Birthday of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Hero of Little Round Top
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born in Brewer, Maine on this date, September 8, in 1828
More than one hundred and thirty years before Tom Hanks ever portrayed Captain John Miller in Saving Private Ryan, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1828–1914) served as the prototype of the schoolteacher turned soldier/hero. The proverbial unlikely hero, Chamberlain graduated from Bowdoin College in 1852 and was well into his career as a professor of modern languages at Bowdoin when the Civil War began. Chamberlain felt compelled to join the Union cause and entered the war as an officer.
Chamberlain’s wisdom might have been evident in the classroom, but his courage was battle-tested many times, the most brilliant performance of which might have been at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. Civil War historian Shelby Foote describes the situation at Little Round Top:
The fighting was particularly desperate on the far left, where the 20th Maine, made up of lumberjacks and fishermen under Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a former minister and Bowdoin professor, opposed the 15th Alabama . . . composed for the most part of farmers. Equally far from home—Presque Isle and Talladega were each 650 crowflight miles from Little Round Top, which lay practically on the line connecting them—the men of these two outfits fought as if the outcome of the battle, and with it the war, depended on their valor: as indeed perhaps it did, since whoever had possession of this craggy height on the Union left would dominate the whole fishhook position.
Little Round Top held a view of the entire line of Northern defense. So when Chamberlain ordered his men—tired and mostly depleted of ammunition—to fix bayonets late in the day, it is not too much to say that his order saved the Union a terrible loss. A Southern victory at Gettysburg would have quite possibly resulted in a speedy march by Robert E. Lee’s army to Washington, D.C. Tactically, Colonel Chamberlain was not left many choices in the military playbook; choosing a bayonet assault against an equally tired foe, however, won the field and the day for him.
Chamberlain would later serve as governor of Maine, and later still as president of Bowdoin College, which numbers among its alumni many famous Americans, including Franklin Pierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Would Tom Hanks be as good a choice to play Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain as he was to portray Captain John Miller? Is Hanks the man to reprise the role of a schoolteacher in combat? Although Hanks has shined in the many great projects he has touched, Hollywood seems to be convinced another actor has earned his way into the role of Chamberlain. Jeff Daniels has twice portrayed Chamberlain on film, first in Gettysburg (1993) and more recently in Gods and Generals (2003).
--Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Additional reading:
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Fredericksburg to Meridian, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1963)
Interview by Kimberly Largent with actor Jeff Daniels at:
http://ehistory.osu.edu/world/articles/ArticleView.cfm?AID=47
https://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/getttour/sidebar/chambln.htm
