HotmailExcerpt: RFK Jr.’s ‘American Heroes’
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Chapter 1: “JUST DO IT!”
Joshua Chamberlain was born September 8, 1828, in Brewer, Maine, the oldest of five children. His parents required their children to be honest, honorable and cheerful. Joshua had to practice good manners and the knightly traits of humor, courtesy and generosity. Joshua worked hard on his family farm and grew up to be slim and muscular, handsome and tall, with piercing blue eyes. He learned to ride, to sail and to fence with swords. He was a crack shot, but he hated killing animals. He loved poetry and played the piano and violin. Joshua eventually learned 10 languages, including the language of the Aroostook Indians, who lived in birch-bark wigwams on his family’s hundred-acre farm.
When he was 13, Joshua got the axle of a hay wagon stuck between two large rocks on his father’s farm. With 400 pounds of hay on the wagon, the oxen could go neither forward nor back. Joshua’s father ordered him to free the wagon and get it moving. When Joshua asked, “How should I do it, Father?” his dad replied angrily, “Just do it!” With an act of superhuman strength that he didn’t know he had, the young boy lifted the wagon, and the oxen started off with a jerk. No one was more surprised than Joshua, and the lesson stayed with him for life. From that day on, he had a sense that even the worst obstacles could be overcome with effort. A big problem he faced as a boy was an embarrassing stutter. But he worked hard to overcome it and eventually became a superb public speaker and even a professor of rhetoric!
Joshua’s mother wanted him to be a minister, and his father hoped he would make a career in the army as had his grandfathers, both of whom had fought in the American Revolution. But Joshua felt trapped by all the rules and “petty despotisms” of both the ministry and the military. He loved ideas and the freedom to think and read, so he won a position as a professor at Bowdoin College, where he taught French, German, Greek, Latin and Rhetoric. He married Fannie Adams, and the couple settled into a quiet college routine and eventually produced five children.
Joshua loved this life. But then Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States and threatened to abolish slavery. The slave states declared war and tried to split our country in two. Joshua hated slavery, which he would later call “a pox on the nation.” And he loved America. When the Civil War began, Joshua knew he could not stay out of the fray. He wrote, “But, I fear, this war, so costly of blood and treasure, will not cease until the men of the North are willing to leave good positions, and sacrifice the dearest personal interests, to rescue our Country from desolation ... every man ought to come forward and ask to be placed at his proper post.” He left his family and Bowdoin College to volunteer for the Union army in 1862. He was 34 years old.
Chapter 2: LIEUTENANT COLONEL CHAMBERLAIN
Although he lacked any military background, Joshua’s strong education landed him the rank of lieutenant colonel in the newly formed 20th Maine Infantry Regiment. He worked hard to make himself a good leader. He read every manual and military history he could find and studied books about maneuvers and tactics by lantern in his tent, late into the night. Each day he drilled his men tirelessly, a routine that would save their lives and our nation at Gettysburg. “It is the discipline which is the soul of armies,” he later said. “Other things — moral considerations, impulses of sentiment and even natural excitement — may lead men to great deeds; but taken in the long run, and in all vicissitudes, an army is effective in proportion to its discipline.”
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Joshua’s men despised the constant drilling but idolized their lieutenant. Although officers were entitled to better food and conditions, Joshua cheerfully underwent the same hardships as his men. He slept outdoors, using his saddle as a pillow and wrapping himself in a rubber blanket when it rained. When he ordered his men to do chores, such as building fortifications, he would strip off his shirt, pick up a shovel or ax and work side by side with them.
Text copyright © 2007 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s “American Heroes: Joshua Chamberlain and the American Civil War,” published by Hyperion Books for Children, an imprint of Disney Book Group.
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