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CHAPTER 24 We Have Been So Long Spared to Each Other" I n the summer of 1903, Chamberlain experienced a period of such acute illness, that many, including Chamberlain himself, had doubts that he would recover. General John B. Gordon, though his own health was precarious, came to Maine to see his old friend. Gordon was reported to have leaned over Chamberlain, saying, "Dear old fellow, can't bear to lose you." Another friend who consoled Chamberlain during his painful illness was Myra Porter, a Maine woman who worked for a New York orphanage. Having sent her regards to "Mrs. C" in mid-July, commenting, "how hard her lot!", Myra wrote to Chamberlain on the 21st of the month: "...I am so sorry to hear that you are suffering and hasten to send my most earnest and heart-felt sympathy. Yes, you can bear pain like a hero, as you have borne it for years— suffering in silence; but I know full well how hard it must be even for your brave spirit." Myra was involved with the Orphan Train Society, an organization that sent thousands of orphaned and abandoned city children to new homes in the Midwest. The daughter of a veteran of the 19th Maine from Old Town, just up the river from Brewer, it is possible that the Chamberlain and Porter families knew each other. But it is likely that Fanny and Lawrence came to know Myra from her work with destitute children in New York City. Myra subsisted on a small salary, prompting Chamberlain to send small sums of money in his regular correspondence with her, letters in which he would come to confide some personal problems and concerns.1 John Brown Gordon, 1896. As Chamberlain recuperated in August 1903, the commission that superintended what is now a national park at Gettysburg, contacted him regarding the placement of a memorial to the 15th Alabama on the battlefield. This began an exchange of letters that provided plenty of stimulating, if not pleasant, diversion for the ailing Chamberlain. General William Oates had proposed that a stone be placed at the Alabamians' farthest point of advance on Little Round Top, despite the commission's policy that monuments be placed at the point where regiments began their first advance. General John Nicholson, chairman of the battlefield committee, sent Chamberlain a copy of the letter that Oates had written to the Secretary of War, which described the area to which he claimed the 15th had advanced before they were stopped. Nicholson commented, "Some of the statements are so much at variance with the records that we thought we would ask your opinion on the subject." Chamberlain responded, "I should feel no objection to the erection of a monument to the honor of a regiment that had pushed its way so far around the flank of the Union line and made so gallant an attack; but I should expect it to be placed on ground where it actually stood at some time during the battle,—at the extreme point of its advance, if desired,—so that it might not only represent the valor of a regiment but the truth of history."2 Chamberlain was troubled by statements that Oates made, which differed from established records and from Oates' previous statements. Nor did these agree with that which Chamberlain had received several years before in personal letters from Oates. That correspondence, Chamberlain commented, had left him "much gratified to find so close an agreement between our impressions and recollections as to our contest there." A confusion of lefts and rights in Oates' statement to the Secretary of War led Chamberlain to believe that Oates was now asserting that the 15th had driven the 20th Maine's right from their position, when in fact, Oates apparently meant the left wing of the 20th. But there was no confusion in Chamberlain's disavowal of Oates' claim that the 15th Alabama also fought the 83rd Pennsylvania and the 44th New York. Chamberlain insisted that the 15th Alabama "never saw the front or flank of the 83rd nor 44th regiments in this engagement. It could have seen only their rear, and that for a brief season in their extreme advance upon us." He also averred that the two regiments that Oates described as threatening his rear were, in fact, a skirmish line comprised of the 20th Maine's Company "B" and the sharpshooters who had joined them behind the stone wall. Chamberlain concluded his [18.221.187...

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