Joshua Chamberlain by John J. Pullen

Author:John J. Pullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stackpole Books

The question of whether or not Adams actually did preach a sermon back home with the Maltese cross of the Fifth Corps attached to his clerical garb is not answered by any record now at hand, but there is an undocumented understanding that this is exactly what he did.

After serving the First Parish Church for forty years and in the seventieth year of his life, Adams felt the need of a new challenge and departed for East Orange, New Jersey, where he successfully organized a new church and died on Christmas Day, 1875. He had been more than an ordinary father-in-law to Joshua Chamberlain, and his loss was felt deeply. Ideally as a man grows older, one generation passes away as another comes on to surround him with fresh warmth and capabilities. With one exception—the family produced by his daughter Grace—this did not happen to Chamberlain. His mother and father, to whom he was greatly devoted, died in the 1880s. His brothers Horace and John died of a lung disease, probably tuberculosis, in 1861 and 1867 respectively. His brother Tom, who had served with him so loyally and well in the 20th Maine, began drinking after the war, suffered from heart and lung disease, and died in 1896. His sister Sarah had two children, but they were off to the north in Brewer, Maine, and Chamberlain had little contact with them. His son, Harold Wyllys, never married and failed to be self-supporting in occupations he undertook. The removal of the Rev. George Eliashib Adams’s stalwart figure from the family circle therefore meant more than the ordinary loss of comfort and support to Joshua and Fanny Chamberlain. In 1882 they gave to the church in his memory the large stained glass window that dominates the east wall of the church, the first colored window installed in the building. Chamberlain never belonged to the church; he retained his membership in the First Congregational Church in Brewer, his native town, all his life.5 He was, however, a member of the First Parish, the corporate body supporting the church. He bought and occupied a pew. He served on committees. Referring to the stained glass window, the church history remarks, “It is a memorial to Dr. Adams, but it also is a constant reminder of the service and loyalty of General Chamberlain.”6

The First Parish Church held other memories closely related to the Chamberlains. In one pew, number twenty-three, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wife of a Bowdoin professor, on March 2, 1851, a day when Chamberlain as a student should have been in attendance, had seen her vision of the death of Uncle Tom. In 1964 Martin Luther King preached in this church, thus bringing to full circle, a century later, the struggle for freedom, from civil war to civil rights.7 Mrs. Stowe was, in Lincoln’s words, “the little woman that wrote the book that made this great war”—the Civil War that brought Chamberlain fame.

In her relationship with Joshua the war had been Fanny’s greatest rival. He

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.