On Sunday morning, April 9, 1865, brevetted Major General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain stood in command of the 1st Brigade, 1st Division of the Fifth Corps, near the White Oak Road at Appomattox in Virginia. General Grant’s Army of the Potomac was chasing a nearly defeated General Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, and Chamberlain was preparing for another charge against the enemy.

Just a week before, Brunswick’s Chamberlain had been severely wounded when a bullet had ripped through the neck of his horse, then struck Chamberlain, ricocheted through his chest, around his torso and exited through his backside. The wound was so terrible, Joshua was nicknamed, “Bloody Chamberlain.”

Still healing from his wounds, Chamberlain was about to order a charge at Lee’s confederates when suddenly, “my eye was caught by the figure of a horseman riding … a Confederate officer … the white flag earnestly borne.”

“The messenger … dismounts, with grateful salutation,” Chamberlain later wrote. “Sir,” the rebel officer began, “I am from General Gordon, General Lee desires a cessation of hostilities until he can hear from General Grant as to the proposed surrender.”

By afternoon, General Grant joined General Lee at Wilbur McLean’s home in Appomattox Court House, where the Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia formally surrendered. After four long and bloody years, the American Civil War was now all but over.

“Later that night I was summoned to headquarters, [and] informed … I was to command the parade on the occasion of the formal surrender of arms and colors of Lee’s Army.”

For the next two days, men in blue mingled with men in gray. “It looked like a country fair,” Chamberlain described, the men trading “tobacco, pipes, knives, money, shoes … and what we had left for trade … even saddles.”

Early on the morning of April 12, 1865, exactly four years to the day since Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard ordered his artillery to fire upon Fort Sumter — beginning the American Civil War — “the [final] business transactions had been settled, the parole papers made out; all was ready for … the dissolving … of the Army of Northern Virginia.”

“My lines formed for the ceremony at sunrise,” Chamberlain explained, “our eyes … scan the busy groups on the opposite slopes … breaking camp for the last time … then slowly forming ranks … now they move … gray columns march … [with] swaying battle flags.”

Chamberlain mounted his horse and stood by the Union Colors, his troops, “mounted beneath our flags …”. Soon, the last remaining vestige of a gray and tattered rebel army marched forward towards Chamberlain and his Union troops.

“Our bugle sounds … [the] whole line … regiment by regiment … [giving] the marching salute,” these former rebels now “welcomed back into [the] Union.” As they approached, General “Gordon at the head of the column … gives word … for his brigade … to pass us with the same … honor answering honor.”

Lee’s men, all battle-hardened Confederate troops, one after the other stopped, formed in line, to “fix bayonets, stack arms; remove cartridge boxes [and] lay them down.” Then they “reluctantly … tenderly fold their battle worn, torn, and blood stained … flags,” until “only the flag of the Union greets the sky.”

“Then, stripped of every token of enmity or instrument of power to hurt, they march off to give their word of honor never to lift arms against” the United States ever again.

When the great surrender of Lee’s army was over, Chamberlain and his men prepared to muster out of service and return home. The Great War of Southern Rebellion was finally over. “Our sojourn at Appomattox Court House was a hard experience. We had raced to that point,” prepared to fight on and instead found Lee’s surrender.

By late summer, Chamberlain was on a train, headed home to Brunswick. It was a long four years of action fought at places such as Chancellorsville, Antietam, Gettysburg, Petersburg and Appomattox. He had been wounded six times and was promoted to brigadier general while laying on his deathbed.

Now, Major General Chamberlain’s service to the United States of America, during the American Civil War, was finally complete, but his future service to Maine was just beginning. He would go on to serve Maine as her 32nd governor, become the sixth president of Bowdoin College, head the Maine State Militia, defend the Maine capitol from armed insurrectionists and, finally, serve the United States, once again, as the surveyor of the Port of Portland.

The life and experiences of Brunswick’s Joshua Chamberlain are well-known and important to Maine and to the history of the United States. And the extensive and impressive biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain still serves today as one of the best and most legendary 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.