[On November 19, 1863
President Abraham Lincoln delivered the
Gettsysburg Address. Few American speeches have been more significant, so
this week I’ll AmericanStudy the address and a few other Gettysburg histories
and contexts. Leading up to a special Thanksgiving weekend post!]
On one of the historical turning points for which I’m most thankful, and
the man who made it happen.
If I’m wary about identifying
distinct literary transitions and turning points—as I’ve
argued in this space, just before identifying one of course—then I’m even
more wary about doing so with historical events. Of course it’s easy, and not
inaccurate, to highlight singular and significantly influential events like
presidential elections (or, on the bleaker side, like the
Wilmington coup and massacre with which I began this blog); but to
attribute sweeping historical changes or shifts to those, or any other
individual events, seems to me to elide the subtleties and nuances and
gradualism and multipart nature of historical movement and change. All of this
might be especially true when it comes to wars, since they’re so overt and
striking and can seem to hinge so much on singular moments and battles and
choices. And yet—and you knew this was coming—I think it is possible to boil
down the whole trajectory of the Civil War to a single moment and incredibly
bold and risky choice, made by perhaps the most unlikely military leader in our
nation’s history.
This moment, and everything
surrounding it, is a central focus of both Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer-winning
historical novel The Killer Angels (1974) and the Hollywood film Gettysburg (1993), so it may be a
bit better known than many of my focal points in this space. But then again,
every time I’ve told it to someone—and I have done so not infrequently, as it’s
one of my favorite American stories—it has been new to them; both of those
things (the newness and the favorite-ness) make me feel that it’s okay to
include it here. For the contexts, it’s worth noting first, as Shaara does at
length, how much the future of the Civil War, and thus America as a whole,
hinged on the outcome of Gettysburg—not just militarily but also and more
importantly diplomatically, since Confederate General Robert E. Lee was
carrying a letter given him by CSA President Jefferson Davis in which, to be
brief, the English government basically promised to enter the war on the side
of the Confederacy if its army could win a decisive victory on Northern
territory. If the war and the American future thus hinged on this battle, the
battle itself largely hinged on what happened on the hill called Little Round
Top—it was at the extreme Southern end of the Union lines and was the high
ground, and if the Confederate army managed to take it, it was likely that the
Union army would have to retreat, thus quite possibly giving the battle to Lee.
And by the most random but crucial quirk of fate, the Union
officer whose regiment was charged with holding Little Round Top was Colonel
Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine.
Whole books, including much of
Shaara’s, have
been written about Chamberlain, so here I’ll just highlight a couple of
things: he was a college professor of rhetoric and modern languages who had
volunteered for the Union army out of a sense of duty; and prior to Gettysburg
his principal battlefield experience had been a horrific night (chronicled in
his diary) spent huddled amongst corpses during the brutal Union defeat at
Fredericksburg (an event that, among others, had led Chamberlain in that same
diary to admit to some significant uncertainty about whether he was capable of
adequately leading men in battle; and it’s worth adding that many of his men
had come to share those doubts, and had nearly staged a mutiny against his
leadership not long before Gettysburg). Throughout the second day of the
fighting at Gettysburg (July 2nd, 1863), Chamberlain and the 20th
Maine were assaulted again and again by Confederate troops trying to take
Little Round Top; they managed to hold off those attackers by the late
afternoon were virtually out of ammunition (many men were entirely out) and
likely could not withstand another charge. No historian or strategist could
fault Chamberlain if he had retreated under those circumstances, but instead he
called for the ultimate bluff: he ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge
the Southern regiment that was preparing for another charge at them. Taken by
surprise, and of course unaware of how little ammo their attackers possessed,
the Confederate troops surrendered to Chamberlain; Little Big Top did not fall,
the Union army took the advantage into the third and final day of fighting, Lee
in desperation ordered the infamous Pickett’s Charge, and the rest, of the
battle and in many ways the war, was history.
It’s impossible,
to reiterate where I started this post, to know for sure what would have
happened, in any historical moment or situation, had things gone differently.
But it is certainly possible, perhaps even likely, that had Chamberlain made a
different choice, the battle and war could have gone to the Confederacy, and
from then on American history would have looked so different as to be
unrecognizable. Chamberlain, who won the Medal of Honor for this moment, would
go on to a very diverse and distinguished career, including four one-year terms
as governor of Maine, a decade as president of Bowdoin College, and many other
posts and accomplishments. But it doesn’t get any more meaningful than that
July 2nd bluff—and we should all be thankful for it.
Next Gettysburg
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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