Fanny & Joshua: The Enigmatic Lives of Frances Caroline Adams and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

By Diane Monroe Smith

Joshua Chamberlain has fascinated historians and readers ever since his service in the Civil War caused his commanding officers to sit up and take notice when the young professor was on the field. What makes a man a gifted soldier and natural leader? In this compelling book, Diane Monroe Smith argues that finding the answer requires a consideration of Chamberlain’s entire life, not just his few years on the battlefield. Truly understanding Chamberlain is impossible, Smith maintains, without exploring the life of Joshua’s soul mate and wife of almost fifty years, Fanny. In this dual biography, Fanny emerges as a bright, talented woman who kept Professor, General, and then Governor Chamberlain on his toes. But you don’t have to take Smith’s word for it. Liberally quoting from years of correspondence, the author invites you to judge for yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Release date: May 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611684407

Book preview

Joshua

CHAPTER 1

The Minister’s Daughter

In the summer of 1850, twenty-four year old Frances Adams pursued her passion for all that is beautiful. Fanny, as she was called by friends and family, was living in Portland, Maine’s largest city, once lovingly described by one of its sons, the poet Longfellow, for its shady, tree-lined avenues and its busy harbor, with the sheen of the far-surrounding seas and islands. . . . She had made the short journey to Portland on the new rail line from her childhood home in Brunswick, Maine, having set off for that city shortly after the death of her much-loved adoptive mother, Sarah Folsom Adams. Here Fanny hoped to establish herself as a painter and musician in Portland’s thriving art community. Establishing a painting room, as an artist’s studio was then called, she declared her determination to enter a profession in which few women of that time achieved recognition. She also continued her study of music with the English-born Prof. Frederick N. Crouch, who had recently arrived in Maine. Crouch, trained in the choirs of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, had won international fame singing the Irish ballad he had composed, Kathleen Mavourneen, a song of love and sad parting.¹

Fanny’s circle of friends came to include artists, writers, composers and poets, but Benjamin Paul Akers, a talented and rising young sculptor, became her closest friend. Akers shared Fanny’s love of the arts and literature, and he charmed both Fanny and her adoptive father, the Rev. George Adams. Fanny’s father, himself a lover of the arts, approved of her friendship with Akers, whom he consulted regarding the monument for his wife’s grave, but Fanny’s relationship with Akers cooled when she began to see beyond his considerable talent and charm to a man of irresponsible character. In the early days of their relationship, Fanny had seen him as not only a gifted sculptor, but as a noble, good, & pure man. Yet she would be disappointed by Akers’ apparent willingness to adopt the uninhibited bohemian lifestyle of the 19th century artiste. Perhaps Fanny’s judgment saved her from the fate of the woman who would become Paul Akers’ wife several years later. In her memoirs, Elizabeth Taylor Akers wrote bitterly of a trip they made to Europe, a seemingly compulsory pilgrimage for every serious artist of the time. Though yet to be married, Akers took charge of Elizabeth’s money and went through her hard-earned savings so recklessly that they soon found themselves stranded on the Continent.²

Benjamin Paul Akers

Fanny in later years described her relationship with Akers as a friendship, not love, grounded on their mutual love of art, but Anna Davis, Fanny’s adopted sister, acknowledged the disillusionment Fanny experienced during that period. Anna, recovering from a broken relationship of her own in early 1852, commented to Fanny, "I don’t think much of the men—and I know you do not—." Fanny was about to begin a relationship with another man who, though no artist, had what she saw as an inner beauty that would touch her heart as no other had. He was the man she would marry and with whom she would spend the rest of her life.³

Fanny, born Caroline Frances Adams in 1825, was the seventh and last child of Ashur Adams and his third wife, Amelia Wyllys Adams. It was a family proud of their lineage, for they were cousins, though distant, to the John Adams family of Boston and were descendants of Miles Standish. Amelia, called Emily by her family, was a descendant of the Wyllys family, the early governors of Connecticut. Yet if the biography of Ashur’s elder brother, Eliashib Adams, is to be considered, Fanny’s birth father grew up a poor and sickly youth on a rundown farm in Canterbury, Connecticut. Though they were impoverished, Ashur attended the Andover Academy’s Latin School and in later life was a Boston banker and broker. But Ashur Adams and his family, at their home in rural Jamaica Plain just outside the city, lived in perpetual genteel poverty, frequently teetering on the brink of economic disaster.⁴

Despite their limited means, Ashur Adams placed great value on education and the arts, and music and art flowed from the Adams’ home, as well as a good deal of laughter. Though an acumen for financial success seemed to elude all members of this household, artistic talent and keen wit were two outstanding attributes of her Boston siblings. Fanny’s eldest brother, George Wyllys Adams, a talented writer and artist, never seemed to make his talents pay. After shamelessly failing to apply himself at Brown, to which his family struggled to send him, he contracted tuberculosis in the 1830s and the family gamely pinched pennies to send him to southern Europe, in hopes that the mild climate would save his life. Though feeble, George enjoyed the trip immensely, his infrequent letters replete with the humorous observations of a rather cynical innocent abroad. He did recover his health, but for all that, he never seemed to become a contributing member to the family’s strained income.

Fanny’s brother Sam emulated George, and often was described as an incorrigible during his attempts at higher learning. Family letters over the years are filled with news of Sam, who, Micawber-like, was perpetually starting on a new job or career, with his family’s forlorn hopes that each new venture would bring success. These two brothers were engaging, charming—but often irresponsible and a considerable strain on the family finances. Two of Fanny’s four sisters, Catherine and Julia, however, were made of different stuff. Educated and talented in music and art, Catherine and Julia proved themselves breadwinners by selling their art and teaching their skills, but the earnings of working women then, even very determined ones, were so meager that the family struggled from year to year.⁵

Fanny’s birth in 1825 no doubt disconcerted her aging father, a man often enfeebled with illness. Beyond being another small mouth to feed, Frances, as her family called her when she was little, periodically displayed the symptoms of an unnamed, painful affliction in her eyes, seemingly one that ran in the family. Their inability to meet their youngest daughter’s needs left her parents feeling dismayed and rather desperate. As Ashur would explain to Fanny many years later, I had met with a sad reverse of fortune, and knew not how to provide for my family; [I] was therefore induced to part with my little pet (altho’ with great reluctance) in the hope that she would fare better in her new home than in her old one.⁶

By the time Fanny was four years old, it was decided that she would go to live with her childless cousin, the Reverend George Adams and his wife, Sarah Ann Folsom Adams of Brunswick, Maine, as their daughter. Rev. Adams was the son of Ashur’s elder brother, the stern and unsmiling Eliashib of Bangor, Maine. Eliashib Adams, by his own description had spent the first part of his life saving his Connecticut parents and siblings, including the sickly Ashur, from financial ruin, and the rest of his existence building from scratch a life and home for his own family in Bangor. A deeply religious man, he worked his way out of poverty, despite the hardship of having his wife become mentally unbalanced. Young George, when deprived of his mother’s care, was sent away to school, and Eliashib eventually managed to send his eldest son to Yale. After college, George taught for several years in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he met his future wife, teacher Sarah Ann Folsom. Some six or seven years older than George, Sarah was the daughter of a prominent ship’s master, Nathaniel Folsom. George left Portsmouth to attend Andover Theological Seminary, returning shortly after his graduation in 1826 to marry Sarah, or Ann, as she was called by her family. When young Fanny came to Brunswick, Maine, around 1829, the handsome man who became Fanny’s adoptive father was now the Reverend George Adams, the dedicated and much respected minister of the Congregationalist First Parish Church of Brunswick.⁷

The Adams were delighted with their new little daughter. Mrs. Adams, a kindly woman quite unconcerned with the style of her own simple dresses, indulged herself when dressing her little girl. A contemporary would remember four year old Fanny outfitted in a beautiful scarlet dress trimmed with black velvet with a charming little hat to match. In their longing for children of their own, George and Ann also adopted Anna Davis, a little girl near Fanny’s age, the granddaughter of Dr. John Delamanter, a faculty member of Bowdoin’s medical school. Their little daughters brought joy and life to the quiet minister’s home, though Rev. Adams admitted that, with all this new bustle in the house, it was a challenge to summon the concentration he needed to write his weekly sermons. Surely little Frances missed the music and laughter of her Boston family in those first weeks and months in her new home. But as time passed, Fanny loved George and Ann Adams as father and mother. As her parents, they would guide and mold her young character.⁸

Brunswick was not a typical small town in 19th century Maine. It followed the calendar of agrarian pursuits and the tides of the seafarers, while its shore echoed with the hammers of the shipbuilder. But it also boasted of the first bastion of higher education in Maine, that red brick sanctuary of learning, Bowdoin College. This combination of influences provided a happy and intellectually stimulating climate for Fanny. The professors and students of Bowdoin came from all over the young United States and, in keeping with Bowdoin’s staunch affiliation with Congregationalism, many of the faculty belonged to Rev. Adams’ church, while the First Parish Church services were mandatory for Bowdoin students.

Though Bowdoin provided an erudite atmosphere, it would not provide Fanny with an opportunity for higher education. This institution, like most others in the country, educated men only, and few indeed were the women who would claim a college education in the first half of the 1800s. While enjoying the society of the college faculty, Rev. Adams and his family hardly held themselves aloof from the working classes of Brunswick. Picnic excursions and the town-wide celebrations that launched Brunswick’s ships were as much a part of the Adams’ family life as college lectures and teas, though no event surpassed the annual commencement at Bowdoin. Each summer, all households filled with company who came to attend the speeches and ceremonies.⁹

George Adams ministered to sailor and scholar alike. Though among the elite who served as a Bowdoin overseer, when the fire alarms of the town rang, he took his place on the bucket lines with the other men of the town. Many in Brunswick looked to Rev. Adams for moral leadership. Fanny’s childhood home saw a constant stream of visitors from both town and college, who came to seek her father’s advice and opinions. Though the conversations were often theological in nature, Rev. Adams, well read and actively interested in the affairs and politics of the day, was an influential man in Brunswick. Fanny, a lively and bright child, took in much of the religious debate and exchange going on around her. When no more than twelve years old, Fanny wrote a letter home to her adoptive parents that shows her to be a precocious observer of the adults around her. Describing her journey to Bangor, Maine to visit Rev. Adams’ family, she reported her amusement at the orations of a Freewill Baptist minister who regaled his fellow passengers with religious opinion and sang Methodist hymns. Fanny also alerted her father that an acquaintance of his was injudiciously relating to others Rev. Adams’ observation that there was no piety in the Episcopal Church. Revealed, too, in this letter, is the promise of a piquant wittiness that would be a beguiling part of Fanny’s personality as an adult. Explaining to her father why he should write her a long letter, though she has written him a short one, she quipped that her letter, though brief, contained a great deal of valuable information. Sending love to her mother, Fanny reported that she could have guessed that her mother’s message to her would be for her to mind her books.

Mrs. Adams and her sister, Deborah Folsom, who had come to live in the Adams’ household, were former teachers, and Fanny received her early education at home. And as she came into her teenage years, her life and education expanded to include visits with her Boston family.¹⁰

Fanny did not visit or establish a regular correspondence with her birth family until she was twelve years old, the Boston Adams’ silence seemingly indicating a complete surrender of their youngest member to the Brunswick family. In a poignant letter from her birth mother to twelve year old Fanny, Emily Adams answered her daughter’s inquiry about what date she had been born. Birthdays did not receive the sort of observance that we give them today, but it is, nonetheless, touching to see evidence of a growing desire on young Fanny’s part to know of her beginnings.¹¹

Fanny enjoyed an affectionate correspondence with her birth family in the 1840s, and received warm assurances from her birth mother, Emily Adams, of her Boston family’s love for her. Emily, a religious and affectionate woman, encouraged Fanny to realize her deep obligations to her adoptive parents and to be a dutiful and obedient daughter to them. Emily emphasized her daughter’s indebtedness to Rev. and Mrs. Adams, and she expressed her enthusiasm for Fanny’s study of music and art, asserting that these skills might provide a livelihood in the future, if need be.

When Fanny was thirteen, she began spending time at Ashur Adams’ home in Jamaica Plain, just outside Boston, studying art and music with her talented sister, Catherine Adams Lombard. Though married, no mention is made of the whereabouts of her husband, Daniel Lombard, and Catherine earned a modest income for herself and her two daughters by painting and teaching art. Catherine, at least fifteen years Fanny’s senior, would, in the years to come, be quick to take offense if any praise of Fanny’s talents implied that they outshone her own, leaving one to wonder if she resented the opportunities that Fanny enjoyed with her Brunswick family. Fanny’s sister Charlotte cautioned her younger sibling to be discreet when discussing art and music with Catherine. Fanny’s letters to and from Charlotte Adams display a special bond that sprang up between the two half-sisters, though Charlotte was eight years Fanny’s senior. Charlotte followed news of Fanny’s activities with great interest, never failing to tease her little sister over some new enthusiasm or a new flame, and Charlotte took it upon herself to write to Fanny with their own news and questions on the Boston family’s behalf.¹²

During one of Fanny’s first visits to her birth family’s home, Charlotte Adams traveled to Brunswick to spend time at the home of Fanny’s adoptive parents. Fanny’s eldest half-sister, Mary, did her best to convince the thirteen year old Fanny that Rev. Adams had decided to keep Charlotte in place of her. Fanny wrote to her father that she had assured Mary that if all the people in Boston should tell me so, I should not believe it. This was a sad way of teasing a young girl who knew very well what it was like to be given away, but Mary’s dark sense of humor may be explained by her recurring periods of debilitating depression.

Fanny’s roguish brother, George Wyllys, expressed an amused fondness for his little sister, as did Samuel, the only one of Fanny’s siblings who was born from the marriage of Ashur and Emily. Sam would take pains to stay in touch with his younger sister over the years, despite his ramblings and the undisciplined nature of his life.¹³

As Fanny entered womanhood, she finished her education in Brunswick’s high school. A paper that Fanny wrote as an eighteen year old school girl in a favorite teacher’s class reveals a lively and witty scholar. In her assignment to use verbs ending in fy, she incorporated an apology for indulging in laughter in Mr. Pike’s class: This is to certify, notify, exemplify, testify, and signify my obedient disposition; and I hope that it will gratify, satisfy, beautify, and edify my teacher, and pacify, modify, mollify, and nullify his feelings of dissatisfaction toward me. . . . Please do not to exclaim ‘O fie!,’ when reading this paper. Though Fanny was a student at Alfred Pike’s Brunswick High School in 1843, in that same year she also began teaching drawing and painting at the school, as she would in a number of Brunswick schools in the 1840s.¹⁴

The Adams family provided numerous opportunities for Fanny to develop the artistic talents they recognized in their daughter, for Rev. Adams held the arts in great esteem. He recorded a favored quotation from Jean Paul in his 1842 diary: The world of art must be the highest, the most ideal, wherein every pang dissolves into a greater pleasure, and where we resemble men on mountain tops; the storm which bursts heavily on the real life and world below is to us but a cooling shower. Fanny would go beyond the superficial training in the decorative arts that society encouraged for young ladies, studying painting with Maine’s premier portrait artist, Jeremiah Hardy. And in music as well, Fanny sought and obtained excellent training.

Perhaps it was during the daily prayer and hymn in their home that Rev. and Mrs. Adams first noticed that little Frances could sing and had a love of music. Here, too, it is no surprise that Rev. Adams encouraged Fanny’s talents. Another citation in his diary offered a quote from Luther: "Next to theology it is to music that I give the highest place and the greatest honor."

Fanny received instruction from the Portland organist, Henry S. Edwards, then considered the best in the state. And occasionally when Fanny’s father traveled to New England cities for religious conferences, she accompanied him. On one trip, they heard the celebrated singer, Jenny Lind, and on others Fanny had the sublime pleasures of visiting the art galleries and museums of Boston and New York. This willingness to provide extraordinary opportunities for a young woman provoked comment from family and friends, and may account, in part, for the perception that Fanny was their pet.¹⁵

Though proud of their talented daughter, Rev. and Mrs. Adams instilled in Fanny a sense of modesty concerning her abilities and accomplishments, and Fanny displayed an earnest desire to please her Brunswick family and meet their expectations. In her letters to Brunswick while studying with her sisters in Boston, young Fanny struggled with the convention of not writing too much about herself in her letters. Though fearing her adopted parents’ disapproval, she longed to write to her parents of her delight in the artistic skills she was developing while under her sister Catherine’s tutelage. With a plea that they not scold her, she begged their forgiveness for writing so much about the joy and excitement she experienced while mastering the arts.¹⁶

Beyond music and art, Fanny’s other great loves were literature and poetry, and, again, she was influenced by Rev. Adams. He, having taught classical literature at the Bangor Theological Seminary before coming to Brunswick, was a voracious reader and read to his children from the works of the great poets, dramatists and novelists. Adams traveled frequently to Boston and New York to religious conferences and he invariably searched the book shops of the cities, bringing back the latest books of note, and also the classics. Shakespeare, Juvenal, Carlyle, R. H. Dana, and Coleridge, to name a few, were among his interests in the early 1840s. Fanny became a regular member of Brunswick’s literary discussion groups, and was recognized as one who put much thought into her reactions to the discussed writings and theories. She was not afraid to offer her own opinions, and as one friend teasingly commented, Fanny’s reasoning, so poetical and ingenious, was enough to puzzle even a Champollion, the scholar acclaimed for first deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. His observation that Fanny left people amazed, and "unwilling to allow the truth so different from previous convictions . . . ," is some indication that some of Fanny’s opinions were, at times, unconventional.¹⁷

The Brunswick family raised a daughter who could not only reason and think for herself, but could express herself in intelligent company. The rich intellectual atmosphere of her home led her to look and think beyond the perimeters of a woman’s sphere, that limited a woman’s interests and concerns to home and family. Not many women of Fanny’s time dared to display their intellectual abilities. Critics of education for women warned that intense mental activity for women was at best unfeminine, and at its worst could lead to physical illness or even insanity. In this societal climate, Fanny’s willingness to offer opinions that did more than validate existing ideas, startled some and intrigued others.

Though quite comfortable and confident in her world of learned and talented adults, both as a child and as a woman, Fanny was not unshakable. Her aplomb could vanish, as when faced with her father’s request to make a visit alone to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Boston. Confident enough to face the great man of American poetry if accompanied by a friend, she begged Rev. Adams not to send her on this visit alone. Audacious in some situations, she exercised caution in others. She approached her first riding lessons with a fearlessness that surprised her instructor, yet she showed an early apprehension toward sailing, though she discovered that the pleasures of it could overcome her fears. Fanny’s caution in regard to sailing does not seem so surprising when considering the many examples of Brunswick seafarers who went to sea and never returned. Among Rev. Adams’ many duties as minister was notifying and comforting Brunswick families when news came, all too frequently, of lost ships and sailors. On one occasion while visiting Brunswick, Fanny’s birth-sister, Charlotte, teased Fanny for being the only member of a party that was skeered to ride a newly-built ship at its launching in Brunswick. Laughably, the ways broke midway into the launch, leaving the brig and its passengers stuck in the mud. Perhaps Fanny’s caution was, again, born from experience.¹⁸

As Fanny grew into womanhood, it has been said that her father became disturbed by what he saw as willfulness and stubbornness in her behavior. Most painful for him was Fanny’s refusal to become a member of his Congregational community. Although Fanny attended her father’s First Parish Church regularly, and played the organ for the choir, she refused to become a member of his church. Unable, in good conscience, to deny her own beliefs and convictions, Fanny rejected the dogma of Congregationalism and its adherence to biblical doctrines. The Reverend Adams, who led many into the Congregational fold and the promises of salvation it offered, must have felt great pain and frustration at being unable to touch the religious feelings of the adopted daughter he loved. But, as she demonstrated in later years, Fanny was more at home with the liberal theologies of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Unitarian minister, Starr King. As Catherine Clinton indicated in her book, The Other Civil War, choice of religion was one of the few decisions that society allowed a woman to make for herself. Obedient daughter Fanny strove to be, but she would accept no arbiter of her spiritual beliefs.¹⁹

The Reverend Adams also expressed frustration with what he perceived as flaws in Fanny’s character—her tendency to be late for appointments and, as he saw it, remiss in attending promptly to social obligations, provoking her assiduous father to exasperated scolding. Adams, whose life of diligently attending, day and night, to the needs of the members of his congregation all through the years of his ministry, was baffled by his daughter’s failure to emulate her father’s perceptions of duty. But all in all, Fanny was her adoptive father’s child. A bright little girl, brought up on religious debate, treated to literature steeped with philosophical dialogues, inspired to prize and glory in the arts, she became a reflective and dynamic young woman.

Fanny’s father also provided a role model for his young daughter as one who stood by his convictions. Though sensitive to the opinions and attitudes of his flock, a number of whom had no appreciation for abolitionism in any form, in the early 1840s, Rev. Adams invited a black minister from Portland, one Rev. Freeman, into the pulpit of the First Parish Church. Three members of his congregation, all ship’s captains who spent as much time in the South as in the North, walked out. Adams commented in his diary that Rev. Freeman cast out three devils before he said a word. Young Fanny learned much from her father about having courage in one’s convictions.²⁰

Perhaps no member of the household, though, could be more critical of Fanny than Cousin Deborah, the sharp-tongued sister of Mrs. Adams. Deborah Folsom offered stern advice on what she perceived as Fanny’s love of beautiful clothing. Her judgment has been used to describe Fanny Adams as a vain girl who put on airs inappropriate to her station in life as a minister’s daughter. Yet Cousin Deborah loved to sew for Fanny and helped her shop for the beautiful materials and trims that she admired. Fanny did love beautiful colors and textures, as an artist will, and her taste was once described by her artist brother, George Adams, as gorgeous. But Fanny described herself as having tastes quite different from anyone else, with no ambition to be dressed in the height of current fashion. Though Deborah was often critical and an unrelenting scold, there is little doubt that she loved Fanny and was often most generous and supportive. But she treated Fanny as her silly child, unwilling to accept her passage into womanhood, and seeing Fanny’s dreams and goals as unrealistic. Meddlesome and seldom tactful, Deborah was involved in any and all turmoil that occurred in the Adams family.²¹

Fanny must have relished the freedom of Portland, with the opportunity to order her own life and indulge herself in the arts. As she began to show her own talents in painting and music, she developed an ever increasing circle of talented and admiring friends. But as 1851 unfolded, Fanny’s attentions to her painting, music and friends in Portland were interrupted by visits home to Brunswick. She had become increasingly aware of a tall, serious, gray-eyed student at Bowdoin, who had become the new director of her father’s choir. And when Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain began to pay court to Fanny, before many months had passed, she found that they had much more in common than their mutual love of music.²²

CHAPTER 2

Raising an Idealist

The young man determined to win Fanny Adams’ hand had been named Lawrence Joshua Chamberlain at his birth in 1828. It is written in the family bible that he was named in honor of Commodore Lawrence, whose words of defiance in the face of defeat, Don’t give up the ship, won him fame in 1813. Yet the young scholar would enter Bowdoin College as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Perhaps he merely saw his opportunity to reverse his names as he started his new life among strangers at Bowdoin College. But how significant was this wish to place his biblical name before that of the modern warrior? He would be known as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain throughout his academic and professional life, though his family would always call him Lawrence.¹

His early years might be seen as the quintessence of a son of Maine, his family’s life dominated by timber and sail, and nourished by the soil. Born to a respected family in Brewer, a small town across the river from Bangor, Maine, one of the busiest lumber ports in America, he was the grandson of Col. Joshua Chamberlain, who had settled in the area in 1800 as a shipbuilder. Lawrence’s father, Joshua Chamberlain, Jr., was a successful farmer and expert on timberlands, whose marriage to Sarah Dupee Brastow joined two of the area’s pioneer families. Ships from all over the world made their way up the Penobscot River, carrying away the rich harvest of wood from Maine’s forests. Sailors and woodsmen crowded Bangor’s wooden sidewalks, riddled with holes from the spikes of the riverdrivers’ boots. Only after loading timber at the city’s busy wharves, would the ships pause briefly at a spring on the Brewer side of the river, to fill their barrels with sweet water before heading downriver to the open sea.²

How different those two towns on opposing sides of the river were, for though Bangor had outstripped Brewer in size and commerce, it was the latter community which founded the first church in the region. By the time Lawrence was born, Bangor had its own churches and even a theological seminary, but it also bore the brunt of the sailors’ respite from months at sea and the woodsmen’s emergence with the freshets of spring from their long winter in the wilderness. The jingle of coins in the pockets of these hardy men had attracted an array of bawdy and ale houses. Yet Bangor retained enough respectability for its houses of ill repute to discreetly advertise their trade, to those in the know, with signboards that declared laundry.³

The daily passage of ships that sailed to and from exotic and faraway ports must take any boy’s thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own world, which for Lawrence was bound up in the hard work of his family’s farm and timberlands. Though it would not be the sea that would lure the Chamberlains’ promising firstborn son away, he would not remain to walk in his father’s footsteps through field and forest. Lawrence entered Bowdoin to pursue the ministry, his longing to see those romantic foreign lands to be satisfied by becoming a missionary. But what influences of his home and childhood set him on this path?⁴

The family adhered to the stern Calvinist teachings of the conservative Congregationalist Church. Lawrence’s father had been one of the community leaders who labored to see a new Congregational meetinghouse raised in 1828. Yet it was not until the 1840s that the children would hear the tenets by which Sarah and Joshua Chamberlain, Jr. raised their family echoed from the pulpit of that church by the river. In 1844, Lawrence’s younger siblings, Horace, Sarah, John, and Thomas, were baptized at the church, and in 1845, at the age of 16, Lawrence became a member of the church after a customary testimony of faith. The family’s rather lengthy hesitance to become active members of the church may have been in deference to the feelings of Lawrence’s mother, Sarah Dupee Brastow Chamberlain. She was a woman of deep religious convictions, but her father, Billings Brastow, had left that Brewer Congregational Society with his family in 1822 over some unknown disagreement with its followers.⁵

Strict demands were made on the members of the Brewer church. Alcohol was a demon, though ale and cider, at least by the Chamberlains’ reckoning, were exempt. Indulgence in drink or such seemingly innocent amusements as dancing or taking a buggy ride on the Sabbath were enough to bring excommunication on the offender’s head. But what may have been the most narrowing restriction that the church placed on its members was its condemnation of reading any literature that was not religious in nature. This placed many works beyond the reach of young Lawrence, who reminisced in his memoirs of having been turned down flat when he asked his parents’ permission to read James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer in his youth.⁶

The Chamberlain household, however, cannot be viewed as a grim and sterile environment, devoted only to toil and devoid of warmth or joy. Consider Lawrence’s life beyond hard work and the tenets of his church. Much of his unfinished memoirs are filled with fond remembrances of his childhood homes. One of his first memories was the scent of roses round the door of his birthplace, a small cottage that Joshua Chamberlain, Sr. had given to his son and new bride as a wedding present. Lawrence found it difficult to leave the large home his father had built for his growing family when it was time to part from these loved ones and follow his dreams. He relished the memories of working the earth on sunlit days, of riding headlong over the fields and taking a horse over the fences. The solitary pleasures of the woods and visits to the mysterious camps of nearby Maine Indians remained in his memories, while the treks that he made with his father through the forest wilderness of Maine and Canada were prized recollections.

Music was a great source of pleasure to Lawrence. Captivated with the sound of the bass viol, he mimed the finger positions and bowing on a dummy instrument of his own making, until he managed to acquire the real thing. His sister Sarah, called Sae by the family, would gradually acquire enough skill on the family piano to attempt duets with her enthusiastic brother. Mother Chamberlain, who devoutly instilled in her children a deep sense of duty to God and church, was a loving mother, whose eyes often sparkled with humor and shone for her young ones with the serenity of good family life. Father Chamberlain, though described as taciturn and stern, nonetheless proved to be a caring and supportive father. Lawrence’s parents had great dreams and hopes for their talented son, and he, with much gratitude for all they provided and made possible for him, loved and honored his mother and father as long as they lived.⁷

Lawrence credited his father with teaching him that obstacles irremovable can be surmounted. Father Chamberlain accepted no excuses from his young son when a job needed to be done, and his imperious command, Do it, that’s how!, became for Lawrence an order of action for life.

The Chamberlain home, Brewer, ca. 1840.

Something in this boy led him to place high demands upon himself, to create challenges beyond those made by his exacting father. The first goal he remembered setting for himself, was to learn to swim well enough to cross the Penobscot River to the Bangor side and return to his own shore. When this had been accomplished, the task was to make the crossing carrying a heavy stone under one arm. There were also the towering masts of the ships in the river to climb. Placing his cap on the top of the mainmast of every ship launched on the river during his youth became his special feat.⁸

Ambitious and daring by nature, Lawrence also possessed a strong sense of idealism, nurtured by the importance his family placed on moral and spiritual obligations. Like many youths, he agonized over his choice of career, for a man’s profession in the 1800s was his identity and established his place in society. But it seems that he, torn between the demands of heart and head, suffered more anguish over his decision than many of his contemporaries. He felt keenly that his decision would determine nothing less than who he was, and who he would be, morally and spiritually.⁹

Lawrence’s father wanted a military career for his son, as evidenced by the boy’s attendance at Whiting’s Military School in nearby Ellsworth, Maine. After all, Col. Joshua Chamberlain, Lawrence’s grandfather, had led several companies of Maine militia, and had commanded a garrison at Eastport, Maine during the War of 1812. And Lawrence’s father had been second in command of the militia that confronted the British during a border dispute between Maine and Canada in the early 1840s. Diplomacy settled the matter before blood was spilled, but the hostile posturing was known thereafter as the Aroostook War. The fates delivered no stirring exploits in the annals of history for either Col. Joshua or Joshua, Jr., yet their service is an indication of the Chamberlain family’s willingness to pick up the musket in their country’s