So begins this most unusual of memoirs -- that of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the college professor turned Union colonel and general during the American Civil War turned Governor of Maine. He is writing here late in his life, and his work will be entirely devoted to a few months in 1864 and 1865, when he participated in the final campaign of the Army of the Potomac and was witness to the historical events surrounding the surrender of the Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee.
The “Situation”
And he begins with a chapter dedicated to and titled “The Situation,” helping the reader understand what had come before and where the army in question has come to stand and, more importantly, what it has come to represent. For this chapter, and indeed, much of the work itself, is less about the army and more about the men -- the men not in their military ranks, but in the moral position they had assumed.
Assumed, at least, in Chamberlain’s estimation.
It seems now to be an accepted maxim of war that the “moral” forces -- meaning by that term what we call the spiritual, pertaining specially to the mind or soul -- far outweigh the material. Few would now claim that “victory is always with the heaviest battalions.” All great contests are inspired by sentiments, such as justice, pity, faith, loyalty, love, or perhaps some stirring ideal of the rightful and possible good.
This is absolutely crucial to understanding Chamberlain’s perspective. As stated above, he believes that “moral” forces far outweigh the material in the execution of war. Let’s call it “righteousness.” He may not go so far as to say that those with the righteous cause will always win, but he clearly sees the advantage that righteousness can bring when men are placed in mortal combat with one another.
And that perspective shouldn’t be surprising.
The hardest hold-up was in front of my left center, the First Battalion of the 198th Pennsylvania. I rode up to the gallant Glenn, commanding it, and said, “Major Glenn, if you will break that line you shall have a colonel’s commission!” It was a hasty utterance, and the promise unmilitary, perhaps; but my every energy was focused on that moment’s issue. Nor did the earnest soldier need a personal inducement; he was already carrying out the general order to press the enemy before him, with as much effect as we could reasonably expect. But it was deep in my mind how richly he already deserved this promotion, and I resolved that he should get it now. It was this thought and purpose who no doubt shaped my phrase, and pardoned it.
This is an anecdote; one undoubtedly among many from that long and terrible war.
Glenn sprung among his men, calling out, “Boys, will you follow me?” wheeled his horse and dashed forward, without turning to see who followed. Nor did he need. His words were a question; his act an order. On the brave fellows go with a cheer into the hurricane of fire. Their beautiful flag sways gracefully aloft with the spring of the brave youth bearing it, lighting the battle-smoke; three times it goes down to earth covered in darkening eddies, but rises ever again passing from hand to hand of dauntless young heroes. Then bullet-torn and blood-blazoned it hovers for a moment above a breastwork, while the regiment goes over like a wave. This I saw from my position to the left of them where I was pressing on the rest of my command. The sight so wrought upon me that I snatched time to ride over and congratulate Glenn and his regiment.
You know where this is going, right?
As I passed into a deeper shadow of the woods, I met two men bearing his body, the dripping blood marking their path. They stopped to tell me. I saw it all too well. He had snatched a battle flag from a broken regiment trying to rally on its colors, when a brute bullet of the earth once pronounced good, but since cursed for man’s sin, struck him down to its level. I could stop but a moment, for still on my front was rush and turmoil and tragedy. I could only bend down over him from the saddle and murmur unavailing words. “General, I have carried out your wishes!” --this was his only utterance. It was as if another bullet had cut me through. I almost fell across my saddle-bow. My wish? God in heaven, no more my wish than thine, that this fair body, still part of the unfallen “good,” should be smitten to the sod, that this spirit born of thine should be quenched by the accursed!
Chamberlain saw it -- day after day, men and boys, sacrificing themselves on an altar he could only interpret, in the idiom of his day and upbringing, as “manhood” dedicated to God’s holy purpose. And it both thrilled and terrified him.
What dark misgivings searched me as I took the import of these words! What sharp sense of responsibility for those who have committed to them the issues of life and death! Why should I not have let this onset take its general course and men their natural chances? Why choose out him for his death, and so take on myself the awful decision into what home irreparable loss and measureless desolation should cast their unlifted burden? The crowding thought choked utterance. I could only bend my face low to his and answer: “Colonel, I will remember my promise; I will remember you!” and press forward to my place, where the crash and crush and agony of struggle summoned me to more of the same. War! --nothing but the final, infinite good, for man and God, can accept and justify human work like that!
Not only does moral force give one advantage -- one of Chamberlain’s time and temperament has to interpret these actions as a manifestation of the highest moral standing. To think otherwise, surely, would have driven one mad.
So this interpretation is not surprising. What is surprising (at least to me) is the kid gloves that he has to don in order to square the circle of that belief with the factual reality of his Confederate opponents and the righteousness that they have claimed for themselves.
The same tendency of thought and feeling was, no doubt, in the hearts of our adversaries, although their loyalty seems to have been held longer by the primal instincts. This appeared not merely in the fervid exhortations of commanders and officials, but in the prevailing spirit of the men in the ranks, with whom we had occasional conference across the picket lines, or in brief interviews with prisoners. The prime motive with these men was no doubt, like ours, grounded in the instincts of manhood. They sprang to arms for the vindication of what they had been accustomed to regard as their rights by nature and law. By struggling and suffering for the cause this thought was rather intensified than broadened. But in these lulls reflection began to enlarge vision. This matter of rights and duties presents itself, as it were, in concentric spheres, within which polarities are reversed as values rise. The right to property must yield to the right to life; individual happiness must be subordinated to the general well-being; duty to country must outweigh all the narrower demands of self-interest. So the sight of “the old flag,” which stood for the guaranty of highest human rights, and which they were now striving to beat down in defeat and dishonor, must have affected their sober thoughts. There was no little evidence of this as the winter and the weary siege wore on. It came to our knowledge in the early months of the new year that heavy desertions were going on every day in Lee’s army, --especially among the Virginians. We had reason to believe that it was the personal magnetism of their great commander that kept alive the spirit of that brave army. The chivalrous sense of personal loyalty was strong with those men.
Chamberlain seems to be saying, here and throughout, that, although chivalrous, the Southerners lost because they fought for a less moral cause.
The Mystic Chords of Memory
Another fairly astonishing chapter is the one that details the surrender of the Confederate Army at Appomattox, told, as it is, by an actual eyewitness to these events.
The messenger draws near, dismounts; with graceful salutation and hardly suppressed emotion delivers his message: “Sir, I am from General Gordon. General Lee desires a cessation of hostilities until he can hear from General Grant as to the proposed surrender.”
What word is this! so long so dearly fought for, so feverishly dreamed, but ever snatched away, held hidden and aloof; now smiting the senses with a dizzy flash! “Surrender”? We had no rumor of this from the messages that had been passing between Grant and Lee, for now these two days, behind us. “Surrender”? It takes a moment to gather one’s speech. “Sir,” I answer, “that matter exceeds my authority. I will send to my superior. General Lee is right. He can do no more.” All this with a forced calmness, covering a tumult of heart and brain. I bid him wait a while, and the message goes up to my corps commander, General Griffin, leaving me mazed at the boding change.
Chamberlain is right there, a brigade commander, parlaying the actual messages that will result in the surrender and, likely because of his long and influential service in the Army, chosen to command the Union troops that accept the actual surrendering Confederate troops on April 12, 1865.
Our earnest eyes scan the busy groups on the opposite slopes, breaking camp for the last time, taking down their little shelter-tents and folding them carefully as precious things, then slowly forming ranks as for unwelcome duty. And now they move. The dusky swarms forge forward into gray columns of march. On they come, with the old swinging route step and swaying battle flags. In the van, the proud Confederate ensign -- the great field of white with canton of star-strewn cross of blue on a field of red, the regimental battle-flags with the same escutcheon following on, crowded so thick, by thinning out of men, that the whole column seemed crowned with red. At the right of our line our little group mounted beneath our flags, the red Maltese cross on a field of white, erewhile so bravely borne through many a field more crimson than itself, its mystic meaning now ruling all.
Chamberlain writes with the locution of his day and breeding, but the emotion is there, there on the page for even the modern reader to see. And then…
The momentous meaning of this occasion impressed me deeply. I resolved to mark it by some token of recognition, which could be no other than a salute of arms. Well aware of the responsibility assumed, and of the criticisms that would follow, as the sequel proved, nothing of that kind could move me in the least. The act could be defended, if needful, by the suggestion that such a salute was not to the cause for which the flag of the Confederacy stood, but to its going down before the flag of the Union. My main reason, however, was one for which I sought no authority nor asked forgiveness. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond; --was not such manhood to be welcomed back in a Union so tested and assured?
It will be one of the most controversial acts of Chamberlain’s military career, ordering a salute of arms for his fallen foe. It will be questioned again and again in subsequent years, and Chamberlain seems to go out of his way to explain but not defend the action. It makes me wonder if such a thing could happen today. Should something similar happen in our modern day, would the victors “welcome such manhood” back into their Union? But of course, nothing like the American Civil War had happened before and will likely never happen again, given the emotional resonance that the men on opposite sides had for each other. Not for their causes, but simply, and perhaps inevitably, for each other. They had, after all, been through hell together.
What visions thronged as we looked into each other’s eyes! Here pass the men of Antietam, the Bloody Lane, the Sunken Road, the Cornfield, the Burnside-Bridge; then men whom Stonewall Jackson on the second night at Fredericksburg begged Lee to let him take and crush the two corps of the Army of the Potomac huddled in the streets in darkness and confusion; the men who swept away the Eleventh Corps at Chancellorsville; who left six thousand of their companions around the bases of Culp’s and Cemetery Hills at Gettysburg; these survivors of the terrible Wilderness, the Bloody-Angle at Spottsylvania, the slaughter pen of Cold Harbor, the whirlpool of Bethesda Church!
Here comes Cobb’s Georgia Legion, which held the stone wall on Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, close before which we piled our dead for breastworks so that the living might stay and live.
Here too come Gordon’s Georgians and Hoke’s North Carolinians, who stood before the terrific mine explosion at Petersburg, and advancing retook the smoking crater and the dismal heaps of dead -- ours more than theirs -- huddled in the ghastly chasm.
Here are the men of McGowan, Hunton, and Scales, who broke the Fifth Corps lines on the White Oak Road, and were so desperately driven back on that forlorn night of March 31st by my thrice-decimated brigade.
Now comes Anderson’s Fourth Corps, only Bushrod Johnson’s Division left, and this the remnant of those we fought so fiercely on the Quaker Road two weeks ago, with Wise’s Legion, too fierce for its own good.
Here passes the proud remnant of Ransom’s North Carolinians which we swept through Five Forks ten days ago, --and all the little that was left of this division in the sharp passages at Sailor’s Creek five days thereafter.
Now makes its last front A. P. Hill’s old Corps, Heth now at the head, since Hill had gone too far forward ever to return: the men who poured destruction into our division at Shepardstown Ford, Antietam, in 1862, when Hill reported the Potomac was running blue with our bodies; the men who opened the desperate first day’s fight at Gettysburg, where withstanding them so stubbornly our Robinson’s Brigades lost 1185 men, and the Iron Brigade alone 1153, --these men of Heth’s Division here too losing 2850 men, companions of these now looking into our faces so differently.
What is this but the remnant of Mahone’s Division, last seen by us at the North Anna? its thinned ranks of worn, bright-eyed men recalling scenes of costly valor and ever-remembered history.
Now the sad great pageant -- Longstreet and his men! What shall we give them for greeting that has not already been spoken in volleys of thunder and written in lines of fire on all the riverbanks of Virginia? Shall we go back to Gaines’ Mill and Malvern Hill? Or to the Antietam of Maryland, or Gettysburg of Pennsylvania? -- deepest graven of all. For here is what remains of Kershaw’s Division, which left 40 per cent. of its men at Antietam, and at Gettysburg with Barksdale’s and Semmes’ Brigades tore through the Peach Orchard, rolling up the right of our gallant Third Corps, sweeping over the proud batteries of Massachusetts -- Bigelow and Philips -- where under the smoke we saw the earth brown and blue with prostrate bodies of horses and men, and the tongues of overturned cannon and caissons pointing grim and stark in the air.
Then in the Wilderness, at Spottsylvania and thereafter, Kershaw’s Division again, in deeds of awful glory, held their name and fame, until fate met them at Sailor’s Creek, where Kershaw himself, and Ewell, and so many more, gave up their arms and hopes, --all, indeed, but manhood’s honor.
With what strange emotion I look into those faces before which in the mad assault on Rives’ Salient, June 18, 1864, I was left for dead under their eyes! It is by miracles we have lived to see this day, --any of us standing here.
Now comes the sinewy remnant of fierce Hood’s Division, which at Gettysburg we saw pouring through the Devil’s Den, and the Plum Run gorge; turning again by the left our stubborn Third Corps, then swarming up the rocky bastions of Round Top, to be met there by equal valor, which changed Lee’s whole plan of battle and perhaps the story of Gettysburg.
Ah, is this Pickett’s Division? --this little group left of those who on the lurid last day of Gettysburg breasted level cross-fire and thunderbolts of storm, to be strewn back drifting wrecks, where after that awful, futile, pitiful charge we buried them in graves a furlong wide, with names unknown!
Met again in the terrible cyclone-sweep over the breastworks at Five Forks; met now, so thin, so pale, purged of the mortal, --as if knowing pain or joy no more. How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all!
They are brothers. At least that is how Chamberlain -- and many others -- saw it. As Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
But not everyone felt that way. Some of the Confederate generals that Chamberlain interacted with were frankly astonished by his conduct and that of the men he commanded.
“General,” says one of them at the head of his corps, “this is deeply humiliating; but I console myself with the thought that the whole country will rejoice at this day’s business.” “You astonish us,” says another of equally high rank, “by your honorable and generous conduct. I fear we should not have done the same by you had the case been reversed.”
And for others, astonishment is not even the right word.
I saw him moving restlessly about, scolding his men and being answered back by them instead of ordering them. He seemed so disturbed in mind that I rode down the line to see if I could not give him a word of cheer. With a respectful salutation, calling his attention to the bearing of men on both sides, “This promises well for our coming good-will,” said I; “brave men may become good friends.” “You’re mistaken, sir,” he turned and said. “You may forgive us but we won’t be forgiven. There is a rancor in our hearts [here came in an anatomical gesture] which you little dream of. We hate you, sir.”
Perhaps this is what Chamberlain means when he writes about the Confederate cause being inferior to the Union one? They fought, with honor and with valor, but they kept a rancor in their hearts which could not be mollified by even the end of hostilities?
Standing on Warren’s Rock
One famous episode that Chamberlain relates from his own perspective is the removal of General Gouverneur Warren as commander of the Fifth Corps following the Battle of Dinwiddie Court House and before the Battle of Five Forks.
A study of this battle shows vexing provocations, but does not show satisfactory reasons for the removal of General Warren from command of the Fifth Corps. The fact is that much of the dissatisfaction with him was of longer standing. We recall the incident that General Sheridan did not wish to have the Fifth Corps with him at the start; also the suggestion by General Grant that Sheridan might have occasion to remove him, and the authority to do so; then the keen disappointments of the Dinwiddie overture the day before, and the exasperation at Warren’s not reporting to Sheridan that night. We recall General Griffin’s remark in the morning that something like this would happen before the day was through. We recur also to the complaints earlier noticed. There was an unfavorable judgment of Warren’s manner of handling a corps; an uncomfortable sense of certain intellectual peculiarities of his; a dislike of his self-centered manner and temperament and habit generally, and his rather injudicious way of expressing his opinion on tender topics. There was a variety of antagonism towards General Warren stored up and accumulating in General Sheridan’s mind, and the tension of a heated moment brought the catastrophe.
The infamous deed was done by Union Cavalry commander General Philip Sheridan, evidently given license to do so by General Grant -- and Chamberlain lists here the myriad reasons that seemed to come to a momentous climax following Dinwiddie.
No one can doubt General Sheridan’s “right” to remove Warren; but whether he was right in doing so is another question, and one involving many elements. It is necessary that a chief commander, who is under grave responsibilities, should have the power to control and even displace the subordinates on whom he depends for the execution of his plans. Nor is it to be expected that he can properly be held to give strict account of action so taken, or be called upon to analyze his motives and justify himself by reasons to be passed upon by others. In this case, there are many subjective reasons -- influences acting on the mind of General Sheridan himself and not easily made known to others, impressions from accounts of previous action, the appearance of things at the moment, and his state of mind in consequence -- which go to strengthen the favorable presumption accorded to his act. But as to the essential equity of it, the moral justification of it, opinions will be governed by knowledge of facts, and these extending beyond the incidents or accidents of this field.
The deed is somewhat infamous because Gouverneur Warren is “the Hero of Little Round Top,” best remembered for arranging a last-minute defense of that hill during the Battle of Gettysburg, and thereby, probably, turning the battle into a Union victory. There is even a statue of Warren, standing atop Little Round Top, which I saw when I visited there in July 1995.
The simple transfer of a corps commander is not a disgrace, nor necessarily an injury. General Warren had no vested right to the command of the Fifth Corps. And if Sheridan expected to have this corps with him in this campaign, in which he held assurances of a conspicuous and perhaps pre-eminent part, and General Warren was to him a persona non grata, we cannot wonder that he should wish to remove him. He had already objected to having this corps with him; but after trial he did not send back the corps, but its commander. It was the time, place, and manner of this removal, the implications involved in it, and the vague reasons given for it, which made the grievance for General Warren. He was immediately assigned to another command; but even if Grant had restored him to the Fifth Corps, this would not wipe out that record, which stood against his honor. It is highly probable that a court-martial would not have found him guilty of misconduct warranting such a punishment as dismissal from his command. There was not then, as there is not now, any tribunal with power to change the conclusion so summarily given by Sheridan, or to annul or mitigate the material effects of it. But such reasons as were given for this affected Warren’s honor, and hence he persistently invoked a court of inquiry. All that he could hope for from such a court was the opportunity thus given for the facts and measurably the motives and feelings affecting the case to be brought out and placed upon the public records.
It was a scandal. A hero’s honor besmirched by a small, often mud-spattered man -- a general, yes, but one (morally?) placed improperly over another general, a man of great bravery and affection. Who was this man, this dwarf, this Philip Sheridan, to cast such judgment over a giant like Gouverneur Warren? A court of inquiry! Yes, that’s what’s needed. As Chamberlain here goes to great lengths to describe -- Sheridan had the right to do what he did, but was it right? I ask you, sir. Was it right?
The posture of the parties before that court was peculiar. The members of the court were general officers of the active army. The applicant was then a lieutenant-colonel of engineers. The respondent -- virtually the defendant -- was lieutenant-general of the armies of the United States, --the superior of course, and the commander, of every member of the court, as also of most of the witnesses before it, then in the military service. The “next friend” and chief witness -- called by the applicant, but necessarily for the respondent -- was General Grant, ex-President of the United States, who still carried an immense prestige and influence. The traditions of the whole War Department were for sustaining military authority. We could not expect this court to bring in a verdict of censure on General Sheridan, or anything that would amount to that. We can only wonder at the courage of all who gave Warren any favorable endorsement or explanation, and especially of the court which found so little to censure in the conduct of General Warren as commander of the Fifth Corps in those last three days. The court sustained General Sheridan in his right, but General Warren felt that the revelation of the facts was of the nature of vindication. It came too late to save much of his life; it may have saved what was dearer.
It is a remarkable history. The court of inquiry Chamberlain describes here took place years after the incidents at Dinwiddie Court House -- beginning in 1879 and concluding (sort of) in 1881. It was not President Abraham Lincoln, or Andrew Johnson, or even Ulysses S. Grant that ordered it. It was Rutherford B. Hayes.
And in those intervening years -- and since, as any quick Google search on the subject will reveal -- so much ink has been spilled on the subject, so many passions passionately expressed by those both close and far removed from the events and people involved. Sheridan had the right. But was he right, sir? I ask again, was he right?
Let me tell you a story. As mentioned earlier, I visited Gettysburg in July 1995, and I spent two or three days on the battlefield, biking and hiking in the sticky summer heat of southeastern Pennsylvania. I knew something about the battle at the time, but little about Gouverneur Warren and nothing of his subsequent history in the war. When it comes to the American Civil War, I have never been more than an enthusiastic amateur, and back then I was even more of an amateur than I am today.
But I knew what happened on Little Round Top, and I felt that my presence there, physically climbing and hiking around on that hilly and rocky patch of ground -- admittedly far removed in time and in any sense of mortal danger -- was respectful and deferential to the memory of the thousands of men in blue and gray who struggled and perished there on another July day, one hundred thirty-two years earlier.
Upon reaching the summit of Little Round Top, I spied the observatory rock upon which the statue of Gouverneur Warren had been placed. Then, as it had during the battle, it offered a commanding view of the surrounding area, and I went and stood upon it, next to the eight-foot tall statue, but far enough away from it to stay out of its shadow.
“Hey,” someone behind me said. “Hey, you, get down from there.”
I turned. There was a tourist there -- his face and appearance now vanished from my memory, but a tourist, not a park ranger or a volunteer tour guide or anything like that. Just a guy, like me, except he likely had driven his air-conditioned car up to the parking lot on the opposite side of the hill, just below its summit.
“What?” I said to him, not entirely sure what he had said.
“Get down from there,” he said again. “That’s Warren’s Rock. We don’t stand upon it.”
I looked at him for several long moments, first trying to understand what it was that he meant, and then, realizing whose statue I was standing next to, trying to understand exactly what kind of harm I was doing by standing on ‘his’ rock. If memory serves, and it often doesn’t, I think I told the nosy asshole to fuck off. At least that’s what I like to think I said. ‘We’ don’t stand on Warren’s Rock? Well, I don’t know you who think ‘we’ are, but I stand just about anywhere I like.
Heroes are strange animals stalking our minds. There was nobody there telling me not to climb the face of Little Round Top, or hop across the boulders at the Devil’s Den, or crouch behind the low stone wall that represented the final position of the 20th Maine. I did all of those things, those things and more. But Warren’s Rock? Evidently my modern hiking shoes had no right to tarnish that sacred ground.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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