Joshua Chamberlain led the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment during the crucial fight on Little Round Top at the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Chamberlain went on to serve as governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin College. Gettysburg Museum of Military History

Many credit President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as ending slavery in the United States of America. Yet, the truth is somewhat colder to understand, as the demise of slavery in America was actually purchased with a currency of blood.

On July 4, 1863 a deadly and bloody battle was being cleaned up all along a 3-mile stretch of land on the outskirts of Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, where two great armies clashed for three terrible days.

Nearly 94,000 Union soldiers under the command of Gen. George G. Meade positioned to defend Washington from General Robert E. Lee’s advancing Confederate forces, then numbering nearly 72,000.

Men of both armies hurried their infantry regiments, Calvary corps, sharpshooter brigades and artillery batteries, into position then engaged in battle.

On the first day, Bowdoin College’s one-armed “Christian General” Oliver Otis Howard had commanded the 11th Corps from Gettysburg to Cemetery Hill, on the outer edge of town.

Howard’s command was heavily engaged and overwhelmed by superior forces. His men were being slowly crushed by repeated confederate advances as the extreme right of the Union line began to collapse.

The 16th Maine Regiment of Infantry Volunteers were sacrificed into a “hornet’s nest” to be slaughtered by confederate forces, while Howard’s troops retreated to better position on Cemetery Hill. The 16th suffered a near 85% casualty rate.

When Brunswick’s Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain received orders to lead his regiment into battle on the second day of July, he led approximately 400 soldiers of his exhausted 20th Maine Regiment of Infantry Volunteers who marched all night, and all day, to arrive at Gettysburg by three that afternoon.

The regiment was below half strength when it was placed at the extreme left flank of the Union line. Almost immediately, wave after wave of Confederate attacks began assaulting the 20th’s position.

From close order musketry, to saber fighting, to hand-to-hand combat, the regiment fought valiantly and desperately. Chamberlain continually reformed the line, repositioned his troops, moved his colors, re-planned his tactics, and fought a thinking man’s battle.

Now, completely outnumbered and nearly out of ammunition, Chamberlain was left with no choice but to order a bayonet charge “forward” down the rocky slope.

Perfectly timed and well executed, the oncoming rush of Union blue completely surprised the surging rebels. When the charge was over, the 20th had thwarted the Confederate advance, took more than 100 prisoners and stood victorious. American history was made, the Union Army was saved, and a Confederate threat to Washington was erased.

Nearly 3 miles of wounded, dead or dying, all littered the rocky Pennsylvania ground. Yet, two days of brutal butchery between these armies was nowhere near over.

The officers of the 20th Maine. Courtesy photo

On the third day of July, Confederate Commander Robert E. Lee, determined to crush the Union Army, theorized that two viscous days of assaults had weakened the Union center in order to bolster its ends, and Lee aimed to penetrate that center of weakness. By the time the 15,000-man confederate onslaught, now known as “Pickett’s Charge,” was executed, what was left of the fatigued 20th Maine had assigned to the center of the Union Army’s line, for a rest that would never come.

Through a mile of green fields, stockade fences and stony dirt-roads, the southern attack marched toward the heavily armed and fortified blue line. The deadly clash between these two behemoths was cataclysmic.

Over half of the confederates lay wounded, dead or dying, and approximately 1,500 Union men were also dead or wounded. But the gory three-day Battle of Gettysburg was finally over.

Together with his brothers Tom and John, Joshua Chamberlain and the men of Maine now had to begin picking up the pieces of their tattered regiment.

When the entire Gettysburg conflict was concluded, toll was so extreme that the entire world was stunned. The severe cost of freedom exacted more than 51,000 combined casualties in just three days of fighting.

There were “more American casualties at the Battle of Gettysburg than in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 combined.”

Many legends were created at Gettysburg, including the stories of thousands of Maine’s soldiers who fought at both ends of the Union line, at the Peach Orchard, at Devil’s Den, at Sickle’s Salient and at Little Round Top.

By the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the butcher’s bill tallied 620,000 Americans dead or wounded, and about 7,500 Maine men had given their “last full measure of devotion” in order to eradicate the stain of slavery from the fabric of America and to reunite the United States in this, one of the most costly, of our Stories from Maine.

Lori-Suzanne Dell is a Brunswick author and historian. She has published four books and runs the “Stories from Maine” Facebook page.