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5 Finding William C. Oates Little Round Top was a place where heroes could be found in abundance on July 2, 1863, although in recent times it seems almost as if Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain fought on that hill by himself and against an amorphous foe. Yet, as I’ve shown, there were men engaged in that fight who did not agree with Chamberlain’s account of the battle, including men in the ranks of the 20th Maine as well as his adversary that day, William C. Oates, the colonel who commanded the 15th Alabama regiment at Gettysburg . Indeed, as a historian I was not attracted to the Little Round Top story by having first encountered Joshua Chamberlain and his exploits, but rather by having stumbled upon William Oates by accident. Sometimes historians and biographers find themselves traveling down roads they never intend to follow and discovering views of the past they never expect to behold. When I started to research and write about Oates some fifteen years ago, I did not know how enthralled I would become with his life, his times, and his family. My discovery of Oates came truly out of nowhere. In the early 1990s, I was asked by Bantam books to edit a new edition of Frank Haskell’s classic account of Gettysburg, which, as we’ve seen, is one of the most vivid surviving recollections of the battle. After I submitted the completed manuscript to Bantam, my editor thought the book would be too short, so he suggested adding a comparable Confederate description of the battle.1 My thoughts immediately turned to Oates, whose Gettysburg chapters from his Civil War memoirs, The War between the Union and the Confederacy , published in 1905, offered an exciting eyewitness recitation of his regiment’s exploits in the Pennsylvania campaign, particularly of the Alabamians’ failed attempt to dislodge Chamberlain and the 20th Maine from Little Round Top.2 I had read Oates’s book, but I knew little about him beyond what he and his regiment had done at Gettysburg. Bantam wanted me to write a detailed biographical introduction, so I began to search for sources on Oates and his life. Secondary accounts of Oates were not terribly hard to find, for Shelby Foote had much to say about him in the second volume of his massive Finding William C. Oates 91 narrative history of the Civil War, and the standard books on Gettysburg, including Glenn Tucker’s High Tide at Gettysburg (1958) and Edwin B. Coddington’s The Gettysburg Campaign (1968), contained plenty of useful information on the man and his Civil War experiences. Elsewhere, I discovered that Robert K. Krick, a National Park Service historian and perhaps the foremost living expert on Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, had published a fine short biography of Oates as an introduction to a reprinted edition of Oates’s memoirs.3 Krick cited several primary sources in his preface, but the one I found most intriguing was a surviving fragment of Oates’s unpublished autobiography, which belonged to the Alabamian’s granddaughter, Marion Oates Leiter Charles, who lived in Washington, D.C. I called Krick—an enormously helpful man who will practically give the shirt off his back to fellow Civil War writers and researchers— and he told me that he had consulted the Oates autobiography sometime in the 1970s, but that he thought Mrs. Charles had died since then. I determined that he was wrong, and I subsequently succeeded in getting to know Mrs. Charles over the next several months, when she finally agreed to let me see and use not only Oates’s unpublished autobiography but an entire collection of family papers in her possession. For the next few months, I consulted the Oates manuscripts as often as I could, making some attempts to organize the documents into a comprehensive family archive while also learning about Oates’s life and taking notes as I went along. My fascination with William C. Oates drew me deeper and deeper into the record of his life and the history of his family. But the family papers did not tell me everything I wanted—or needed— to know about William Oates. In fact, the papers in Mrs. Charles’s possession documented Oates’s antebellum and postwar life in fairly good detail , but his Civil War experiences were hardly touched on at all, and his seven terms as a U.S. congressman and one term as Alabama governor were barely covered. Little seemed...

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