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3 Becoming Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain When it comes to Gettysburg heroes, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain outshines all the rest. Although he was hardly the perfect soldier, modern Americans have come to see him as one. In the minds of many, he stands as the ultimate model of what a military hero should be. Yet Chamberlain ’s reputation was made over time; it did not spring forth fully formed, complete in all its glory and honor, from the head of Zeus or on the field of battle. Indeed, Joshua Chamberlain was actually an unlikely hero. But once he accepted the mantle of a perfect hero, he wore it proudly and for the rest of his life. Soldiers are made, not born. Nothing in Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain ’s life prior to the Civil War suggested that he would one day become known as “the Hero of Little Round Top,” that he would earn a Medal of Honor, and that he would gain great fame and even celebrity with a following of devoted admirers in his own lifetime and in our own modern age. Nothing that he achieved prior to the outbreak of the war seemed to prepare him for his moment of truth on the hillside at Little Round Top during the battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, when his quick thinking and iron determination enabled his regiment, the 20th Maine Infantry, to hold the left flank of the Army of the Potomac and throw back a fierce enemy assault. In fact, Chamberlain’s life during the antebellum years took him about as far afield of military matters and battlefield heroism as a man could get. He was born, the eldest of five children, in Brewer, Maine, on the bright morning of September 8,1828.1 His father,Joshua,was a farmer who worked a spare one hundred acres of land that he had acquired from his own father , also named Joshua. Chamberlain’s mother, Sarah Dupee Brastow of Massachusetts, was a descendant of Huguenots who had escaped persecution in France by fleeing to Boston in 1685. The Chamberlains named their first son Lawrence for the American navy hero of the War of 1812, Captain James Lawrence, the man who had told his men,“Don’t give up the ship,” 50 Gettysburg Heroes as he lay dying on the decks of the warship Chesapeake during a desperate battle with the British on Lake Erie in 1813.2 Lawrence Chamberlain’s given name broke with the family custom of naming the eldest son Joshua, after the Old Testament warrior who had knocked down the walls of Jericho. It was, apparently, his father’s idea to name him after the naval hero, but the decision to sever the family tradition seems to have made Chamberlain’s mother nervous. As a result, she changed his name to Joshua Lawrence several years after his birth when, in an act of loyalty “to her husband’s house,” she set the boy’s name down in the Brewster record books as the third Chamberlain named for the ancient ruler of Israel. Despite the change, the family—including his mother— continued to call him Lawrence.3 Chamberlain’s father tried to make a go of it as a farmer, but his tiny farm yielded small rewards. The elder Joshua was a good and honest man, a leading member of the community, and a devoted family man. In his later years, Joshua Lawrence fondly described his father as “a stalwart, earnest , thoughtful, inward-looking man,” who seemed capable of accomplishing any task and doing so with “a deep vein of poetic imagination.”4 Yet there was another side to his father that proved to be more difficult to reckon with. The elder Joshua often assumed a sober, strict, and even demanding mien. When it came to his children, and particularly to his sons (Joshua Lawrence had three younger brothers: Horace, John Calhoun, and Thomas), the father believed his place was not to instruct or guide, but to order them to fulfill their obligations, no matter how difficult those duties might be. The stories told about him hardly seem complimentary. Joshua Lawrence experienced his father’s gruff tendency to command rather than instruct when, during one haying season in his youth, the boy inadvertently drove a wagon through a stream bed and got a wheel caught between two stumps so that he could not move forward or backward. “Clear that wheel!” came his father’s shout from behind.“How am I...

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