“You were making history”
On October 6, 1889, Joshua L. Chamberlain stood to address friends, dignitaries and former brothers in arms who were gathered to dedicate a monument to the regiment he had commanded 26 years earlier at Gettysburg. It was from their perilous position at the extreme left of the Union flank that Chamberlain ordered the men of the 20th Maine to fix bayonets. The ensuing charge from Little Round Top led the 20th Maine straight into the teeth of the 15th and 47th Alabama regiments, but the Federal line would hold–a triumph that marked a pivotal point in the war and would later earn Joshua Chamberlain the Medal of Honor.
When he once again took the field in 1889 Chamberlain, the minister and professor turned soldier and statesman, drew upon his love of languages and rhetoric as he reflected on his place in history.
“In great deeds, something abides,” he said. “On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate 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 . . . shall come [here] to ponder and dream; And lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.”
As we began to organize thoughts, notes and memories to tell the story of recreating President Lincoln’s funeral car, General Chamberlain’s words seemed indeed to abide. Each member of our team, like each man in the 20th Maine, was a volunteer and though the stakes for us in the 21st century were hardly life and death, we shared the same devotion to a cause far greater than ourselves. As Chamberlain eloquently said in 1889, “A quarter of a century ago on this rugged crest you were doing what you deemed your duty.”
So it is that Chamberlain’s reflections on that long-ago October day have come to symbolize the work of those that rebuilt Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train.