Hallowed Ground - James M. McPherson [20]
In 1862 he got his chance. Although thirty-three years old and the father of three children, he considered it his duty to fight for Union and freedom. To dissuade him, Bowdoin offered him a two-year sabbatical to study in Europe. Instead, Chamberlain went to the state capital and accepted a commission in the newly organized Twentieth Maine. He was probably the only officer in either army who could read seven foreign languages—these seven, at least: Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, French, and German.
As the shadows lengthened toward evening on July 2, Chamberlain found himself responsible for preventing the enemy from rolling up the Union left. His orders from Vincent were to “hold that ground at all hazards.” Chamberlain soon found out what that meant. For more than an hour, repeated assaults on Vincent's brigade (eventually reinforced by another brigade) surged back and forth, constantly increasing the pressure on the left flank held by the Twentieth Maine. Chamberlain and his senior captain, Ellis Spear (one of Chamberlain's former students at Bowdoin), extended and bent back their line in an attempt to prevent this disaster. Meanwhile, off to Chamberlain's right, on the west face of Little Round Top, the battle raged fiercely as Alabama and Texas regiments advanced from boulder to boulder up the hill. Vincent was mortally wounded, a colonel and the general commanding the reinforcing brigade were killed, and the commander of an artillery battery that had struggled into position was also killed.
Chamberlain seemed likely to meet the same fate. He had already been slightly wounded twice. With a third of his four hundred men down and the rest of them nearly out of ammunition, with the enemy apparently forming for yet another assault, the Twentieth Maine seemed finished. As Chamberlain later wrote, at this crisis “my thought was running deep.… Five minutes more of such a defensive, and the last roll-call would sound for us. Desperate as the chances were, there was nothing for it but to take the offensive. I stepped to the colors. The men turned toward me. One word was enough,—’BAYONET!’ It caught like fire, and swept along the ranks.” With a wild yell, the survivors of this two-hour firefight, led by their multilingual fighting professor, lurched downhill in a bayonet charge against the shocked Alabamians. The Twentieth drove them across the front of the next Union regiments in line, the Eighty-third Pennsylvania and the Forty-fourth New York, and together these three regiments captured more than two hundred of them (Chamberlain claimed almost four hundred).
The hero-worship of Chamberlain has prompted a minor backlash among some historians and park rangers who have grown tired of exaggerated questions and claims by visitors who want to see where Chamberlain performed these exploits. The revisionists claim that the men of the Twentieth spontaneously charged, or that Ellis Spear deserves the credit for the bayonet assault (though no one denies that it was Chamberlain who gave the order to fix bayonets). They quote the report of Colonel William C. Oates, commander of the Fifteenth Alabama (who, like Chamberlain, later became governor of his state), that he was in fact preparing to withdraw when the Twentieth Maine came screaming down the hill, and that the withdrawal was a retreat, not a rout. Oates doth protest too much. But there is no doubt that the Alabamians were exhausted and dehydrated after seemingly endless uphill fighting following a twenty-five-mile march to the battlefield.
It seems clear, however, that Chamberlain