Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born in Brewster, Maine on September 8th , 1828. Originally born Lawrence Joshua, he changed his name to Joshua Lawrence when he reached adulthood. Joshua was the eldest of three sons. Joshua’s father, Joshua Chamberlain Jr., was a farmer who held many political offices. Despite his father’s aspirations for him to become a soldier, Chamberlain wanted to be a missionary from a young age.
Chamberlain attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 1848, where he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, a northern abolitionist writer. It was her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel about the cruelty of slavery in America, that sparked his contempt for slavery. For the first two years of his college experience,…show more content… Soon into his service, Joshua’s younger brothers joined the Twentieth Maine. They went on to fight with him for the rest of the war. In September of 1862, Joshua’s regiment occupied Sharpsburg, Maryland. This was the site of the Battle of Antietam and, even though Chamberlain did not fight in the battle, he witnessed the brutal effects of the war on his fellow soldiers. Chamberlain was emotionally scarred when he say a dead, sixteen year old, Confederate soldier who was holding a bible when he…show more content… Towards the middle of the day, Chamberlain had run out of ammunition and had already lost almost half of his men. However, he fiercely refused to give up the high ground. So, as a last resort, he commanded his men to make a daring bayonet charge down the hill against the Confederate forces. The jagged rocks that littered the side of the hill made a bayonet charge very dangerous. Despite the odds, the charge worked, as many enemy soldiers surrendered in the face of the fierce Twentieth Maine, running down the hill with bayonets, impaling anyone who stood in their way. Chamberlain’s men bravely defended Little Round Top, keeping General James Longstreet from attacking the Army of the Potomac’s left
