Maine general recounts Civil War

THE CIVIL WAR RECOLLECTIONS OF GENERAL ELLIS SPEAR, University of Maine Press, 383 pages, hardcover, $28.

You remember him from Michael Shaara’s classic, “The Killer Angels,” and his cameo in its epic film adaptation, “Gettysburg.” But the place to get to know Gen. Ellis Spear, born in Warren, second in command of the 20th Maine, is on the south-facing slope of Little Round Top.

Climb the boulders. Let the eyes gaze in the bright sunlight across the hot, open ground to the Devil’s Den. Try to see Gettysburg as Spear saw it. Hear Lee’s cannon in the distance, the cries of men and horses in pain. Try to smell the smoke. Sense the fear as Spear did.

Wars define the lives of those who experience them. Spear, 40 years after he put down his sword, picked up his pen. Retired as a patent attorney and former U.S. commissioner of patents, he returned to the front lines. He hunkered down behind the bodies of fallen comrades at Fredericksburg, plodded through mud back and forth on the roads from Washington to Richmond, felt the earth shake at Petersburg, and spent a night among grinning skeletons on the field of the Second Battle of Bull Run.

Spear’s memoirs, previously unpublished, include three original documents: his diaries, from 1863 to 1865; his 1896 Personal Memoranda, and his Civil War Recollections. It was the decision of his editors that they be left essentially as he wrote them, without major reworking — a sensible call, and rewarding for the reader. Spear, educated in the classics at Bowdoin College, knows the language. His style is relaxed and learned, not scholarly. He is insightful, never tedious; focused and disciplined, and the passages in his reflections are not overwritten.

The book is an achievement that is Spear’s, but the project is an accomplishment that also belongs to the people who smoothed his work and gave it organization: his grandson Abbott Spear, now deceased, of Warren; Andrea C. Hawkes, doctoral candidate in American history at the University of Maine; Marie H. McCosh, a free-lance editor; Craig Symonds, professor in the history department of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis; and Michael H. Alpert, director of the University of Maine Press.

“At the close of the first year of the war,” Spear, in 1862 a Wiscasset schoolteacher, thought “it seemed easier to go to the front than to stay at home.” In July, he helped muster a company that later merged with the 20th Maine and reunited him with a professor he knew at Bowdoin, Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain.

The Maj. Spear who shortly bivouacs in “malarial” swamps in the humidity of a Washington summer emerges as a thoughtful, often sensitive leader, a compassionate observer experiencing the irrationality of army life. He is an officer forced to compensate on the field for incompetence and politics in high places. He is a man who suffers at the hands of men and nature. Descriptions of Spear’s war often grow from wry humor rooted in resignation.

At stops on what is an all-too-brief march with Spear through his recollections, he pauses to remind us that it wasn’t the abolition of slavery, or fear or belligerence that consumed these men as they marched toward Antietam, or Richmond, or into the hell of one of those sunken roads rimmed by stone walls and bristling with rifles. It was nagging, empty stomachs. Units that would stand firm against a bayonet charge would dissolve ranks for a patch of blackberries.

The man who stood on the field at Appomattox would recall four decades later that while “salt pork had much to do with putting down the rebellion” the secret weapon came out of a pot. “In my opinion, it [victory] was due mainly to coffee,” which he described as a “palatable drug” that “allowed men to rise before daylight, march the muddy roads and wade cold creeks.”

It awakened him for his final day at Gettysburg where “over all the field, in the damp, hot July air was a subtle, penetrating deadly smell,” as bodies “lay here and there, just as they fell, some lying as if advancing when struck and fallen forward. All were black in the face and distorted and swollen until their clothes were tight upon them.” Amid this grim scene, macabre, overwhelming to the senses, Spear and his men, having done “what we could to give decent high burial alike to friend and enemy,” lay back and “ate what dinner we had, of dry hardtack, for to horrors men may become accustomed, but not to hunger.”

Battles with the Confederate Army are intermittent, terrible and blessedly infrequent. In the long intervals between bugle calls and adrenaline rushes, Spear fights a daily war against disease, “rusty” salt pork, hardtack green with mold, the elements, and the monotony of the encamped warrior. He takes a Mainer’s pride in the ingenuity of his winter quarters, a fire pit inside his tent, smoke and heat channeled under a flat rock to warm his feet and out through a chimney rigged of stacked barrels.

He convincingly refutes the story that Chamberlain, his men out of ammunition, ordered a bayonet charge down Little Round Top. Spear, responsible for the entire left of the 20th’s line, received no such command, nor could he find anyone who remembered its being given. Instead, his plausible explanation is that men of the 20th near its center pushed forward to retrieve their wounded, and began a cascade that carried down the hill and routed the enemy.

Spear witnesses an execution. He marvels at the skills of Maine soldier-lumberjacks felling trees with precision to create an obstacle for the rebel army. He writes of confused, frightened men firing their ramrods in battle, of moments of Confederate goodwill, but always of the horror.

There is a temptation to be cautious as you share his recollections. They are, after all, the dimming memories of one man about himself. And, Spear warns you upfront, “I may at times be in error as to places and dates … [but] I shall write as truthfully as I am able.” Taking him at his word, he offers a self-portrait that is remarkably calm amid the turmoil of battlefields and self-disciplined in poignant moments, even in grief.

Did he create this image as a self-serving legacy? Perhaps. But even that would say something about Spear the man, who chose the boldest strokes to paint himself as decent, not important; compassionate, rather than heroic; a soldier’s officer whose last recorded thoughts were about the comfort of his men.

Mark Woodward of Bangor is director of communications for Sen. Susan M. Collins.