Maine Roads to Gettysburg

Maine’s prominent place in the American Civil War seems somewhat ironic. The history of the Civil War is one of “mosts.” The most unexpected, deadly, long, mechanized to date, mismatched sided and destructive among the mosts.

Tom Huntington has written in his recently published Maine Roads To Gettysburg, that Maine sent the largest number of soldiers per capita of any northern state to fight in the Civil War. Maine at the time had few African American residents, free or enslaved. Maine’s 20th volunteer regiment is credited with winning the final battle of the most known, influential and deadly battle of the war at Gettysburg. This under the leadership of Bowdoin College academic Joshua Chamberlain. Maine had been a major trading partner with the coastal southern states and the Carribean from colonial days. Shipping staples such as lumber northern white pine and southern yellow pine for ship building, molasses, cotton, fish and rum.

Huntington, who grew up in Portland, Maine, researched federal and state data bases where he found the names of some of the 73,000 Maine residents who served in the Civil War. There were 4,000 of them at Gettysburg. His research at Augusta, Maine’s state Civil War original correspondence archives revealed the human aspect of the data collected in thousands of letters written by and to Maine soldiers during the war.

When news of the outbreak of the war at Fort Sumpter South Carolina reached Maine, the reaction was with the firing of cannons and flying flags. But, said Huntington, “Maine was unprepared for the Civil War. There were militias in Maine,” a vestige of the American Revolution, “but they had not trained for years.”

Maine Roads To Gettysburg, Stackpole Books.