six weeks after assuming command, on 1 July 1863, Chamberlain was hastening his men up a Pennsylvania road, amid applauding, cheering, and even singing Union sympathisers, towards a small town where the vanguard of the Northern army was already heavily engaged with Lee. It was a cloudless summer’s afternoon. The dusty men of the 5th Corps covered twenty-six miles – not nearly as far as 2nd Corps hiked that day, but enough. At last they halted to bivouac, and set about finding those indispensables for marching soldiers, water and fence rails for firewood. A galloper burst among them from the front. There was to be no bivouac: 5th Corps must keep marching. The army faced crisis. After the previous day’s heavy action, only the fall of darkness had prevented a Confederate triumph. Union forces had been obliged to fall back to new positions south of Gettysburg. It was plain that the action would be renewed at daybreak, and that a ridge between two eminences known as Culp’s Hill and Round Top must be held against Lee’s assault. As 5th Corps trudged on under moonlight, a rumour spread through the ranks that the ghost of George Washington had been seen riding across the battlefield on a white horse. Chamberlain wrote later: ‘Let no one smile at me! I half believed it myself.’
An hour after midnight, the regiment halted to rest for three hours, then set forth again without breaking its fast. Arrived early in the morning at the edge of the battlefield, at last they halted. A statement was read to them from General George Meade, now commanding the army, about the gravity of their task. Sporadic fire was already audible, yet for reasons that have baffled posterity, Lee was slow to launch his great assault. For some hours 5th Corps lingered in the rear, before at last it was committed to join the five-mile front along Cemetery Ridge, where the Army of the Potomac was to stand. Its commanders were granted vastly greater licence than they might have expected to deploy their eighty-eight thousand men, regiments still hastening forward piecemeal. Only late in the afternoon did Meade’s chief engineer Gouverneur Warren perceive to his horror that the key elevations of Round Top and Little Round Top, on the left flank of the line, were undefended and indeed unoccupied, save for a signal corps outpost stationed on the latter. He rushed 5th Corps forward from reserve, even as Long-street’s corps was making its laborious eight-mile detour in order to reach the start line for the Confederate assault unobserved by the Union army. The 15th Alabama Regiment, commanded by Colonel William C. Oates, together with elements of the 47th Alabama, was able to advance up Round Top, scattering the few Union skirmishers in the area, and occupy that hill without resistance.
Disaster threatened the Union. The way seemed open for Lee’s army to turn Meade’s flank and roll up his line. Oates called for Confederate cannon to be hustled up Round Top to sweep the blue-uniformed Union divisions. He himself proposed holding the dominant summit rather than pressing onwards, but his brigadier insisted on renewing the advance. After giving his men ten minutes’ rest following their exertions on the climb, Oates began to align them once more to assault Little Round Top, immediately to the north. He afterwards asserted that his decision to give his men a brief respite cost the Confederacy victory at Gettysburg. He may have been right.
At the last moment, Union commanders perceived the mass of Lee’s men closing on their left flank, preparing to seize Little Round Top. They recognised that if the few hundred yards’ frontage of this steep, wooded rock outcrop were lost, so was the battle. Colonel Strong Vincent, twenty-six-year-old commander of the 3rd Brigade which included 20th Maine, doubled his men towards the crest, shells already falling upon them. Chamberlain’s was the last of Vincent’s four regiments to fall into line at the southern extremity, with his brigadier’s order ‘You are to hold this ground at all costs.’ Another officer, Colonel James Rice, observed sonorously: ‘Colonel, we are making world history today.’ Chamberlain detached one company to cover his left flank from a distance, down the valley east of Round Top. This left him with 358 men to hold the summit. For a brief moment, three Chamberlain brothers were together on the field, for in addition to Tom, who was serving as Joshua’s adjutant, John had appeared as a civilian spectator. Then a shell exploded close by, and the colonel bade the little family group disperse: ‘Another such shot might make it hard for Mother.’
Below him, Chamberlain beheld chaos, with Confederate troops crowding the Devil’s Den and Plum Run gorge. Longstreet’s sharpshooters had a good view of the summit of Little Round Top, and brought a galling fire to bear on its defenders, which cost a stream of casualties. There could be no more convincing proof of the increased effectiveness of rifled weapons during the half-century since the campaigns Marcellin Marbot and Harry Smith knew. The whole of Vincent’s brigade was soon exchanging fire with dense masses of advancing Confederates. Both sides were equally weary with long marching. The Union’s only advantage was that the Confederate artillerymen were obliged to cease fire as their own infantry closed on the objective.
Chamberlain had been a soldier barely nine months, yet his grasp of tactics was already remarkable. Seeing that his rear was critically exposed, under fire he ordered his officers to shuffle the regiment’s entire line leftwards, curling back among the boulders along the south-east face of the hill. He thus doubled 20th Maine’s front, at the cost of thinning its ranks. His new disposition formed an arrowhead with the regiment’s colours on a rock at the tip. The companies just had time to complete their difficult manoeuvre before a storm of shouting and musketry signalled the assault of five Confederate regiments. There were now two Union brigades on Little Round Top, under heavy attack and losing leaders fast – a brigadier and a colonel fell dead within minutes, and more officers soon followed.
Oates’s 15th Alabama had supposed the rear of the Union position to be undefended. As they sprang forward the last yards to the summit, they were shocked to meet a frenzy of fire from the left wing of Chamberlain’s positions. ‘Again and again was this mad rush repeated,’ wrote one of the Maine officers, ‘each time to be beaten off by the ever-thinning line that desperately clung to its ledge of rocks.’ Chamberlain said: ‘At times I saw around me more of the enemy than of my own men; gaps opening, swallowing, closing again with sharp, convulsive energy…All around, strain, mingled roars – shouts of defiance, rally and desperation.’ The Maine men were pushed back in places, yet somehow summoned the energy to recover their ground. Soldiers were tearing open cartridges with their teeth, ramming and firing like madmen. Some wrestled hand to hand with attackers. Chamberlain had thrown into the line every man he possessed, including the sick, cooks, bandsmen and even two former mutineers from 2nd Maine who had been held as prisoners. He sent the adjutant, his brother Tom, to reinforce the depleted colour guard.
The Confederates, exhausted after twenty-five miles of marching followed by this terrible encounter, fell back to regroup. Chamberlain walked among his men, supervising the gathering of dead and wounded, closing ranks and offering the reassurance of his calm presence. A shell fragment had gashed his right foot, while his left leg was bruised where a ball had smashed his scabbard against it. As the grey ranks of the 15th Alabama stumbled uphill once more through the trees, the colonel almost despaired of holding his ground. He begged for reinforcements, but succeeded only in persuading his neighbours of the 83rd Pennsylvania to take over a portion of 20th Maine’s right flank frontage.
A new crisis came as men began to cry ‘Ammunition!’ They had started the action with sixty rounds apiece. Almost all were gone, even after emptying the cartridge boxes of the dead and wounded.
Seeing some of his soldiers preparing to resist the Alabama’s charge with clubbed muskets, Chamberlain made the greatest tactical decision of his life. Calling ‘Bayonet! Forward!’ he ordered Captain Ellis Spear to lead the entire left wing of the regiment in a sweeping, wheeling charge downhill. The right wing held its ground until the regiment was aligned, then sprang forth also. The astounded Confederates checked, recoiled, then broke. One of the Alabaman officers fired his Colt at Chamberlain’s face before surrendering when he found the colonel’s sword at his throat. Many of the erstwhile attackers threw down their weapons and raised their hands. A Confederate attempt to make a stand before a field wall collapsed when from behind the stonework emerged Chamberlain’s detached B Company, firing on their rear. “We ran like a herd of wild cattle,’ a crestfallen Colonel Oates acknowledged. Two Confederate colonels, one badly wounded, surrendered.
