Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [19]
In 1863 these troops were spotted from Little Round Top. When Longstreet's assault began, the only Union soldiers at this key position were a handful of signal corpsmen. Meade had sent the army's chief of engineers, Brigadier General Gouverneur K. Warren, to check on affairs at Little Round Top. As Warren later told it, he asked a Union cannoneer to send a shot toward a woodlot a mile away. Confederate soldiers concealed there jerked suddenly, and Warren saw the glint of sunlight reflected from their rifle barrels. The story sounds rather fanciful, especially since the late-afternoon sun was behind the Confederates. More likely the signalmen told Warren there were Confederate troops across the way, and he soon saw them moving out from the treeline. Hurriedly sending orders for reinforcements to double-time to Little Round Top, Warren earned his niche in history.
The brigade that came was commanded by Penn-sylvanian Strong Vincent, recently promoted from colonel to brigadier general. As millions of readers and viewers of the novel The Killer Angels and the movie Gettysburg know, one of the regiments in this brigade was the Twentieth Maine, commanded by Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, ex-professor of rhetoric and modern languages at Bowdoin College. Vincent posted the Twentieth at the left of his four-regiment brigade, getting the whole brigade in position just minutes before enemy regiments began their assault on Little Round Top.
We can easily find our way to the Twentieth Maine monument, about 250 yards southeast of the Little Round Top parking area. When I first visited Gettysburg in the 1960s, scarcely any tourist knew about the Twentieth Maine, and few ever saw its monument, which is tucked away from the others that are back on the west face of Little Round Top. After The Killer Angels was published in 1974 and won the Pulitzer Prize, the Park Service put up a sign pointing to the regiment's monument and position. After Ken Burns's video documentary The Civil War in 1990, which prominently featured Chamberlain, and the movie Gettysburg in 1993, two interpretive markers, more directional signs, a paved walkway, and an auxiliary parking lot just below the monument materialized. Now this site is the most heavily visited in the Park.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain became an iconic figure in the 1990s. More people on the tours I have led want to see where he fought than anything else. Powerful emotions have gripped some of them as they stared at the simple stone and bronze monument and their imaginations drifted back to those desperate moments about 7:00 P.M. on that July 2. I remember one such occasion in particular. In April 1987 I took a group of Princeton students on a tour of the battlefield, as I have done many times. This year one of those students had written her senior thesis on Chamberlain, but had never before actually been to Gettysburg. As we came to the place where the Twentieth Maine fought, she could no longer hold back the tears. Nor could the rest of us. Although I have experienced other powerful emotions while walking Civil War battlefields, none has ever matched that April day in 1987. The world has little noted what I said there, but it can never forget what they did there.
Several of Chamberlain's ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. His father had wanted young Lawrence (as his family called him) to pursue a