Sheridan cantered away, having given Chamberlain a peremptory order to assume command of all infantry in the sector and take them forward. As he rallied groups of men wherever he found them, Chamberlain met a soldier hiding from the crackling rifle fire behind a tree stump. ‘Look here, my good fellow,’ cried Chamberlain concernedly, ‘don’t you know you’ll be killed here in less than two minutes? This is no place for you. Go forward!’
‘But what can I do?’ demanded the man. ‘I can’t stand up against all this alone!’
‘No, that’s just it,’ said Chamberlain. ‘We’re forming here. I want you for guide center. Up and forward!’ Chamberlain gathered two hundred fugitives around him, and watched them advance under command of a staff officer. He wrote afterwards: ‘My poor fellow only wanted a token of confidence and appreciation to get possession of himself. He was proud of what he did, and so was I for him.’ Chamberlain spent the rest of the day in his accustomed role, leading forward elements of his command to confront the enemy wherever he stood. The Confederates broke. Lee was obliged to evacuate Richmond and Petersburg. Yet the chief emotions within 5th Corps that evening were shock and dismay at the news that Sheridan had sacked its commander, Warren, for alleged dereliction of duty.
All through the week that followed, the rival armies conducted their legendary race as Lee and his starving men strove to link up with the Confederate forces led by General Joseph E. Johnston, and Sheridan led the pursuit to cut him off. On the night of 8 April, the exhausted Chamberlain had scarcely fallen asleep when he received a terse message from Sheridan. Rising on his elbow, he read it by matchlight: ‘I have cut across the enemy at Appomattox Station, and captured three of his trains. If you can possibly push your infantry up here tonight, we will have great results in the morning.’ Chamberlain and two brigades reached the station at sunrise. Within minutes he received orders which swung his men into line to support Sheridan’s cavalry. The epic drama of America’s Civil War was all but finished. The Maine general and his comrades saw before them ‘a mighty scene, fit cadence of the story of tumultuous years. Encompassed by the cordon of steel that crowned the heights about the Court House, on the slopes of the valley formed by the sources of the Appomattox lay the remnants of…the Army of North Virginia – Lee’s army! It was hilly, broken ground, in effect a vast amphitheatre.’
As the Union masses prepared to attack, a lone horseman rode out of the Confederate lines and approached Chamberlain. It was an officer carrying a white towel. He saluted Chamberlain and reported: ‘General Lee desires a cessation of hostilities until he can hear from General Grant as to the proposed surrender.’ Chamberlain, stunned, said: ‘Sir, that matter exceeds my authority. I will send to my superior. General Lee is right. He can do no more.’ Yet even as the South’s principal commander acknowledged defeat, so keyed for combat were the men of both sides that their officers were obliged to struggle to restrain them. It took time, and a few lives, before desultory firing could be quelled. At last, as silence fell on the field, a figure appeared between the lines, superbly mounted and accoutred. Chamberlain was awed to perceive Robert E. Lee. Ulysses S. Grant rode out to meet him. The great war between the states was all but over.
That night, 9 April 1865, Longstreet rode over from the Confederate lines and declared wretchedly: ‘Gentlemen, I must speak plainly, we are starving over there. For God’s sake, can you send us something?’ They did so, of course. Chamberlain wrote, with his accustomed stately pride: ‘We were men; and we acted like men.’ That night also, he was informed that he would have the honour of commanding the representative infantry division of the Union army at the ceremony of surrender. On the morning of 12 April, four years to the day since the attack on Fort Sumter which opened hostilities, as Chamberlain stood at the head of 1st Division, long, silent grey files began to march past. This was a moment of humiliation for the defeated Confederates, which Grant was determined that they must experience. Yet as they began to pass Chamberlain, the brigadier turned to his bugler. A call sounded. The entire Union division, regiment by regiment, brought its muskets from ‘order arms’ to ‘carry’, in token of salute. It was a magnificent gesture, which went to the hearts of a host of Confederates, who immediately responded in kind. Here was a token of mutual respect and reconciliation which won for Chamberlain the acclaim of the greater part of the American people.
His generosity of spirit in the Union’s hour of triumph, reflected in all his dealings with the defeated Confederates, earned him as much regard as his deeds on the battlefield. Though the war was effectively over, on Griffin’s strong recommendation Chamberlain received brevet promotion to major-general in recognition of his services of 29 March 1865, on the Quaker Road. He assumed formal command of 1st Division, which spent the weeks that followed the surrender at the Appomattox seeking to maintain order in the countryside amid the chaos accompanying the collapse of the Confederacy.
On 23 May Chamberlain received a final honour when he headed 5th Corps in the Grand Review of the Armies through Washington. It was one of the most emotional moments of his life. Though he had always deplored the horrors of war, he took deep pride in what he and the soldiers of the Union had accomplished. ‘Fighting and destruction are terrible,’ he wrote later, ‘but are sometimes agencies of heavenly rather than hellish powers. In the privations and sufferings endured as well as in the strenuous action of battle, some of the highest qualities of manhood are called forth – courage, self-command, sacrifice of self for the sake of something held higher – wherein we take it chivalry finds its value.’
It is remarkable that a man as humane and intelligent as Joshua Chamberlain emerged from such an experience as the American Civil War with a romantic enthusiasm for the nobility of conflict, despite his uncertainty about the divine view: ‘Was it God’s command we heard, or His forgiveness we must forever implore?’ he mused. His own writing about his experiences may jar a modern reader by its unashamed lyricism. Yet it is unsurprising that such a man in such an era perceived his experience in these terms, for he had discovered personal fulfilment as a soldier. Many of the people described in this book possessed courage, charm and professional skill, yet lacked intellect. Chamberlain, by contrast, became celebrated as a hero of the United States whose intelligence and nobility matched his courage.
The Civil War represented a technological and tactical midpoint between the campaigns of Bonaparte and those of the early twentieth century. Railways had transformed mobility, and the telegraph strategic communications. The improved technology of rifled weapons had increased their killing power, but the decisive change wrought by breech-loading and repeating weapons had not yet come. The battles of Grant and Lee were among the last in which formation commanders led from the front, and thus where the personal example of a general officer could exercise a decisive influence ‘at the sharp end’, as did Chamberlain again and again.
The general thoroughly enjoyed his postwar celebrity. He served four terms as Republican governor of Maine, and became president of his old college, Bowdoin. His performance in the latter role was controversial. He introduced military science to the curriculum, including compulsory drilling. This provoked a student revolt which ended in the abandonment of uniformed training. Though Chamberlain’s military career spanned less than four years of a long life, he continued to think of himself as a warrior through the decades that followed. Almost seventy when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, and suffering recurring pain from his old wounds, he pleaded in vain for a field command. Even in his own family he was always called ‘General’, affectionately abbreviated by his grandchildren to ‘Gennie’. His marriage was tempestuous – in 1868 Fannie demanded a divorce – but somehow survived until her death in 1905. The surgeons who predicted that the terrible wounds Chamberlain received in 1864 would kill him were right – they did so when he was eighty-five, in February 1914. He remains the pattern of American military virtues, one of the most admirable men to wear the uniform of any army, in war or peace.
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