A professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College in Maine before
the war, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain had enlisted in the Union army because of a simple
belief: the dignity of man. The Southern cause supported slavery, and this Chamberlain
could not abide.
This was the land where no man had to bow... The
fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more
even than that was the curse of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was
transplanting to new soil... Chamberlain had come to crush
it.
He believed that in his
United States, unlike in other countries, the American fought for mankind and freedom.
He would fight for the people, not the land. Chamberlain also tells his men that joining
the army was " 'the right thing to do.' " They would not be fighting for the land, he
repeats, but instead for each other.
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