Scars to Prove It: The Civil War Soldier and American Fiction

4. Each Man Has His Own Reason to Die: The Triumph of the Individual in The Killer Angels

118 In January 1993, Bantam Books published a paperback edition of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s 1915 memoir, The Passing of the Armies. Early in his introduction to the text, historian James M. McPherson explained how Chamberlain, a brevet major general in the Union army, has become one of “the best-known figures” of the Civil War: “Chamberlain’s modern fame springs from his role as protagonist in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, a gripping epic of the battle of Gettysburg that won a Pulitzer Prize and has become a favorite assigned reading in college Civil War courses throughout the land. Sharing the spotlight in the novel with the likes of Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet, Chamberlain comes across to the reader as more heroic and human than either.”1 Nothing in this passage will surprise readers familiar with the widespread popularity of The Killer Angels. Millions of Americans have viewed the war and its personalities through the lens of the 1974 novel and the books and films it has inspired. The reputation of the once-obscure Chamberlain has soared; at least one scholar credited Shaara “with giving his country a legendary hero all its own” and with making the Maine professor and soldier “the largest commercial subject in the Civil War community.”2 What might surprise readers of McPherson’s introduction, however, is what happens once the focus turns to the historical Chamberlain rather than Shaara’s version. Aiming to enlarge his reader’s knowledge beyond the fictional account of Gettysburg , McPherson explained that Chamberlain “went on to become one of the most remarkable soldiers of the Civil War—indeed, in all of American history.”3 Yet readers of The Killer Angels already know as much, because Shaara said so in his afterword, and with nearly those exact words. Though Chapter Four Each Man Has His Own Reason to Die The Triumph of the Individual in The Killer Angels The Triumph of the Individual in The Killer Angels 119 wounded, the novel states, Chamberlain went on “to become one of the most remarkable soldiers in American history.”4 McPherson likewise used other phrases from the novel’s afterword, and again followed Shaara’s language closely in noting that “Grant selected him [Chamberlain]—out of dozens of generals who ranked him—for the honor of receiving the Army of Northern Virginia’s formal surrender.”5 Should it matter that Shaara’s words and emphases have influenced those of McPherson, arguably the foremost living historian of the Civil War era? I believe even those who answer “no” to this question might think twice on realizing that McPherson followed Shaara—on the issue of Chamberlain’s role at Appomattox—into the complex world of Civil War myth. In A Place Called Appomattox (2000), William Marvel pointed out that “Chamberlain was the only original source of the claim that he commanded the surrender ceremony; he offered no witnesses or documentation, and none has been found.” Marvel further explained that while the hero of The Killer Angels “undoubtedly was present” at the ceremony, he was “evidently not in formal command, and he certainly was not designated for that service by General Grant.”6 Rather than clarify the relationship between Shaara and McPherson, and between fiction and history, these observations muddy the waters all the more. Indirectly, the analysis by Marvel shows us that The Killer Angels, influenced by Chamberlain’s mythmaking in The Passing of the Armies, has in turn influenced McPherson’s “historical” account—an account meant by Bantam Books to introduce Chamberlain’s narrative. As confusing as this circle of myth, fiction, and history may seem, it nonetheless suggests something about why The Killer Angels stands as the most popular Civil War novel published during the last fifty years. Though undoubtedly well crafted and narrated, Shaara’s novel owes its tremendous success to the fact that it both reflects and perpetuates the words, interpretations, and mythologies of Civil War veterans. Carefully uniting elements from different veterans’ traditions and individual memoirs, Shaara created a story that interprets the war in a way attractive to Americans of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I. The Killer Angels has appealed to a wide range of readers. A favorite among Civil War enthusiasts and the reading public at large, it also draws praise from academic historians. Elsewhere naming it his “favorite historical 120 Scars to Prove It novel,” McPherson explained: “It...