Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a Bowdoin professor of rhetoric who asked for a commission and received the 20th Maine. On July 2, 1863, that regiment held the south slope of Little Round Top when the left of the Union line was a thin idea. After the ammunition ran low he ordered a bayonet charge down the hill. The 15th Alabama broke. The flank held.

Gettysburg has collected more sentences than any American field. This page will not add a novel. It will say a college teacher kept a rocky shoulder because the army had put him there and he understood what the shoulder was for.

He was wounded later, badly, and still returned. At Appomattox he commanded the infantry that received the formal surrender of arms — a courtesy, not a triumph lap. He died in Portland on February 24, 1914. Maine kept the professor. The army kept the hill.