-chop style soon became known as “sideburns.”

Burnside proposed to attack Lee where he would least expect it: right up the middle of his position at Fredericksburg. What he had done at Antietam he would repeat here, but on a much larger and deadlier scale. He laid pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock, as confederate sharpshooter picked off the Union army engineers for sport. Still, he got his Army across with many fewer casualties than he expected; savvier military minds realized that they were able to enter the town of Fredericksburg with relative ease because Robert. E. Lee wanted him to be there; in fact, he could not believe his luck.

On the other side of the town, a relatively flat plain led to a relatively gentle slope, culminating in a broad ridge known as Marye’s Heights. There Robert E. Lee placed his artillery and prayed. After spending two days getting his army across the river, on the Morning of December 13th the thick fog lifted suddenly, as if it were the rising of a curtain, and then, at about 11 am, the Confederate commander’s prayers were answered and Union troops began a slow and steady march up the slope behind the town, determined to take those Southern guns.

About halfway up the slope, a sunken road runs across about half of Marye’s Heights: the half the Federal troops were advancing upon. The downhill side was lined with a stone wall: given six months and an unlimited budget, it would have been hard for Lee to improve on this position. Confederate General Thomas Cobb put 3000 of his Georgians along this impenetrable barrier: the same men who had shot down the Union men by the hundreds as they tried to cross Burnside’s Bridge. Now they would get an even better chance. With Confederate field artillery lining the ridge above them, they loaded their rifles, waited patiently as the line of blue walked into range, and then the entire length of the stone wall erupted in orange flashes and a cloud of blue gunpowder and the Union men were cut down like hay before a scythe.

“It’s is the discipline which is the soul of armies, as indeed the soul of power in al intelligence,” Chamberlain would write, recalling the horror that was Fredericksburg. “Other things — moral considerations, impulses of sentiment, even natural excitement — may lead men to great deeds, but taken in the long run, and in all it’s vicissitudes, an army is effective in proportion to its discipline.”  Chamberlain seemed to have been nearly universally idolized by his men, but he was a big believer in discipline and would wield the iron rod when he needed to. Now it was time to test what Chamberlain had called the should if the army in what would turn out tone the harshest test of discipline during the entire war. 

Once again, the Fifth Corps, including the 20th Maine, was held in reserve, but unlike the scene at Antietam, where the undulating terrain would mast only one part of the battlefield from the others, here at Fredericksburg the entire battlefield had been arrayed before them as if in an arena. They watched through gritted teeth as the the first wave advanced up the hill, and then were cut down by the ribbon of flame from behind the stone wall, or blown to bits by the Rebel artillery. A second wave would advance and then be cut to pieces, and then a third, and then a fourth… it was not long before the entire slope leading up to Marye’s Heights seemed to be crawling — a carpet of Union blue with the wounded and the dying trying to crawl back down the hill they had just climbed so bravely and so pointlessly. Like a steer in an abattoir, every successive Union wave brought the men of the 20th Maine closer to the front of the line. Chamberlain had time for a final notebook entry before leading his men into that musket and artillery fire: “I see tears in the eyes of many a brave man looking on that sorrowful sight, yet all of us were eager to dash to the rescue.”

That last is actually compelling evidence of Chamberlain’s departure from the norm. None of those men, with the exception of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, were eager to dash into that hell. It’s been a universal refrain of men in any war placed in their position: every man was scared —scared out of their wits — but if properly led they would go and do their duty. The single exception to this rule that I have ever encountered came from this gentleman pictured here: Curious people often ask the question whether in battle we are not affected by fear, so that our actions are influenced by it; and some are prompt to answer, ‘Yes, surely we are, and anyone who denies it is a braggart or a liar. I say to such: Speak for yourselves!”

Well now! Coming from just about anyone else this would have the rank odor of an armchair soldier; the kind of professor who would rally young boys and send them off to die while he remained behind, wrapped in glory and safe in his faculty lounge. But Chamberlains actions are unimpeachable, as we will see. It is true that once the battle begins many soldiers find themselves relieved that the the actions they need to take may somewhat, or even completely, outweigh the fear, but to stand there and watch men being massacred, piecemeal, as they were in this most lopsided of Union catastrophes… well, I just… — it’s unheard of.  

“As a rule,” continued Chamberlain, “ men stand up from one motive or another — simple manhood, force of discipline, pride, love, or bond of comradeship: ‘Here is Bill; I will go or stay where he does.’ And an officer is too absorbed by the sense of responsibility of his men, for his cause, or for the fight that the thought of personal peril has no place in governing his actions.” And there is another remarkable statement: the idea that something as primal and powerful as fear of your own destruction is something that a man could fight with; some internal battle that has to be won before the extra one commences.

Other men, who ere not made of this kind of stuff, nevertheless prepared to advance. “I held my breath and set my teeth together,” wrote a junior officer from Chamberlains regiment, “determined to not show fear if I could, by will, keep it down.” Which sounds much more like the language of mortal men. Confederate artillery had been blasting hoes not only in the advancing Union lines, but in the assembly areas as well. As Col. Ames and Lt. Col. Chamberlain walked up and down the ranks, checking equipment but mostly setting an example of calm determination, the boys from Maine tried to steady themselves, surrounded by a charnel house of wounded and dead men, scattered limbs, smashed heads, piles of intestines and the entire field soggy with blood. Just a few moments earlier, General Charles Griffin watched his First Brigade leave the assembly area and begin their march up the hill. “There goes one of my brigades to Hell,” said Griffin, “and the other two would soon follow.”

Now it was time. “Attention!” shouted Ames. The men of the 20th Maine had loaded their muskets and fixed bayonets. A bugler sounded the call to advance. “God help us now,”Ames said to Chamberlain. “Take care of the right wing.” Then he raised his sword and shouted, “Forward the 20th!”

To the right of the 20th Maine were two Regiments from New York. Neither of them heard the call to advance, just possibly on purpose, and that left the entire regiment exposed to galling enfilading fire from the right, where Chamberlain would be “taking care of the right wing.”

As they began their march, a high board fence that had been inexplicably left in place to further compress the Union men for Confederate artillery was holding them up even as they began. Musket balls, soft, heavy lead slugs this big snapped and whizzed past their heads as they turned the corner to face the entire line of Marye’s heights, and the crawling carpet of dead and wounded Union blue spread out below it like a blanket. Chamberlain order the mean to tear down the fence; but when you first face musket fire and hear the bullets whistling through the air so thick around you that you are sure you are being attacked by a swarm of angry hornets, most men find that it has your full attention. “Do you want me to do it?” he shouted above the buzzing, already being interrupted by a dull thwack! and a scream of pain, or sometimes the sound of a man loaded with equipment falling to the ground. As Chamberlain started to got at the boards his men soon joined him and with that obstacle out of the way they hurried to rejoin the men on the left.

After the wave after wave of men calmly walking to their deaths, there was at least now the relative mercy — not mention sanity — of having the men advance double-quick. Another officer would later write that the only memory he has of that time was the sight of the Rebel cannons silhouetted against the setting sun at the crest of the heights, and a vague memory of, quote, “running up and down the line, urging the men on.”

Chamberlain would later write that his regiment “charged over fences and through hedges, over bodies of dead men and living ones, past four lines that were lying on the ground.”  The survivors of the regiment that had gone before them were laying flat, face against the mud, as the musket balls treated small brown geysers is they slammed into the mud all around them. They made it to within a few feet of the stone wall, the Blue of the Union men, and the grey and butternut brown of the Confederates ramming home powder and ball and blasting away at each other just a few yards apart until darkness fell.

The men of the 20th still alive, who in the past ninety minutes had gone from green recruits to seasoned veterans, having survived this most ghastly of Civil War battles, soon saw the wisdom of getting down as low as possible into the cold mud. It was mid December, but the night grew unseasonably cold, even for that time of year, and as the night deepened they shivered in the freezing wet mud, none of them having either blankets or overcoats. The Confederates, relatively comfortable behind their stone wall, shot ant anything that moved ad even at things that didn’t. 

Chamberlain was too cold to sleep, nor was he inclined to. The earl-splitting roar of the cannon, musketry and exploding shell had gone, the night punctuated by the cack of a musket, a flash of orange from behind the stone wall, and the thwack! of a musket ball hitting flesh, either causing a scream of pain or silencing one. But the field was far from quiet, and the sound was loud, pervasive and much, much worse than the explosions and gunfire of a few hours earlier. Chamberlain said the entire file was a cacophony of sound: moans, screams, men calling for their mothers as they slowly bled to death in the icy mud. “You could not locate the source,” Chamberlain would later write, “A wail so far and deep and wide, as if a thousand discords were flowing together into a key note: weird, unearthly and terrible to hear and bear.” 

A biting wind had come up to make things even more miserable; Chamberlain crawled between two dark forms and pulled a third toward him to protect his head. “The living and the dead were alike to me,” he would later recall, numbly, transported through memory to that surreal and awful night.

Right around midnight, when even the Rebels taking the potshots finally became tired and bored enough to fall asleep, Chamberlain and his Adjutant began to make their way up and down the rows of shot-down men, offering water and binding whatever wounds they could. As word of the mission of mercy was whispered from man to man, the calls for help grew louder and more frequent. Some men begged Chamberlain to shoot them and put them out of their misery, and not long after, other dark figures began to arise, floating through the icy gloom, looking for friends or brother, or to take whatever clothing they could find from men who no longer needed them.  He was greatly relieved when stretcher-bearers began to arrive from the town below, and began to ease the suffering of the men as best they could.

Chamberlain went back to his grotesque fortress, pulling a loose flap of tunic from the body just above him to cover his face as he tried to get a few minutes of sleep. He jumped when a hand puled the flap of tunic back, and saw just inches in front of his news what he called the “half-vampire face” staring right at him. Chamberlain let out a yelp and the other figure did too, jumping back in such a panic that a small New Testament bible fell from his pocket. The man died not long after, and Chamberlain retrieved the Bible which he wore to return to the man’s family. Which, of course, he did. A loose shutter one one of the blasted out houses from the town below banged back and forth in the icy wind all night long. The exhausted Professor of Rhetoric the rhythmic banging began to take on the sound of a human voice: Never-forever. Forever-never. Never-forever. He would never forget that sound for as long as he lived.“The man of the highest physical courage and the soldier of the highest discipline may find that he has something of himself yet to learn,” he wrote, recalling that terrible long night.

When dawn broke on the 14th, a heartbroken Ambrose Burnside emerged from his headquarters to see what had become of the thick carpet of blue he had seen at last light, the day before. He was shocked and horrified to see that the field had gone from blue to brilliant ivory, the blue mass now gleaming bright white in the morning sun. It upset him so greatly that it took him several moments to understand what he was seeing. The hills were white because so many of the pale northern bodies had been stripped naked during the freezing night.

The survivors spent the entire day doing absolutely nothing. They lay stone still as the sun climbed toward noon then continued to set behind Marye’s Heights. The occasional bursting shell could still evoke a scream of pain, but many of the men on that field would ever feel pain again and the survivors huddled behind their fortresses of flesh, the bodies they had stacked for cover trembling now and then as a Confederate trying his luck put a musket ball into the bodies of former friends with what Chamberlain called “a dismal thud.”

The second day ended, and the second night began. By now the bodies were beginning to decay, despite the frigid temperatures, and the men tried to scrounge a piece of wooden board to scape out a shallow grave in the frozen mud. As first they huddled around matched held within cupped hands, but not long after dark the sky erupted into spectacular curtains of light. The Aurora Borealis, rare as far south as Fredericksburg, lit up the skies with an intensity none of them had ever seen before… not even the men from Maine, far away to the north. 

The professor of rhetoric from Bowdoin College was transfixed by the sight, which moved his pen top open up the full scope of 18th century prose, which to the modern ear sounds stilted and contrived, but which nevertheless was very real to those of their time:

“As we bore them, the forms of our fallen heroes, on fragments of boards torn from the fences by shot and shell, to their honored graves, their own beloved North lifted her glorious lights, and sent her triumphal procession along the arch that spanned her heavens.  An Aurora Borealis, marvelous in beauty. Fiery lances and banners of blood, and flame; columns of pearly light, garlands and wreaths of gold — all pointing and beckoning upward. Befitting scene! Who would die a nobler death, or dream of more glorious burial. Dead for their country’s honor, and lighted to burial by the meteor splendors of their northern home!”

Death lived much closer in those days.

After the hours of Fredericksburg, Chamberlain would contract a very severe case of Malaria; it would stay with him, on and off, for the rest of his long life. His eyes turned yellow; he was racked with fever, debilitating headaches that would last for days, and frequent vomiting. Despite his spirit and his constitution, he would have to take an extended leave of absence to recover, back in Maine. He would miss Lee’s masterpiece at Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson would appear at the far right of the Union line and roll it up like a blanket, leading to one of the most complete collapses in the entire war. Relieved after the catastrophe at Fredericksburg, Burnside would remain in the army. At Chancellorsville, the Army of the Potomac would be under the command of Joe Hooker, who had done a great deal of scheming to see to it hat Burnside was relieved and he himself put in his place. He was leaning against a wooden pillar of the actual Chancellorsville house when it took a direct hit from a Rebel cannonball; the shock from which travelled down the thick column and knocked Hooker senseless; aides would say he spent the majority of the disaster wandering around like a duck hit on the head. Burnside would introduce the word sideburns to describe the whiskers that flowed around his face. Hooker would introduce the word “hooker” to describe the women that he allowed to flow around his headquarters.

By the time of Lee’s second invasion, Chamberlain would be backing the field, although still deathly ill. After being turning back Lee at Gettysburg, an over-cautious George Meade would allow the Grey Fox to escape once more, a failure that grieved Abraham Lincoln more than any of the other disasters that befell the Army of the Potomac. Nearly a full year would pass before Ulysses S. Grant, brought from his string of victories in the Western Theatre, could get it moving again. His first contest with lee would take place on the same battlefield that Chancellorsville had been fought and lost on, an isolated thicket known as the Wilderness. Lee had rolled up Hookers entire right wing a year earlier, but he would roll up both of Grant’s between May 5th and 7th, 1864.  But this time, the Army of the Potomac did not limp back to Washington to wait for months as yet a new commander arrived. This time, with the disaster of the Wilderness just a few hours behind them, they would take the right Han fork in the road and head South, to Richmond, and the cheer that went down the entire Army as they realized that Grant was advancing after being soundly whipped shook the Earth.

An actual footrace took place as both armies headed south, with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia desperate to interpose itself between hard-driving US Grant and the Confederate capital at Richmond. He found a good defensive position at a little hamlet known as Spotsylvania Courthouse, the Rebels literally running to beat the Federals to the high ground. Chamberlain would be there during what was not the bloodiest, but simply the most horrific single day of the war. At the tip a a salient in the Confederate lines, called the Mule Shoe, the blue and the grey fought hand to hand with bayonets for sixteen hours in an area so small that when I went looking for it many years ago, I only discovered it by the presence of a legendary tree this thick that had been cut down not by artillery but by musket fire. I had been looking for a spot called The Bloody Angle, a small bend in the lines that was ground zero of this worst of all nightmares, out there, somewhere. It was only when I saw the tree trunk that I realized I was standing in it. Hundreds of men killed, bodies stacked against hastily thrown-up earthworks six and seven deep, all in this incredibly small space. Crazed men would climb on the to log barricades, fire their muskets directly into the faces of other men and then hurl it like a spear, only to be shot dead by another crazed man who would then do exactly the same. The stress and pressure were so intense than many men — many men — who survived would recall seeing red: their blood pressure was so high that it ruptured capillaries in the back of the eye, causing the entire landscape to turn the color of blood. Chamberlain and his men would not be in the Mule Shoe, but they would help clean up the mess, which was horrible beyond words.

He would be there as the two armies waltzed further south, stopping at a crossroads known as Cold Harbor, where Grant, in a rare moment of careless impatience, sent in a frontal attack against Confederate fortifications that saw seven thousand men cut down in fifteen minutes, bodies so thick you could walk across the entire battlefield without your feet ever touching the earth.

And he would be there at the Confederate lines surrounding Petersburg, a critical rail junction just south of Richmond. Grant had finally gotten the drop on Lee: if he could carry those think defended breastworks before Lee’s reinforcements arrived he would take Petersburg, cut Richmond’s last supply line, then seize the rebel capital and end the war. 

Chamberlain could see what he was up against: well-defended fortifications at the far end of a large, open field. It was going to be Cold Harbor all over again. But Chamberlain had his orders. It was June 18th, 1864. The attack was set for 3:00 pm.

“We are to charge those works,” said Major George Merrick to a young Lieutenant Ransford B Webb. Webb looked across the open field to the log walls and packed Earth of the Confederate potion, gleaming like the scales of a fish as the sunlight glinted off uncounted rebel bayonets. “My heart dropped to my shoes,” Webb recounted, shuddering at the memory. ”Cold drops stood out on my forehead. I could still use my eyes and turned them to the rear. Over a blood plain there was not a bluecoat in sight. By this time my blood was frozen solid. 

As they counted down the minutes, Sgt. Patrick DeLacy, Chamberlain’s old warhorse though many tough fights, handed him a canteen filled not with water but with whisky. “Colonel, here’s a drink,” he said. “Keep it, thank you,” replied Chamberlain, who had been promoted to commander of a brigade. “I would not take a drink from an enlisted man going into battle. You may need it. My officers can get me a drink.”

It was almost time. Chamberlain spoke to the men he would be leading in the assault. He was calm and confident, as he always was, and he spoke, as he always did, as a professor of rhetoric would speak. “Comrades,” he said, “ we nw have before us a great duty for our country to perform, and who knows but the way in which we acquit ourselves in this perilous undertaking may depend the ultimate success of the preservation of our grand republic. We know that some must fall — it may be any of you, or I —but I feel that you will all go in manfully and make such a record as will make our loyal American people grateful. I can but feel that our action in this crisis is momentous, and who can know but in the Providence of God our action today may be the one thing needful to break and destroy this unholy rebellion.”

Lt. Webb felt himself regain control of his breathing, though he still thought his heart would count its way out of his chest. He realized that Chamberlain possessed many excellent qualities that had made him a great leader, but chief among them all was a quality not numbered among the Seven Cardinal Virtues, and this was us boundless courage. Courage, the greatest virtue of all, whiteout which all the others fall. That, Webb realized, was what made Chamberlain a great man.“His absolute indifference to danger… In the field his mind worked as deliberately and as quietly as it would in his own study. “

Three o’clock came, and Chamberlain led his men out int the field, walking steadily. The familiar buzzing of musket balls came upon him again, but he kept on walking. After a small distance he turned to face his men, motioning with his saber to the left, “obliquing” his line so that all of his men would hit the enemy works at the same time. Just as he was turning back to face the enemy, he staggered to the side as if kicked by a horse. The soft lead of a musket ball entered below his right hip, tore through his groin, and and came to rest just inside the skin on his left side. He felt the pain first in his back, and his immediate thought was, “What will my mother say, her boy shot in the back!” meaning facing away from the enemy. Such things were very, very important in that heroic age.

Blood was using from the huge hole in his side, but his disciplined mind continued to work cooly and clearly. If he went down his men may break under the murderous fire. As long as he was standing, they would follow him. But he had lost so much blood, and the torn away so many ligaments, that he didn’t think he could stand for more than a few seconds, so with the last of his strength he turned around, facing his men, and plunged his saber into the ground, and leaned upon it, as if he was inspecting them on parade. The saber steadied him enough to remain on his feet, and he would later write the he could remember each individual face of his men as they surged passed him. He felt his deep pride in them, and his affection for them too. Then he dropped to one knee… and then the other…and finally he fell over on his side the backness took him, took him for what he and everyone else firmly believed would be forever.

Now. I have most emphatically spent the bulk of the story of the hero of Gettysburg as far from Gettysburg as I could. I did that so that you can render your own verdict on the Great Man Theory.

To me, Lawrence Chamberlain was a walking billboard for the Seven Cardinal Virtues. Chastity. Temperance. Charity. Diligence. Patience. Kindness. Humility. And transcendental courage. Now all we have to do is return to Little Round Top on July 2nd, 1863, and you can decide for yourself whether or not you believe the History From Below theory that someone else might just as easily filled his shoes.

Both the Union and the Confederates had raced onto the field at Gettysburg, vying for position. Unlike what would happen later at Spotsylvania Courthouse, the Union won this one. Historians are often struck by the fact that in his greatest battle of the Civil War, the north came in from the south and the south came in from the north, and on the first Day, July 1st, 1863, Union elements fought a delaying action as mead set up his famous fishhook line of defense. It was a strong position, well up on the high ground, anchored by Culp’s Hill on the left and running down the length of Cemetery Ridge. So the south, at the far left of the union line, are two small conical hills — called Round Top, farthest south, and Little Round Top, between it and Cemetery Ridge. By the morning of July Second the Confederates had matched the Union positions all down the line, just across a broad valley on the opposing line of hills called Seminary Ridge. There were a great many logistical delays, and the Rebels were not in position until after 5pm, late in the day

Inexplicably, Union General Daniel Sickles — formerly a New York politician most famous for shooting dead his wife’s lover  — decided to advance, completely without orders, and all alone. And there he sat, 800 yards in front of the rest of the Union Army.

In military language he had “uncovered” Little Round Top, leaving a huge hole through which the Confederates could attack. There was no one on Little Round Top because until Sickles decided to move the Confederates couldn’t get here. But there he was. If the confederates could take Little Round Top, they would be able to see the entire Union army as if from a hot air balloon — including the status of reinforcements in the rear.  And if they could get some guns up there, then they could bast the entire Union army to atoms, as they had done so many times before. They would have no where to go but South; there would be nothing between Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Washington, the capture of which would mean the end of the war.

An electric spark ran through Confederate General James Longstreet’s First Corps, which held the lines opposite both Sickles and Little Round Top. He sent a brigade to take the hill, fortify it, and hold it.

At exactly the same moment, Union commanders realized the incredible danger they were in, and rushed everything they had onto Little Round Top before the Rebels got there. The Union was extending its line further south, past Sickles, and anchoring it on the small hill. The first regiment to get there went the furthest, and three other filed in behind. That first regiment was the 20th Maine Infantry, commanded by a professor of rhetoric named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. While under sporadic but increasing Confederate artillery fire, he set a defensive line along the military crest of the hill. Facing the rebels coming from the west, he would extend his line to his left. The man who happened to be on the far left of that line was not just at the end of the 20th Maine. That man was at the far left of the entire Union Army.

Chamberlain didn’t have long to prepare, and he didn’t have long to wait. The first thing that struck him was the sudden quiet. The endless explosions that had been pounding for two days simply stopped, and Chamberlain instantly realized what this meant. The Confederate artillery has ceased firing so as not to hit their own infantry. They would be there any second now. The Rebels knew how important that hill was, and so did Chamberlain. Whoever was in command of that far left regiment; the man upon whom the fate of the Union position and likely the entire war now rested upon, would need all of the Cardinal virtues, every one of the and in abundance.

Okay, maybe not Chasity, but the other six, and in spades. The future of the country depended on that commanders leadership, bravery, imagination, intelligence, discipline and especially courage. One of the officers describing that man remembered the moments just before the fight began. “Up and down the line,” he would remember, “with a last word of encouragement or caution, walks the quiet man, whose calm exterior concealed the fire of the warrior and a heart of steel, whose careful dispositions and ready resource, whose unswerving courage and audacious nerve in the last desperate crisis, are to crown himself and his faithful soldiers with laurels that cannot fade.”

Just as they were bracing for the assault, Lt, James H Nichols, commander of Company K, ran to Chamberlain to say that something strange was happening behind the Confederate lines. Jumping onto a large boulder about fifteen feet behind his lines, he could see the ranks of the Confederates who would make the attack, but behind them flowed a steady stream of men, heading even further off to the left, filling the small valley between the two hills. They would launch the main frontal attack, and while the Union men were heavily engaged, this smaller force would outflank them and take them from behind. And that would be the end of that.

He had no more troops, and he had no ore time. How could he possibly hold this position with a handful of men, while being attacked from both sides?

Do it. That’s how.

As the Rebels started advancing he called for his color sergeant, 25 year old Andrew Tozier. His job was to plant and the regimental and United States flags as a rallying point, and defend them with his life. He pointed to a position on his far left and told Tozier to stand there and plant the flags. As the Rebels broke into a run, he had his entire line half step to the left, bending around the flag at a right angle. This thinned the part of the line that would take the brunt of the attack, but it also put a small firing line aimed directly at the flanking party. The Rebels who thought they would take Chamberlain by surprise would be in for a surprise of their own.

And then, the Confederates from Alabama let loose the Rebel yell and charged up the hill.

Much has been said and written about the Rebel Yell. Union men who heard it said it send a weird corkscrew sensation up their spine. For a century and a half it was thought lost to history, but recently, a newsreel shot in the 1930’s at a Civil War reunion came to light. The confederate veterans were asked, on camera, if they could repeat the famous yell. Now mind you, all of these men were in their eighties by this time; when asked to give the yell one more time one of them said, “We can’t give you much, but we’ll give you what we’ve got left.”

Modern audio engineers have taken those recordings, mixed them together and multiplied them several times. As Chamberlain and his men heard the whiz and thwack of musket bulls flying past their head or smashing into trees, they also had to contend with this:

“We know not the future, and cannot plan for it much. But we can hold out spirits and our bodies so pure and high — we may cherish such thoughts ad such ideals, and dream such dreams of lofty purple — that we can determine and know what manner of men we will be whenever and wherever the hour strikes that calls to noble action… No man becomes suddenly different from his habit and his cherished thought.”

Confederate Lt. Colonel William Oates, who commanded the 15th Alabama infantry assaulting Little Round Top, would write that the first volley from the 20th Maine was, quote, “the most destructive fire I have ever seen,” unquote.

They Rebels moved like water flowing uphill, coming to within ten paces of the Union men before being blasted back down again to regroup. On they came again, seemingly endless swarms of tough and determined men. This time that made it to the Union line, and in desperate, hand-to-hand fighting pushed them back several yards. Wherever the danger was the thickest, there was Chamberlain: “The edge of the battle rolled backward and forward like a wave,” he said. On the far left, at the angle of his makeshift hinge, Chamberlain caught a glimpse of Sgt Tozier. He was standing alone. He had picked up a musket from a dead Union boy, and he was loading the rifle with his right hand as he held the colors in the crook of his left arm.  Chamberlain remembered thinking the sight reminded him of a Greek hero and was worthy of an epic poem, but did not have time to compose one just at that moment.

He saw too that the men he had placed at right angles to his main line, awaiting the Rebel flankers, had taken what seemed like a trivial action but one which gave Chamberlain tremendous confidence. They had removed their cartridges from their belts and lead them out on the ground in front of them for faster loading. And they had stick their ramrods in the dirt in front of them for the same reason. These were the actions of men determined to stay where they were.

Again, the Rebels came, and again. The flankers party, running as fast as they could and completely unheard due to the ear-splitting musket fire, came charging into sight holding their rifles with one hand and the explosion of musket fire from Union men that could not possibly have been there blasted them back down the hill, utterly convinced that entire Union regiments had arrived to reinforce the open flank. 

This continued for almost two hours, and every time the Rebels came up the hill, there were more of them and fewer of the men from Maine. Most of them were out of ammunition; the most recent attack had been repulsed by throwing rocks but that would only work once: the men from Alabama would much rather face a thrown rock than an aimed bullet. Chamberlain had given them everything they had. He may not have had any limits, but sure his men did.

Right around this time, as the awful hand-to-hand fighting had driven the Confederate back yet again, a Rebel sharpshooter from the 15th Alabama had silently moved to the side of the battle and taken a position between two large rocks, which meant he could take his time. Just thirty yards away stood the Union commander, so close as to be almost embarrassing: the worst marksman in the entire Confederate army could make this shot with ease. He knew nothing about the man in his sights: all he could see was the blue uniform and the shoulder epaulettes of a Lt. Colonel in the Army of the United States. He drew a careful bead; regardless of the range this would be one to crow loud about. He pulled the hammer back on the firing pin, and then, to his amazement, he discovered he could not pull the trigger. Puzzled for a moment, and then angry with himself, he aimed for the center of the blue tunic… and his finger would not move. He didn’t know why but he could not pull the trigger. Finally he gave up and went back down the hill. This would be a fine piece of fiction from a novelist, but the private memoirs of Confederate soldiers usually do not overflow with brotherly love toward Yankee officers. Make of that what you will.

And now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is time to render your verdict. Chamberlain himself, in a private letter to his beloved wife, and elsewhere besides, could have taken credit for calling for a charge and not a soul on either side would begrudge him that. But what this fundamentally honest man said was simply this:

He knew they were out of ammunition and that the next assault would succeed. The choices were to either run forward or run backwards; that was all that was left. He made his decision, and turned to the survivors of the 2th Maine Infantry. He did not yell “Charge!” and he did not shout “follow me boys!” and he most certainly did not draw his sword and start running down the hill. He spoke two words, shouting to be heard all the way down the line.

He said, “Fix Bayonets!” And then, by his own account, the men under his command twisted and locked the wicked, 16” spike to the end of their muskets and left forward as if they were Olympic runners reacting to the starting pistol. The men on the far left swung around on their own, and as they charged Chamberlain drew his sword and joined them.

Now I ask you: which do you find more impressive? A man that draws such respect and admiration that the men under his command are willing to follow a desperate order… Or a man whose entire life was such a shining example to those around him that they acted on this order before he had time to give it?

After the war, Chamberlain would be called The Lion of the Round Top. But that is an injustice. That’s not what happened. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain did not lead the charge that day. He didn’t lead the charge because he didn’t have to lead it. His discipline, his kindness, his keen intelligence, his moral clarity and his relentless courage turned every one of his men into the Lion of the Round Top.

After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the defeated Confederates formed ranks a final time behind General John B. Gordon, who would lead them through their greatest trial of the entire war. His men would bring their battle flags: shot-torn pieces of silk embroidered with the names of the great southern victories that they had won. The souls of all of their friends were in those flags; men they had been willing to die for but who had ended up dying for them. And now, they would have to take those flags, and their muskets, and run the gauntlet of well-fed, well-equipped Yankees who would be crowing loud. Many of them were barefoot and all of them were hungry; they were dressed in tattered rags and no one was more keenly aware than they were of just how little they resembled the once-proud Army of Northern Virginia.

They staggered along behind Gordon, a man who had half of his face hacked away in defense of what he believed to be his country. And the instant that the nose of his horse passed the farthest soldier in the Union line, a bugle blew and very single Union soldier snapped to attention at once and proceed to perform the rifle drill known as “carry arms.” These was no mistaking it; Gordon knew the instant he heard the first click of the heels what was happening. The Union men were offering a salute. Gordon was so surprised that he accidentally spurred his horse, which reared, allowing Gordon to draw his sword and touch the point of it to the toe of his boot, returning the gesture to the man he would later call “one of the knightliest soldiers of the Federal Army.”

It was Chamberlain, of course… who else. The salute was entirely his idea, and he weighed the idea of presenting arms to the Rebels but thought that would be going too far. Gordon turned in the saddle and barked an order. His filthy, starving, weeping men straightened immediately, and dipped their beloved battle flags in salute as they passed. Chamberlain would still be amazed by it himself, describing it many years later:

“On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor for, nor whisper of vain-glory-ing, nor motion of man standing gain at the order… but an awed stillness, rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead.”

Regiment by regiment the Confederates stacked their arms, then gently laid down their most priceless possessions; their battle flags. They could barely part with them and when they finally summoned the strength to do so they laid them down painfully, reluctantly, with tears streaming down their dirty and weather-worn faces. And in the clean, well-fed, blue ranks many men were crying too, their lips trembling, wondering if they would have had the courage to do what these men were doing if the situation had been reversed.

Lawrence Chamberlain would return to Bowdoin College and resume teaching. He would run as a Republican and become the 32nd governor of the Great State of Maine. He stayed active in politics but especially in the affairs of the men who had served with him, attending many reunions over the years.

He would die at age 85 on February 24th, 1914 a result of the terrible wound he had taken outside of Petersburg, fifty years before. It had never really healed. He had spent the last half-century of his long life in constant and severe pain, pain that never went away. For five decades this man of great dignity would wear a primitive version of a colostomy bag under his black professorial robes, and the damage caused by that Confederate bullet would rob both he and his beloved Fanny of a sex life for the remainder of his days. The constant infection caused by that wound finally grew stronger than even he was. He was the last man to be officially recognized as dying from a wound sustained during the Civil War, and many consider him — rightfully, in my option — to have been the last casualty of that terrible conflict.

Many years after his stand on Little Round Top, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain would write about the men he had lost there, and these are the words he wrote:

“In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate the ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and they we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! The shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.”

To me, those are the words of a good man; and they are, as well, those of a great man. There is no better evidence than this life.

The defense now rests.