armies were manned first by citizen volunteers and later by conscripts, most higher commands were held by professional soldiers, many of them West Pointers or graduates of the Virginia Military Institute. Some two thousand alumni of these institutions provided the senior leadership of both sides during a conflict which at one time or another involved four million men. Necessity placed many regiments in the hands of amateurs – in the early days, elected by their men – often with tragic consequences for those they led. Yet a few of those thrust into uniform by circumstance proved uncommonly talented leaders. None more so than Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, at the outbreak of war a thirty-two-year-old professor of modern languages at Bowdoin College in Maine. The conflict ended before Chamberlain was tested in higher commands, but he had already shown himself one of the Union’s finest officers, a model of courage, intelligence and inspirational leadership. When to these qualities were added charity, humanity and generosity of spirit, a knight emerges who might be deemed worthy of a place at an Arthurian Round Table. There have been more distinguished commanders in American history than Professor Chamberlain, but few seem so deserving of admiration as a human being.
He was born in 1828, into a family of stern Maine farmers. His father proposed an army career for Joshua as a teenager, and sent him to be schooled at a local military academy. Yet Chamberlain’s ambitions were at that time scholarly and artistic. He was devoted to music, and played the bass viol. While still a schoolboy he gained a little experience of teaching, and liked the work. He crammed assiduously for a college place with a view to entering the ministry and becoming a missionary overseas. He was finally admitted to Bowdoin College in 1848, after a struggle to learn the necessary classical Greek. His college record was exemplary. He emerged garlanded with prizes and honours, led the choir at the local Congregational church, and fell deeply in love with Fannie Adams, the ward of its minister, a girl two years older than himself. It was often later remarked that Chamberlain could well have been singing in the choir on the day the wife of a Bowdoin professor experienced her vision of the death of Uncle Tom while sitting in Pew 23, which caused Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), vastly influential in mobilising Northern opinion against slavery.
Still anticipating a career as a missionary, and too poor to marry Fannie Adams, whose family anyway opposed the match, Chamberlain enrolled at Bangor Theological Seminary. He spent the next three years studying – Hebrew, German, Arabic and Latin as well as theology – and preaching, to growing local acclaim. In 1855 he became an instructor in logic and natural theology at Bowdoin, and was soon promoted to professor of rhetoric and oratory. Having at last achieved some financial security, he was able to marry Fannie, evidently a moody and sometimes irascible girl, whose enthusiasm for her husband later waned, as his for her never seemed to do. They began to raise a family. By 1861 Joshua Chamberlain had become a significant local figure, respected for his cleverness, integrity and commitment to everything he undertook. Though he had abandoned ideas of a career in the ministry, in a God-fearing age he was a sombrely upright, God-fearing man, not much given to jesting, direct to the edge of naivety. His deep-set eyes reflected remarkable powers of concentration. By a notable feat of will he had overcome an early liability to stammer, to such effect that he gained a reputation as a formidable speaker, as well as a writer. On his salary of $1,100 a year, he and Fannie were able to acquire for $2,500 a pleasant house just off the college campus in which to rear their two surviving children. He found himself increasingly impatient with what he considered the restrictive regime of Bowdoin, with its emphasis on the ancient languages and its unwillingness to give students freedoms he thought they deserved. In 1862 he was granted a two-year leave of absence from the college to travel and study in Europe. This was partly, no doubt, to assuage the restlessness of a teacher whom the college admired and wanted to keep.
Yet already the Civil War was a year old. At the outset it had been perceived as the business of soldiers, no concern of such as Joshua Chamberlain. Now, however, every citizen was conscious of both sides’ desperate need for men. The Bowdoin professor was hostile to slavery, and wholly unsympathetic to secession. In August 1862 he travelled to the state capital, Augusta, to meet the governor and discuss whether his services might be of value to the Union cause. Maine was raising thirteen regiments, and the governor was at his wits’ end how to officer them. At once he offered Chamberlain a colonelcy and a command. The professor declined. Without military experience, he said, he was quite unfit to lead a thousand men. He would, however, consider a lieutenant-colonelcy, in which role he might learn to be a soldier.
On that note he returned to Bowdoin, to face a chorus of recrimination. Colleagues urged his unfitness for military life, the faculty’s need of him, and no doubt also the threatened waste of a clever man’s life, doing a job best left to coarser material. A Bowdoin teacher told the governor that Chamberlain was ‘no fighter, but only a mild-mannered common student’. Brunswick’s town doctor, however, wrote in contradiction, testifying that Chamberlain was a man of ‘energy and sense, as capable of commanding a Reg’t as any man out of…West Point’. The latter view prevailed. When the 20th Maine sailed from Portland for the theatre of war on 3 September, Lieutenant-Colonel Chamberlain was with them, along with a magnificent grey warhorse presented to him as a parting gift by the people of Brunswick. His father, who cared little for the Union cause, offered a somewhat qualified farewell blessing, muttering that his son was ‘in for good, so distinguish yourself and be out of it…Come home with honor, as I know you will if that lucky star will serve you in this war. We hope to be spared, as ‘tis not our war.’
The men of the 20th Maine were volunteers aged between eighteen and forty-five, enlisted for three years, and now commanded by Colonel Adelbert Ames, an ambitious twenty-six-year-old not long out of West Point, who had earned promotion by his courage during the Union defeat at First Bull Run, the earliest major battle of the war, where he won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Arrived at the encampment of his new command, instead of a sentry’s salute Ames received an outstretched hand and the greeting, ‘How d’ye do, Colonel.’ He took one horrified look at the shambling crowd of recruits for whom he had become responsible, and said: ‘This is a hell of a regiment.’ In one of his gloomier moments, he urged the Maine men that the biggest favour they could do the Union was to desert. They had no more notion of soldiering than Professor Chamberlain, and precious little time in which to acquire one.
They joined McClellan’s Army of the Potomac in September 1862, a few days before Antietam, the bloodiest single day’s fighting of the war, at which their own 5th Corps was fortunately left in reserve. From high ground they were shocked spectators of the slaughter. The battle ended in stalemate, but checked Lee’s advance. The 20th Maine could not even march in step. Its officers and men dedicated themselves to mastering the disciplines of war, none more energetically than Chamberlain. He had told the governor of Maine that his greatest advantage in becoming a soldier was that he knew how to learn. So it proved. He also possessed notable self-discipline. When his regiment came under fire for the first time on 20 September, retreating across the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, its lieutenant-colonel impressed all who saw him by the coolness with which he sat his horse in midstream, while Confederate bullets splashed into the water. One of these caused his mount to collapse under him, precipitating Chamberlain into the flood alongside his men. It might be argued that this performance reflected only a green officer’s innocence of peril, save that Chamberlain would behave in the same fashion under fire through twenty battles that followed.
For the next month, the regiment trained hard. Chamberlain wrote to Fannie: ‘I believe that no other New Regt. will ever have the discipline we have now. We all work!’ It was a revelation to this college professor, no longer in the first flush of youth, to discover that he loved the military life: ‘I have my cares and vexations, but let me say that no danger and no hardship ever makes me wish to get back to that college life again…My experience here and the habit of command…will break in upon the notion that certain persons are the natural authorities over me.’ By upbringing he was a country boy, for whom the wilderness held no terrors by day or night. He discovered a natural gift for leadership by example, stripping his jacket to wield a spade beside men digging trenches, sharing every hazard of battle. If his regiment slept on open ground, he shared it with them rather than commandeer a house. He possessed a natural authority, tempered by consideration for those he commanded, which earned more than respect. One of his soldiers wrote: ‘Lieutenant Colonel Chamberlain