Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

“Was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?”

Famous for leading the heroic bayonet charge during the defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg and respected for his generalship during the Petersburg campaign, Chamberlain was chosen personally by Grant to receive the formal surrender of Confederate troops at Appomattox.

He also had the distinction, as a young teacher at Bowdoin College, of attending small Sunday receptions at the Bowdoin president's house. Here the president's wife, Harriet Beecher Stowe, would occasionally read the latest chapters from her novel-in-progress, later to be titled Uncle Tom's Cabin. Chamberlain had a distinguished career after the fighting and wrote several highly poetic memoirs of the war, including Through Blood and Fire at Gettysburg and The Passing of the Armies.

The Army of the Potomac Returns Home

"The sun went down in glorious promise for the morrow, leaving us there to ourselves again, on the banks of the river whose name and fame we bore, flowing in darkness past us, as from dream to dream.... And it must be that by such things as we had seen and done and suffered, a step is taken in the homeward march of man."

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