“Wrestling at the Gates of Death”: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible Disability in the Post–Civil War North

On the night of June 17, 1864, Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain walked anxiously among his sleeping soldiers. They were outside of Petersburg, Virginia, preparing for a major attack against the Confederate city’s fortifications. Something was bothering the colonel. He was no stranger to warfare—he had been in the hardest of the fights at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, but something about this place felt different. “I had a strange feeling that evening, [a] premonition of coming ill,” Chamberlain later wrote. “A dark shadow seemed to brood over me, dark wings folding as it were . . . and wrapping me in their embrace.”¹ His unnerving premonition proved true. The next afternoon, he led his men in an attack against Rives’ Salient on the heavily fortified Confederate Dimmock Line around Petersburg. The fight quickly became intense. His staff scattered in the action; many lay wounded. The corps moved forward and came upon wet, marshy land that would be difficult to cross. He lifted his sword in one hand and the flag bearing the Maltese Cross of the Fifth Corps in the other, using them to motion his men to the left. As he held the flag and sabre aloft, a minié ball smashed into him, traveling through his right hip to the left, crushing his bones and cutting into his bladder and urethra. Blood pooled around his feet. Stunned, he braced himself with the flag and sword as his men passed, until the loss of blood brought him to his knees.

Removed to the division hospital, Chamberlain believed he was a dead man. Surgeons located and cut out the ball, but there was little else they could do. Chamberlain urged the surgeons to leave him aside and put their efforts toward the other wounded soldiers and officers filling the hospital. The surgeons agreed. Chamberlain asked for pen and paper in order to write a bloodied last letter to his wife Fanny, then lay back to wait for the end.²

But the end never came. Chamberlain survived that long night, though it seemed impossible even to him: “I never dreamed what pain could be and not kill a man outright.” After six months “wrestling at the gates of death,” he returned to the front of his brigade.³ He served out the remaining year of the war, was promoted twice for bravery, and left the army in 1865 as a brevet major general. When Chamberlain returned to his civilian life at the war’s end, he was the very picture of a citizen-soldier. The former college professor was charming, handsome, and intelligent, but perhaps most importantly, he was a war hero. In addition to his action at Petersburg, his leadership had helped win the Battle of Gettysburg, and was crucial in the war’s final battles in the Appomattox campaign. During his three years in the army, Chamberlain was wounded six times and seriously ill twice. He returned quickly to the field each time, and his bravery and dedication helped him to rise through the ranks. When the war ended, he used his reputation to win four years as the governor of Maine, followed by twelve years as the president of Bowdoin College. Chamberlain was adored among Civil War veterans and regularly served as a featured speaker at commemorations and encampments.

This carefully constructed heroic public image, however, obscured a troubling dimension of the general’s life. Hidden beneath his blue uniform and fine suits, the wound from Petersburg quietly tortured Chamberlain. Because of the damage to his urethra, he initially required a catheter, which created a fistula near the base of his penis that never healed. It leaked urine constantly and left him susceptible to chronic bladder and testicular infections that caused him, in his own words, “unspeakable agony.”⁴ He underwent surgery in 1883 to close the fistula; he barely survived, and his symptoms—including the fistula—soon returned. Over the next thirty years, recurring infections plagued Chamberlain’s self-described “weak spot,” often leaving him incapacitated.⁵ A pension examiner noted in 1893 that...