In its emphasis on the intellectual and moral formation of Chamberlain, Ronald C. White’s On Great Fields: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and His Fight to Save the Union reveals the depths of Chamberlain’s impressive learning from which he drew to prove more than competent at soldiering and which he harnessed in the postwar period, along with political influence, to shape public memory of the war. White examines Chamberlain with the same moral imagination he brings to bear on subjects Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, contemporaries of Chamberlain also possessed of sharp minds and energetic temperaments, but men who bore significantly greater responsibility for Union victory than the Bowdoin College professor. But if Lincoln the statesman and Grant the great captain exerted far weightier influence on the war’s outcome, time did not permit them to enjoy the same opportunities as Chamberlain to shape, in spoken or written word, remembrance of the war. Chamberlain’s longevity, his active participation in postwar commemorations at Gettysburg, and his myriad contributions to the war’s historical record as late as 1913 (the year he contracted with G. P. Putnam’s Sons to publish The Passing of the Armies) transformed a remarkable career into legend. His death in 1914—Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885, Philip H. Sheridan passed in 1888, and Sherman, the last of the US Army’s triumvirate, in 1891—ensured Chamberlain’s position as a champion of the Army of the Potomac and as an oracle of the war.
Literature and longevity fashioned Chamberlain’s myth. The 1974 publication of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, which won a Pulitzer Prize, has exerted considerable influence on popular culture and even informal professional military education in America, and was regarded by US Army General Norman Schwarzkopf as a great and realistic war novel. Shaara’s novel endeared Chamberlain to readers enthralled by the war’s centennial commemorations from 1961 to 1965. A synthesis of the Emancipationist, Lost Cause, and Reconciliationist schools of Civil War memory, Shaara’s novel casts Chamberlain as an idealist and a morally-minded liberal counterweight to Southern oligarchs who sought the creation of a faux-Cavalier, race-based slaveholding aristocracy. Shaara depicts the Maine volunteer as the victor at Little Round Top in an epic recreation of the fierce fighting that transpired at Gettysburg. In fact, already in August 1863, Chamberlain believed that the US Army victory at Gettysburg had portended a swift conclusion to the war. But even if his prediction proved erroneous, his place in the memory of the war has endured. What Chamberlain described as “the salvation of Round Top” in his 1906 lecture proved his most memorable hour of the war. To this day, visitors flock to Little Round Top (the National Park Service recently completed a significant restoration and preservation project of the site) in a kind of historical pilgrimage, something Chamberlain himself foretold on a battlefield visit in 1889.