The Ol' Professor: The Hero of Little Round Top (The Turning Point of the American Civil War)

What would a professor of rhetoric know? It is one thing to be the turning point of the American Civil War in a battle involving over 250,000 men with just your regiment reduced to only 300 men. One can synthesize down all the words, all the books, all the thoughts and all the speculations through all these years of what General Robert E. Lee was up to when he slipped around the right (western) flank of the Union Army in Virginia, marching up through Maryland and into Pennsylvania, in June 1863. For the hundreds of thousands of men engaged, the millions of people on both sides who supported those men, and the tens of thousands of those men who died as a result of this march, it all came down to this: Upon "A", Then a letter would be placed on the desk of "B". One "A" was capturing Harrisburg [the capital of Pennsylvania (the second most populous state in the Union)]. The other "A" was the destruction of the Union Army of the Potomac. "B" was either the Governor of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg or the President of the United States in Washington, D.C. The letter would be an offer to negotiate a peace and the end to the war.

It's another thing to stop another bloody and deadly civil war alone, unarmed, facing a mad and armed mob - without any bloodshed. That's what the Ol' Professor did. & that is why he is now known as Maine's Grand Old Man.