Boom

// posted July 2, 2005 by Lou Schuler

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if all middle-aged windbags get this way around the Fourth of July weekend. But I can’t help thinking about the Battle of Gettysburg, which took place this week in 1863.

Gettysburg is also on my mind because of the death, earlier this week, of Shelby Foote, the great Civil War chronicler and the man who almost single-handedly made Ken Burns’ mammoth Civil War documentary series come alive.

There’s nothing like visiting the battlefield at Gettysburg to get an idea of the sort of sacrifice that made this country safe for men of all races to barbecue steaks in their backyards.

I did a quick trip to Gettysburg two years ago, after reading Stephen W. Sears’ history of the battle.

I wish I had spent more time there (and not had to waste so much of the day trying to keep my kids from climbing on the cannons), because, as I wrote in the July/August 2003 issue of Men’s Health, “Every boulder of Gettysburg National Military Park tells a story, and someone here can recount it so vividly you can almost see the bodies falling.”

Some 51,000 bodies fell that day and never got back up again.

Because I had so little time there, I drove the family up to Little Round Top, where on July 2, 1863, the entire course of U.S. history may have been changed by a college professor named Joshua Chamberlain, “an excellent scholar with a special talent for languages eventually mastering Greek, Latin, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac.”

Counting English, the man knew 10 languages, living and dead, and still managed to find a place in his brain for military strategy. As a full colonel and commander of the 20th Maine regiment, he was sent late that afternoon to plug a gaping hole in the Union left flank.

Here’s how Michael F. Nugent describes the scene:

Colonel Vincent placed the 20th Maine along the southern spur of Little Round Top, the extreme left flank of the Federal position on Cemetery Ridge, and instructed Chamberlain, “I place you here! This is the left of the Union line. You understand. You are to hold this ground at all hazards …”

Chamberlain fully understood the criticality of his mission. If the Confederate forces were able to flank his position, they would gain the rear of the entire Union line with disastrous results and be positioned between the Union Army and the capital in Washington. What Chamberlain could not have known, was that in the event of a significant Confederate victory during General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, the leaders of the Confederacy intended to present President Lincoln with an offer to pursue a negotiated peace, potentially dividing the Country permanently.

No pressure there, Josh. Just remember to speak English to your soldiers. Oh, by the way, if you fuck up? Game over. Nice country we almost had.

Chamberlain didn’t fuck it up:

During the attack, Chamberlain was alerted to the movement of a number of Confederates between the Round Tops towards his left flank. This was the 500 man 15th Alabama under Colonel William C. Oates. Chamberlain countered by ordering a “refusal of the line,” a complicated maneuver where the men of the 20th extended their line to twice its original length and formed the left wing of the regiment at a right angle to their front as a further defense against a flanking attack. The execution of this difficult maneuver while under fire is a tribute to the regiment’s training and discipline and to Chamberlain’s resourcefulness.

When the 15th Alabama attacked what had moments before been an unprotected flank, the left wing of the 20th fired a devastating volley that momentarily stopped the assault. The Confederates quickly reformed and assaulted the position again, reached the Maine line and engaged in vicious, hand-to-hand combat.

Colonel Oates believed that his men penetrated the Union lines five times but each time the Maine regiment managed to repel the assault.

Chamberlain remembered that: “The two lines met and broke and mingled in the shock. The crush of musketry gave way to cuts and thrusts, grapplings and wrestlings. The edge of the conflict swayed to and fro with wild whirlpools and eddies. At times I saw around me more of the enemy than of my own men; gaps opening, swallowing, closing again with sharp convulsive energy; squads of stalwart men who had cut their way through us, disappearing as if translated. All around, strange, mingled roar. Shouts of defiance, rally and desperation … everywhere men torn and broken, staggering, creeping, quivering on the earth … Things which cannot be told — nor dreamed. How men held on, each one knows. Not I.”

After some 90 minutes of fighting, he’d lost about a third of his men, and many of the ones who were left were out of ammunition. Although he had held the high ground, he was outnumbered two-to-one, and the Confederates were lining up for another assault.

So Chamberlain did what no one expected: He ordered a bayonet charge.

The attacking Confederates recoiled in terror at the sight of the two hundred screaming men charging towards them with fixed bayonets. Many retreated towards a stone wall in the valley between the Round Tops. As they approached, Captain Morrill and the men of the detached Company “B” rose from behind the wall, fired a volley into the Confederate ranks and then joined in the pursuit down the slope. Believing that he was being attacked from different directions by several Union regiments, Colonel Oates ordered a retreat. In the panic and confusion an orderly retreat was impossible and Oates admitted that “we ran like a herd of wild cattle.”

Stephen Sears, in his book, argues that Chamberlain’s actions alone didn’t preserve the Union left flank. Even if Oates’ Alabamians had taken Chamberlain’s position, they wouldn’t have held it long, since more Union troops were moving that direction.

Still, all things considered, it wasn’t a bad afternoon’s work for a college professor.

Interesting footnote: Although Chamberlain’s actions are celebrated now (Jeff Daniels played him in TBS movie Gettysburg), and considered as pivotal as Pickett’s disastrous charge into the middle of the Union line, at the time he received little recognition.

Thirty years after the battle, though, he received a nice package in the mail: the Congressional Medal of Honor.

One nation, under the table

One other note about history on this Independence Day weekend:

This fun Salon story says that rum, not tea, was the key commodity spurring the colonists to rebellion:

[T]he real conflict between the colonists and Britain began over taxes on molasses, not tea. And that’s where the French come in. The Founding Fathers not only loved the French, but they also loved the molasses that Paris’ Caribbean colonies produced — and they loved even more the rum that New England distillers made from it.

Years of temperance pressure and Prohibition — and probably the Walt Disney Co. and Hollywood — have essentially shoved the real history of the Revolution down a memory hole.”

Soldiers in the Continental army were paid in rum, which explains how one of my ancestors came to be one of the most entertaining footnotes of the Revolutionary War.

My brother Rob found the anecdote in the out-of-print 1960 book, Now We Are Enemies, by Thomas J. Fleming. (He also hunted down copies for his four brothers, for which I can’t thank him enough.)

Here’s the story, from page 305 of Fleming’s book:

Private Isaac Livermore of this company had gone into action with a canteen of rum on his hip. As they retreated along the slope of Bunker [Hill], a British ball severed the canteen thong and it went rolling down the hill toward the pursuing British. Instead of congratulating himself for a narrow escape, the hotheaded private roared: “I’ll be damned if I’ll let the regulars have my rum” and went scrambling after it. He snatched it up barely a musket length from the amazed British and escaped in a shower of bullets.

To recap:

My ancestor, private Livermore, lost his canteen of rum, which represented much of his pay as a soldier in the Continental army. So he charged down Bunker Hill, virtually to the feet of the advancing British, grabbed the canteen, and ran back up the hill.

And lived to tell about it.

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