During the pivotal battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War, the flag bearer for the famed 20th Maine Infantry Regiment emerged as a hero.

The regiment’s commanding officer, Joshua Chamberlain, described the scene on a rocky hill called Little Round Top on July 2, 1863, as his men struggled to hold off advancing Confederate troops.

“I saw through a sudden rift in the thick smoke our colors standing alone. I first thought some optical illusion imposed upon me. But as forms emerged through the drifting smoke, the truth came to view. The crossfire had cut keenly; the center had been almost shot away; only two of the color guard had been left, and they (were) fighting to fill the whole space; and in the center, wreathed in battle smoke, stood the color-sergeant, Andrew Tozier.

“His color staff planted in the ground at his side, the upper part clasped in his elbow, so holding the flag upright, with musket and cartridges seized from the fallen comrade at his side he was defending his sacred trust in the manner of the songs of chivalry.”

For his bravery, the nation later awarded Tozier the Medal of Honor, the military’s most prestigious honor, given for extraordinary acts of valor on the battlefield.

But Tozier, who is buried in Litchfield, wasn’t always a daring warrior.

Two years after the battle, just months after the end of the war, Tozier helped rob a store in Livermore Falls and engaged in other crimes across Maine that caused the Lewiston Evening Journal to call him “a hard customer” and “a wily rogue.”

But Chamberlain, not a man to forget those who served him, came to Tozier’s rescue anyway.

TOZIER’S EARLY YEARS

Born in 1838 in the tiny village of Purgatory at the north end of Woodbury Pond in Litchfield, Tozier spent his first 10 years in a rural spot that supposedly got its name because its “mosquitoes and black flies were so thick” that visitors couldn’t sleep there.

The 1892 Illustrated History of Kennebec County said preachers, mapmakers and the post office had tried to change the village name to Pleasant Valley or North Litchfield “but the old name is indelible.”

Tozier’s family, though, managed to escape Purgatory with a move to Plymouth in Penobscot County.

John A. Christian, who investigated Tozier’s life for Gettysburg Magazine in 2016, found little material on his subject’s early years, but managed to unearth that Tozier’s father “was an abusive patriarch” toward his seven children and that the future soldier “left home during young teenage years to seek work as a seaman.”

By 1860, though, Tozier was back home with his parents in Plymouth, according to the 1860 Census.

He didn’t stay long.

When the Second Maine Regiment formed in Bangor in the spring of 1861, it recruited young men who were used to hard living in rural Maine, including Tozier, who signed up on July 15, 1861.

By then, the new unit was already on the march toward Virginia, determined to join in the defense of the nation’s capital.

TWO YEARS OF FIGHTING BEFORE GETTYSBURG

Before Tozier caught up with the unit, the Second Maine found itself in the middle of the confused and bloody First Battle of Bull Run, where writer Christian determined that its color bearer died from a shot through his throat and his successor fell soon after with a bullet in his brain.

When Tozier got there after the fighting, he was a private.

In the following year, not an especially good one for the Union armies, Tozier and the Second Maine fought in the Battle of Gaines’s Mill in Virginia.

Tozier was lucky to come out of it alive. A bullet shot away the middle finger on his left hand. A passing cannonball, with a glancing hit, managed to break a rib. And yet another bullet lodged in his left ankle.

As if that wasn’t enough, he also got taken prisoner.

Somehow, Tozier managed to heal a bit during his five weeks in a wretched Confederate prison in Richmond, from which he was swapped back to the Union side in a prisoner exchange. He spent a couple more months in a Union hospital.

On Nov. 1, 1862, Tozier returned to the Second Maine, where a promotion to sergeant followed.

From the start, the all-volunteer unit planned to disband after two years. It proceeded to do just that in the spring of 1863, despite the raging war.

But many of its soldiers had signed up for three years, not two, so it wasn’t clear what should happen to them, including Tozier.

The military, not surprisingly, thought the 120 men who’d agreed to serve three years should be required to stick around for another year. The men, not surprisingly, mostly disagreed,

When the Mainers who wanted to go home began refusing to obey orders, Brig. Gen. James Barnes authorized guards to shoot them.

The mutinous men wound up under the command of Chamberlain, who quickly moved to deescalate the mutiny by pulling the guards who’d been watching them and showing some sympathy for their plight.

Despite a plea for help by Chamberlain to Maine Gov. Abner Coburn to intervene, the men had to stay.

Tozier was the highest-ranked member of the mutinous Mainers.

HEROISM AT GETTYSBURG

As Chamberlain’s 20th Maine Regiment marched toward the little town of Gettysburg, its color sergeant got so drunk and insubordinate that his superiors ordered him arrested, creating a vacancy at a critical moment.

Chamberlain immediately chose Tozier to take the highly coveted post. It was a brilliant way to cement the entire group into his regiment. And it came just in time.

As Union and Confederate forces converged on Gettysburg, Chamberlain’s men were ordered to hold Little Round Top, a hill at the end of the line that overlooked fields.

Thousands of books have been written about the large and complex battle of Gettysburg. Suffice it to say, as U.S. Army officer Abner Doubleday put it in an 1882 book about the battle, the rebels on July 2, 1863, “came on like wolves, with deafening yells” as they charged toward the Mainers folded around the rear of the small mountain on the far left of the Union lines.

A general who witnessed the scene, Ellis Spear, wrote in his memoirs that “what I most distinctly remember” from the battle “was the color sergeant Tozier, who had picked up a musket dropped by one of the killed or wounded, and with his left arm about the colors, stood loading, firing and chewing a bit of cartridge paper.”

Oliver Otis Howard, a Union general at Gettysburg, told a crowd in California in 1887 that Confederate troops were seizing the heights, the key to victory, until “an officer stood on Little Round Top waving a flag” that rallied the Union defenders and allowed them to drive back the enemy.

Tozier himself described the fight to a Lewiston Evening Journal reporter shortly before his death in 1910: “We had about 500 men in our regiment when we reached the summit of Little Round Top, and then commenced a tragic scene.

“My color guards were all shot around me in a few moments and then the smoke was so thick that I could see but a few feet away.

“My regiment had changed position and fell back a short distance and before I realized it, I was standing entirely alone in front of the line holding the colors with one arm and firing with the other. Of course, I was the target for many bullets, but I didn’t get scratched.”

It’s hard to get more heroic, and lucky, than that.

MORE WAR BEFORE RETURNING TO MAINE AND CAUSING TROUBLE

After Gettysburg, Tozier stuck with the 20th Maine as it helped chase the Southern army back into Virginia.

That winter, he transferred to an ambulance corps that rescues the wounded, including the many stricken at the Wilderness battlefield. In May 1864, while Tozier worked to evacuate the maimed, a shell exploded nearby.

A fragment of metal slammed him in the head, knocking him to the ground. Some of his colleagues hauled him to a hospital, where he stayed until July 15, when his three-year commitment to serve ran out.

At that point, nine months before the war’s end, Tozier was allowed to go home to Maine.

After his discharge from the Army, Christian found that Tozier married a Litchfield woman, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bolden, in February 1865.

A few months later, he applied for a veteran’s disability pension that would soon bring him the regal sum of $8 each month. That’s the equivalent of $147 today, clearly not enough for the couple to live on.

In 1866, Tozier had something to do with a bowling alley in Fairfield, though it’s not clear exactly what, Christian said. Whatever other moneymaking efforts he made are uncertain – except for one: crime.

On a Tuesday night in late August of 1865, newspapers reported, someone broke into Michael Larkin’s clothing store in Livermore Falls and stole men’s clothing valued at $2,000 or more. The owner offered a $200 reward for the recovery of missing overcoats.

But nobody came forward with any evidence for another four years.

In 1869, two men — one named Cushman, from Carmel, and the other Shorey, from Monmouth — were arrested for stealing six oxen in Washington County. They drove the oxen south to Augusta, where a butcher slaughtered them, and then they sold the hides at Miller & Randall, a tannery located behind Auburn Hall, the building where Auburn’s council still meets.

When the two men were arrested by authorities in Kennebec County, they wasted little time in naming a key accomplice: Tozier.

Tozier, though, beat the rap in Augusta because he showed he hadn’t been with his partners at the butcher and hence hadn’t committed any crime in Kennebec County.

Washington County wasted no time arresting him again. At trial in Bangor, witnesses testified they’d seen all three men driving off the oxen.

Tozier’s lawyer tried to get him off the hook by seating Tozier’s brother, who resembled the criminal, up front in the audience. When a boy who claimed to have seen Tozier on the road began to testify, the attorney asked him if he could spot the man he’d seen in the courtroom, confident the lad would pick out Tozier’s brother. But the boy pointed to the right Tozier.

Summing up the case for the jury, Tozier’s attorney mentioned that he “did not care if Tozier was found guilty” because Chamberlain, who had won election as governor, would pardon him.

For whatever reason, Tozier was found innocent.

But freedom proved elusive for Tozier since Androscoggin County authorities immediately arrested him.

Cushman’s confession had included an inadvertent admission that he and Tozier were the thieves behind the Larkin heist.

Tozier might have beaten that rap, too, since Cushman retracted his claims, except that a witness in the audience at the Bangor trial recalled that Tozier sold a cart stolen in Livermore Falls the same night as the Larkin robbery.

Out of legal tricks, Tozier admitted his guilt in stealing the coats and the cart. The Supreme Judicial Court for Androscoggin County sentenced him to five years behind bars.

“Justice finally triumphs,” said the Journal.

Well, maybe.

A GOVERNOR’S HELPING HAND

In June 1870, Chamberlain cut short Tozier’s stay at the state prison in Thomaston.

Calling Tozier “the bravest of the brave” during the war, the governor pardoned the convicted crook.

Instead of five years behind bars, Tozier spent only three months in the slammer.

Chamberlain didn’t just turn Tozier loose.

He hired Tozier and his wife to serve as attendants to his family at his Brunswick home, where the pair lived with their own son for at least a couple of years and perhaps for an entire decade.

Christian managed to uncover evidence the Toziers had moved on by 1880, when they began farming in Cumberland County.

Tozier appears to have held a few different jobs before finally settling on another farm in Litchfield by the 1890s, where he became active in veterans activities and was ultimately buried.

Tozier griped to the government that his old gunshot wounds “pain me all the time.”

He also suffered headaches, weakness in his left hand and tenderness in his chest. His heart hurt, too.

By 1908, Tozier’s health had deteriorated, his heart clearly failing, according to a physician’s report. That convinced federal bureaucrats to increase his monthly pension by 50% to $12 monthly. That’s the equivalent of $388 today.

In 1898, Chamberlain wrote to the secretary of war to urge him to award Tozier the Medal of Honor “for distinguished personal gallantry in defending the colors” of his regiment during the clash at Gettysburg.

In those less officious days, Tozier got his medal via parcel post. It doesn’t appear that any newspaper took notice of it.

The official citation accompanying the medal said that “at the crisis of the engagement this soldier, a color bearer, stood alone in an advanced position, the regiment having been borne back, and defended his colors with musket and ammunition picked up at his feet.”

With that, his criminal record mostly forgotten, Andrew Jackson Tozier Sr. became a legend. He died March 28, 1910.

A statue of Joshua Chamberlain, former Maine governor and a Civil War hero, stands to the left of his former home, where he once employed Litchfield native Andrew Tozier, a Medal of Honor winner who served in Chamberlain’s 20th Maine regiment. Steve Collins/Sun Journal

Copy the Story Link