Joshua Chamberlain: the professor of Little Round Top

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain taught rhetoric and languages at a small college in Maine. On 2 July 1863, at the far end of the Union line at Gettysburg, the professor's regiment, out of ammunition, fixed bayonets and charged downhill, in one of the most famous moments of the Civil War. He went on to be gravely wounded, to be promoted general on the battlefield, and to receive the surrender of Robert E. Lee's infantry at Appomattox.²

The professor from Brewer

Chamberlain was born in Brewer, Maine, on 8 September 1828.³

He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1852, studied at Bangor Theological Seminary, and in 1855 returned to Bowdoin to teach languages and rhetoric.⁴

The 20th Maine

The war weighed on him. In 1862 he offered his services and was appointed lieutenant colonel of the newly raised 20th Maine Infantry. He had no military experience. Its colonel, Adelbert Ames, was a West Point graduate, and Chamberlain set himself to learn soldiering from him.⁵

The regiment was at Antietam but not engaged. Its first real fight came in December 1862, in one of the doomed assaults on Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg, and an outbreak of smallpox kept it on guard duty during Chancellorsville. In May 1863 Ames was promoted to a brigade, and Chamberlain, now a colonel, took command of the regiment a few weeks before Gettysburg.⁶ › Battle of Fredericksburg, 1862

Little Round Top

On the afternoon of 2 July 1863 the brigade commander, Colonel Strong Vincent, led the 20th Maine up the rocky spur called Little Round Top.⁷

On the southern slope Vincent showed Chamberlain his ground. It was the extreme left of the whole Union line, and he was to "hold that ground at all hazards," as Chamberlain's report puts it. Chamberlain formed his men among the rocks and scattered trees, facing the bigger hill of Big Round Top across a wooded hollow, and sent Company B under Captain Morrill out beyond his left as skirmishers.⁸

The Confederate infantry struck the brigade first, then rolled along his front, and a column moved to get around his open left. Without breaking contact Chamberlain stretched his line and bent back his left wing almost at a right angle, doubling his front, some companies thinned to a single rank. For an hour the fight surged back and forth "like a wave," at times hand to hand. His men took cartridges from the boxes of the fallen, friend and foe alike.⁹

The charge

A third of the regiment was down and the ammunition was gone; men were getting ready to club their muskets. "At that crisis," Chamberlain wrote, "I ordered the bayonet." The 20th Maine swung forward in a great right wheel, its right holding fast and its left sweeping down the slope, while Morrill's skirmishers and some of the 2nd US Sharpshooters fired into the breaking enemy from the flank. A Confederate officer fired a pistol at Chamberlain's face and in the same moment handed over his sword.¹⁰

Counts of the prisoners differ: Chamberlain's report and the Maine commissioners say about 400, mostly of the 15th and 47th Alabama with some Texans; the regiment's monument says 302; the National Park Service says over 100. The cost was heavy. Chamberlain reported a loss of 136, among them 30 killed, out of 386 men; the monument gives 38 killed or mortally wounded and 92 wounded out of 358 engaged. That night, with empty cartridge boxes, about 200 of the survivors went up Big Round Top in the dark with fixed bayonets and took the crest.¹¹

Much later he received the Medal of Honor for "daring heroism and great tenacity" in holding the hill against repeated assaults and carrying the advanced position on Big Round Top.¹² › Battle of Gettysburg, 1863

Wounded at Petersburg

After Gettysburg Chamberlain was given a brigade in the Fifth Corps. At Petersburg on 18 June 1864, still a colonel, he led his brigade against the Confederate works and was gravely wounded in the hip; he was expected to die.¹³

Grant, who had seen him lead "in all the engagements in which he had previously been engaged," wrote in his memoirs that he promoted Chamberlain to brigadier general "on the spot" and asked Washington to confirm it without delay. Chamberlain survived and returned to the front.¹⁴ › Siege of Petersburg, 1864 to 1865

The last campaign

In the final campaign of spring 1865 Chamberlain was wounded again, and for his gallantry he was brevetted major general. He played a leading part in the pursuit that ended at Appomattox.¹⁵

The salute at Appomattox

Chamberlain was chosen to command the Union troops at the formal laying down of the Confederate infantry's arms on 12 April 1865. He resolved, he wrote, to mark the occasion with "a salute of arms." As the Confederate divisions marched past, his line came to the marching salute, the shift from "order arms" to "carry."¹⁶

At the head of the column rode John B. Gordon. Hearing the arms shift, he wheeled his horse, dropped the point of his sword to his boot toe, and ordered his men to pass with the same salute, "honor answering honor" in Chamberlain's words. Gordon later called it "a token of respect from Americans to Americans."¹⁷ › Appomattox Court House, 1865

Command style

Chamberlain came to soldiering as a scholar and learned it as one, from books and from Ames, and he never stopped leading from the front: Grant noted that he habitually led his brigade in person. On Little Round Top his gift was quick reading of ground and of a crisis. He refused his flank under fire before the blow fell, and he struck with the bayonet because waiting would have been worse. His report shows a commander who trusted his officers to understand his intent, and who credited them: the line, he wrote, moved so well because "my officers and men understood my wishes."¹⁸

Governor and college president

Back in Maine, Chamberlain was elected governor four times. He then served as president of Bowdoin College from 1871 to 1883, and he spent his last years writing and speaking about the war; his account of its final campaign, The Passing of the Armies, appeared after his death.¹⁹

He died on 24 February 1914, at the age of 85, and was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Brunswick. His death was attributed to the Petersburg wound of half a century before.²⁰

Legacy and memory

In his lifetime he was known as the "Lion of Little Round Top"; the American Battlefield Trust calls him a veritable icon of Civil War legend. Even the general whose army he saw surrender called him one of the knightliest soldiers of the Union army.²¹

Walk the ground in our account of the Battle of Gettysburg, follow the siege lines at Petersburg, read about Ulysses S. Grant, explore the industrial age, or see what else happened on 2 July.