The word was enough. It ran like fire along the line, from man to man, and rose into a shout, with which they sprang forward upon the enemy, now not 30 yards away.

Of his desire to serve in the War he wrote to Maine's Governor Israel Washburn Jr. Gen. He would break his own record in 1868.

He served on the faculty and as president of his alma mater Bowdoin College. After the war he entered politics as a Republican and served four one-year terms of office as the 32nd Governor of Maine.