In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER Raising an Idealist T he young man determined to win Fanny Adams' hand had been named Lawrence Joshua Chamberlain at his birth in 1828. It is written in the family bible that he was named in honor of Commodore Lawrence, whose words of defiance in the face of defeat, "Don't give up the ship," won him fame in 1813. Yet the young scholar would enter Bowdoin College as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Perhaps he merely saw his opportunity to reverse his names as he started his new life among strangers at Bowdoin College. But how significant was this wish to place his biblical name before that of the modern warrior? He would be known as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain throughout his academic and professional life, though his family would always call him Lawrence.1 His early years might be seen as the quintessence of a son of Maine, his family's life dominated by timber and sail, and nourished by the soil. Born to a respected family in Brewer, a small town across the river from Bangor, Maine, one of the busiest lumber ports in America, he was the grandson of Col. Joshua Chamberlain, who had settled in the area in 1800 as a shipbuilder. Lawrence's father, Joshua Chamberlain, Jr., was a successful farmer and expert on timberlands, whose marriage to Sarah Dupee Brastow joined two of the area's pioneer families. Ships from all over the world made their way up the Penobscot River, carrying away the rich harvest of wood from Maine's forests. Sailors and woodsmen crowded Bangor's wooden sidewalks, riddled with holes from the spikes of the riverdrivers' boots. Only after loading timber at the city's busy wharves, would the ships pause briefly at a spring on the Brewer side of the river, to fill their barrels with sweet water before heading downriver to the open sea.2 How different those two towns on opposing sides of the river were, for though Bangor had outstripped Brewer in size and commerce, it was the latter community which founded the first church in the region. By the time Lawrence was born, Bangor had its own churches and even a theological seminary, but it also bore the brunt of the sailors' respite from months at sea and the woodsmen's emergence with the freshets of spring from their long winter in the wilderness. Thejingle of coins in the pockets of these hardy men had attracted an array of bawdy and ale houses. Yet Bangor retained enough respectability for its houses of ill repute to discreetly advertise their trade, to those in the know, with signboards that declared "laundry."3 The daily passage of ships that sailed to and from exotic and faraway ports must take any boy's thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own world, which for Lawrence was bound up in the hard work of his family's farm and timberlands. Though it would not be the sea that would lure the Chamberlains' promising firstborn son away, he would not remain to walk in his father's footsteps through field and forest. Lawrence entered Bowdoin to pursue the ministry, his longing to see those romantic foreign lands to be satisfied by becoming a missionary. But what influences of his home and childhood set him on this path?4 The family adhered to the stern Calvinist teachings of the conservative Congregationalist Church. Lawrence's father had been one of the community leaders who labored to see a new Congregational meetinghouse raised in 1828. Yet it was not until the 1840s that the children would hear the tenets by which Sarah and Joshua Chamberlain, Jr. raised their family echoed from the pulpit of that church by the river. In 1844, Lawrence's younger siblings, Horace, Sarah, John, and Thomas , were baptized at the church, and in 1845, at the age of 16, Lawrence became a member of the church after a customary testimony of faith. The family's rather lengthy hesitance to become active members of the church may have been in deference to the feelings of Lawrence's mother, Sarah Dupee Brastow Chamberlain. She was a woman of deep religious convictions, but her father, Billings Brastow, had left that Brewer Congregational Society with his family in 1822 over some unknown disagreement with its followers.5 Strict demands were made on the members of the Brewer church. Alcohol was a demon, though ale and cider, at least by the Chamberlains' reckoning, were exempt . Indulgence in drink...

Share