Joshua L. Chamberlain:  
A Life in Letters

Edited by Thomas Desjardin

The National Civil War Museum, 2012

312pp., $25.95

Review by Gordon Berg

            Michael Shaara and Ken Burns have made Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain into a Civil War rock star. The publication of 300 never-before-seen letters and other related documents by The National Civil War Museum should please his legion of loyal acolytes.

            Readers familiar with the Victorian art of letter writing may find the early letters between Chamberlain and his wife, Frances (Fanny) Caroline Adams, contain little more than overheated professions of romantic love and mundane recitations of day-to-day family activities and responsibilities.  If they contain deeper character revelations, they lie hidden between the lines of 19th century rhetoric.

            Not until Chapter Four do Chamberlain's Civil War letters appear.  Written by the colonel of the 20th Maine and hero of Little Round Top, an officer six times wounded, and commander of Union troops that received the formal surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, they are more revealing of the soldier behind the fawning husband, doting father, and studious professor.

            An 1862 letter from Warrenton, VA, contains a clear statement of what Chamberlain believes he's fighting for.  His notes about Fredericksburg written right after the battle, paint a vivid word picture of his first experience of “seeing the elephant.”  But a hint of his lust for glory emerges when he uncharacteristically writes “one of the most thrilling sights to me on going into the fight” was “the parks of ambulances by the hundreds—all of them so orderly in line...ready to go on...when our mangled bodies lay writhing in the field.”

            Chamberlain had a big ego and a burning desire for recognition.  Failing to be promoted to brigadier general after his exploits at Gettysburg, he lamented “I have won it in the field and if Napoleon had seen it he would have made me a Genl. on the spot...Promotions, however, are managed strangely in Washington.”  Even during his 1864 convalescence from an attack of malaria, he confides to Fanny that he told Maine Senator William Pitt Fessenden, “I wished very much that before any promotion was recommended the authorities would just look at my record at the military history of my last year.”  Chamberlain consoled himself by concluding “Men may not do right towards me, but Providence will.”

            After the war, Chamberlain achieved political and professional prominence.  But his wartime experiences revealed the true measure of the man.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

The Louisiana Scalawags:
Politics, Race, and Terrorism
During the Civil War and Reconstruction

Frank J. Wetta

LSU Press, 2012

244 pp., $42.50

Review by Gordon Berg

            Louisiana has always been a state steeped in exotic scenery, elegant food, and dirty politics.  Politics there was never more corrupt, as Frank Wetta so thoroughly documents, than during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

            Wetta reminds us that the term “scalawag,” used during that time “was a vicious slur often used with deadly intent.”  It referred to “Southern white Republicans in positions of influence and leadership, or those native white men identified as voting the Republican ticket.”  They were distinct from “carpetbaggers,” that is northerners who came to Louisiana after the Civil War.  When joined by newly freed African Americans, these groups formed an unholy trinity in the eyes of most southern whites and a serious impediment to reinstating the dominant role the prewar plantation elite played in state politics.

            Wetta asks and answers most of the important questions.  Who were the leading scalawags? What role did they play in founding the Republican Party in Louisiana?  Did they really believe in racial justice and political reform?  What was the importance of the New Orleans riot of 1866 to Reconstruction policies in the South?  What is the legacy of the scalawagism in Louisiana history?

            The New Orleans riot of July 30, 1866 rightly forms the core of Wetta's investigation.  Spurred by a radical attempt to rewrite the state constitution adopted in 1864, “the riot turned congressional and northern public opinion against the conservative, lenient Reconstruction program of President Johnson, gave weight to demands for harsher policies toward the defeated South, and contributed to the first impeachment effort of an American president.”  It also marked the high water mark for the scalawags.  The era of carpetbaggers and their black allies dominated Louisiana politics for the rest of Reconstruction.

            Wetta tells a compelling story.  His narrative, however, would read better if it were not shot through with the language and style of the dissertation from whence it surely came.  Nevertheless, studies like this will help put Reconstruction on a more scholarly footing, thereby shining new light on America's first experience with military occupation and nation building.

           

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.