The turning point

On this day in 1863, the boys of the 20th Maine led by a strange University Professor named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain were fighting to save what was the most important scrap of real estate on the Gettysburg battlefield: the hill called Little Round Top.

Image via Civilwar.org

It seems like an inconspicuous and unimportant location, way off on the Union's left flank.  The main fighting during the night had been on the Union right, and latter in the day in the center.  You might have excused the Union brass from being unconcerned when John Bell Hood's Texans swept up the slopes of Little Round Top.

You'd be wrong if you thought that.  Little Round Top was the high point of the Union line; if the Confederates took the summit and placed artillery there, the entire line would have been shot to pieces.  I believe that if Stonewall Jackson had not died after Chancellorsville, Lee might have had him lead this charge rather than Hood.  Hood was no Jackson, and that saved the Union.

Or maybe it was that Chamberlain was no Oliver Howard, flanked and routed by Jackson.  Fluent in nine languages, he was from an age where Professors were expected to understand the Western Canon, and in particular the stories of past sacrifice for the advancement of freedom.  Chamberlain knew the stories in the original Greek and Latin.  Seeing his men shoot off their last ammunition, but understanding the position's importance - and recalling the story of The 300 and of Horatio at the Bridge, he turned to his troops and gave the order that stopped their hearts for a moment.

Soldiers!  Fix. Bayo. Nets!

They all knew that they were out of ammunition, and at that point they knew that they had to screw their courage to the sticking point.  The 20th Maine, of course, won the day and the battle.  Its center held like Jackson's stone wall while its right wing pivoted in an end run to catch the attacking Texans on the flank, routing them with cold steel alone.

Faulker - the finest of a whole stable of fine Southern authors - is justly famous for the way he captured every Southern boy's regrets over Picket's doomed charge the next day:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin ...

But it had even begun, and had been lost the day before when Hood's Texans ran for their lives from the Maine boy's bayonets.  You can't get there from here.  It was over the next day, over before it had even begun.  Perhaps Jackson could have channeled Lee, if he had still been alive.  Lee's "blood was up" and so he wouldn't have backed down, but perhaps Jackson could have proposed an alternative to the folly that was Pickett's Charge.

And so it played out: the end of the American War of Southern Independence (probably good), the end of the Federal Constitution (certainly bad), the end of slavery (certainly good), the unleashing of Leviathan (a grotesque horror as we learn to our own sorrow*).

Chamberlain went on to command the Union troops at Lee's surrender at Appomattox.  On his own initiative as the Confederates approached to lay down their arms he ordered the Union troops to show the respect due their foes with the command "Carry Arms".  He wrote afterwards of the moment:

Gordon, at the head of the marching column, outdoes us in courtesy. He was riding with downcast eyes and more than pensive look; but at this clatter of arms he raises his eyes and instantly catching the significance, wheels his horse with that superb grace of which he is master, drops the point of his sword to his stirrup, gives a command, at which the great Confederate ensign following him is dipped and his decimated brigades, as they reach our right, respond to the 'carry.' All the while on our part not a sound of trumpet or drum, not a cheer, nor a word nor motion of man, but awful stillness as if it were the passing of the dead.

The soldiers knew what the politicians did not, that we were a people united in custom if not in law.  The grotesqueries of the Reconstruction would have passed much faster if run by the soldiers of the 20th Maine than by the Radical Republicans.

Chamberlain also went on to be Governor of the great State of Maine - for some strange reason the Governor's Mansion is named not after him but after the odious and corrupt James G. Blaine.  Then like Cincinnatus, he went back to his plough, taking the position of President of the Bowdoin College where he taught.  Perhaps that's why th eGovernor's Mansion is named after a mere politician, rather than a Hero: he sought no honors, believing that he served.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.  Amen.

* Note to NSA PRISIM operators: you are worse traitors than any Confederates who at least could honorably claim that they were fighting for their State which freely entered the Union under the belief that it could leave if it had need to.  They at least had an honorable justification for what they did.  In contrast to what you do.

Bootnote: The Gettysburg National Military Park is perhaps the Republic's largest Cathedral.  The whole park is a shrine, with numerous monuments to the different units that fought there.  The monument to the 20th Maine is particularly interesting: much less grandiose (and in much better artistic taste) than those for the many New York units which had little effect on the outcome, the 20th Maine has but a simple monument on the peak of Little Round Top.  But it has something much more impressive: the people who erected the monument planted White Pine trees - the Maine State tree, known by its bundle of five pine needles all together.  The Monument is surrounded by a White Pine forest, and other than the heat of a July day you might think that with the rocky terrain you might indeed me in the Pine Tree State.

This is the view from our day, looking back through the glass darkly from the vantage of 150 years later.  The incomparable film Gettysburg shows this pine forest:



But it wasn't so.  Little Round Top was essentially denuded, either by the battle or by logging before.  There were no trees until Maine veterans came to plant them.

Photograph by Matthew Brady, 1863.