Maine Roads to Gettysburg: How Joshua Chamberlain, Oliver Howard, and 4,000 Men from the Pine Tree State Helped Win the Civil War's Bloodiest Battle

By Tom Huntington

From the author of Searching for George Gordon Meade, a study of how troops from Maine aided the Union Army’s victory at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine regiment made a legendary stand on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. But Maine’s role in the battle includes much more than that. Soldiers from the Pine Tree State contributed mightily during the three days of fighting. Pious general Oliver Otis Howard secured the high ground of Cemetery Ridge for the Union on the first day. Adelbert Ames—the stern taskmaster who had transformed the 20th Maine into a fighting regiment—commanded a brigade and then a division at Gettysburg. The 17th Maine fought ably in the confused and bloody action in the Wheatfield; a sea captain turned artilleryman named Freeman McGilvery cobbled together a defensive line that proved decisive on July 2; and the 19th Maine helped stop Pickett’s Charge during the battle’s climax.

Maine soldiers had fought and died for two bloody years even before they reached Gettysburg. They had fallen on battlefields in Virginia and Maryland. They had died in front of Richmond, in the Shenandoah Valley, on the bloody fields of Antietam, in the Slaughter Pen at Fredericksburg, and in the tangled Wilderness around Chancellorsville. And the survivors kept fighting, even as they followed Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania.

In Maine Roads to Gettysburg, author Tom Huntington tells their stories.

Praise for Searching for George Gordon Meade

“An engrossing narrative that the reader can scarcely put down.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson

“Unique and irresistible.” —Lincoln Prize-winning historian Harold Holzer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9780811767729

Book preview

Maine Roads to Gettysburg

Maine Roads to Gettysburg

How Joshua Chamberlain, Oliver Howard, and 4,000 Men from the Pine Tree State Helped Win the Civil War’s Bloodiest Battle

Tom Huntington

Guilford, Connecticut

Published by Stackpole Books

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Huntington, Tom, 1960– author.

Title: Maine roads to Gettysburg : how Joshua Chamberlain, Oliver Howard, and 4,000 men from the Pine Tree State helped win the Civil War’s bloodiest battle / Tom Huntington.

Description: Lanham, Maryland : Stackpole Books, an imprint of Globe Pequot, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017059147 (print) | LCCN 2017059406 (ebook) | ISBN 9780811767729 | ISBN 9780811718400 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780811767729 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863. | Maine—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Regimental histories. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Regimental histories. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. | Chamberlain, Joshua Lawrence, 1828–1914. | Howard, O. O. (Oliver Otis), 1830–1909. | Soldiers—Maine—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC E475.53 (ebook) | LCC E475.53 .H894 2018 (print) | DDC 973.7/349—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059147

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To my parents, Milton and Lillian Huntington, for—among many other things—having the wisdom to make sure I was born and raised in the great state of Maine.

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Maine Goes to War

Chapter 2: Maine Spills Blood

Chapter 3: McClellan Makes His Move

Chapter 4: Howard Loses His Arm

Chapter 5: Ames Gets a Regiment

Chapter 6: The 7th Maine Makes a Charge

Chapter 7: The 19th Maine Smells Powder

Chapter 8: Hooker Takes Command

Chapter 9: Howard Gets Flanked

Chapter 10: The Army Moves North

Chapter 11: The 16th Maine Gets Sacrificed

Chapter 12: The 17th Maine Finds a Wall

Chapter 13: The 20th Maine Holds the Left

Chapter 14: The Army of the Potomac Triumphs

Chapter 15: Aftermath

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I’ve lived in Pennsylvania for more than two decades now, and my previous books covered soldiers from the commonwealth. For this book, I’ve symbolically returned to the land of my birth—Maine. If nothing else, the research for Maine Roads to Gettysburg provided me with a good excuse to head north and spend some time in the Pine Tree State. Not that I needed an excuse!

During my travels, I made multiple visits to the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives at Bowdoin College’s Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, where Marieke Van Der Steenhoven and the rest of the staff were always friendly and helpful. A long, long time ago, when I was a student at Bowdoin, I used to work at the library. Back then, I never dreamed I would be returning to Bowdoin to do research for a book about the Civil War—and a book that included material about one of my fraternity brothers, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. (I should point out that Chamberlain and I did not attend Bowdoin at the same time.)

I would also like to thank the people at Bowdoin for the terrific job digitizing the letters of Oliver Otis Howard. Having all that correspondence just a mouse click away made my job a lot easier, even if it did prevent me from spending even more time in Brunswick.

Also in Brunswick, the staff of the Pejepscot Historical Society were welcoming and eager to help. Looking further south, I’d like to thank Leslie L. Rounds of the Dyer Library in Saco and Zoe B. Thomas of the Saco Museum for providing the transcripts for John Haley’s unpublished journal notebooks.

Many thanks also to the staff of the Maine State Archives, which has such a great collection of materials. The letters they put up on the web for the Civil War sesquicentennial were a huge help, and I quoted from a lot of them. But that’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg in the files of the Civil War Regimental Correspondence, which includes literally thousands of letters dealing with the creation and maintenance of Maine’s Civil War regiments. Before one of my research expeditions to Maine, I neglected to make sure the archives was going to be open during my visit. To my shock and horror, I learned they were closed that week. The staff there has my heartfelt thanks for letting me into the research room nonetheless.

I would like to thank Desiree Butterfield-Nagy in special collections at the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono. I emailed her a list of things I wanted to consult, and when I arrived bright and early on the morning indicated, I found everything sitting on carts waiting for me. It was a great way to start the day.

Thanks to the Fifth Maine Regiment Museum Collection, Peaks Island, Maine, for permission to quote from the John French letters. (The museum, on a scenic island in Casco Bay, is well worth a visit.) Patti Whitten of the Damariscotta Historical Society was also very helpful digging up background about James A. Hall.

Outside of Maine, I remain impressed by the staff and the facility at the Army Heritage Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. That’s another amazing resource. John Heiser at Gettysburg National Military Park was instrumental in making my visits to the library there productive. In addition, I had fruitful visits to the Hay Library at Brown University (for the Selden Connor letters) and the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College (the Adelbert Ames papers). The Cumberland County Library System proved invaluable, and my home library in New Cumberland was a great help with interlibrary loans. Support your local library!

I also want to express my appreciation for Andrea Solarz, the great-great-grandaughter of the 6th Maine’s Charles Amory Clark, for letting me quote from her ancestor’s letters, and to Ron Coddington for helping me get in touch with her.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank everyone at Stackpole Books for all their help and support. Publisher Judith Schnell, another Maine native, gave me the go-ahead for the book, and the crack editorial team—including Dave Reisch and Stephanie Otto—made the whole process flow smoothly. Speaking of smooth, my thanks to copy editor Brett Keener for making my prose less lumpy, saving me from errors, and untangling my thicket of endnotes. I must also thank Charlie Downs for looking over the galleys and saving me from several embarrassing errors. Any that remain are, of course, my responsibility.

On the non-editorial side, thanks most of all to my lovely wife, Beth Ann. Over the past few years, she’s seen our summer vacations turn into research expeditions, but she makes sure we have a good time. I could not have written this book without her love and support.

Introduction

Joshua Chamberlain Returns to Gettysburg

In proportion to the number of her troops in the action, no one of the eighteen states whose regiments flew the stars and stripes on this hard-fought field contributed more than Maine to the victory. At whatever point the battle raged, the sons of the Pine Tree State were in the melee.

—Selden Connor, October 3, 1889

The Maine veterans returned to Pennsylvania in October 1889, 26 years after they had fought at Gettysburg with the Army of the Potomac. For three days in July 1863, the Union troops had withstood the attacks of the Army of Northern Virginia, and they had emerged victorious in what would be the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. When the smoke had cleared, nearly 8,000 soldiers were dead, 27,000 were wounded, and an additional 11,000 were captured or missing. The soldiers who had fought then were now much older, if not always wiser. It was likely that many of them were making their first trip back to the field where they had risked life and limb for the Union cause on a battlefield far from their Maine homes. Unlike so many, they had survived that battle and the war, and now they returned to reminisce, exaggerate, and relive one of the crowning moments of their lives.

The chief reason for this visit was the dedication of monuments to the Maine units that had fought here. The solid stone sentinels, many of them chiseled from Hallowell granite, were intended to commemorate and perpetuate the conspicuous valor and heroism of Maine soldiers on that decisive battlefield of the war of the rebellion. There were 15 monuments, representing the regiments, batteries, and battalions that had struggled in the epic battle.¹

The dedication day, October 3, brought perfect autumn weather. The ceremonies began at 9:00 a.m. with a national salute fired from guns on Cemetery Hill, the strategic high ground that Maine native Oliver O. Howard had selected as an ideal defensive position when he arrived there on the first day of battle. After the salute, Governor Edwin C. Burleigh and the state’s other Gettysburg commissioners set out to inspect the monuments; accompanying them was Hannibal Hamlin, the Maine Republican who had served as President Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president. At each regimental monument, they listened to dedication speeches alongside the men who had fought with that particular unit. It was the rare pleasure of the company to hear the stories of many exciting scenes of the battle from the lips of narrators, who had also been actors in those scenes, recalled one participant.²

That evening a large crowd gathered at the county courthouse for the overall dedicatory ceremonies. Anyone eager to hear the former vice president speak would have been disappointed, because Hamlin’s exertions during the day had left the 80-year-old too exhausted to attend. Maj. Greenlief T. Stevens, who had commanded the 5th Maine Battery during the battle—and had the knoll where his battery was posted named after him—called the meeting to order and introduced a speaker who still retained enough energy to talk.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain stood to speak. Twenty-six years earlier he had commanded the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry on the rocky, wooded slopes of Little Round Top, and his soldiers had successfully fought off attack after attack by Confederates from the 15th Alabama Infantry. Later in the war, Chamberlain was severely wounded, shot through both hips during a battle outside Petersburg, Virginia. Chamberlain’s wounds were so severe, in fact, that Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant promoted him to brigadier general on the spot, thinking that he couldn’t survive. Perhaps they had been mortal wounds—but, if so, they wouldn’t kill Chamberlain until more than five decades had passed. In the years after the war, Chamberlain served as governor of Maine and president of his alma mater, Bowdoin College. His Civil War experiences, especially his successful defense of Little Round Top, remained the high point of his life.

Chamberlain was now 61 years old. His hair and drooping mustache had long since turned gray, and his war wounds left him in near-constant discomfort. If anyone had a right to be tired, it was Chamberlain. He had already given a speech that day, when he and other veterans of the 20th Maine had assembled with their wives and others at Little Round Top to dedicate their monument. You were making history, he told the men who had fought under him. The centuries to come will share and recognize the victory won here, with growing gratitude. The country has acknowledged your service. Your State is proud of it. After the ceremonies on Little Round Top, the gathering moved west through the woods to pay homage at the spot where the regiment’s Company B had been during the fighting, when it had risen up from behind a stone wall at the struggle’s climax to pour a volley into the unsuspecting Confederates’ flank. Then the group climbed the steep slopes of Big Round Top to dedicate the monument that marked the position the regiment had taken and occupied during the night of July 2. Chamberlain made another short speech there.³

Now he had one more speech to make. As he looked out over the faces in the audience, Chamberlain could be excused if he saw ghosts. Not just the spirits of the thousands of Maine men who had died in the war—the victims of shot, shell or, more likely, disease—but also the ghosts of much younger men who had been replaced by the graying veterans staring back at him. After war had broken out in 1861, young men from all over Maine had joined the cause. Many of them felt compelled to do their part to restore the Union. Others felt the stirring of adventure, or the chance to see the world outside their own state. And there were even some who wanted to strike a blow against slavery, the root cause of the war. They came from all walks of life. They were farmers, lumberjacks, fishermen, sailors, students, lawyers, and teachers. For all of them, it’s safe to say, their experiences in the war had been transformative. Missing limbs and scars testified to the physical effects, but life as a soldier in the American Civil War left wounds that were harder to see, psychic scars that few people in the nineteenth century understood. Those who were lucky enough to survive returned to their homes and resumed their lives. Now they had come back to this small Pennsylvania town where so much blood had been shed to receive recognition for what they had done and endured.

The State of Maine stands here to-day for the first time in her own name, Chamberlain told the assembly. For back in 1863, he explained in his usual florid, oratorical style, Maine had fought at Gettysburg as part of a greater whole—the United States of America. For which great end, in every heroic struggle from the beginning of our history until now—a space of more than two hundred years—she has given her best of heart and brain and poured out her most precious blood. The Union men who fought at Gettysburg, Chamberlain told the gathered veterans, had played a part in a struggle that was much bigger than themselves, greater, even, than their home states. They had fought to preserve their country. That said, Chamberlain couldn’t resist extolling the role the Pine Tree State had played during the American Civil War. [W]herever there was a front, the guns of Maine thundered and her colors stood.

Near the end of his speech, Chamberlain recited a passage that has echoed down through the years, one that is still quoted today. In great deeds something abides, he said. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.⁴

One thing that abides at Gettysburg is the reputation of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. There’s no doubt that he and his men made a courageous and bloody stand on the south flank of Little Round Top on July 2, 1863. When his division commander, Brig. Gen. James Barnes, wrote his official report on the battle, he felt compelled to include a lengthy account of Chamberlain’s role. Colonel Chamberlain, of the Twentieth Maine Volunteers, whose service I have endeavored briefly to describe, deserves especial mention, Barnes wrote. There have been several books written about Chamberlain and his regiment since, including John J. Pullen’s The Twentieth Maine and Thomas Desjardin’s Stand Firm, Ye Boys From Maine. Chamberlain told his story quite often, too. Yet there was a time when Chamberlain and his regiment were not widely known, not until novelist Michael Shaara made Chamberlain a centerpiece of his 1974 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Killer Angels, which was later adapted as the movie Gettysburg. In 1990, documentarian Ken Burns devoted a good deal of time to Chamberlain in his epic documentary The Civil War. Suddenly, the Maine colonel was a Civil War celebrity.⁵

Chamberlain’s current prominence bothers some historians, who argue over the details of his story or maintain that Little Round Top was not all that vital to the Union victory at Gettysburg. It bothered some of Chamberlain’s contemporaries, too. Ellis Spear, who fought on Little Round Top as a major in the 20th Maine, grew tired of the plaudits sent Chamberlain’s way, and by Chamberlain’s acceptance of them. He called their brigade commander, Strong Vincent, the true hero of Little Round Top (if any officer is to have that honor). Writing to the 20th Maine’s first commander, Adelbert Ames, in 1913, Spear pointed out that the park road at Little Round Top was not named after Vincent, who was mortally wounded in the fighting. (It was named after Chamberlain.) ‘Dead men tell no tales,’ said Spear. That is left to the living if they desire it, and this thing wears upon my nerves, though I have no personal complaint whatever.⁶

Over the years the 20th Maine’s fight on Little Round Top has become Gettysburg’s Rashomon, an event witnessed differently by its various participants. By 1889 Capt. Howard L. Prince, who was acting as the regiment’s historian, had to concede that the conflicting accounts made it difficult to determine exactly what had happened during the flurry of action on July 2. It is not believed to be possible to reconcile all the theories and beliefs of the actors, even in so small a space as the front of a regiment, Prince admitted, and when we fail, as sometimes we must, we must conclude, that as there is a substantial agreement on the main features of the action, these disputed details were seen from different points, or were viewed at different stages as part of a whole.⁷

None of that dissuades the thousands of people who visit the modest granite monument on Little Round Top. They come to salute Chamberlain and his men, and often leave behind small tributes—notes, pennies, American flags—in honor of the Mainers who fought and died there. Chamberlain’s fame even extends out into our solar system. In 2015 he had a rock on Mars named after him. The Red Planet is, of course, named after the Roman god of war.⁸

Chamberlain’s fame has also overshadowed the roles other Maine regiments and soldiers played at Gettysburg. You can practically write the story of the three-day battle just by highlighting the roles of Maine units and individuals. Selden Connor, who had been in command of the 7th Maine during the battle and, like Chamberlain, went on to serve as the state’s governor, also spoke to the gathered veterans that night in October 1889. In proportion to the number of her troops in the action, no one of the eighteen states whose regiments flew the stars and stripes on this hard-fought field contributed more than Maine to the victory, he said. At whatever point the battle raged, the sons of the Pine Tree State were in the melee.⁹

That started with James Hall’s 2nd Maine Battery, which fought desperately with the I Corps on July 1, and it continued up to the actions of the 19th Maine Volunteer Infantry on July 3, when it stormed into the Bloody Angle on Cemetery Ridge to help repulse Pickett’s Charge. The 16th Maine made a valiant stand on the battle’s first day; on July 2, the 17th Maine fought in the Wheatfield, the 3rd Maine was in the Peach Orchard, and the 4th Maine made its stand in Devil’s Den, at the extreme left of the III Corps’ extended line. Later that day, Maine sea captain-turned-artilleryman Freeman McGilvery, from the army’s artillery reserve, set up batteries along Cemetery Ridge that kept the attacking Confederates from piercing the Union line. In the words of one artilleryman, McGilvery was the only field officer who realized and tried to remedy the situation. He was fearless and untiring in keeping the enemy from discovering the widening gap in our line. One of the units McGilvery ordered to hold its position at all hazards was Edwin Dow’s 6th Maine Battery. Dow later said that McGilvery was ever present, riding up and down the line in the thickest of the fire, encouraging the men by his words and dashing example, his horse receiving eight wounds, of which he has since died, the gallant major receiving only a few scratches.¹⁰

Adelbert Ames, the first commander of the 20th Maine and the soldier who taught Joshua Chamberlain the arts of war, led his brigade with the XI Corps on July 1. General Howard, who hailed from Leeds, was at one point the Union’s commanding general on the field before being superseded by Winfield Scott Hancock.

After the war, a soldier who had fought with the 19th Maine at Gettysburg heard Chamberlain speak about the 20th Maine’s role in the battle. When the talk was over, he went up to Chamberlain. I see, General, you claim that the 20th Maine saved the day at Gettysburg, he said with some heat.

Certainly, Chamberlain replied.

Hitherto, the soldier said, ‘I had thought it was the 19th Maine that saved the day there."

And you thought rightly, Chamberlain told him. Don’t you know that every picket that sticks to the fence may claim the credit of keeping the pigs out of the garden? The 19th Maine man decided that was a very simple and sensible explanation.¹¹

We do not claim a monopoly of the glory won on this field, said Charles Hamlin, the son of the former vice president and an assistant adjutant general to Maj. Gen. Andrew Humphreys during the battle, when he addressed his fellow Maine veterans that night at Gettysburg. But it is with justifiable pride, as we scan the line occupied by the living arch throughout the long three days’ contest, we note the pivotal points made memorable by the presence and conspicuous valor of Maine soldiers. While it may be an exaggeration to say that Maine saved the Union at Gettysburg, its soldiers certainly played vital roles in the victory.¹²

No coward has disgraced the fair name of the Pine Tree State, claimed an early history of Maine’s role in the Civil War. Obviously, that’s not true. Many brave soldiers from Maine fought in the war, but there were also plenty of men whose courage failed them, as well as shirkers, liars, thieves, and opportunists. There were even two men from Maine, Danville Leadbetter and Zebulon York, who served as generals for the Confederacy. Others born in the Pine Tree State fought as ordinary soldiers for the South.¹³

Abner Small, who wrote two slightly jaundiced accounts of his experiences with the 3rd and 16th Maine regiments, provided one account of the many soldiers to whom valor and glory were just words. We had a few—very few—pessimists among us, constitutional growlers, who were, on the opening of every campaign, attacked with a dyspeptic foreboding that defeat and disaster would follow us, Small wrote in his history of the 16th Maine. With them we always marched too long and marched too fast, but never fast enough to get ahead of their dismal prophecies. They had an ingrained hatred of discipline, cursed red tape by the great gross, and itched with a desire to ‘see a live Johnnie and draw a bead on him.’ Their desires were never gratified, for the Johnnies seemed to have had an intuitive perception of these ferocious fighters’ intentions, and kept out of sight, hence the few casualties in the immediate front of these rascally bummers.¹⁴

On the other hand, sometimes even the least reputable men found hidden reservoirs of courage on the battlefield, and there were many times when the most steadfast soldiers crumbled under fire. They were human, after all, with all the associated vices and virtues. That’s one reason why so many people find the Civil War irresistibly fascinating. Even more than a century and a half later, as we peer back into this chaotic, violent period of our history, we can still see traces of ourselves—the good and the bad—staring back at us.

Whether they enlisted as a lark, to find adventure, see new places, help save their country, or end slavery, the soldiers from Maine—like the soldiers from any state—found that war changed them. Many wrote home to share their experiences, or captured them in memoirs and unit histories after the war. Some of them, such as Joshua Chamberlain, were eloquent. Others could barely spell. But all who wrote about their war felt a need to communicate what they had gone through, whether it was the mind-numbing tedium of winter camp, or the adrenaline-surged rush of battle. People fought the Civil War, and people can be strange, complex, and fascinating creatures.

Take, for example, the experience of Freeman McGilvery on July 2. The story of how this former sea captain threw together an improvised artillery line that helped save the battle has been told before, but who knows about the resentments, recriminations, and accusations that had been swirling about through Maine’s artillery units—much of it due to McGilvery’s intense desire for promotion? When McGilvery found Edwin Dow and the 6th Maine Battery in the late afternoon of July 2, it must have been an interesting encounter. McGilvery had been actively trying to prevent Dow from getting permanent command of the battery, and had accused him of public drunkenness. Dow had responded by demanding a court-martial for McGilvery. That’s what happens when you place ambitious people in high-pressure situations. They rub up against each other and interesting things happen.

The Maine soldiers’ roads to Gettysburg had already been long and difficult by the time they reached Pennsylvania in the summer of ’63. The nation had been at war for more than two years. Many of the Maine soldiers who fought at Gettysburg had already experienced plenty of combat, as well as weeks and months of tedious camp life between the fights. They carried regimental flags emblazoned with the names of their battles—Gaines’ Mill, Glendale, Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and more. Farm boys who had never ventured farther than a few miles from their homes found themselves in Virginia, slogging their way up the Peninsula toward Richmond—and then heading the other way. Many had entered the war thinking it was going to be over fairly quickly, before realizing it was going to be long and bloody, and that the country was going to be transformed before it was over.

Maine owed its very statehood to the sectional tensions that eventually blew up into civil war. The region had belonged to Massachusetts until it entered the Union in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise, with Maine becoming a free state and Missouri a slaveholding one. The compromise maintained an uneasy balance between slave and free states, but cracks that would turn into fissures were already starting to break up the nation. In 1855, Maine elected Anson P. Morrill as its governor, the first chief executive from the new Republican Party. That was also the party of an Illinois politician named Abraham Lincoln, and in 1860 Maine’s Hannibal Hamlin became Lincoln’s running mate and then his vice president. (Had Andrew Johnson not replaced Hamlin for the 1864 election, Maine might have had its first president following Lincoln’s assassination.) South Carolina responded to the election of Lincoln, a man whose opinions and purposes are hostile to Slavery, by announcing its secession from the Union.

When the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor started the war in April 1861, Maine citizens rallied to the Union. In the glorious uprising that took place no State was in advance of Maine in showing its devotion to the national cause, wrote the authors of the 1865 history Maine in the War of the Union. That might not be a completely objective assessment, as the war’s passions still burned brightly when the authors published their book in 1865, but it’s true that Maine remained largely pro-Union—with some exceptions, of course. For example, in the town of Freedom, a man named Robert Elliot began recruiting his own militia units. State authorities suspected that Elliot planned to use them to resist the Union cause, not support it; they had Elliot arrested and sent to Fort Lafayette, a prison in New York Harbor where the government sent those suspected of disloyalty. Elliot saw the light, swore his allegiance to the United States, and was released on November 7, 1861. In 1863, citizens of the Democratic-leaning town of Kingfield, nestled among the state’s western mountains, mounted an attempt to resist the draft. The state sent a company of soldiers to put down the rebellion, but all ended peaceably.¹⁵

Those with a more patriotic spirit responded rapidly to President Lincoln’s April 1861 call for 75,000 volunteers. Some of them came from Bowdoin College, a small institution in the town of Brunswick. The college had opened in 1802 with only a president, a professor, and eight members of its first freshman class. Although the school grew slowly at first, by the time the war broke out it had established a solid reputation. Future president Franklin Pierce and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had both graduated from Bowdoin in 1825, and the college became known as an eastern seat of learning. It also furnished a surprising number of soldiers for the Civil War. By the end of the war, Bowdoin College could claim that a larger percentage of its alumni participated in the war than any other college in the North, wrote historian David K. Thomson.¹⁶

The most famous Bowdoin alumnus of the Civil War was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, but around 290 other graduates became soldiers—and not only for the Union. John Cummings Merrill, class of 1847, was born in Portland but joined the Confederacy as an army surgeon. His brother, Charles (class of 1851), fought for the Union and commanded the 17th Maine at Gettysburg. Arthur McArthur (class of 1850) was another Bowdoin graduate who threw in his lot with the South. He had been Oliver Otis Howard’s roommate when they both attended North Yarmouth Academy, where McArthur earned a reputation for his hard drinking. Travels through the South gave him an appreciation for slavery, which he believed was mutually beneficial to the master & slave. McArthur ended up in Louisiana, and joined one of that state’s regiments as a captain. He was killed by a sharpshooter in Winchester, Virginia, in 1864.¹⁷

Bowdoin influenced the war beyond the battlefield. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the wife of Bowdoin professor Calvin Stowe, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin while living in Brunswick. The hugely popular book helped fan the flames of abolitionist sentiment throughout the North. Otis Howard’s mathematics professor, William Smyth, was also the editor of the Advocate of Freedom. Published in Hallowell since 1838, it was the state’s first antislavery paper.¹⁸

In response to Lincoln’s call for troops, the state initially raised two regiments, the 1st and 2nd Maine Volunteers. The state legislature, called into a special session later in April, passed an act calling for a loan of $1 million for the war effort and summoned 10,000 volunteers to man 10 regiments. Per capita, by the end of the war Maine contributed more soldiers to the Union effort than any other state, with some 73,000 serving. Eighteen thousand of them became casualties.

Some 4,000 of those Maine men fought at Gettysburg over the three bloody days in July 1863. For many who survived, the battle remained the high point of their lives. Some talked about it until the day they died; others buried it deeply into the unconscious and tried to forget its horrific events. None of them emerged unchanged from the killing fields of Gettysburg. Whether they liked it or not, they had become a band of brothers. As Joshua Chamberlain told some of the survivors in October 1889, Those who fell here—those who have fallen before or since—those who linger, yet a little longer, soon to follow; all are mustered in one great company on the shining heights of life, with that star of Maine’s armorial ensign upon their foreheads forever—like the ranks of the galaxy.

Chapter 1

Maine Goes to War

I shall endeavor to do my duty and if I am unfortunate why so mite it be the cause is just, and if my humble life can help drive out those traitors from the soil it may freely go.

—John French, 5th Maine

In November 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States. His victory tore the nation apart. Southern states, seeing Lincoln as an imminent threat to the institution of slavery, reacted quickly. South Carolina announced its secession in December and other states prepared to follow suit. War appeared inevitable, but Maine—like the rest of the nation—remained woefully unprepared for conflict. There are at present only thirty-six organized military companies in the State, Davis Tillson, the state’s adjutant general, reported in December. And but very few of them, at all, answer the purposes for which they were designed and chartered. Most of them have but a fitful and uncertain life, resulting in nothing but vexation and annoyance to their members.¹

Israel Washburn was inaugurated for his first one-year term as Maine’s governor on January 3, 1861. Born in the town of Livermore, he had practiced law in Orono and served in the Maine legislature and the U.S. Congress. He was a strong antislavery man and had helped found the Republican Party. Washburn was small of stature—no more than five feet six inches tall—and clean shaven, with short hair and light blue eyes that gleamed from behind wire spectacles. He was the oldest of seven brothers and three sisters. One of the brothers, Elihu Washburne (who had attached an e to his name because it looked more English), moved to Illinois, where he became a Republican congressman and the political patron of a still-obscure soldier named Ulysses S. Grant. Another brother, Cadwallader Colden Washburn, ended up in Wisconsin, became a U.S. congressman two years after his brother, and took command of the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry after war broke out. He eventually became a major general and commanded a corps. It was a distinguished family indeed. On one occasion, the brothers got together and began arguing about who had the most impressive record. They put the question to a vote and the result was a tie—every brother had voted for himself. Cadwallader, the general, won on the second ballot.²

In his inaugural address, Washburn downplayed the danger to the republic. We are told that the slave States, or a portion of them, will withdraw from the Union, he said. No, they will not. They cannot go, and in the end will not want to go. They would know that their strength and happiness lay in the Union.³

Washburn, of course, was overly optimistic. Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s Maine-born vice president–elect, nursed no such illusions. James Dunning, a friend from Bangor, spoke to Hamlin just before his inauguration and asked him if he thought there would be a war. Dunning, there’s going to be a war, and a terrible one, just as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, Hamlin replied.⁴

Thomas W. Hyde had a frontline perspective on the nation’s political divisions. Hyde, born in Italy to parents from Bath, Maine, was studying at Bowdoin College when he received an offer to spend a year at the new University of Chicago. He and two other students jumped at the chance, even though far-off Chicago seemed to be almost the Western wilds. Hyde arrived just in time for the Republican convention in May 1860. The entire city seemed to buzz with excitement. One could hardly walk a block without encountering a band or music or witnessing a knot of people telling each other what they had seen or speculating on the probable action of the convention, noted one visitor. At night, thousands of Wide Awakes, a paramilitary wing of the Republican Party, marched through the streets. Inside a huge wooden structure called the Wigwam, politicians thundered and promoted their candidates, while behind the scenes they cut backroom deals in the quintessential smoke-filled rooms. New York’s William Seward seemed the odds-on favorite for the presidential nomination, but Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron, and Missouri’s Edward Bates all nursed hopes that they would become the party’s choice. Abraham Lincoln remained home in Springfield, Illinois, but he had capable men in Chicago to back his candidacy.⁵

Hyde visited the Wigwam and heard Owen Lovejoy transfix the crowd. Lovejoy had been born in the Maine town of Albion in 1811. He was another Bowdoin graduate, an ardent antislavery man, and an early member of the Republican Party. His older brother Elijah had been a staunch abolitionist and the editor of an antislavery journal in Alton, Illinois. Owen had followed his brother west and was present in 1837 when Elijah was murdered as he tried to protect his printing presses from a mob of anti-abolitionists. Watching Owen transfix the crowd in the Wigwam, Hyde believed him the greatest stump orator I ever heard. He would hold spellbound for two hours at a time nine thousand people in this vast hall, tearing his coat off and then his vest and cravat in the excitement of his invective against slavery, though never alluding to the fact that but a short time before his brother had been shot by a pro-slavery mob.⁶

Hyde and his fellow students nourished hopes that William Pitt Fessenden, the U.S. senator from Maine, would get the nomination. Fessenden’s youngest son, Sam, was one of Hyde’s friends at Bowdoin. In the end, of course, the convention picked Lincoln. Maine went strongly for the Republican in the November general election, giving him all eight of its votes in the electoral college as well as 62.2 percent of the popular vote. Nationally, Lincoln won less than 40 percent of the popular vote, with the Southern states leaning strongly against him. Around 30 percent of Maine’s voters went for Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas; Southern Democrat John Breckinridge won 6 percent, and John Bell of the Constitution Union Party received only 2 percent.⁷

Hyde sometimes saw the president-elect in Chicago. The first encounter was at the home of attorney and Lincoln supporter Norman B. Judd. Mr. Lincoln looks pale and worn by anxiety and the foreshadowed cares of office, Hyde wrote home to Annie Hayden of Bath, the young women he would later marry. He is raising a beard which will materially improve his appearance. Hyde described another party where he watched Lincoln regale the men around him with stories. I found it very hard to realize that I was standing before the president elect and was not listening to the jovial autocrat of some country town, he said.⁸

In his memoirs, Hyde claimed he was present for Lincoln’s first meeting with Hannibal Hamlin. Born in Paris Hill, Maine, in 1809, Hamlin had entered politics as a Democrat and won election to the state legislature in 1835 and then, in 1843, to the U.S. House of Representatives. He was tall, and gracious in figure, with black, piercing eyes, a skin almost olive-colored, hair smooth, thick and jetty and he possessed a manner always courteous and affable. Courteous and affable he may have been, but his complexion and his abolitionist politics led enemies to suggest he was a mulatto. One of his antagonists was Kentucky congressman Garrett Davis; the two men clashed so vehemently in Washington that Hamlin began carrying a pistol for protection.

Hamlin was still a Democrat when won a special election to the Senate in 1848. Encouraged by Maine newspaper editor and nascent politician James G. Blaine, in 1856 Hamlin won election to the Maine governorship as a Republican, but resigned almost immediately so he could return to the Senate. He wanted to stay there, and the news that he had been nominated as Lincoln’s running mate came as a complete surprise. I neither expected nor desired it, he wrote to his wife. But it has been made and as a faithful man to the cause, it leaves me no alternative but to accept it.⁹

Hamlin and Lincoln met for the first time in Chicago on November 21. Historians place the meeting at the Tremont House hotel, but Hyde remembered it taking place at the home of Jonathan Young Scammon, where he was lodging. (Hyde must have been milking his Maine connections for all they were worth, for Scammon was Maine-born and had moved to Illinois in 1835. He eventually became Norman Judd’s law partner.) In his memoirs, Hyde recalled seeing Lincoln and Hamlin regard the other with a deep look of interest before moving off for a private conversation. According to Hyde, once the vice president departed, Lincoln turned to Scammon and said, in reference to the rumors about his vice president’s background, Well, Hamlin isn’t half so black as he is painted, is he Scammon?¹⁰

Hyde said Scammon even took him on a visit to Lincoln in Springfield, where Hyde attended a party at Lincoln’s house and pitched in to help the president-elect’s secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, sort through Lincoln’s voluminous mail. Passions were running so high that the young men soaked especially suspicious packages in water before opening them.

While in Springfield, Hyde met Ephraim Elmer Ellsworth, a young military enthusiast and founder of the U.S. Zouave Cadets of Chicago. Ellsworth’s Zouaves dressed in colorful uniforms patterned on those worn by French soldiers in Algeria, and they enthralled audiences with intricate drill routines. Capt. ELLSWORTH is a young man, but a wonderful tactician, who has his company under the most perfect control, not only in camp, but while scaling walls over inclined planes formed by the backs of their stooping comrades, lighting as skirmishers, executing the Cashing bayonet exercise, or while on parade, wrote the New York Times in July 1860. Ellsworth later studied law at Lincoln’s law office and became almost a surrogate son to the president.¹¹

The smoldering embers of sectional difference burst into the flames of war early on the morning of April 12, 1861, when Confederate guns began bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The fort’s commander, Maj. Robert Anderson—who had once headed the Kennebec Arsenal in Augusta—surrendered the next afternoon. President Lincoln responded with a call for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion.