Chamberlain’s understanding of ‘courage’ evolved from the Civil War battlefield to his service in the public square

By Duncan Newcomer
Author of Thirty Days with Abraham Lincoln

In the days when election results were being hotly challenged, the former Governor of Maine bravely stood down angry mobs and told rioters to go home.

If anyone wanted to take a shot at him, he reminded them he already had numerous bullet wounds from his service in the Civil War. Those bloody battles included a critical victory at Gettysburg in 1863, holding the line with his troops on Little Round Top.

Even after Gettysburg, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was no stranger to courage on the battlefield. At the Battle of Petersburg in 1864, he was so gravely wounded, shot through the hip, that surgeons were sure he would die—and his death was prematurely reported in Maine.

Now, 15 years after the end of that war, here he was again in the midst of a violent battle, this time in Augusta, Maine’s capital, protecting the election process from what appeared to all observers to hold the potential for a regional civil war.

Once again in his storied career, he pulled on his old uniform—and wore it in that crisis for twelve days.

At that time, he had been serving as Professor of Rhetoric and President of Bowdoin College and was deeply imbued with the Greek and Roman Classics. He knew history. He’d named his horse Charlemagne. He knew the history of the Crusades. It could seem as if men, in their active imaginations, had pretty much been fighting the same battles over and over in the centuries. Chamberlain illustrated this repetition by telling his wife Fanny that this showdown in Augusta was “another Little Round Top.”

“Courage”—a value Chamberlain often wrote, spoke and taught about—was illustrated in his acceptance of the plea from officials Augusta to help safeguard that public square and the future of Maine and the country itself.

And again he served.

Another Civil War did not break out in Maine—thanks largely to Chamberlain’s resolute belief that the principles of our nation were worth risking one’s life to defend—not by force of arms in this case but by sheer force of moral example.

Fifteen years after the end of the Civil War, Chamberlain was showing the nation a different kind of courage—risking his life day after day inside the Maine State House, determined not to bow to violence.

This was a new kind of ‘courage’ for Chamberlain

But wait a moment! Let’s reflect.

It’s easy to look past the dire threats in Augusta to celebrate the peaceful outcome Chamberlain attained and miss the lessons he had learned in 15 years since Appomattox. (He served in that final chapter of the war, as well, having been ordered to supervise the potentially explosive “parade” of the surrendering Confederates—another charge he successfully undertook. And, in doing so, his superiors already saw in him a new understanding of “courage.”)

As an educator and scholar, Chamberlain understood that history was moving, evolving—and I wonder if today’s Americans are taking to heart his example. Some are making threats about yet another Civil War. And although that seems so extreme and absurd an idea that we might dismiss it out of hand—it is worth asking ourselves, as Chamberlain did:

What is true courage in defense of our shared values?

Many have tried to redefine ‘courage’

The theologian Paul Tillich is an example of the many wise voices calling on us to continually rethink what courage requires of us. He suggested a new vocabulary for what he simply called “the courage to be.” He was trying to find a language for our context. Tillich himself had traumatic experiences as a Chaplain in the Kaiser’s Army in World War I. Photographs of him show his face frozen in the terror of what he had experienced, and his eyes had grown stunned and small.

What Tillich realized is that beneath the question of courage was the question of meaning. And, he argued, meaning can provide context when the situation we are facing may seem absurd and destined for conflict. The last battle line, it turns out, is the line that draws us in or out of meaning.

If the question of war is meaningless or wrong, if the national definitions no longer resonate, then sheer existence is where courage takes its last stand. This was why his book on anxiety was called “The Courage to Be.”

Another way to frame this question is: Do we choose life over death? We are all comrades in arms when it comes to that. The courage to be comrades is the courage to hold hands. This courage is to observe the unseen connections between the I of the self and the Thou of the other.

Unlike battlefield courage, now is the time to leave the war-time metaphors of a “field of battle.” We no longer need the victory of “our side wins” and “their side loses.” Increasingly, courage in our context is to be able to value and hold onto a safe and civil space between us and the Other.

The old battlefield courage was to win. Our hero’s journey now is to create a space for us all to win-win.

How a new meaning of ‘courage’ played out in the face of deadly force

The stakes in resolving the contested election in Maine in 1880 certainly were not as big as those at Gettysburg in 1863—but there’s remarkable inspiration for our time in reading the letters Chamberlain wrote to his wife and to others during that crisis in Maine, many of them collected in The Grand Old Man of Maine.

Throughout the 15 years since Appomattox, Chamberlain had developed a strong-as-steel conviction that the Civil War itself had been fought and won “for the completion of those great ideas which inspired the souls of our fathers … in defense of a united and indivisible country.” If Americans allow themselves to abandon that vision, he argued repeatedly in those years, the danger was that “the blood of our heroes was poured out in vain, and our treasures worse than wasted.”

This solid “faith in the right,” which Chamberlain also connected with the roots of his deep Christian faith, caused him to repeatedly refuse calls to escalate the 1880 crisis in Augusta, including offers to bring even more armed men into the fight. Instead, Chamberlain “fought” this battle by simply refusing to leave the State House. He would hold this public space as safe ground with the sheer force of his moral stature in Maine and nationwide. And, soon, national newspapers covered his strangely peaceful stand.

His situation there was dire! His letters make it clear that he expected he could die at any moment.

Others urged him to call up troops! Then—his refusal to call up more armed men in an already enflamed dispute astonished and enraged both supporters and opponents. They began to realize they were dealing with a very different kind of commander.

“I do not dare leave here for a moment,” he wrote to his wife. “There would most assuredly be a coup d’etat, ending in violence and bloodshed. … It is a critical time and things are greatly mixed. But I know my duty thoroughly.”

Knowingly risking his life, he would hold that safe and civil space, surrounded by forces intent on tearing apart the entire state government. Even under such threats, he wrote, he would hold to his belief that he must “temper justice with mercy.”

His letter to Fanny comparing this to Round Top came during a couple of defining days in the middle of that January with calls for him to be lynched—and “the ugly looking crowd seemed like men who could be brought to do it—or to try to do it”—along with threats of a “reign of terror and blood.”

When two of his military friends showed up with the intention of forcing him to accept the services of about 80 men at arms, Chamberlain said he simply wished they had stayed away. Those 80 soldiers, now, were just more people whose “precious little pink skins” Chamberlain had to safeguard. “I shall protect them of course: My main object is to keep the peace and to give opportunity for the laws to be fairly executed.”

Astonishing isn’t it?

Even with an armed force showing up to “save” him, Chamberlain simply stood his ground as the symbol of civility in the State House and, instead of asking them to level their guns as the surrounding mob—he took those nervous young soldiers under his wing along with the larger populace he was defending—including his sworn enemies.

And, in the end, he won that battle. The crisis finally faded.

Are you inspired by Chamberlain’s post-Civil War definition of courage?

Those letters from 1880 are still available to read both online and in book form—but they are rarely read by anyone anymore.

Perhaps by writing this column, I may be pointing more Americans toward that kind of example—because the battle for equality, freedom, and a united country continues to call upon our ever-evolving understanding of courage.

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Duncan Newcomer has recently returned to writing after the loss of his wife to cancer. He is the author of Thirty Days with Abraham Lincoln, subtitled Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Lincoln. He also wrote a book on the death of his cat, Sonnets: Poems on the Death of an Abyssinian Cat, published by Goose River Press, Waldoboro, Maine. Before retiring to Maine, Duncan was on the faculty of The Loomis Chaffee School, Windsor, Ct., and the University of Connecticut Medical School. He has been a psychotherapist and a United Church of Christ clergy serving churches in Connecticut, Washington D.C. and Kentucky.