Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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November 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 7
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 7
There is something irresistible about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the soft-spoken, be-spectacled Bowdoin College professor who somehow transformed himself into one of the Union Army’s ablest commanders. He was one of the protagonists in Michael Shaara’s vivid novel about Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, and the real hero of John J. Pullen’s fine history of Chamberlain’s regiment, The Twentieth Maine, and when Ken and Ric Burns and I were working on the script for the PBS series The Civil War, he was among the soldiers whose exploits we followed most eagerly.
Now he is the subject of a solid new biography, In the Hands of Providence: Joshua Chamberlain and the American Civil War, by the late Alice Rains Trulock (University of North Carolina Press, 569 pages, $34.95). I confess that I began it with some trepidation, concerned that our admiring portrait of him might somehow have been overdrawn, that a persistent biographer would have turned up flaws in a character that had seemed to us astonishingly consistent. I needn’t have worried. Chamberlain was just as impressive as we thought he was—and more interesting.
To begin with, when the war began, he was not quite so ill prepared for combat as we had supposed. He was, after all, a veteran of six bitter years of battling with his Bowdoin colleagues over the small rewards afforded by academia. He had dared to develop an innovative way of teaching rhetoric that seems only to have irritated other members of the faculty, and he had reluctantly agreed to abandon that subject in 1862, in exchange for an appointment as professor of romance languages that carried with it the promise of a two-year leave of absence to travel in Europe. Then he resolved to forgo both the leave and the stipend that went with it to enlist in his country’s service. His fellow professors violently objected, not because they feared for their colleague’s life but because if he failed to return, the vacancy might be filled by some stranger whose Congregationalism would prove less orthodox than theirs. They first warned Chamberlain of the dangers he faced, and when he could not be terrified into staying home, they tried to scuttle his appointment as lieutenant colonel of the 20th Maine. Chamberlain was “no fighter,” one told the governor; another writer claimed he was “ nothing at all.”
He got in anyway, and never looked back. He commanded his troops in twenty-four full-scale battles, led them on eight reconnaissances and through so many skirmishes that his latest biographer was unable to provide an authoritative tally. It was his courage and quick thinking—and that of his men—that held Little Round Top for the Union on the second day at Gettysburg and won him the Medal of Honor. Over the course of the war, men under his command took twenty-seven hundred prisoners and seized eight battle flags, and Chamberlain himself survived six