Joshua L. Chamberlain: A Life in Letters ed. by Thomas Desjardin (review)

Joshua L. Chamberlain: A Life in Letters offers scholars and lay readers alike a practical and interesting resource for learning more about one of the Civil War's more famous figures. Edited by Thomas Desjardin, this volume presents a collection of previously unpublished letters from the National Civil War Museum's holdings. A foreword by James McPherson provides a concise summary of Chamberlain's adult life and his rise to fame in the latter part of the twentieth century. In an introduction, Janice Mullin, former director of the National Civil War Museum, describes the museum's collection of Chamberlain artifacts and discusses the museum's role more broadly.

The book is organized into five chapters, with the first three covering Chamberlain's prewar life, the fourth his Civil War correspondence, and the final chapter his postwar years. The letters are unmodified, retaining original spelling quirks and other distinctive qualities. Desjardin supplies a brief introduction to each chapter and sometimes adds further introductions to contextualize particular letters or groups of letters. The documents follow a straightforward chronological arrangement.

Letters by Chamberlain and his wife, Fannie, comprise a majority of the book, but other writings include school essays, an unofficial report written two days after the Battle of Gettysburg, and letters between other family members, friends, and military officers. There is a long series of letters from Chamberlain's cousin Annie (with whom Chamberlain apparently carried on some degree of a romantic relationship before he married). A letter from Chamberlain to his wife, written only a few days after the Battle of Fredericksburg, offers a remarkably close glimpse of his experience on that battlefield. In later years, Chamberlain received letters from veterans, political figures, and former Bowdoin College students, among others. A ballot-counting controversy in Maine in 1880 propelled Chamberlain, head of the state militia, into the limelight and occasioned many letters to him.

The book includes several helpful aids for readers, including a timeline of Chamberlain's life, a number of photographs of him or his family members, and a list of key figures (making it easier to identify the various names that appear in the letters). Occasional explanatory footnotes also help elucidate the letters. The book stumbles only slightly with the disappointing shortness of the index, which limits its functionality as a scholarly tool. This well-organized and highly accessible volume will likely be useful to historians and insightful to anyone seeking to learn more about the antebellum and Civil War eras.