“I read to you from manuscripts dimmed with long, lone companionship with me,” began Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in a lecture to the Commandery of the State of Maine, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, in 1906, “the story of my last vision of the Army of the Potomac,—the vision of its march out of momentous action into glorious dream.” In a retelling of the Grand Review of the US Army of the Potomac in Washington, DC, on May 23, 1865, Chamberlain sought not a complete history—“it will be manifest that I cannot undertake to reduce all the features of the picture to a common scale, nor to exhibit merit equitably”—but “to hold fast the image which passed before [his] eyes.” While he sought to convey the power of an image, Chamberlain nevertheless reassured his listeners that his vision “will no less be truth,—one aspect of the truth.” He succeeded: the rendering of the last march of the Army of the Potomac down Pennsylvania Avenue and of its battles and men is spellbinding.

Chamberlain’s The Passing of the Armies, a history of the Fifth US Army Corps, Army of the Potomac, in the Appomattox Campaign (and the Maine soldier’s magnum opus), appeared in 1915. It represents the fullest expression of Chamberlain’s many years of writing and speaking about the American Civil War. The liberally and theologically educated Chamberlain—trained in more than six languages ancient and modern, steeped in classical texts, and immersed in the sacred writings of Protestant Christianity and Islam—knew well the power of the written word in fashioning history and myth. Chamberlain first spoke of his experiences in the Civil War to the congregation of First Parish Congregational Church in Brunswick, Maine, in August 1863, mere weeks following the historic Battle at Gettysburg. In April 1864, Chamberlain re-visited Gettysburg with his wife, Frances Adams Chamberlain, establishing a precedent for future visits to Pennsylvania. For the remainder of his life, Chamberlain authored, commented on, and edited numerous histories of the war, ranging from unit accounts to popular pieces in Cosmopolitan and Hearst’s Magazine. Although he lectured in almost religious tones on the re-consecrated unity of the American people after the war, Chamberlain’s writings did not always transcend the partisanship that occasionally tainted postwar reminiscences. Like many who served in it, Chamberlain remained sensitive to critical treatment of the Army of the Potomac till his death, and he was not above revising opinions that held forth the superiority of General William T. Sherman’s Western armies to the Army of the Potomac (he dedicates a chapter in The Passing of the Armies to comparing his army to Sherman’s troops).

In its emphasis on the intellectual and moral formation of Chamberlain, Ronald C. White’s On Great Fields: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and His Fight to Save the Union reveals the depths of Chamberlain’s impressive learning from which he drew to prove more than competent at soldiering and which he harnessed in the postwar period, along with political influence, to shape public memory of the war. White examines Chamberlain with the same moral imagination he brings to bear on subjects Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, contemporaries of Chamberlain also possessed of sharp minds and energetic temperaments, but men who bore significantly greater responsibility for Union victory than the Bowdoin College professor. But if Lincoln the statesman and Grant the great captain exerted far weightier influence on the war’s outcome, time did not permit them to enjoy the same opportunities as Chamberlain to shape, in spoken or written word, remembrance of the war. Chamberlain’s longevity, his active participation in postwar commemorations at Gettysburg, and his myriad contributions to the war’s historical record as late as 1913 (the year he contracted with G. P. Putnam’s Sons to publish The Passing of the Armies) transformed a remarkable career into legend. His death in 1914—Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885, Philip H. Sheridan passed in 1888, and Sherman, the last of the US Army’s triumvirate, in 1891—ensured Chamberlain’s position as a champion of the Army of the Potomac and as an oracle of the war.

Literature and longevity fashioned Chamberlain’s myth. The 1974 publication of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, which won a Pulitzer Prize, has exerted considerable influence on popular culture and even informal professional military education in America, and was regarded by US Army General Norman Schwarzkopf as a great and realistic war novel. Shaara’s novel endeared Chamberlain to readers enthralled by the war’s centennial commemorations from 1961 to 1965. A synthesis of the Emancipationist, Lost Cause, and Reconciliationist schools of Civil War memory, Shaara’s novel casts Chamberlain as an idealist and a morally-minded liberal counterweight to Southern oligarchs who sought the creation of a faux-Cavalier, race-based slaveholding aristocracy. Shaara depicts the Maine volunteer as the victor at Little Round Top in an epic recreation of the fierce fighting that transpired at Gettysburg. In fact, already in August 1863, Chamberlain believed that the US Army victory at Gettysburg had portended a swift conclusion to the war. But even if his prediction proved erroneous, his place in the memory of the war has endured. What Chamberlain described as “the salvation of Round Top” in his 1906 lecture proved his most memorable hour of the war. To this day, visitors flock to Little Round Top (the National Park Service recently completed a significant restoration and preservation project of the site) in a kind of historical pilgrimage, something Chamberlain himself foretold on a battlefield visit in 1889.

White’s narrative moves beyond the battle that begot Chamberlain his lasting fame. This is a discerning choice not merely because of the limited tactical significance of the Little Round Top action—Chamberlain did not save the Army of the Potomac’s position in Pennsylvania, much less did the 20th Maine’s skillful bayonet charge save the Union itself—but because Chamberlain’s service after Gettysburg in the Army of the Potomac’s final campaigns from 1864 to 1865 demonstrated more thoroughly his acquired grasp of soldiering. In another dramatic moment of Chamberlain’s US Army career, and one that caused considerable post-war controversy, the brevet major general accepted the formal surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, according his defeated foes full military honors.

In Chamberlain’s return to civilian life, one glimpses the difficulties wounded veterans faced when they re-entered a society shattered by war. The regular, professional US Army numbered merely 13,000 officers and men in March 1861; by April 1865, the US Government had put more than one million men in uniform and had leveraged the full weight of northern industry and civilian managerial expertise to equip numerous field armies and military departments across the United States. These armies subdued swaths of hostile territory that in geographical expanse approximated the size of Europe. Some 850,000 Americans died in and because of illnesses, wounds, and injuries sustained from the war. As its dearest defenders hoped, this massive military effort saved the political Union of the states, but it also birthed, to adapt Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, “a new nation,” transformed the American economy, expanded powers of the American state, and remade the social fabric of the nation. In the process, it irreparably changed the lives of men like Chamberlain who fought to save the republic.

In all of this Chamberlain represents only one minute point, but his case is illustrative: wounded in the hip while leading his brigade at Petersburg, and hit again in March 1865, the Maine volunteer had no fewer than five horses shot from beneath him during the war and was hit by bullets and shell fragments six times. White describes maladies that plagued Chamberlain, especially cases of malaria and pneumonia, and chronicles the Maine general’s hidden wounds, a sensitive topic that Sarah Handley-Cousins has examined thoroughly in Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. Chamberlain endured several postwar surgeries and their attendant complications: chronic bacterial infections (especially of the testes and the urinary tract) then incurable with the advent of penicillin more than a decade in the future; festering of the wound site; and urination through a catheter for the remainder of his life. Intimate details of Chamberlain’s 1883 surgery in Boston were even carried in the Maine press.

Later, professional life was turbulent though generally kind to Chamberlain, who struggled in business ventures, but whose intellectual, philanthropic, and religious engagement remained robust. In 1900, Chamberlain accepted an appointment from President William McKinley as surveyor of the Port of Portland, Maine. In this season of life, Chamberlain also served as Vice President of the American Bible Society; he served as a director for the Maine Institute for the Blind; and, as evidence of his lifelong learning and appreciation of history, he joined such organizations as the American Historical Association, the Maine Historical Society, and the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts. Chamberlain’s wife Fanny died that same year, and he moved to Portland, devoting much of his time to his children and grandchildren in Boston. To the end, Chamberlain spoke and wrote about his beloved Fifth Corps, Army of the Potomac, and sought to exonerate his commander, Major General Gouverneur Warren, whose handling of that corps at the Battle of Five Forks so infuriated Sheridan that the cavalry commander fired Warren on the field.

White characterizes Chamberlain as an unlikely hero. There is a compelling truth in this. A reluctant college president, a capable four-term governor, a man of the Long Nineteenth Century who saw much of the world (in 1878, at the appointment of President Rutherford B. Hayes, Chamberlain traveled to Paris as the US commissioner for education at the Exposition Universelle), Chamberlain’s enduring appeal lies in what he represents: the beau-ideal of the citizen-soldier, a talented if frustrated academician who, despite unfamiliarity with military life prior to entering the service, forswore domestic comforts, endured intensive drill, and developed a gradual proficiency of infantry tactics and small-unit command. By 1863, Chamberlain’s bravery and competence disproved, if only in one instance, later conclusions of European professionals who dismissed the American war as an uncivilized contest waged by undisciplined mobs. In fact, Grant promoted Chamberlain to brigadier general on the field when the Maine colonel suffered his presumed fatal wound at Petersburg, noting that Chamberlain had several times received recommendations for brigade command for meritorious leadership in battle. In his transformation from civilian to soldier and back again, Chamberlain represented the best of an American tradition that championed an armed people and expressed boundless confidence in the military potential and skillfulness of the educated, loyal citizen.

And yet, in this unlikely heroism, Chamberlain was hardly an isolated case. General Sherman noted in his memoirs that, by 1865, many of the Army’s finest officers, commanders from regiment to division and even corps, as well as staff officers, had come from civil professions. These men, and their professional Army peers, had on many great and bloody fields transformed the volunteer armies of the United States into the most lethal killing machine of any nineteenth-century army in the Western Hemisphere, a transformation affirmed almost as an article of faith by generals Sherman and Sheridan, who viewed the American armies of the war as superior even to their Prussian counterparts as late as 1871. Chamberlain thought the US Army had fought well, too, and he thought well enough of his military talents, while governor of Maine, to appeal to Prussian King Wilhelm I for a commission in the king’s army.

War transformed Chamberlain in body and soul: nothing in life after combat—not politics, academic prestige, nor status—could match the sense of purpose he had experienced on campaign with the Army of the Potomac. Yet the legacy of this soldier flows not from his military proficiency, for although he proved competent, the Maine volunteer never grasped the character of modern war like the best of the Army Regulars; nor in his laurels, though he accrued these handsomely; but in what he represents: the man of peace, of great learning, indomitable, neither common nor great, possessed of high ideals, steeped in faith, and committed to the security of American political institutions. Like thousands of Northerners who hated slavery, Chamberlain risked all in defense of the nation and the Republican administration that prosecuted and won the war against long odds.

If the War of the Rebellion proved Chamberlain an unlikely hero; if Chamberlain succeeded, in later years, in making his image of the war its written history; and if generations of Americans have since grafted Chamberlain’s vision of the war into their historical consciousness, so still it should be said that the Maine soldier merits the admiration he has received. Today, American society largely prefers the unraveling of truths, moral and scientific, to the glories of permanent things. For this reason alone, Chamberlain is as important now as he was in his own time, and the complete uniqueness of his story bespeaks a redemptive quality that somehow represents the truth of America itself. More than mere narrative, more than “glorious dream,” Chamberlain’s war, like the nation his war preserved, is truth—or, as the Maine soldier called it in his golden years, “one aspect of the truth.”

The author previously reviewed White’s work in the pages of the International Journal of Military History and Historiography, though the interpretation offered here is original. The ideas presented in this review are those of the reviewer and are not the official views of the US Army Command and General Staff College, the US Army, or the Department of Defense.

Editors’ Note: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Chamberlain was appointed Surveyor of the Port of Portland, Maine, in 1905; in fact, he received the appointment in 1900.