Independence Day

Note: During the Civil War, nearly 400,000 New Yorkers joined the Union Army, more than 53,000 New York soldiers died in service, or roughly 1 of every 7 who served. This is only one of the many reasons why I gotta wonder about That Guy from Queens, New York, that seems to have such deep emotional connexions to the stars and bars and other confederate symbols.


The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac  Joshua Chamberlain

In the last 20 years, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain has become one of the most famous soldiers of the American Civil War.  For his actions on Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg against a Rebel general who has a military base in Texas (surprise!) named after him, he was a heroic character in Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels. He was also featured in Ken Burns' documentary The Civil War.

The Passing of the Armies is a Civil War memoir describing Chamberlain's experiences in the last couple of weeks in the war at Petersburg, White Oak Road, Five Forks, and Appomattox. This book is not a collection of easy to read war stories, but highly detailed account of driving the Army of Northern Virginia to surrender. He was a Rhetoric Professor at Bowdoin College so his allusions derive from the classics, he employs a wide vocabulary, and he constructs coherent if sometimes flowery prose.

Written in his eighties and in the spirit of reconciliation, Chamberlain often expresses his respect for the soldiers and officers the Confederacy. He has nothing – not one word - to say of race-based chattel slavery. He doesn’t come close to the causes of the war or what Sherman called “that political nonsense of slave rights, states' rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press and such other trash as have deluded the southern people.”

To my mind the strong points were the two essays that bookended the chapters on the battles. He includes blunt score settling with Sheridan and a mix of praise and criticism of Grant. On the high cost of Northerner’s lives, he observes, “The hammering business had been hard on the hammer.” However, he also says:

Grant was necessary to bring the war to a close... his positive qualities, his power to wield force to the bitter end, much entitle him to rank high as a commanding general. His concentration of energies, inflexible purpose, imperturbable long-suffering, his masterly reticence, ignoring either advice or criticism, his magnanimity in all relations, but more than all his infinite trust in the final triumph of his cause, set him apart and alone above all others. With these attributes we could not call him less than great.

Like other war memoir writers, he argues for the ennobling effects of combat. Here he answers the question, In battle aren’t soldiers affected by fear:

But, as a rule, men stand up from one motive  or another — simple manhood, force of discipline,  pride, love, or bond of comradeship — "Here is  Bill; I will go or stay where he does." And an officer is so absorbed by the sense of responsibility for his men, for his cause, or for the fight that  the thought of personal peril has no place what - ever in governing his actions. The instinct to seek safety is overcome by the instinct of honor.

The memoir is worth reading for serious students of the American Civil War; for people who want an somewhat skeptical view of Grant and Sheridan; and for readers who like the idea of college professors also being born soldiers.

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