Representative Zager: Lesson learned from Joshua Chamberlain
While planting flags at veterans’ graves with neighbors, and attending the city’s Memorial Day commemoration in Monument Square, I’ve been contemplating what we can learn from those we honor. Memorial Day stems from the Civil War, and no state in the Union mustered more troops per capita for that war than Maine. The plaque on the pedestal in Monument Square records that Portland alone sent over 4,000 men at a time when the city’s total population was only 26,000 . Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1828-1914) At the beginning of the book, To the Last Man (2020), Jonathan Bratten, author and officer in the Maine National Guard recounts the origins of Maine’s Guard. One of the predecessor units was the 20 th Maine Regiment, commanded during the Civil War by Joshua Chamberlain. Chamberlain is known to many as a 19th-century recipient of the Medal of Honor, President of Bowdoin College and governor of Maine. Before all that, though, he was a relatively unknown former theology scholar and