Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg by James M. McPherson Page B

that the men of the Twentieth spontaneously charged, or that Ellis Spear deserves the credit for the bayonet assault (though no one denies that it was Chamberlain who gave the order to fix bayonets). They quote the report of Colonel William C. Oates, commander of the Fifteenth Alabama (who, like Chamberlain, later became governor of his state), that he was in fact preparing to withdraw when the Twentieth Maine came screaming down the hill, and that the withdrawal was a retreat, not a rout. Oates doth protest too much. Butthere is no doubt that the Alabamians were exhausted and dehydrated after seemingly endless uphill fighting following a twenty-five-mile march to the battlefield.
    It seems clear, however, that Chamberlain deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor he won for the defense of Little Round Top. He went on to become one of the war's most extraordinary soldiers. He rose to brigade command and, on June 18, 1864, was shot through the pelvis while leading his brigade in an assault at Petersburg. Such wounds were almost always fatal; Ulysses S. Grant promoted the supposedly dying colonel to brigadier general on the field—one of only two such occasions in the war. Chamberlain beat the odds and recovered to lead his brigade in the final campaign to Appomattox. At the battle of Quaker Road on March 29, 1865, he took another bullet, this one just below the heart, where it would have killed him had it not been deflected around his ribs by a leather case of field orders in his breast pocket. Chamberlain suffered two cracked ribs and a bruised arm, but continued to lead his brigade in several more fights during the next eleven days until the surrender at Appomattox. So impressed was Grant with his fighting professor that he selected Chamberlain to take charge of the Army of Northern Virginia's formal surrender at Appomattox.
    In 1886, Chamberlain and other veterans of the Twentieth Maine returned to Gettysburg to dedicatetheir monument on Little Round Top. As we stand at the same spot, listen to Chamberlain's words on that occasion: “In great deeds, something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate the ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them…” Little wonder that my students could not hold back the tears when I read these words to them here in 1987.
    The Twentieth Maine was not the only Union regiment whose heroics helped to save the day at Gettysburg. We will walk back to the west face of Little Round Top to study the interpretive markers and a dozen monuments there. One of the latter is a bust of Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, who graduated at the top of his West Point Class of 1861, the same class in which George Armstrong Custer, now a brigadier general, had finished last. O’Rorke fell dead with a bullet through his neck while leading his 140th New York in a counterattack that saved that flank of the Union position from collapse. We can also stand on a granite boulder next to a bronze statue of General Warren looking to the southwest where he professed to have seen the glint of sunlight reflected from enemy rifles.
    From there we will head down the north slope of Little Round Top and continue on Sedgwick Avenue for a half-mile, where it becomes Hancock Avenue at about the point where it also begins to rise gradually from a swale to the higher ground of Cemetery Ridge. On the right, soon after the road becomes Hancock Avenue, is another impressive bronze statue, of Father William Corby standing with his right arm raised in blessing. Father Corby was chaplain of the famed Irish Brigade of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock's Second Corps. These five regiments, composed mainly of Irish-American Catholics, were much depleted by their losses in battle the previous year but