Finding the Hero in History
What is a hero, after all? Conventional wisdom tells us that history’s heroes are ordinary men and women thrust into circumstances that lead them to perform extraordinary feats. One person’s hero, however, may be another’s deadly enemy, as so often was the case during the Civil War. Historians now ask who these people really were and why they are still lauded long after their deaths. This is not just an exercise in deconstruction; it is an effort to understand the influences that shape a society’s concept of the heroic.
During a lovely summer week this July, a group of 21 high school and middle school students gathered at Bowdoin College to discuss what makes a hero. They focused on Joshua Chamberlain, the college professor from Maine who became a celebrated Union general. They were taking part in the Maine Humanities Council’s first History Camp, which gave promising pre-college students the kind of intellectually rich summer experience the Council has long made available to its teachers.
Many of the students had read Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels or seen the film Gettysburg. Both works influenced their notions of who Chamberlain really might have been. A cadre of historians and archivists helped them determine how much fiction was indeed fact.
The real Joshua Chamberlain certainly did not look like a heroic figure. He was under average height for his time, with gentle eyes and a large nose. He was also an academician who had had only limited combat experience before finding himself in command of the 20th Maine regiment atop Little Round Top at Gettysburg. His troops were expected to anchor the far left flank of the Union Army on the crucial second day of the battle. Exactly what happened is still disputed. The Chamberlain legend maintains that when his overstretched Mainers ran low on ammunition, he ordered “Fix bayonets!” and caught the attacking Alabamians by surprise with a dramatic charge down the hill.
Just the premise of this story sets the stage for a hero’s arrival, and who better than the bookish Chamberlain? But it was more than this that made Chamberlain heroic to his contemporaries, explained Dennis Edmondson (history teacher at Mt. Ararat High School), who directed the camp. Edmondson—the 2005 Gilder-Lehrman Maine History Teacher of the Year—spoke about other ways that Chamberlain could be perceived as a hero. He was an example to his men in bravery, persistence, and cleverness. He fought in 24 battles, and his six wounds testified to his insistence on putting himself in the line of fire. He had a distinguished career off the battlefield, too, serving four terms as Maine governor and a decade as president of Bowdoin, where he advocated admitting women, a reform that would not come for more than a century.
But one might not have seen Chamberlain in so heroic a light if one had been present at the Battle of Gettysburg. Bowdoin historian Patrick Rael’s talk “What Really Happened at Little Round Top?” presented six different accounts, some written immediately after the battle and some many years later, including one dismissive of Chamberlain’s actions that day. “Did anyone actually remember what had happened in the confusion of battle?” Rael asked. The students were invited to compare these often conflicting texts and to determine which writer was the most reliable witness.
A major focus of the History Camp was on the use of primary sources, drawing on the archival research techniques used in the Council’s biography institute for teachers earlier in the summer: studying documents, noting consistencies and discrepancies, trying to figure out where the truth really lay.
Speakers included Charles Plummer, who, in Civil War uniform, presented a “living history” account of Chamberlain’s life. Historian Tom Desjardin, author of Stand Firm Ye Boys from Maine: The 20th Maine and the Gettysburg Campaign and These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory, described in detail how Civil War battles actually were fought. Deborah Smith, former director of the Pejepscot Historical Society, which owns the Joshua L. Chamberlain House Museum, spoke about the revival of interest in the almost-forgotten Chamberlain and how his legend grew in the late 20th century.
Students also visited Chamberlain’s house, Special Collections at Bowdoin’s Hawthorne-Longfellow Library (where they examined original documents from the time), and Pine Grove Cemetery, where Chamberlain is buried under a small, undecorated stone.
Charles Calhoun, who directs the Council’s teacher programs, explained his philosophy for the camp: “The idea is to take them beyond thinking of history as battles and the names of generals and to help them understand how history gets written. History is not just facts, but the way those facts are interpreted.”
Students came from Gardiner Regional, Biddeford, and Bath middle schools; and Mt. Ararat (Topsham), Freeport, Edward Little (Auburn), Catherine McCauley (Portland), Deering (Portland), Boothbay Regional, and Maine Central Institute (Pittsfield) high schools.
Most had been recommended by teachers participating in the Council’s American Lives: Teaching History Through Biography institute, a collaboration with MSAD #11 in Gardiner, funded by a Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Clearly, the students were bright, sensitive, outgoing people, and they seemed to thrive on being in a room with other equally sharp history buffs. It was not an experience they had often had in school, but one they treasured, as they made clear in the final program evaluation.
At the end of the week, no one doubted Chamberlain’s status as a hero. Students said it had been helpful to study the steps that led to that recognition. Perhaps the whole nature of heroism was summed up best by Jeffrey Sullivan, a History Camp faculty member who teaches at Lewiston High School. Sullivan knows the Gettysburg battlefield well. He described to a group of students what it felt like to look out over the rocky terrain and think of the 20th Maine and the exhaustion and pressure they faced: “Anyone in a battle like that who isn’t running away in terror is a hero.”
