What experiences of spiritual and character formation can prepare us for a time of testing? If the habits and practices developed in our private lives are suddenly drawn out “on great fields,” how can we be ready to stand firm?

Joshua Chamberlain, a mild-mannered Bowdoin College professor, shocked his colleagues when he volunteered for the Union Army at the age of 32, and became an unlikely hero after holding the line at Gettysburg and routing the confederate attackers, despite a precarious position and shortage of ammunition. Deeply wounded a year later at Petersburg – and told by surgeons he would die – he survived and went on to be elected governor of Maine four times, serve as an innovative president of Bowdoin, and help envision and articulate the meaning of America in the post-Civil War decades.

How did a stuttering boy come to be fluent in nine languages and teach rhetoric? How did a “book worm college and seminary student” become a “risk-taking Civil War soldier”? What intellectual and spiritual formation contributed to his military leadership and his post-war public service? Trinity Forum Senior Fellow and acclaimed historian Ronald C. White, author of On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, is the ideal guide to this extraordinary life.

Ronald was the guest of The Trinity Forum at an Evening Conversation at the National Press Club on Monday, October 30, where he spoke and answered questions about the unlikely heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Thank you to Pepperdine School of Public Policy for supporting this event!

Evening Conversation | Ronald C. White | October 30, 2023

Pete Peterson

Good evening. I’m Pete Peterson, the very grateful dean of Pepperdine’s Graduate School of Public Policy and it’s a delight to welcome you back to tonight’s Evening Conversation. Our first partnered evening conversation since 2020. That night, we featured Ross Douthat, who had come out with a book on the very cheery topic of American decadence. And I remember in the dinner after that event, that was the launch of his book that evening, and as he looked at his calendar for the next three or four months, he had really laid out book events all over the country. And at one point in the dinner, he leaned over and he said, I wonder if this is going to be my first and last book event. And sure enough, it was. The relationship with The Trinity Forum has been going on for a very long time, over a dozen years.

And at first glance, it might not make a lot of sense that a graduate policy school would have a relationship with such a terrific D.C. based, faith based leadership and events conversation program. But I hope what you’ve seen, if you’ve seen some of the other events that we’ve partnered on, it actually makes a lot of sense. The School of Public Policy takes a very different approach to preparing public leaders, one that understands that it’s not just the numbers. It’s not just the statistics or the economics. It’s not just the multiple regressions that policymakers go through when they analyze one policy versus another. It’s the decisions that leaders make once they understand the data that comes to them, the incorporation of the civic virtues. And in that, that’s where the School of Public Policy is focused. It’s a balanced curriculum designed by the late great political scientist James Q Wilson, who understood that for public leaders, there needed to be a balance between the quantitative, analytical skills that all policymakers should have, but also these civic virtues, ones that are grounded in a great books liberal arts curriculum, ones that teaches that in all of public policy there are decisions that can be made that may not be necessarily quantitatively understood, but really need to be understood through the lens of civic virtue. 

And so secondly, it might not make a lot of sense that a graduate policy school would care a lot about a Civil War general. But I wanted to draw your attention to, for those of you who picked up the book, I’m going to steal, as if our author here is not going to quote this. It’s the great virtue of being the introductory speaker that I get to steal some of this incredible content. And I just wanted to draw this second to last paragraph of this incredible book On Great Fields. “In his old age, Chamberlain recalled, the heading frequently printed upon his copy books, quote, ‘Be virtuous and you will be happy.’ In his long and varied life, he had come to see that it is no simple task to embrace virtue. In fact, in his memoirs, he lingered on this thought rewriting the mandate to read, ‘be virtuous and you will pass through pain and suffer evil. But at the end of the grievous passage, you will find the good.’”

Friends, they don’t teach this in most policy schools. In fact, I would argue they don’t teach this in a lot of institutions of higher education. But this is all that matters in public life. This, the understanding of trade offs in life, the importance of civic virtue, to be able to operate in very conflicting times. And so not only is this relationship with the Trinity Forum an important one for us 3000 miles away in Malibu, California, but it’s one that’s frankly important for America at this time. What Dr. White has done once again is draw our attention not to a historical figure that we would just look back and appreciate, but to ask some deeper questions about how do we develop leaders like that? How does America call on leaders like that? And in this effort, we are joined at the hip with our friends at the Trinity Forum. So thanks so much for joining us here this evening. Without further ado, I want to welcome up my dear friend and colleague in crime, Cherie Harder. 

Cherie Harder

Thank you Pete for that gracious and fun introduction. It is such a pleasure to get to partner again with you and the Pepperdine School of Public Policy. I’ll just add my own welcome to all of you joining us for tonight’s conversation with Ron White on the unlikely heroism of Joshua Chamberlain. As Pete noted, this is actually part of a long and ongoing series that Pepperdine School of Public Policy and Trinity Forum have partnered on over the past dozen years. And during that time, we’ve really covered all sorts of topics, not only just American decadence with Ross Douthat, but also the link between injustice and poverty with Gary Haugen, the link between authority and vulnerability and trying to cultivate human flourishing, the friendship and shared war experience of Lewis and Tolkin with senior fellow Joe Loconte, who’s also here with us tonight, and a whole variety of other topics as well. And actually, this Wednesday, we’re going to be partnering on a Socratic forum on character and courage for young leaders. So this is a partnership that’s really ongoing. And again, it is just a real delight and joy to get to partner with you, Pete, as well as with Pepperdine.

I’d also like just to point out a few special guests who are here, including our chairman of the Board, Richard Myles, and his wife, Phoebe. So, so glad to have you as well as I think Brian Swartz from Pepperdine is here as well. But we’re really just delighted that so many of you are here turning out on a night with rain, with tons of wind and with all sorts of closed streets and the like. So thank you for persevering and making it here.

And if you wanted to have friends, if you had friends who wanted to be here but could not, well, we will be recording tonight’s evening conversation. It will be on our YouTube channel and on our website within the next 48 hours or so. So feel free to share that with others and start conversations on the topic. For those of you who are here for the very first time or otherwise new to the Trinity Forum, we work to provide a space and resources for the discussion of life’s biggest questions in the context of faith, and we do that by sponsoring programs like this one tonight to both connect thinking leaders with leading thinkers in wrestling with those big questions of life and ultimately coming to better know the Author of the answers. And we hope tonight will be a small taste of that for you. 

And certainly one of the big questions of life pertains to how character is formed or reformed, how we understand what makes a good person and a good leader. And perhaps the best way of grappling with such questions is through story and example. Our speaker tonight has spent much of his life researching and reflecting on the character, words and works of great leaders, how to understand how they became the person that they were, do the things that they did and learn from their example. His latest and superb work On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Chamberlain officially releases tomorrow morning.

It’s a work that’s been described as phenomenal by General David Petraeus, definitive by historian Harold Holzer, and historians rarely say that other people’s work is definitive. Vital, vivid and marvelous by Jon Meacham. In this work, Ron considers one of America’s most interesting, complex, even controversial heroes of the Civil War. He explores the circumstances and commitments that shaped him, the largely untold story of his faith and the great fields on which he found himself and the challenges he faced there; in war and in peace, the halls of academia and the campaign trail, in government and amidst insurrection. And in doing so, he raises questions and offers insight on the importance of character and leadership in our own riven times. It’s hard to imagine a historian or biographer who could do so with more expansive research, deep expertise, empathy for his subjects, or contagious enthusiasm than our guest tonight, Ron White. 

Ron is a renowned historian and a bestselling biographer who has authored or edited more than ten major works, not only including the one that he’ll be discussing tonight, but also his bestselling work, A. Lincoln: A Biography which was honored as the best book of the year by the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, History Book Club, and Barnes and Noble, as well as his work American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S Grant, another New York Times best seller, which won the William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography. He’s also the author of the award winning 2021 book Lincoln in Private, as well as a staggering number of op eds and articles which have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. Finally, last but not least, he is, I am very proud to say, a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum. After Ron offers remarks, he and I will have a brief, moderated conversation and then we’ll turn it over to questions from the audience. Ron, welcome.

Ronald C. White

Thank you, Cherie and Pete. Cynthia, my wife, is here with me this evening. We live in Pasadena, California, and every winter I travel one hour to Malibu. I already have my tickets for the Gonzaga vs. Pepperdine basketball game, but Pepperdine has become really smart. They make you buy tickets to three games, if you’re going to see the Pepperdine Gonzaga basketball game. So I’ll be there on February 18. It’s been wonderful to greet old friends and meet new friends. Thank you so much, Cherie, for your generous introduction and the privilege of being a Trinity Forum Senior Fellow. 

As I prepared the final manuscript about eight months ago, I received a telephone call from a woman in Maine. She told me she was a consultant asked to rewrite the narration that guides would use for the remarkable Joshua Chamberlain home in Brunswick, Maine. So I asked her the question. I said, well, who comes to that home? And she said, well, she said, about 60% of the people that come are huge fans of Joshua Chamberlain. The other 40% have been wrangled in. They don’t really know who this guy is at all. And they have been kind of brought in by their friends. So I’m not sure who you are this evening. You might be asking who is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain? This is not Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses S Grant, but I know you’re friends of the Trinity Forum. 

On the afternoon of July 2nd, 1863, as the back and forth battle at Gettysburg waged on, the 20th Maine Volunteer Regiment received orders to defend the entire far left of the Union Line. But they had run out of ammunition. And as they were besieged by the 15th Alabama coming forward against them up the hill, their young lieutenant called out “bayonet” and they charged down the hill and defeated a force twice their size, and that became a life changing moment for Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. 

Now, he was an unlikely military leader; mild mannered, amiable, good humored. He worked as a professor in a small New England college in far off Maine, Bowdoin College. Handsome with a lean build. Five feet, ten and a half inches tall, but with an erect posture that made him seem like he was six feet tall. His smile and twinkling eyes radiated his concern for the men that he led. He had an affection for these volunteer soldiers.

And yet here was a man that didn’t seem to be prepared to be a military leader. He was not a graduate of West Point. He had gone to Bowdoin College himself. He had become fluent in nine languages. He was an amazing scholar. But at age 33, he decided he must volunteer to serve in the Union Army. Born only 50 years after the founding of this nation, he had this incredible devotion to what was called the union. It’s really hard for us today to understand what that reality was. The union was not simply a political reality. It was a religious, it was a transcendent reality for which he was prepared to give his life. 

At Gettysburg he would need to draw upon every one of his skills to lead his men to victory. Yet the vagaries of American memory meant that Chamberlain fell from fame. By the early 20th century his name had been forgotten, and only in Maine was he remembered. And then a remarkable trifecta took place, some of you might have been a part of this. The new novel Killer Angels, brought him attention. Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary highlighted Chamberlain. And then Jeff Daniels played him in the movie Gettysburg. And suddenly, Chamberlain becomes this amazing figure who is venerated by millions of people.

In fact, it became quite annoying to the people at Gettysburg. They, in the 1990s, as people streamed to see Little Round Top, right now Gettysburg is going through a two year renovation of Little Round Top because the enormous foot traffic and car traffic has tended to kind of decimate the grounds there. So the park service visitors under their official uniforms in the 1990s wore a T-shirt that said Joshua who? Joshua who? They were concerned that Chamberlain was taking away the deserved credit of other people. But now he’s been rediscovered. But my concern in approaching this biography was to understand that it really rediscovered in what I would call a zoom lens. Focus is almost entirely on Gettysburg. What I wanted to suggest in my biography and briefly in the presentation this evening is that I think more than any other Civil War figure, he embraced a variety of vocations. Professor. Governor of Maine for times. President of Bowdoin College. Incredible speaker. Professor of rhetoric. He outshone any of the Civil War veterans in speaking, and an amazing writer. This is the story that I wish to tell and want to tell this evening briefly. 

As with my biographies of Lincoln and Grant, I have a number of convictions that kind of underscore my approach to what I’m doing. First of all, I believe that the life of the young person has been literally almost overwhelmed by the larger story of the adult accomplishments. It’s what I call formation. Think of your own lives when you are 16, 18, 20, 22, 24. Are these not the important years in your life? Oh, obviously you’re a different person in your forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, but I argue that this is the formation, so I hadn’t even thought about it. But in the 20 chapters of my biography, I give five chapters to Chamberlain’s early years. This is how he is formed. Secondly, my conviction is I want to talk about the faith story. Somehow, the faith story of our leaders has been underplayed, if not completely denied. The Lincoln story is a remarkable story of a young boy who rejects the faith of his parents in the second Great Awakening in Kentucky and Indiana. And then when first one son and then a second son die and the deaths of the Civil War, he is forced to rethink his faith. And in the listening to a Presbyterian minister at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church here in Washington, he comes to a remarkable faith that surprises people when he gets to his second inaugural address and suddenly in 701 words he mentions God 14 times, quotes the Bible 4 times and invokes prayer 3 times. It’s a Presbyterian story. For Ulysses S Grant, it’s a Methodist story. Where did he get his humility, his self-effacement, he never talked about himself. I think it comes from the Methodism of the middle of the 19th century, especially his mother. When a biographer came to interview her about her son, she said, I’m proud of all my children, but I’m not proud of my children. I’m proud of the Creator. That’s who I want to talk about. This is a Methodist story. 

For Chamberlain it’s a Congregational story. It’s really a Puritan story. It’s the 19th century version of Puritanism. Puritanism has suffered a bad rap for a long time among academics.

I don’t agree with that. Puritanism is really the story, both of the life of the mind of an incredible piety. And Chamberlain embraces that story. And finally, I asked myself a question where will I most be surprised in writing this biography? What has been really overlooked? And for me, it is his decision after college when his father wants him to go to West Point to decide to follow his mother’s counsel to become a minister or missionary and to go to Bangor Theological Seminary. Now, he went there for three years. He graduated from the seminary, he did not become an ordained minister because Bowdoin offered him a teaching position. I’ve served as the dean of a seminary. I’ve served as a professor at seminaries. I know all kinds of people who go to theological seminaries, who never become ordained ministers or clergy, but for whom that theological education is central in their formation.

And finally, every biography for me is kind of a piece, pieces of a puzzle. And that’s what I wanted to understand about this biography. When I started, I knew rather early that this was going to be a prickly biography because as much as Chamberlain has been praised, he also recently has been criticized. We have a tough time dealing with heroes in our modern culture. And so there’s been efforts to take him down. Did he fabricate? Did he overestimate what he actually did? So some of the pieces of the puzzle were this: how to understand the proud beneficiary of Bowden’s classical education with a young professor willing to challenge the curriculum and challenge the teaching method when it became his turn to become a professor. How to reconcile the bookworm college and seminary student with a risk taking soldier at Gettysburg and Vicksburg and Petersburg. How to appreciate the person, and this is a contemporary issue, how to appreciate the person so caught up in the Union, but willing to understand and even praise the courage of the Confederate soldiers. He did not agree with their cause. He did not agree with the Confederacy. But he valued and praised the courage of his opponents. And finally, how to understand Francis Caroline Adams, the young woman who became his wife. This, for me, became a central issue. 

Let’s meet the young Chamberlain in his first years. It’s a warm Maine day. He’s pushing an ox cart across the main agricultural field filled with rocks and tree stumps. And finally, the cart is stopped by two tree stumps. He doesn’t know how he’s going to go forward. “How am I going to do it,” the young boy calls out to his father, and the father, in a strong, commanding voice said, “Do it. That’s how.” And the father booms. And so the son grabs the thing, the cart, and pushes it forward, and suddenly, to his great surprise, it frees itself and moves forward. He said for the rest of his life, this became an order for life. Do it. That’s how. His father told him. And that’s the way he decided to live his life. 

Lawrence grew up in the small village of Brewer, Maine. I traveled 3096 miles from Pasadena, California to Maine to start doing my research, and I fell in love with Maine. If there’s any Mainers here tonight. With deeply religious parents his Christian nurture was rooted in a form of Christian education called catechesis. For him, it was the memorization of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. 107 Questions and Answers. Question one. What is the chief end of man? Answer one. Man’s chief end is to enjoy Him and glorify Him forever. Now, we have been told that well, young people have been told you can look it up on Google, but we have been told to kind of dissuade ourselves from the rote memory that many, as many of us may have done with the memorization of Bible verses when we were young. But for Chamberlain and his education, this was all about putting this not simply in the mind and in the heart. I love the story that when he went off to one of the great challenging teaching experiences that he had, he said to himself, fortified by the Westminster Catechism, he was ready to face whatever came in front of him.

At 16, he joined the Congregational Church. You did so in those days not by answering seven questions like today, but you gave a narration of your faith. But he said, I’m no sudden saint. I haven’t had some dramatic conversion experience. But this became very important for his life. He went off to Bowdoin College. Bowdoin College was founded in 1808 in Maine because it was a five day horseback ride from Maine to Harvard. And we needed a college for our own young men, obviously just men. He found himself immersed in a classical curriculum. The founders were very much caught up in the classics of Greece and Rome. This was the curriculum that was a part of the American college. All the way almost to the end of the 19th century, as was indicated in Cherie’s introduction and in Pete’s comments, this was an education about character. This was learning what the meaning was of duty, of kindness, of integrity. I was caught by that penmanship book that I found at the top. Sort of like the old blue book. At the top it said, be virtuous. And here was all of his penmanship as he sought to improve his handwriting. 

But he came to Bowdoin with a terrific problem: stammering, what we would call stuttering today, and in an oral culture where the way that you educated people was all through recitation, can you imagine a young boy who stuttered? Fortunately, there was a professor there who worked with him, worked with him, worked with him, and he was able to overcome that stuttering. That’s part of the unlikeliness. He becomes professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College. The boy who stuttered. The most remarkable part of his studies at Bowdoin actually became his meeting of Fanny. She, in an unusual 19th century way, had been born into parents who lived in Boston, but her father was 50 years old, old enough to be her grandfather, and the father and mother had seven children. So the parents decided that maybe it would be better for Fanny to live with his younger cousin and his wife, who were in their twenties. And so they literally gave their daughter to Reverend Adams, the minister of First Parish. We would call it First Congregational Church of Brunswick.

In doing a biography, I’m always interested to try to figure out maybe there’s a story or an anecdote that kind of really tells who is this person? And I found that this was true of Fanny in this particular tale, which I’d like to read to you. As a high school student at Brunswick High School this was the assignment she was given. Her teacher, Mr. Alfred Pike, asked the students to compose a paper using verbs ending in fy, knowing that Pike did not entirely approve of her and her humor, she wrote, “this is decertify, notify, exemplify, testify, and signify my obedient disposition. And I hope that it will gratify, satisfy, beautify, and edify my teacher. And pacify, modify and nullify his feelings of dissatisfaction toward me. Please do not exclaim oh fy when reading this paper.” Young Fanny was smart and she knew it. She was gifted in music. She was gifted in art. But she also struggled with eye problems. She would ultimately go blind at the end of her life, and she struggled in her vulnerability with depression and sometimes her stepfather, who wrote this amazing diary, would sometimes say poor Fanny, poor Fanny. And she struggled with herself. 

She was three years older than Joshua. He was called Lawrence in those days by his parents. That was very, very unusual in the 19th century. But they married. And that’s quite a remarkable story. He becomes, after graduating from Bowdoin College, he makes the decision to go to Bangor Theological Seminary. Now, this was founded in 1814. Before theological seminaries, the pattern of the 17th and 18th century was you would go to Harvard and Yale and then like becoming a lawyer, you would live with a pastor. And the pastor would then teach you the arts of ministry. You got your academics at Harvard and Yale. But then this all changed and Bangor Theological Seminary in 1814, became one of the first seminaries, again, we can’t travel all the way down to Boston or Princeton or anything like that. But the problem for me was the seminary went out of business in 2013, so where to find the records? Fortunately, the Maine Historical Society in Portland had taken all the records of Bangor Theological Seminary, and just after I arrived, they had cataloged them and I was allowed to see what it had been like for those three years. All the previous biographies had given two sentences to those three years. I gave a full chapter because I believe that part of the formation was not simply Bowdoin College, but it was Bangor Theological Seminary. 

When he graduated, he had calls from two different churches, one in Maine and one in New Hampshire, invitations to serve those churches. But then Bowdoin College asked him to give a Master of Arts lecture on the morning of commencement. And evidently it was so outstanding that that afternoon they offered him a teaching position. At Bowdoin College he taught a curriculum of classics. There were really no electives and he enjoyed his teaching, but he began to challenge the curriculum. He felt that the boy, the students were being treated like boys instead of men. And what we would call critical thinking was totally absent in the curriculum. It was all based on recitation. He wanted to expand their thinking. He did, in his own words, said, “I wanted to awake an enthusiasm in my pupils and also to keep my own style free and my mind fresh and whole.” When the Civil War broke out in April of 1861 some Bowdoin students enlisted. John Cross, the alumni secretary who one of you mentioned to me this evening in our reception, has tracked every single Bowdoin graduate who served in the Civil War. And in those first months, some were captured, some were killed. He would have known every one of those students because there was no elective. But in 1862, Abraham Lincoln offered a new resolution. We need 300,000 more men to serve in the Union Army. Chamberlain offered himself to the governor of Maine. Governors were looking for leading citizens who had the ability to recruit what was a 1000 man regiment. So he was delighted when Chamberlain offered himself. Chamberlain said this to the governor, “I fear this war, so costly in blood and treasure, will not cease until men of the north are willing to leave good positions and sacrifice their dearest personal interests.” He was 33 years old. He was married. He had two young children. He believed he needed to do this.

So the governor, delighted, said, “well, very wonderful. I will make you a colonel.” Chamberlain said, “no, (this is so Chamberlain) I don’t deserve that position. I have no military training. I will take the subordinate position and learn and earn my way to the command.” And so he became a lieutenant colonel. Ten months after that remarkable event at Gettysburg he was wounded at Petersburg so severely that the presiding two doctors told him he would die. He wrote a letter to his wife, a remarkable letter in which he said, “I want you to know of my faith in Jesus Christ and of my love for you. Do not grieve my death. Live for our children.” Fortunately, his younger brother Tom went and found two other doctors from the 20th regiment. They came, the bullet had gone from one hip all the way through his body, smashing his bone, his urethra, smashing blood vessels, stopping at the other side of his body. And they were able to extract that bullet and saved his life. 

But another part of the unknown story is he lived for the rest of his life with what a recent scholar has called invisible wounds. We’ve learned of the amputations that often characterized Union and Confederate soldiers. His wounds were deep within him. He went through three surgeries. He could never be repaired. A doctor told him you will not live a long life. He lived for 50 years and finally died from the infections of his wounds. Ten months later, as the war came to an end at Appomattox he was asked to lead the surrender of the Confederate troops. Now, we have no written order for this, but my teacher and good friend Jim McPherson at Princeton said not everything was written down, and so there’s plenty of evidence. I’m so disappointed, Patrick Schroeder, the park historian in Appomattox wrote me this morning and said he wanted to be here this evening. He was going to travel all the way from Appomatox to be here because I went to Appomattox and he had unearthed the whole story and found all kinds of references. This is one of the pushbacks. Oh, Chamberlain couldn’t possibly have led the thing. Oh, he talked about this 40 years later. No. Chamberlain led the surrender at Appomattox, and he was aware that Grant had offered this magnanimous peace to Lee just three days before on April 9. And so the question was, what would he be able to do to offer that to the Confederate soldiers? The person leading the Confederates was General John B. Gordon. He had risen with no military training to be in many ways Lee’s leading general. Wounded five times at Antietam, he was known by his men as the gallant. He was a terrific person. And as he came forward, I tried to imagine what must have been in the minds and hearts of those Confederate soldiers that evening, that morning. Chamberlain recognizing that same feeling as they came forward, he wanted to offer some form of recognition, not to the cause, not to the Confederacy. Be very clear about that. But to the courage of the soldiers. And so when the bugle sounded and the men approached each other on horseback 3 to 4 yards apart, suddenly he moved from his order of order arms to carry arms, which was the marching salute. And he saluted the Confederate troops. And Gordon was overwhelmed by this. He spoke 30 years later in a great event in New York City. He had written about the Confederacy. He had become governor of Georgia. And he asked Chamberlain to sit on the stage that night. This is all in The New York Times. And he recreated that story. And then at the end of his address, he turned and he said, “I want to commend the man who offered that magnanimous salute to me, that’s what he did that day.”

So at Appomattox, he became another hero. He goes back to Maine, now what will he do? The Republican Party, looking for heroes, decides they would like to have him nominated for governor. Governors in Maine in those times was a one year term. Well, I looked it up. Most governors served one and a half years. Elected a second time. A third time. Well, I’m not going to run for a fourth time. The Democrats wanted to run him as a fourth term he was so popular. He decided he would run and serve a fourth term. It wasn’t always easy. There’s a shadow side of this person, sometimes idealistic people can be stubborn. He could be that way in terms of his values that he held onto. He served four years as governor of Maine.

Then his college, Bowdoin College, reached out to him and asked if he would serve as president. He accepted the position, but when he came to do so, he offered these words, which must have taken some people by aback. His inaugural address was called “The New Education.” While tipping his hat to the old Bowdoin his address spurted with energy about the need for a new Bowdoin. In accepting the commission, which he used a military term, he believed the times had shot past the college. Left out of the current of living sympathies she stood still while the world at full flood and flushed with new life swept on. He said “the college has touched bottom, how to rise again and how to begin.” The easier path would have been to affirm the old Bowdoin, of which he was a part. But he was determined that he had to lead the college into a new age. Many, many colleges, as you know, were established by Protestant denominations. But after the Civil War, as the American landscape changed these colleges, many of them struggled to survive economically. He answered that there were two options. The first, we might confine our efforts chiefly to holding our own, strengthening the things that remain and feel our way by cautious and imperceptible degrees. The second, we might accept the challenge of our times. He put the question in bold language: should the college conquer or should it die? Well, alumni wanted change, but not too much change. And so when he attempted to make science a full department in the college people, often of a religious faith, were very concerned that science would somehow contradict their long held religious beliefs. So he offered his resignation after two years and the board of trustees refused to accept it. And three years later he offered his resignation again because he felt all this pushback coming at him. It’s interesting, when the memorial service was held for him in 1914, just months before the beginning of World War I, the then president of Bowdoin College said Chamberlain was way ahead of his time. He understood the meaning of progressive education, we just did not appreciate it at that moment. 

But I want to conclude with this particular story, because I think this is the untold story that I find most compelling. Maine politics were heating up in the 1870s. It had been basically a Republican state after the Republican Party was founded in the 1850s. Maine in 1879 elected a Democrat, I mean in 1878 elected a Democrat. But in the 1879 election, the Republicans were overjoyed. They had won a remarkable victory with a young Daniel Davis, 35 years old, but a veteran of the Civil War. They’d also won victory in the House of Representatives and in the Senate. But Davis had failed to win a plurality by 840 votes. And the Maine Constitution stipulated that if no one had won a plurality, the House of Representatives could select two candidates, and then the Senate could vote and select one candidate. And so what began to happen was the great countout. The Maine secretary of State, if this sounds at all familiar, the Maine secretary of state began to receive these votes and he began to count them out. In one town, five representatives and one senator lost their seats because the results were not signed in an open town meeting. In another town, five representatives were eliminated because the candidate’s names were listed by their initials, not their full name. Votes in the strongly Republican town of Skowhegan were disqualified because the ballot was printed in two columns rather than one. In another town, two representatives were counted out because of a misspelling of their names. In Portland, 143 votes were counted out. In Lewiston, Saco, Bath and Rockland the votes were dismissed because three aldermen instead of four aldermen signed a ballot. Republican anger flurried across the state. One Maine Republican newspaper headline was “The Conspiracy: Revolution Actually Afoot. Only Awaiting The Final Act Will They Dare Commit The Monstrous Crime? They have stolen the election.” 

Now, Governor Garcelon, who was a Democrat, worried by the anger growing across the state, ordered 120 rifles and 20,000 rounds of ammunition moved from the state arsenal in Bangor to Augusta, the capital. He assembled a paramilitary force to defend the capitol, called by the Republican newspaper’s Fort Garcelon. As 1880 dawned, the rules of the state were that a new governor must be elected by January 7. Garcelon, a Democrat, understood there was only one man, a Republican, who could deal with this situation. And so he summoned Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from the presidency of Bowdoin to come to Augusta. Quote, “Major General Joshua L. Chamberlain is authorized and directed to protect the public property and institutions of the state until my successor is duly qualified.” Duty called him once more. Chamberlain arrived in Augusta on January 5. He found the state house barricaded with heavy wooden planks. He entered and established himself in a small office. In his first orders, he dismissed the paramilitary force, said he would rely on the Augusta police force, which was lightly armed. He now became the military governor of the state. In his unanticipated position, he decided to keep himself clear from all political and civilian questions. He said, “I don’t have the authority to decide who are the rightly elected officials or who is the rightly elected governor.” But what he discovered was that everybody turned against him. He wrote to Fanny, “everything is confusion here. Although I succeeded yesterday in getting a good many awkward things straightened out, what vexed me the most was that some of my own people, Republicans, do not want me to straighten things out.” Two days later, he wrote Fanny again: “I do not dare to leave here a moment. This would mean assuredly a coup d’etat ending in violence.”

A letter from the United States Congressman Thomas Reed depicts Chamberlain at this moment. “At last, we have peace. White winged, beneficent and headed by a major general, the resplendent figure shining like one of the sons of the morning which has brought us this tranquil joy is the figure of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, to whom Lee surrendered.” He described Chamberlain as one who walks the state master of the situation. Although Chamberlain understood his role as a nonpartisan mediator, there were rumors of attempt, there were rumors of attempts to kidnap him. There were rumors that they would kill him for his role. Even Republicans willing to do it. In a January 15 letter to Fanny, he confided to her of bitter attacks upon him in a Republican newspaper, calling him a traitor to the Republican cause. He even heard of threats to her. If you were afraid, he told her to contact Thomas Eaton, a local police officer, to have the police look upon you in our house. 

On a particularly frantic day, a member of Mayor Nash’s staff rushed in to say a group of angry men were approaching the capitol. Chamberlain walked out of his office, went to the rotunda, ascended two steps. Here were all the battle flags of the Union from the Confederate Army. And he said these words. “Men, you wish to kill me I hear. killing is no new thing to me. I’ve offered myself to be killed many times when I no more deserved it than I do now. Some of you, I think, have been with me in those days. You understand what you want do you? I’m here to preserve the peace and honor of this state until the right government is seated. Whatever it may be, it’s not for me to say, but it is for me to say that the laws of this state are put into effect without fraud, without force, but with calm thought and sincere purpose. I am here for that and I shall do it. If anybody wants to kill me, here I am. Let him kill.” And with those words, he opened his coat in a dramatic gesture and challenged the insurrectionist mob. Witnessing the event Nelson Dingley, a previous governor, recalled, “there was a breathless silence for a moment. Then a veteran in the crowd called out ‘by God, old general, the first man who dares lay a hand in you I’ll kill him on the spot.’” The crowd drifted away. 

By 1880, Chamberlain had given hundreds of speeches across Maine and across the nation to which he received thunderous applause. I think this was his greatest speech. It ended in silence. For Chamberlain, it was really a reprisal of what he had done 17 years before. In fact, he wrote Fanny, “yesterday was another Little Round Top. Yesterday was another Little Round Top.” During those and the days that followed he received numerous letters from across the country. L.T. Carlton, a lawyer in Winthrop, Maine, penned “you have too long hidden yourself away from public gaze. Let me assure you that the old time enthusiasm for you has not abated in the least.” Chamberlain was gratified to receive letters from those who had served with him in the 20th Maine. Alice Speer wrote from Washington to say, “I laughed when I saw and heard the threats against you. The men who made them did not see you in the hellfire of Petersburg.” Dennis Shapely, remembering his participation in the surrender at Appomattox, wrote, “General Chamberlain, we were never so proud of you as now, not even when you stood upon the boundary lines and received the surrender of our vanquished brave foe.” But I think I like most the words of Helen Killen. She was a leader of the women’s club movement in Massachusetts. And she wrote, “we see it possible for a man to be a statesman, a soldier, a scholar, a gentleman, and a Christian.” The 12 days at Augusta, I think, might be Chamberlain’s finest hours, even greater than Little Round Top. At Little Round Top he acted spontaneously. At Augusta he acted with deliberate calculation and courage in a battle that lasted 12 days. 

So in conclusion, I’ve come away from Chamberlain’s compelling and complex story, believing that it’s much more than a 19th century story. It’s much more than a Civil War story. At its heart, it poses a question with many possible answers. What makes a hero? What background? What behavior? What beliefs? What circumstances? What records? What outcomes? At the end of this presentation, I turn that question over to you.

Cherie Harder

And the questions over to you all in the audience. Ron, you mentioned in a couple of ways, sort of implicitly that you take a different approach than so many biographers to study in your subject. I think you mentioned that most historians give maybe two sentences to Chamberlain’s time in seminary, whereas you devote an entire chapter, you devote five entire chapters in your book to Chamberlain’s background and formative influences. And you mentioned what you call the four tributaries of his character, which you define as a Christian faith, a love of music, an adventuring spirit, and a commitment to education. So I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about those four tributaries, but would also like to ask why you have adopted this particular approach of focusing so much on the formative aspects of a person’s youth and young adulthood and why other historians don’t?

Ronald C. White

Well, writing history is about your subject, but it’s probably, as my friends have said about yourself. My own experience as a teenager in Young Life and in the Presbyterian Church. My years as a youth minister in a parish, then as a college chaplain in two different colleges allowed me to see again how those years are so absolutely fundamental to all of us. And so if that’s true in my experience, it certainly must be true for Lincoln and Grant and Chamberlain. And I just felt we needed to delve into that with greater depth. I think we often, Cherie, talk about what a person does: wins the Civil War, signs the Emancipation Proclamation. I’m as interested in who a person is. And I think that’s a contemporary question for all of us. Who is this person? What is their belief? What is their character? What is really at the center of them? And that’s what I find fascinating about these three people. Yeah. 

Cherie Harder

You mentioned earlier in your presentation the Chamberlain story is largely a Congregational story.

Ronald C. White

Right.

Cherie Harder

Now, I think not everyone will know what that means. So tell us a little bit more about his faith journey and what a Congregational story entails.

Ronald C. White

Well, the Congregationalists were really those who came to New England at the beginning. They were the Puritans and they were the pilgrims who were sort of separatists. But the Congregations were the basic church of Maine, Massachusetts. Chamberlain had to deal with the fact that by the beginning of the 19th century, Unitarianism came in as a liberal version of Congregationalism. Very, very different than what Unitarianism is today. And in Boston by 1850, of the 14 Congregational churches, 13 were Unitarian. Now, Unitarianism was coming into Maine. When he went to seminary the theology that was coming was coming from Germany. And he decided to read his theology in German and Latin. And not all of his professors were pleased with that because they weren’t sure they wanted this kind of liberal German. So on the one hand, Chamberlain had this basically kind of traditional belief, but also he was open to other currents of thought. So the Congregational church was the basic church in its governance that meant that each congregation governed its own way. But it was basically a kind of evangelical Protestant denomination in the 19th century.

Cherie Harder

Another way that you have been in some ways perhaps unusual among historians and biographers is that your work clearly shows a fascination with a love for the hero’s journey.

Ronald C. White

Yes.

Cherie Harder

And so it seems like in many academic circles, the idea of heroism itself is somewhat out of favor or seen as perhaps a cover for power dynamics or exploitation or the like. But each of your major biographies have been about a hero and their journey. We’d love to hear you talk a little bit about why is that so important to you and why have you adopted that particular lens through which to view and understand these figures?

Ronald C. White

Two weeks ago, under Cherie’s leadership, 17 Senior Fellows here in Washington, and I was very helped by William Imboden, by pronouncing his name correctly, who has just gone from the University of Texas to the University of Florida to lead the kind of civics and classics program there. And he told all of us, and this was interesting to hear, how young people today are feeling criticized by their elders. They are critical of themselves. They are critical of each other. But that they need and are looking for heroes. And yes, somehow it’s tough to be a hero. It’s tough to write about a hero today. But I think we need these exemplars in our lives. Not that the 19th century is the 21st century. I mean, Lincoln can’t tell us what to do with climate change, but I think that these values are transcendent values that can be transmitted. And so that’s why I find, especially today, to be able to write about the values of these people, which is really based on a character based education, is I think, really important, not simply historically, because I think it’s true, but also it connects with, I think, the conversation we need to have with each other.

Cherie Harder

Yeah. Thank you. You know, in writing a biography, I mean, this is a massive book. You know, you’ve spent a lot of time deeply immersed in Joshua Chamberlain and gotten to know him quite well. And I think just in general, when we know someone well, we find ourselves changed by the knowledge and the relationship. And so I’m curious how were you changed by learning about getting to understand Chamberlain so deeply and so well? 

Ronald C. White

I sometimes wake up at 3:00 in the morning thinking about Chamberlain.

Cherie Harder

Who among us does not. 

Ronald C. White

I keep a little notepad by my bedside that oh, write that down. Don’t let that get away. And I don’t think a 25 year old could write this biography. No  disrespect to anybody who’s out there that’s 25. I think it’s part of one’s own lived experience. And so I find myself challenged by the values of Chamberlain, by each Chamberlain, Grant and Lincoln. All are magnanimous. They are willing to see the best in the person who might in one sense be their opponent, might be the other Democrat, other political party, whether it be Democratic or Republican. And I like to think, but it’s difficult is it not, to try to imbibe those values in yourself, to try to be more magnanimous with those with whom you disagree. To say this one thing that we are all Americans. We love our country. We may disagree on this policy or that policy, but if we get to the place where we discredit each other as people who love America, that’s when we’ve reached a real problem. Chamberlain. Lincoln. Douglas. I mean, when Lincoln had the debates with Stephen Douglas, he never thought that Stephen Douglas was not a patriot. He would affirm Stephen Douglas’ patriotism. He just disagreed with him on certain fundamental issues. So hopefully biography changes the author as well as the audience.

Cherie Harder

Well, you know, one of the things that changes our perception is certainly our own times. And, you know, we tend to look through our current context in evaluating past heroes and past leaders. And I’d be interested in what you think about the way our current context affects the way that we look at the three men that you’ve written about Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Joshua Chamberlain.

Ronald C. White

Well unfortunately I think Lincoln has come under attack. People have taken his statue down, they’ve taken his name off of public schools. And I’m bothered by the fact that we’re unwilling or unable to understand people in their own time. I think and my son said, be very careful when you say this dad, that we come across as so morally superior to these people. I mean, Ulysses S. Grant said to President Andrew Johnson, you will not try Robert E Lee as a traitor. He is the spirit of the South, and you will not prosecute him. But of course, today we are. I spoke in Richmond two weeks ago and I learned that the Robert E Lee statue has now just been melted into nothing. So we have a hard time reconciling ourselves to these different understandings of people in the 17th, 18th and 19th century. I sometimes wonder what will people think of us 50 or 100 years from now? So I’m wanting to plead with people to try to understand people in their own context. I want to know what did Frederick Douglas, an African-American, think of Abraham Lincoln? That’s very important. Yeah.

Cherie Harder

Yeah. You know, we’re going to turn to audience questions in just a second. But each of your subjects played leadership roles in the darkest and most divisive part of our history. And thankfully, we’re not facing civil war now, but we are facing a time with deep, deep divides and a lot of fracture and alienation. And I’d be curious, what lessons, if any, do you think we can glean or insights in navigating the fractures of our own time and the injustices of our own time by looking at some of the examples of the folks that you’ve written about?

Ronald C. White

Well, Lincoln and Chamberlin were great public speakers. Grant was not. But what we miss is they were also great listeners. They were willing and able to listen carefully to the other side. And that’s a skill that is lacking. We live in a 24/7 news cycle so people have asked what you think Lincoln would do today or Chamberlain would do today? It takes time to think about how we might respond, to understand the nuance, the ambiguity of some of the issues that we face instead of just very quickly responding. And so I wanted to embrace these three to show the complexity of them. They also have their own shadow side. They also are caught up in controversy. But how did their foes even respond to them? I am a believer that these three and others offer a template for how we might respond to some of our issues today.

Cherie Harder

Well, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of questions out there in the audience, and we do have two mics so just wait until you’re called upon. Those of you who have been to Trinity Forum events before know that we have three guidelines during the audience question part. We ask that all questions be brief, all questions be civil and all questions be in the form of a question. So if you just raise your hand, I can call on you and there are two mics on the way; right here on the second row.

Q:

So a question. Who in the present buffet of American political leaders do you see as Chamberlain-esque? 

Ronald C. White

Some years ago Cynthia and I went to one of these big popularity series, and David McCullough was speaking in Pasadena, California, and when a similar question was asked to David McCullough without much of a pause, he simply said, I am an historian.

Q.

Ron, I heard you present on all three, and inevitably in your presentation, you reach a point where you get emotional and your voice catches and it’s clear that you are an objective historian, but there’s more to it. What point in your process do you get to the point where you really deeply care about who you’re writing about and if it’s different for all three? If you could go by all three in this particular case. Yeah. And I am a 40 percenter right. But at what point do you cross that line and really get invested personally?

Ronald C. White

Well, I crossed that line and my dear wife Cynthia says, please don’t cry this evening. Because I think part of the task is to somehow try to get inside of these people, try to inhabit them. Yes, they’re 19th century persons, but to get inside of them. My problem is that when I did my biography of Ulysses S Grant, J.T. Stiles gave a wonderful review in The New York Times, but he said Ron White has done the best book on the virtues of Grant. But what he was really saying is he hasn’t yet done it on the contradictions in Grant. So the real challenge is to try to step back a bit and to try to understand that in every one of these people, there is a shadow side. So how to, in one sense, give understanding to those who are the critics of Chamberlain, even though at the end I stand with the fact that I think Chamberlain is basically truthful and basically narrating carefully what he did in the Civil War. But yes, it didn’t take me too long with Chamberlain. I just find him the most incredible person. It’s hard to imagine a person that speaks nine languages and lives with these incredible wounds, he can’t even sit straight while he’s the president of the college. He’s got to lean over. He goes through infection after infection after infection after infection and I think how this man could do this without ever complaining? One of the veterans came to visit him one day and he said, you’ve never told me that you have all this pain. And now I learned that you’ve been dealing with this for 35 years. Chamberlain did not complain. This was part of his value system in terms of the 19th century. So I do, it’s an interesting question at what point did I pass the line? For Lincoln it was pretty easy, for Chamberlain. For Grant, it was a little more difficult because Grant oh, he was the butcher. He was the scandal. He was not this, that and the other. But I came to really respect and enjoy him. Yeah.

Cherie Harder

Mary, right here on the third floor, third row. 

Q.

Thanks. I really appreciate the emphasis that you give on formation of people, especially as they are young people. I wonder who shaped and formed you when you were younger and growing into adulthood and how your view of hero has changed over the years?

Ronald C. White

Well, it was, thank you for your question, it was youth ministers who shaped and formed me growing up in high school and college, yeah, and my understanding of hero would not have been at that point at all. That became, as an historian, trying to understand this. And I never particularly read any books on heroism. I just tried to understand Lincoln, Grant, and now Chamberlain and their formation and the values that formed. And that’s why I get back to the faith story or with Chamberlain, much more than either Grant or Lincoln, there’s also a classical education here. So a professor at Harvard in Chamberlain’s day said, well, why are we emphasizing classical education with college students? Does this sound contemporary? Because he said our society is infected with self-interest, with self-interest. And if we can study the classics, they will allow us to get beyond the self-interest, the me, to the larger values that he believes were the foundation of both the best of the Greek and Roman societies.

Cherie Harder

Oh, right there in the back.

Q.

Professor White I’m part of the 60% so I discovered Chamberlain through the Killer Angels and I wonder what you think about Shaara’s historical fiction of Chamberlain as a young man. But relatedly, the other characters in Shaara’s books are Confederates. And so how do you think about the Confederate officer corps, particularly in our modern reexamination of them?

Ronald C. White

Well, in my book, I take quite a bit of time to talk about William Calvin Oates, who is the leader of the 15th Alabama Regiment, and try to compare these two men. Very, very different parenting. Oates’s parents did not want him to have an education. He then goes off on three years of carousing through Texas and doing all kinds of ridiculous things. But then he comes back and he does discover the Christian faith and he does discover education. So I try to look at the two different ways that these men come to this battle and how they both had their own heroism. Both went on to remarkable careers after the Civil War, but they came from very different backgrounds and I have to think again about the way Shaara, I can’t quite remember the way Shaara portrays the other side of the story, but people have asked me many times, what about Jeff Daniels portrayal of Chamberlain in in the movie Gettysburg? I think it’s a pretty accurate portrayal. I don’t think it over does it in any way. I think it, the funny thing again about Jeff Daniels is that I’m told when people in Gettysburg go down into towns and villages and they want to get portraits of Chamberlain or portraits of Jeff Daniels, and they say, well, I’ll get Jeff Daniels.

Cherie Harder

Bryan Lee.

Q.

So you mentioned how Augusta was compared to Little Round Top, and I wonder how Little Round Top was formative for Chamberlain. Did he reflect on it, did it shape him, did it change him? And so could you just relate some of, perhaps if there are any, some of his reflections upon that experience, why he did it, what motivated him, what he was thinking, whether it was spur of the moment and unreflective? 

Ronald C. White

Yes, thank you. That’s a wonderful question. Well, first of all, the person who was appointed colonel was also a Mainer named Adelbert Ames. He was much younger than Chamberlain. He had  been a recent graduate of West Point, and the men hated him because he was tough and he was a disciplinarian. But that didn’t bother Chamberlain. Chamberlain knew he had to learn from this man seven years younger than himself, and he took every moment he could to learn from Ames, and they became great friends through the rest of their lives. The problem for many Civil War persons and maybe this is true for World War II veterans I don’t know, is that this was the crowning moment of their lives and they were very young and nothing else could ever quite come to terms with what they’d experienced. So everything else was kind of almost downhill. Chamberlain was looking for challenges. He thought he might find it in being governor, but that was not always a successful venture. He thought he might find it in being the president of the college, and then he did what 20 other colleges did, he instituted military drill at the college, believing that these young men were soft in the 1870s and that the nation had been caught unawares with the Civil War. So at first these young men thought, this is great, and somebody brought in a cannon and they were firing all over the campus. And then after a while, they rebelled. They hated it. And they all signed a petition. They were no longer going to do this. And Chamberlain wrote a letter to every one of their parents saying, if your son does not agree to abide by the rules of the college, he will be dismissed. And this became the great drill rebellion. And only three did not come back. So the difficulty for veterans often is this was the crowning moment of their lives. And is there anything else that could be so challenging? I think he was looking for those challenges. He did have the opportunity to take two quite amazing positions, and I think his speeches were far beyond anybody else. They were battle histories. He was bringing in Greece and Rome and Dante and his speeches were amazing about the meaning of America in the 1880s and 90s, all the way into the beginning of the 20th century.It’s a good comment, thank you.

Cherie Harder

This one right here.

Q.

Good evening. My question is, how did Chamberlain’s study of the classics affect his leadership,  either on the battlefield or in a governor’s mansion or at the university?

Ronald C. White

That’s a great question. It’s kind of like what I feel, sadly about today, is that with the plummeting study of history, philosophy, English, it’s very hard to say, well, this meant that. But I think he was given incredible value curriculum. It was based on character. And so he had one moment, for example, where the second Maine were thinking they were going to go home. They had served their time and they had been kind of hoodwinked by those who had registered them. And the men who thought they’d served two years suddenly discovered no, you’d signed up without knowing it to serve three years and they mutinied. And they were almost shot. So they were brought into Chamberlain and Chamberlain understood what had happened to them. And he said to them, I’m going to treat you fairly and if you decide that you will participate in this army you’ll receive every benefit that every one of my other soldiers is going to receive. He did not down them. Well this, I think, comes back to his basic values structure. The other West Pointers, they were going to pounce on these guys, not Chamberlain. He understood how they might have been hoodwinked and he treated them with respect. And they became an integral part of what became his command.

Cherie Harder

We’ll go over here, back in the corner there.

Q.

Thank you. Thank you both. As one of the 60% thank you for your research, but also for your obvious care and devotion to telling the true story and just really, truly diving into everything. And I wonder a little bit about your process as a writer. This is years of work and effort to truly get at the heart of who he was and what happened, and I wonder if you could tell us how you do that? 

Ronald C. White

Thank you for that comment. Well, I’m strange and unusual in this regard. When I was the dean of San Francisco Theological Seminary we had a young professor who was going to have his first sabbatical and he was going to be at Westminster College in Cambridge. And I said, what are you going to do? He said, I’m going to spend every day doing research. I said, no, you’re going to start writing the first day. He said, well, how could I do that? The problem, I think, with academics is that we spend way too much on research and way too little time on writing, and therefore the writing is not accessible to the public. I start writing the first day. Well, obviously I don’t know the story, but the writing then dictates the research. And so I want to spend every single morning writing. And then in the afternoon I’ll do the reading and the research and the reading of books and articles. But I just think that the writing is so absolutely important. And I’ve been blessed with phenomenal editors at both Simon and Schuster and Random House who come back with these kinds of questions. The audience doesn’t understand. The audience wants to know. You believe this, but they don’t understand what you’re saying. And you need that kind of feedback to really understand. I mean I’m so wedded to the story that I may assume, but I shouldn’t assume. I’m trying to write. David Donnell, the great Harvard historian who won two Pulitzer Prizes and wrote a great book on Lincoln, a friend took us out to dinner one night in Georgetown, and he wrote a blurb for my first Lincoln book. I had never met him. And he said, This book is both learned and accessible. And my mantra is we have many learned books that are not accessible and we have many accessible books that are not learned. So I’m trying if I can write a book that a 16 or 17 year old can read with appreciation, I think I’ve hit the mark.

That’s what I’m trying to do.

Cherie Harder

I see hands up all over the place here. We’ll take one in the corner there, Phil.

Q.

Thank you. Thank you both. What influence, if any, did the social gospel movement have on Chamberlain? I mean, it was very active during the most active years of his life and in his venues. So I’m just wondering, where that fit?

Ronald C. White

The person who asked the question may know that I have written in earlier times a great deal about the social gospel, which really was the understanding that as America was changing at the end of the 19th century: immigration, industrialization, urbanization, we had to come to grips with the city and how the Christian faith had to take an understanding of this different situation in which people were living. Now, Abraham Lincoln once told this story of two men wrestling, and as they wrestled and wrestled, they wrestled out of each other’s clothes and into the clothes of the other. So he understood that the two parties, the Federalists and the Jeffersonians, had changed places. So in the 19th century, the Republican Party was the party of a strong central government, and the Democratic Party was a party of states rights. In the 21st century, the Democratic Party is a party of strong central government, and the Republican Party, especially in the South, is a party of states rights. So Chamberlain understood that if Maine was going to go forward, the government had to be involved. It had to give loans to the railroads, or the railroads would not be able to flourish and go across the whole thing. So he had a much stronger view of the role of government, as did Lincoln and Grant. And this was part of his understanding, I’ve never quite thought about it in terms of the social gospel, but he understood that industrialism was coming even to the state of Maine and that people were leaving Maine to go to California because of the gold rush. He even understood that people were going to Minnesota from Scandinavia so he appointed a representative to go to Scandinavia and he began bringing Scandinavians. He said they can live in Maine just as well as Minnesota. And so he was way ahead of his time in thinking about where was the society going, not where had it been, the same mindset he brought to being a president of Bowdoin College.

Cherie Harder

I’m going to take one last question. I see your hands up all over the place. Sorry about that. We’ll go right here. 

Q.

How did he talk about his own personal faith? Did he talk about it publicly or was it in letters to his wife, his friends? How did he express his beliefs? 

Ronald C. White

How did he talk about his own personal faith? He was the kind of person and this, again, was partly the 19th century, that he didn’t wear his faith on his sleeve, but his faith, what I discovered again was he took upon himself giving every baccalaureate address that had never been looked at before. And the baccalaureate address, if you know what those are, really are addresses that are sermons. And he would take a presiding issue, for instance, science and religion, how to put them together, the individual and community. And in these baccalaureate addresses, which is often very exegetical in terms of his use of scripture, this was where his faith came through. It’s also very much in his correspondence with Fanny, his belief in a providential God; that somehow God’s hand was upon his life, and whether he would become a missionary or a minister or a professor, he trusted God in that. And that’s in the letter to Fanny when he writes to her believing that he will die, that he has committed his faith in Jesus Christ. He’s committed his life to God, and he will trust God for that. It almost sounds unbelievable to many people today, but that was a deeply held faith, it really was the heart of who he was.

Cherie Harder

We’re going to actually conclude with a very brief word from Ron, however you want to sum up your book or your talk, but before that a few invitations, an announcement just to let everyone know about. First, we very much commend Ron’s book. Need two hands to hold it up On Great Fields, which is available for sale outside. We also want to invite all of you here to join the Trinity Forum Society which is the community of people who help advance the Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good. There are a number of benefits of being involved with the Trinity Forum Society as a member, including a subscription to our quarterly readings such as this one with an introduction by Ron White on Abraham Lincoln, as well as our daily “what we’re reading” list of reading recommendations. And as a special benefit for any of you who become a member tonight with your contribution of $100 or more, we will give you a signed copy of Ron’s book. So I hear that we are almost sold out. I think there’s only six or so copies left. So one way to avoid that, if you are not there soon enough to grab the last of the six copies is to become a member of the Trinity Forum Society, and we will send you a signed copy of Ron’s work. In addition, in the back as you exit, there’ll be a table with a bunch of Trinity Forum readings including the one on Abraham Lincoln that Ron introduced on topics to help us kind of go more deep into the questions that we’ve been talking about this afternoon, or this evening. Finally, I’d also like to just end with thank yous. Any time you have an event like this, there are a lot of people behind the screen who helped make it all possible. Want to again thank our partners Pete Peterson of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, I’ve always loved getting to partner with you. Want to thank the folks on my team who helped make this happen. Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Brian Daskam, Marrie Ann Morris and Kristen Forney. I see some of you are standing already if you aren’t, stand up too, so people can see who you are. Just want to acknowledge and thank our crackerjack interns Katherine Hsu and Caleb Liebengood, as well as Eva Humphries who’s volunteering for us. Our consistently excellent photographer, Ron Blackmore. And finally, Ron, thank you and the last word is yours.

Ronald C. White

If you were wrangled in tonight, my hope and challenge is to somehow acquaint a larger group of people, people who do not know about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. As I said, it is not simply a civil war tale. It’s not simply a 19th century story. In many ways, it’s a 21st century story that we need to hear. We do need heroes. He is both a courageous and a controversial person. He’s a person we need to get to know. Thank you for the privilege of sharing this with you.