On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

by Ronald C. White

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The first ever biography dedicated to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, this is not just the details of his heroism in the Civil War, but a wide-sweeping examination of his life in a tumultuous America. Packed with illustrations, maps and photos, On Great Fields is a deeply engaging history that will keep you hooked.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses comes the dramatic and definitive biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the history-altering professor turned Civil War hero.

“A vital and vivid portrait of an unlikely military hero who played a key role in the preservation of the Union and therefore in the making of modern America.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of And There Was Light

FINALIST FOR THE GILDER LEHRMAN LINCOLN PRIZE AND THE AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST BOOK PRIZE FOR HISTORY

Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers. Despite being wounded at Petersburg—and told by two surgeons he would die—Chamberlain survived the war, going on to be elected governor of Maine four times and serve as president of Bowdoin College.

How did a stuttering young boy come to be fluent in nine languages and even teach speech and rhetoric? How did a trained minister find his way to the battlefield? Award-winning historian Ronald C. White delves into these contradictions in this cradle-to-grave biography of General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, from his upbringing in rural Maine to his tenacious, empathetic military leadership and his influential postwar public service, exploring a question that still plagues so many veterans: How do you make a civilian life of meaning after having experienced the extreme highs and lows of war?

Chamberlain is familiar to millions from Michael Shaara’s now-classic novel of the Civil War, The Killer Angels, and Ken Burns’s timeless miniseries The Civil War, but in this book, White captures the complex and inspiring man behind the hero. Heavily illustrated and featuring nine detailed maps, this gripping, impeccably researched portrait illuminates one of the most admired but least known figures in our nation’s bloodiest conflict.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525510086
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	49,015
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Ronald C. White is the New York Times bestselling author of biographies A. Lincoln and American Ulysses, as well as three other books on Lincoln, most recently Lincoln in Private. White earned his PhD at Princeton, has lectured at the White House, and has spoken about Lincoln across the world. He is a senior fellow of The Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C.

Read an Excerpt

Formation, 1828 to 1855

One


“Do It! That’s How!”
A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “My Lost Youth,” 1855


On a warm August day in Maine, a young boy plods across his family’s farmland, leading two oxen drawing a wagon heavily loaded with hay. Suddenly the wagon pitches, one wheel stuck between two tree stumps. It cannot move forward.

“Clear the wheel!” his father, walking behind the wagon, commands.

“How am I going to do it?” the boy replies.

“Do it! That’s how!” the father booms.

The son grips the hub of the lodged wheel and shoves and shoves with all his young might. Finally, to his astonishment, the cart tongue bumps against the off ox, and the wagon lurches ahead.

Years later, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain would often recall this challenge, his father’s impossible command, and his own surprise and relief upon success. “ ‘Do it! That’s how!’ was a maxim whose value far exceeded the occasion,” Chamberlain would recall in a memoir of his boyhood. It became for him “an order for life”—an instruction for how to face any obstacle.

Chamberlain was the first child of Joshua Chamberlain, Jr., and Sarah Dupee Brastow. Born on September 8, 1828, during the final months of John Quincy Adams’s presidency, his life started on his family’s one-hundred-acre farm in Maine, set at the edge of the Pen​obscot River next to the village of Brewer in the “Down East” or eastern coastal part of the state. The Chamberlain house, average in size for that time, stands today at 350 North Maine Street.

Upon their son’s birth, Joshua and Sarah inscribed his name as Lawrence Joshua Chamberlain in their large family Bible. Underneath they wrote, “named for Commodore Lawrence of the American Navy.”

Captain James Lawrence, commander of the USS Chesapeake, a thirty-eight-gun wooden-hulled three-masted frigate, fought the British HMS Shannon off the New England coast during the War of 1812. Although Lawrence suffered mortal wounds in a losing naval battle, he would be remembered as an American hero for his defiant final order: “Don’t give up the ship.” The boy’s parents, ardent patriots, wished to honor Lawrence’s courage in their naming.

With their son’s name, his parents, in good Puritan tradition, also tethered his identity to the biblical Joshua. Chamberlain recalled that his parents admired how the biblical Joshua “left nothing undone which the Lord had commanded.” The boy would be the third Joshua in five generations of American Chamberlains.

Chamberlain’s family name traced its origins back to the twelfth century, when ancestor Richard de Tankerville became a chamberlain—the officer in charge of managing a royal household—to England’s King Stephen.

The first American Chamberlain, William, emigrated from Hingham, a market town in the east of England, to Massachusetts in 1648. Abraham Lincoln’s ancestor Samuel Lincoln had left this same town for a new England eleven years earlier. Both became part of “the Great Migration” of hundreds of ships and thousands of people who set their sights on the New World and the opportunities they hoped to find there. Over the next century and a half, the first generations of American Chamberlains worked long and hard to make a living as farmers in the stony land of far northern Massachusetts.

In 1799, Lawrence’s grandfather Joshua moved his family to Orrington. Joshua, Jr., was born there the next year. Chamberlain’s father grew up in a new nation energized by the spirit of the American Revolution.

On young Lawrence’s mother’s side, Jean Dupuis, a Huguenot from La Rochelle, France, was an ancestor revered for his steadfast faith. French Catholics first used “Huguenot” as a term of derision for French Protestants as the Reformation, sparked by John Calvin, spread across France in the sixteenth century.

In 1685, with prejudice against Protestants rising, King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had, a century earlier, granted Huguenots substantial rights. This overturning spurred Dupuis to immigrate to Boston that same year to start a new life in America.

Chamberlain’s maternal grandfather, Charles Dupuis, fought in the American Revolution. A misspelling of his name on his army unit’s muster list resulted in the Americanized name of subsequent generations: Dupee. Chamberlain’s mother, Sarah Dupee Brastow—often called Sally—was born in Holden, Massachusetts in 1803.

Joshua and Sarah married in 1827. Their union has been remembered as the proverbial marriage of opposites. If Chamberlain’s father was taciturn, his mother was talkative; Joshua’s stern demeanor brought the Maine landscape to mind, while Lawrence remembered how much everyone liked his mother’s “joyous freedom of spirit” and “impressible sense of humor.”

But the romanticized version of their marriage fails to account for internal tensions, which grew with the years. He of strong, unshakable opinions on all kinds of issues, she wishing to listen to all sides of a question. These tensions would affect the future course of their oldest son, who at times would act with his father’s decisiveness, and at other moments would patiently listen to the many sides of an argument.

As the first child, Lawrence received the unfettered attention of his parents until age six, when the family welcomed another son, Horace, in 1834. The two boys were followed by a sister, Sarah, born in 1836; then John in 1838; and finally, in 1841, Thomas, thirteen years younger than his eldest brother. Throughout his life Lawrence would feel a deep responsibility for his younger brothers and his sister.

To accommodate his growing family, Lawrence’s father moved them a short distance, to a larger house at the foot of a slope down from the Pejepscot River; the house still stands in Brewer today.

The people of Maine, the most northerly continental state, lived in isolation from the rest of America. Boston was 204 miles to the south. Traveling by horse, an animal that can typically walk four miles in an hour, the journey would take four and a half to five days.

The village of Brewer was named for Col. John Brewer from Worcester, Massachusetts, who settled there in 1770. Incorporated in 1812, by 1830, two years after Lawrence’s birth, the town could count a thousand residents. It was located on the Penobscot River, the main highway of Maine, called by locals “the Rhine of Maine.” Bangor, an even larger town located directly across the Penobscot from Brewer, was a successful commercial hub that boasted a population of three thousand. In the nineteenth century, shipbuilding was both Brewer’s and Bangor’s major industry.

By the time the river reached the two towns, it was so wide and deep that large ships could travel the forty-three miles upriver from Penobscot Bay on the Atlantic Ocean to Bangor and Brewer to load rich harvests of pine forest—Norway, white, jack, and pitch—that lumbermen floated down from the north. McGilvery & Company, Charles Cooper & Co., and Joseph Oakes & Son kept the shipyards humming with activity. Ships were berthed so tightly on both sides of the Penobscot that locals boasted one could skip across the decks from Brewer to Bangor without touching the water. Lawrence, who loved to be around ships, challenged himself to climb every new vessel before it was launched and place his hat on the top of the mast.

This vibrant economic growth coincided with Maine’s first years of statehood. Immediately after the American Revolution, settlers began to pour into what people called “the wilderness,” a region of Massachusetts known officially as the Northern District of the state. In July 1819, after several abortive attempts by area citizens to separate from Massachusetts, resentful at being ruled by faraway Boston, the citizens voted overwhelmingly to petition the federal government to become the twenty-second state.

The Northern District believed its application to the sixteenth Congress would be a mere formality. But in Congress, their request became entangled in the Southern states’ steadfast determination to maintain a balance between free and slave states in an expanding United States. Powerful leaders, including Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, made it clear that Maine would be admitted as a free state only if Missouri was admitted as a slave state at the same time. The debate over the admission of Missouri foreshadowed the increasingly vitriolic controversy over slavery.

Mainers were furious. Their application was being held hostage by this acrimonious debate. In the end, Clay, President James Monroe, and Northern and Southern congressional leaders formed what became known as the Missouri Compromise. On March 15, 1820, Missouri and Maine were simultaneously admitted as the twenty-second and twenty-third states, defusing the congressional debate over slavery—for the moment.

Growing up on a family farm in America’s far northern reaches, young Lawrence was insulated from the nation’s growing unrest over the issue of slavery.

Editorial Reviews

08/14/2023

Biographer White (American Ulysses) provides an admiring portrait of Civil War hero and politician Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1828–1914), whose actions defending Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg earned him widespread acclaim. There, he instructed his outnumbered men to fix bayonets and charge downhill at the Confederates, who surrendered in shock at the assault, turning the tide of the battle and ensuring a Union victory. Born in 1828 in Brewer, Maine, Chamberlain was shaped from his early years, according to White, by “four tributaries”: Christian faith, a love of music, an adventuring spirit, and a commitment to education. As a professor at Bowdoin College, he pushed back against the “old-fashioned teaching methods” of the faculty and encouraged critical thinking in his students. As a colonel of the 20th Maine Regiment, Chamberlain was a “master of maps” who dutifully studied the terrain over which his men would fight, playing over a battle’s “possibilities and problems in his mind.” Chamberlain went on to serve an unprecedented four terms as governor of Maine, eventually returning to Bowdoin as president. By delving deeply into Chamberlain’s intellectual and spiritual life, White successfully reconciles his subject’s contradictory reputation as both a “bookworm college and seminary student” and a “risk-taking Civil War soldier.” Civil War fans and general history readers alike should take note. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

A vital and vivid portrait of an unlikely military hero who played a key role in the preservation of the Union and therefore in the making of modern America. From his bookish days as a professor at Bowdoin to the fields of Gettysburg, Joshua Chamberlain was a man of principle and of action, a surprising officer whose conviction and courage made all the difference. A marvelous book.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of And There Was Light

“This evocative biography of Joshua Chamberlain manages to be both dramatic and understated—like the great war hero himself. Readers hoping for a rousing account of Chamberlain’s heroics at Little Round Top will get not only a riveting, but a definitive, version of that battle-changing moment at Gettysburg. But White also opens a window onto the nineteenth-century worlds of military service, politics, and academia, which Chamberlain bestrode with a unique combination of drama and dignity fully reflected in the narrative.”—Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize

“Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is one of the most famous soldiers who fought at the battle of Gettysburg. Ronald C. White chronicles that story and Chamberlain’s other Civil War exploits, but the distinguishing feature of this fine biography is its in-depth account of the varied achievements of this extraordinary American hero in a lifetime that ranged over more than eight decades.”—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“On Great Fields is one of those exceedingly rare biographies that is beautifully written and superbly researched, as well as a truly inspirational tale. It is a phenomenal account of an extraordinary individual.”—General David Petraeus, U.S. Army (Ret.), and co-author (with Andrew Roberts) of Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine

“A thoroughly engaging portrait of the life and career of Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Ronald C. White demonstrates once again his mastery of the biographical art with a fresh assessment of Chamberlain’s complicated yet inspiring journey.”—Joan Waugh, author of U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth

“[White] delivers a satisfying biography. . . . A revealing portrait of an American hero who deserves even wider recognition.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“By delving deeply into Chamberlain’s intellectual and spiritual life, White successfully reconciles his subject’s contradictory reputation as both a ‘bookworm college and seminary student’ and a ‘risk-taking Civil War soldier.’ Civil War fans and general history readers alike should take note.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2023

Joshua Chamberlain (1828–1914) is remembered for his actions during the Battle of Gettysburg at Little Round Top and the charge of the 20th Maine Infantry regiment. Historian White's (Lincoln in Private) latest biography covers the entirety of Chamberlain's extraordinary life. The Union army volunteer demanded strict and exacting discipline from himself. As a young man, he overcame a severe stammer, taught himself military drills and tactics, and learned several languages, including Hebrew and Arabic, to help him on his travels. As a professor at his alma mater, Bowdoin College, he attempted to introduce educational reforms that emphasized critical thinking and reflection instead of rote memorization and recitation. A severe hip and groin wound received at the Battle of Petersburg plagued him for the remainder of his life, leaving him in constant pain. He never healed properly but was awarded the Medal of Honor. After the war, Chamberlain served four terms as governor of Maine, returned to Bowdoin College as president, and gave many lectures on his wartime experiences. VERDICT Based on extensive primary research, this book gives fresh insight into Chamberlain's life. Readers interested in the American Civil War and biographies of famous 19th-century Americans will enjoy this title.—Chad E. Statler

Library Journal

★ 2023-09-07
A full-length biography of the Union officer whose stand on Little Round Top made him one of the heroes of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Distinguished historian White, the author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses, follows the remarkably varied career of Joshua Chamberlain (1828-1914), though his military service is the central focus. Born outside Brewer, a small shipbuilding town in Maine, Chamberlain was the son of a prosperous farmer. He was raised in the Congregationalist church, and his mother urged him to become a minister; his father wanted him to attend West Point. Instead, he embarked on a rigorous course of independent study to qualify for admission to Bowdoin College, where he graduated with honors, eventually mastering nine languages. He also met his future wife, Fanny, organist for the church choir he directed. After three years at Bangor Theological Seminary, Chamberlain was invited back to Bowdoin to teach, and he took the opportunity to introduce a more progressive approach than the lectures and rote recitation then typical of higher education. When the Civil War began, he answered the call of duty and found himself second-in-command of the 20th Maine, which performed memorably at Little Round Top. He was promoted to general after receiving a serious abdominal wound at Petersburg, an injury from which he never fully recovered. Still, he had an illustrious postwar career, including his time as the president of Bowdoin and four one-year terms as the governor of Maine. White is at pains to substantiate Chamberlain’s actions during the war, which have been questioned by some other historians, and he goes into considerable detail on how his religious beliefs affected his actions throughout his life. Ultimately, he delivers a satisfying biography that will satisfy military and Civil War buffs.

A revealing portrait of an American hero who deserves even wider recognition.

Kirkus Reviews