University of Virginia Library

SIXTH PERIOD

THE WAR, 1861–1865

I. Before the Election of Lincoln

Had the students of the University of Virginia been
left without any check on the outbursts of their partizan
preferences, their utterances, through their various
mouthpieces, would still have faithfully reflected the currents
of tempestuous political feeling which were always
running in the world outside. As we have seen, it was
the wise policy of the authorities to avoid in word or action
the identification of the institution with any form of
factional leaning, and they were, therefore, always very
rigorous in endeavoring to put down at once any attempt
of the young men to drag the antagonisms of the existing
political parties within the college precincts. But
the impetuous political sympathies of these youthful
spirits, long before the conflict between the Northern and
Southern people had grown acute and irreconcilable,
could not always be stifled. On June 20, 1832, there
appeared on the university bulletin board a notice which
summoned all those who were in favor of Mr. Clay's
election to assemble in one of the rooms of the Rotunda.
The chairman, observing this notice before the hour appointed,
ordered the janitor to turn the lock of every
apartment in that building; but the young friends of
Harry of the West, instead of being cowed by this rude
interference, as soon as they found the doors shut against
them, trooped away to the Jefferson Society hall, and not
only drew up, with all the formality of veteran politicians,

a series of eulogistic resolutions, but actually nominated
a delegate to attend the approaching convention
in Staunton, which was expected to come out very positively
in favor of Mr. Clay.

The ardent supporters of General Jackson in college
had no intention of allowing their hero to remain in the
background while such honor was being paid to his eloquent
rival. Next day, another notice was tacked to the
bulletin board calling upon the partisans of Old Hickory
to assemble at a designated hour; but again did the ruthless
hand of the watchful chairman tear away the proclamation
for a party rally, and the youthful politicians,
—no doubt anticipating that a meeting in a lectureroom
would be blocked,—gathered together on the open
lawn and adopted a string of resolutions even hotter in
their terms of endorsement than those which, the day
before, had raised the merits of the great Kentuckian
to the skies. In one of the series, very strong approval
was expressed of the Faculty's refusal to grant the use
of an apartment to the partisans of Clay.

The chairman very probably regretted that he did not
also possess the power to curb the political transports
of some of the orators who addressed the Alumni Association
under the roof of the Rotunda; but not even these
were always permitted to speak without some form of
remonstrance, if it seemed proper. There was an unmistakable
pertinency in the resolution offered by John
B. Baldwin, a Whig, at the meeting of the association
in June, 1851, at the University: that body, this resolution
declared, should not be held responsible for the
political sentiments expressed by the speakers chosen to
entertain its members. It was known that John Randolph
Tucker was to deliver the address next day, and
precisely as was anticipated, he dwelt with emphatic approval

on the doctrine of sovereign states-rights. Mr.
Baldwin, afterwards, in a letter to the Richmond journals,
gave his reason for introducing his resolution: there had
been, he said, an effort in other parts of the country to
cast upon the University of Virginia the odium of disunion
sentiments, and several of these annual addresses
had been brought up in proof of the correctness of that
assertion. It was his wish to counteract this impression,
which he considered unjust to the institution; and he
thought that his opinion was confirmed by the adoption of
the resolution.

The prevalence of sectional partizanship was not inconsistent
with opposition to secession. When the agitation
of 1850 began, which led up to the famous compromise
of that year, a respectable number of students
organized what they styled the "Southern Rights Association
of the University of Virginia." In a series of
resolutions[1] which they passed as a declaration of principles,
they proclaimed that they witnessed with regret
the encroachments which the States of the North, hostile
to slavery, were constantly making upon the rights,
the interests, and the institutions of the commonwealths
of the South; that only a shadow of the union which the
fathers of the Republic had established remained in existence;
that compromises and remonstrances had signally
failed to check the aggressiveness of fanaticism; and
that the only means of safety still left was to be looked
for in the concerted action of the Southern people. An
appeal was sent out to the young men of the South to
join the ranks at once, under "the banners of justice and
the Constitution," by organizing similar associations
throughout that region, which would enable them to
keep in unbroken communication with each other.

As the shadow of the approaching catastrophe grew
blacker and blacker as it drew nearer, there were to be
descried many signs that the convictions of the students
about the vital question of separation were far from
being unanimous. The University of Virginia, while
favoring a strict interpretation of the Constitution, had
never, as an institution, shaken the doctrine of Secession
at the North in a threatening way. In the magazine for
October, 1857, there was published an article which
pleaded cogently and temperately for the preservation
of the sisterhood of States as it then existed. This article
had received the approval of the editors,—the most
conspicuous and talented young men within the precincts,
—whether written by a student or by a member of
the Faculty. "Will any one," its author asked, "put
forth the absurd theory of dissolution without a civil
war? We protest against such unflinching animosity on
the part of a portion of the South towards so large a majority
of the people of the North,—animosity so bitter as
to cause them to refuse to acknowledge a man chosen by a
majority of the electoral votes for the Presidency of the
United States, because that majority happens to be composed
of Northern men, members of the Republican
party. Let us strive to strengthen the bonds of Union
and forever banish from our midst any spirit of discord
or disunion. Let us of the South look upon the North
only as a portion of our common country."[2]

The invitation sent to Henry Winter Davis by the
two debating societies to deliver the annual address at
commencement, indicates that, at this time, the sentiments
of the writer just quoted were lodged in more youthful
breasts at the University than one. The Faculty required
this invitation to be recalled, in pursuance of the

general principle that a political disquisition of any kind
in the public hall was repugnant to the fixed policy of
the institution; but a large number of students protested
against its application to the proposed speaker,—an
unmistakable proof of a tolerant spirit in this hour of
commotion and recrimination. A second article was
published in the same organ of college opinion in 1858.
Its title was The Origin and Effect of Partisan Feeling,
and it urged that a patient and conciliatory attitude
should be assumed in considering the causes of controversy
between the two great divisions of the Union.
During December of this year, a resolution was offered
by Mr. Boyce at a meeting of the Washington Society,
that the committee on questions should be instructed to
submit for debate not one that would bring up any of the
political issues now distracting the country. This motion
was adopted, and an endeavor, in the following
month, to repeal it failed to come to a vote.

But a feeling of resentment, which was to increase
straight on, soon began to crop out, although not expressed
with violence. An invitation from Yale College
to the Washington and Jefferson Societies to join in
the publication of an undergraduate magazine was courteously
declined, on the ground that they were unwilling
to take part in such an enterprise until that institution
should, in admitting students to its dormitories and lecture-halls,
recognize that there was a social as well as
an ethnological inequality between the black and the
white youth who applied for entrance. This Yale had
hitherto refused to do. A second indication of rising
animosity was the order given by the Washington Society
to its committee on badges to restrict all purchases thereafter
to Southern jewellers. A third was that, by January,
1860, the ban upon the discussion of political issues

in both societies had been withdrawn. On the night of
the 14th, the question, Has a State the right to secede?
was debated in one of them with great heat, and the decision
of the members was in the affirmative.

But that the sentiment among the students in opposition
to the disruption of the National Government was
still full of vitality is demonstrated by an editorial published
in the March, 1860, number of the magazine.
"We have an abiding confidence in the stability of the
Union," it declared, "but there is a growing disposition
on the part of both sections to encourage a system of
practical non-intercourse between the North and South.
This is sadly to be deprecated. The youths of the
country, so far from growing up, each with bitter prejudice
against the people of the opposite section, and being
taught to believe that all the virtue and patriotism of
the nation is, and ever has been, confined to his own,—
the inevitable consequence of non-intercourse, a consequence
which would be still further developed into a longing
for disunion,—should be trained to regard themselves
as citizens of the broad United States, entitled
to all the privileges secured by the deeds of our forefathers,
and in duty bound to transmit them to succeeding
generations. They should be taught to venerate, not only
the name of him whose birthday, February 22, we this
day celebrate, but also that of every hero, no matter
where born, who stood shoulder to shoulder with him in
his heaven-blessed struggle. And they should also be
taught that, however much we may differ in our view
of the peculiar institution, we are still brethren of one
family, the people of one nation, with one hope, one
destiny, and one common love for the starry ensign of
freedom, and the whole country over which it floats."

It seems repugnant to probability that the principal

organ of the students would have printed these conservative
and deeply patriotic words, had it not, in doing
so, voiced the sentiment of at least a substantial majority
of their number. But events were now advancing
rapidly and by the autumn of 1860, under the influence
of the violent Presidential contest, the attitude even of
that temperate majority had become less loyal to the
Union. On November 3, the question for debate in the
Washington Society was: In case of the election of
Lincoln, should the Southern States secede? and it was
decided in favor of the affirmative by a vote of thirty-three
to six. The conclusion of the members of the Jefferson
Society was precisely the same.

What were the convictions of the professors on this
momentous subject? "Professor Bledsoe," we are
told by Randolph H. McKim, a pupil, "used to interlard
his lectures on the calculus with discussions of states-rights."
Holcombe, as the instructor in constitutional
and international law, had, with copious learning, cogent
arguments, and persuasive eloquence, advocated that doctrine
in its most emphatic form; namely, "the theories
of Jefferson amplified," as was said at the time, "into
the defiance of Calhoun." But if the majority of the
Faculty entertained the same extreme view, they did
not suffer the smallest proof of that fact to escape from
them in word or conduct. All that is recorded of them
would seem to demonstrate positively that they were
moderate and temperate in their opinions, and, therefore,
were more likely to have been in sympathy with
John B. Minor than with either Bledsoe or Holcombe.
Now, if there was one individual among them whose
conclusions on the subject of the right of Secession was
entitled to particular weight it was Minor, the incarnation
of the science of law, not only in its universal principles,

but also in its controlling spirit. His entire manhood
had been given up to its study until he had become
saturated with the genius of jurisprudence. During
some years, he had taught constitutional law as one of the
divisions of the original course, and he was as deeply
versed in that branch of the general subject as he was in
common and statute law, his special province. By nature
as well as by training he was conservative in his convictions,
and he had been identified throughout his life with
the South, as his family had been from its earliest settlement.
"I voted heartily," he tells us in his valuable
diary, "for the ordinance of secession (Virginia), not
indeed as an act of secession,—the whole doctrine touching
which I thought unwise and unwarranted by the text
or spirit of the Constitution,—but as a necessary revolution."

It was necessary, in his opinion, because it was the
only self-respecting reply that could have been returned
to the Federal call for troops after the fall of Sumter.
"I heartily approved that step (the ordinance of secession),"
he continued, "and I will add, that nothing that
has since occurred has tended to modify my convictions
of the madness and wickedness of the act of secession
by the cotton States, and of the necessity, for her own
sake, that Virginia, having exhausted all the resources of
compromise and conciliation, should, at length, have associated
herself with them. Had Virginia's demands
been satisfied, and the Gulf States held out, I should
have regarded it as an improper sacrifice of our interests
to abandon the Union merely from sympathy with
communities which had adopted an extreme course without
consultation with us, and in contempt of our wishes,
opinions, and safety."[3]

II. After Election of Lincoln

On the day of election, the students convened in the
Rotunda and cast the majority of their votes, not for
Douglas or Breckinridge, but for Bell and Everett, whose
campaign cry was the "Constitution and the Union."
The triumph of Lincoln in November, and the secession
of South Carolina in December, had the effect of
crystalizing among them what had previously been a more
or less fluctuating sentiment in support of the general
theory of secession; but several weeks after the last of
these events occurred, the editors of the magazine deplored
the exasperated divisions in the country at large.
"Is it too late," they asked, "to speak of adjustment,
and a return to our former allegiance? Is there no
deliverance from all these troubles, no escape from the
fate that threatens us? Can no remedy be found for
the evils now upon us? We cannot endure, without
inexpressible horror and the profoundest regret, to see
the purest and best government the world has ever yet
known, sink dismembered and dishonored beneath the
waves of civil discord. God grant that the measure of
our calamities may not exceed the rumor of war." A
writer who contributed to the same number, dwells upon
the lofty place among the nations of the globe which
the United States then occupied. "In science, in wealth,
in prosperity, in religious freedom, in power, what country
was there," he exclaims, "which could justly claim
to surpass it? And now hatred was engaged in tearing
down the fabric upon which so many hopes were so
ardently set!"

The very month in which this conservative article was
published, the Washington Society debated the question:
Are the Crittenden Resolutions a sufficient remedy for
the existing posture of affairs? and reached a negative

decision by a vote of seventeen to three. The upshot of
this ballot would seem to demonstrate that the students,
like Mr. Lincoln himself, on the other side, were of the
opinion that the hour for compromise had vanished.
A more significant proof of the same conviction was the
organization of two military companies within the precincts.
This had occurred not long after South Carolina
had adopted the first ordinance of secession. The Faculty
had, as we have already stated, previously discouraged
the formation of such bodies among the young men,
but when they saw the extraordinary agitation of the
public mind both before and after the Presidential election,
they concluded that the hour had arrived for lifting
the ban. Indeed, permission had been granted as early
as December 5. The ranks of both companies were
quickly filled. The officers chosen were as a rule, students
who had been trained in the military art at the
Virginia Military Institute. Professor Holcombe, with
characteristic ardour, suggested that one of these companies
should be christened "Sons of Liberty," in recollection
of the heroes of the Revolution. The uniform
of this company consisted of a red shirt, conspicuously
trimmed with black velvet and bespangled with brass
buttons; trousers, manufactured of black doeskin; a
cape of dark blue color; and a white cross belt, adorned
with a large brass buckle. The other company assumed
the name of the Southern Guard. Its uniform consisted
of a blue shirt and blue pantaloons, with a cap of the
same distinctive color. The weapons of both companies
were the same: a flintlock musket, cartridge box, bayonet,
and scabbard. No banner was used at first; and as wind
instruments were unprocurable, the students, in the course
of the drill, marched to the sound of the hip hip of the
officers.

William Tabb was elected to the captaincy of the
Sons of Liberty, and Edward S. Hutter to that of the
Southern Guard. Tabb, whose health seems to have
been frail, was succeeded in April by James Tosh. The
officers under Tabb were R. J. Washington, first lieutenant;
A. G. Hill, second, and W. Page McCarty, third.
The orderly was F. S. Robertson. There were five
sergeants and four corporals. The officers of the Southern
Guard, subordinate to Captain Hutter, were George
Ross, Frank Carter, James M. Payne, P. L. Burwell,
John M. Poague, L. D. Roane, William Pegram, R. E.
Lee, Jr., J. Compton French, and R. Corbin Wellford.
The names of these officers,—as well as the names of
the officers of the Sons of Liberty,—were conspicuous
in the social history of Virginia. Families of equal distinction
were represented in the rank and file, as the following
partial list for the Southern Guard will demonstrate:
Baldwin, Boyd, and Barton, of Winchester;
Barbour, of Orange; Baskerville, of Mecklenburg; Moncure,
of Stafford; Chapman, of West Virginia; Davidson
and Pendleton, of Lexington; Fairfax, of Alexandria;
Field, of Culpeper; Fleming, of Hanover; Garnett, Latane,
Hunter, and Micou, of Essex; Goggin, of Bedford;
Green, of Fauquier; Hinton and Pegram, of Petersburg;
Maury, of Fredericksburg; McCabe, of Hampton;
Michie, Page, Minor, and Harris, of Albemarle; Bolton
and Munford, of Richmond; Neblett, of Lunenburg;
Elliott, of Georgia; and Howard, McKim, Murdoch,
Mackall, and Munnikhuysen, of Baltimore. Among the
members of the Sons of Liberty who belonged to the
station of privates were Bedinger, of Jefferson county;
Berkeley, of Hanover; Brockenbrough, of Rappahannock;
Bronaugh, of Loudoun; Buford, of Brunswick;
Dew, of King and Queen; Drewry, of Southampton;

Hunter, of Louisa; Lee, of Fairfax; Nicholas, of Richmond;
Preston, of Botetourt; Radford, of Montgomery;
Venable, of Prince Edward; Withers, of Campbell;
Harvie, of Amelia; and Wyatt, of Albemarle.

Each of the two companies counted on its roll about
seventy men. The ground on which the drill took place
was either the Lawn or Carr's Hill. The spectacle of
so many young men conspicuously uniformed and handling
muskets, and marching backwards and forwards, at
the spirited word of command, could not fail to kindle
a martial flame even among those who were simply looking
on. The first exhibition of this newborn fire was
certain to take the form of the display of the flag which
the States that had seceded had already adopted. In
February (1861), it was excitedly rumored about the
dormitories that the students who occupied the rooms
in Dawson's Row were having the flowing emblem of the
new Confederate States duplicated for the purpose of
hoisting it above some conspicuous site within the precincts.
R. C. M. Page and Randolph H. McKim, who
were domiciled in another part of the University, determined
to anticipate their triumph, and hurrying to Charlottesville,
they bought the requisite quantity of inexpensive
colored cambric, and took it to a seamstress on
Main street, the owner of a sewing machine, who soon
manufactured out of it the flag so eagerly desired. Before
leaving the town, they had the foresight to purchase
the gimlet and saw which would be needed for cutting
a hole into the back-door of the Rotunda for the purpose
of gaining admission to the dome. As they were
hastening back, they stopped for a moment and ordered
a flagstaff of a negro carpenter, and gave directions that
it should be delivered on Carr's Hill at eleven o'clock the
same night. The proposed adventure was decided to be

too complicated for two men only to carry it through
successfully, and George Bedinger, James M. Garnett,
John Latane, William Wirt Robinson, and P. Lewis
Burwell were taken into the secret of the project. The
negro arrived, by a backway, promptly at the hour named
beforehand, with the flagstaff, which was borne mysteriously
into McKim's dormitory; and there the virgin ensign
of the new republic was firmly attached to it.

Not until the clock struck the hour of midnight, however,
did the ardent young conspirators consider it safe
to issue forth with the flag. So soon as the Rotunda was
reached, the gimlet and saw were set to going on the panel
of the back-door; a hole large enough in size to admit the
human body was cut; and one by one, the members of
the band crept through it, in the darkness. But there
was still another door to be passed through after the
library was entered. This led out on the roof near the
bell. How was it to be forced? It was too solid and too
full of nails to be pierced by the saw. One means alone
of demolishing the barrier was left, and that was to butt
it down. A line was formed, and each unit in turn serving
as buffer, the repeated impact at last smashed in
the door. But the cupola was yet to be scaled. How
could they reach it? They accomplished this feat by
holding on to the lightning-rod as they climbed up in Indian
file—a course now doubly dangerous as the wind
was sharp and blowing fiercely. The cupola which, at
that time, was surmounted by an arrow, was protected
from a stroke of lightning by the erect end of the conductor.
To this upstanding rod, the staff, with the flag
wrapped about it, was firmly tied; and then the folds were
unwound and allowed to flow with the wind.

The descent to the library was more perilous than
the ascent, and the consciousness of this fact was increased

by signs of approaching dawn, for it was four
o'clock, and the negro servant was seen extinguishing the
gas-jets along the arcades. One of the flag raisers was
wounded in the cheek by the point of the saw as he
awkwardly held it in one hand in going down. The
stars were shining brightly, and lit up the folds as they
were whipped by the strong wind which was blowing, so
that they were plainly visible from below. According
to the historian of this episode, the lamplighter was so
much astonished by the sight of the flag, that he exclaimed,
"Hi, whar' dat thing come from? I aint nuvver
see dat befo'. Dese certan'y is cu'yous times." As
soon as he had shambled off in a state of bewilderment,
the flag-raisers crept back to their dormitories.

It is recorded that the excitement caused by the discovery
of the flag on the Rotunda, when day fairly
broke, was so great that lectures and recitations were
suspended. What would the authorities do in their displeasure?
Virginia had not withdrawn from the Union,
and the sentiment in favor of secession at the University
was not aggressive enough to suffer the flag to continue
to float where it was. The chairman posted the request
that, if it was lowered by those who had raised it, no
further notice would be taken of the act. It was soon
pulled down by another band of students; but finally
found its way to Carr's Hill, where it seems to have
been again thrown to the wind, but now on a very modest
building. From this time, the Confederate flag began
to be descried here and there in town. W. B. Hutton,
a student, mentions in his diary that he had, towards the
end of March, seen several waving above the streets of
Charlottesville; and on the 23rd of March, he was present
at an assembly at William Wertenbaker's house at
which a Confederate flag was unfolded, toasts to the

new Republic drunk, and speeches of a warlike character
delivered.

In April, a few days before the convention sitting in
the capitol at Richmond adopted the ordinance of secession,
there was a parade on the Lawn in celebration of
Jefferson's birthday. The participants comprised the
Albemarle Rifles, commanded by Captain R. T. W.
Duke, afterwards Colonel of the Forty-Sixth Virginia
Regiment; the Monticello Guards of Charlottesville,
commanded by Captain Mallory; the Southern Guard,
by Captain Hutter, and the Sons of Liberty, by Captain
Tosh. These troops numbered about four hundred men,
who had been assiduously trained and were fully equipped.
The drill took place in the afternoon, and as a compliment
to the University companies, the officer in general
charge was Captain Hutter. As the troops stood
drawn up in line before him, a message from O. Jennings
Wise, despatched from Richmond, was handed to
him. "Fort Sumter," it ran, "has surrendered, and the
Palmetto flag now floats over its walls." It is recorded
that this sensational announcement was received with
many evidences of satisfaction by all who were present.
Whatever differences of opinion touching the legality or
the expediency of Secession may, before this event, have
existed among the students or the professors, were
merged by President Lincoln's call for volunteers into
a common determination to resist the invasion of the
South which it foreshadowed.

The revulsion in feeling was reflected in a scene recalled,
with a characteristic spice of humor, by W. Gordon
McCabe. "A knot of us," he relates, "were gathered
at the Blue Cottage[4] and were discussing with great
warmth the affairs of the nation. It is needless to say

our voice was all for war. A friend of mine, then one
of the best students at the University, now a grave professor
in a theological seminary, alone remonstrated
against our abandonment of our studies, and spoke so
sensibly and so temperately as to cast a very decided
damper on our martial aspirations. Later on, during
the same day, our young Sir Galahad, Percival Elliott,
of Georgia, who now fills a soldier's grave, and myself,
walking up to the Rotunda from the postoffice, descried
hurrying towards us a familiar figure clad in a uniform
known to no service in Christendom; a revolver as large
as a small howitzer was buckled about his waist; and a
cavalry sabre of huge dimensions clanked furiously as
he came towards us. We were literally spellbound with
amazement. 'Why, Nelson, what in the name of all that
is righteous is the meaning of this?' 'Have not got
time to talk to you boys. Lincoln has called for 75,000
troops. I enlisted five minutes ago in the Albemarle
troop.' So sped away our peaceful counsellor of the
morning!"

Two incidents that are recorded in the proceedings of
the Washington Society, about a fortnight after the adoption
of the ordinance of secession by Virginia, cast an
unmistakable light on the sentiment then prevailing among
the young men. First, it was resolved that the money
which had been received from Mr. Everett and invested
in a bond,—the income from which was now used for the
annual purchase of a medal for the best essay in American
biography published in the magazine,—should be
returned to him just as soon as hostilities should end;
and secondly, it was voted that the surplus funds of the
society, amounting to two hundred dollars, should be

remitted at once to the Governor of the Commonwealth
for expenditure in defense of the State. It was neither
hope nor expectation of preserving the institution of
slavery that had brought about this perfect unanimity of
opinion among the students at this crisis. The spirit that
now animated them was succinctly expressed in a stanza
which was printed in the April, 1861, number of the
University magazine:

III. Antecedents of the Students

There were more than six hundred students domiciled
within the precincts at the beginning of the session of
1860–1, and although this assemblage dwindled as each
of the Gulf States seceded and summoned its absent citizens,
old and young, to its defense, nevertheless when the
conflagration at last burst out with the explosion at Fort
Sumter, the number of young men remaining at the University
was a very large one; and that number still comprised
many who had come up from the Southern region
beyond the borders of Virginia. From every point of
view, these young men were representatives of the very
best element of the Southern communities. With the exception
of a small minority, they belonged to the widely
known families which had always controlled the social
and political destinies of that broad division of country.
Imbued to the finger tips with the free, virile, and chivalrous
spirit which had been nurtured by the plantation
system, they were at once democratic and aristocratic in
their feelings. Their childhood and youth had been
passed in a rural environment; and to that life each returned

during his vacation. They had been accustomed
there to all the invigorating exercises of that life,—to
riding, to shooting, to fishing, to tramping; and there too
they had been inured by exposure to every change of season
and to every vicissitude of weather. If impatient
of restraint, it was because they had been always at
liberty to follow as they chose the manly pursuits and
the hardy recreations which this independent life had to
offer in such abundance. Even in boyhood, they had
been conscious of that pride of race which the presence
of slavery was so calculated to accentuate, and also of
that corresponding emotion which recognized that this
pride was only justifiable if sustained by a high sense of
personal honor, and an unshakable devotion to country.

No people have been more completely permeated with
love of home than the Southerners. They were a rural
people who, with no accession or infusion of alien blood,
had, from the colonial period, occupied the residences inherited
from their fathers. These roofs had been made
sacred by the long family story, and by the accumulated
traditions of many generations. Each was so secluded
in its site as to have long ago assumed an individuality
of its own. The history of these houses,—their heirlooms,
their surroundings, their occupations, their atmosphere,
—had left a permanent impression on the spirit
of the young men who went straight from those thresholds
to be educated in the University of Virginia.
Their loyalty to their respective States, in consequence
of this affection for their birthplace, was a passion as
ardent as that which the Swiss felt for their mountains,
or the Highlanders for their glens. The romances of
Scott, Lever, and Jane Porter, the tales of Maryatt,
Cooper, Simms and Kennedy,—Ivanhoe, Charles
O'Malley, Thaddeus of Warsaw, Yemassee, Jacob

Faithful, Horseshoe Robinson, and the Last of the Mohicans,
—were known by heart to most of them; and few
indeed were those among them who could not declaim
Hohenlinden, the Burial of Sir John Moore, Marco
Bozaris, and the Charge of the Light Brigade. The
bloody adventures of the pioneers in Indian warfare
along the dark frontier, the exploits of the soldiers of
the Revolution from King's Mountain to Yorktown,
the victories of Andrew Jackson over the redcoats and
the Cherokees, the incursions into the Everglades in
the Seminole revolt, the charges of the Southern regiments
at Monterey and Buena Vista,—such was the
food which had fed their youthful imaginations.[5]

All these martial impressions, this love of home, this
intense emotion of local patriotism, had exercised a
powerful influence over the minds of the young soldiers
who were now about to pass from the quiet dormitories
and lecture-halls of the University into scenes of battle
and wounds and death. The lofty principles of personal
honor inculcated in those lecture-rooms, the instinct
of manliness fostered under the arcades, in spite
of occasional turbulence and intemperance, fortified further
those silent lessons of courage, and fidelity, and loyalty
which they had first learned in the social circle of
their native households. "The University of Virginia,"

we are told by Randolph H. McKim, a matriculate of the
institution during that eventful year, and one who was
deeply responsive to the spirit of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice
that then prevailed, "had, from the first, succeeded
in the high endeavor to fix the gaze of her students
upon the achievements of intellect and generous
manhood rather than on the material prizes and rewards
of the world. She had set herself to cultivate manhood
in the young men who came to her. She had treated
them as men. She had trusted to them. She had appealed
to their sense of honor, their love of truth. The
students and alumni of the University did not stay to celebrate
the chances of success in the struggle to which
they were summoned, nor did they count the cost of
obedience to the clarion call of duty, but sprang forward
with alacrity, eager to offer their all in defense of their
homes and their firesides."

IV. A Taste of War

Fort Sumter surrendered to Beauregard in April, and
only three days after that event, a whisper stole through
the precincts that an order had been delivered to the
commanding officers of the Southern Guard and the
Sons of Liberty to march at once to the front. It was
reported that Fortress Monroe was to be occupied by
the Confederate troops. The ground of the rumor
turned out to be instructions from Governor Letcher,
transmitted through Captain R. T. W. Duke, to the
volunteer companies in Charlottesville,—which were to
go forward in concert with forces from Staunton,—to
start immediately for Harper's Ferry, with the view of
taking possession, in the name of Virginia, of the large
accumulation of firearms and machinery then stored in
the Federal arsenal there. Captain Duke, aware, from

his own personal observation, of the high degree of efficiency
in the drill which the Southern Guard and the
Sons of Liberty had reached, and of their burning desire
to participate in the operations in the field, sent off
an invitation to their captains to join their commands to
the forces stationed in Charlottesville, and to take part
with them in the proposed excursion. So great was the
enthusiasm with which this opportunity of becoming
bullet-tested and weather-hardened veterans was seized
by the members of the two companies, that the Faculty
could not make up their minds to refuse their permission,
and a leave of absence for a week was granted to all
who applied for it. The young men under twenty-one
years of age were advised to remain behind; but not even
they, it seems, were forbidden to go. It was left absolutely
to each member, whether above or below that age,
to determine whether he should accompany the troops;
and few appear to have preferred to continue their
studies.

On the night of the 17th, the two companies marched
with the calm air and steady step of seasoned soldiers
to the rendezvous of the Albemarle Rifles, under Captain
Duke, and the Monticello Guard, under Captain
Mallory, at the station. Some delay was caused there
by the detention of the West Augusta Guard and Imboden's
Battery, on account of a landslide which had temporarily
blocked the railway track west of Charlottesville.
"Never shall I forget," says W. Gordon McCabe,
a member of one of the University companies, "the night
of the 17th of April. Professor Holcombe read to us
the official announcement of the secession of the State,
and Lewis Coleman (Professor of Latin) came amongst
us to wish us godspeed." The Albemarle troops had
been formed into a battalion under the command of

Major Geo. W. Carr. The train, now waiting to transport
the troops, was made up of box-cars, and two of
these were assigned to the Southern Guard and the
Sons of Liberty, who, as one of their number has recorded,
left the station "sans rations, blankets, overcoats,
haversacks, canteens, or cartridges, and with not
even a candle to break the total darkness, but full of an
unquenchable enthusiasm."

Strasburg was reached by way of Manassas Junction
after midnight, on Thursday. As the first sign of dawn
appeared in the sky over the crest of the Blue Ridge,
the battalion, having been bountifully fed by the citizens,
started upon the march for Winchester, eighteen miles
away. Although the youthful soldiers were tramping
along a smooth turnpike, they soon began to suffer discomfort
from tight boots; and when they arrived in that
town, some of them were limping badly, and some were
actually soleless. As they proceeded, with many signs
of fatigue, down the principal street, they were passed by
a band, which was playing Yankee Doodle, and were
greeted with unwelcome shouts of "Hurrah for the
Union." The news that the Virginia Convention had
adopted the ordinance of Secession had not yet been
announced in this part of the Valley. A hospitable reception,
however, was given to the soldiers by the bulk
of the population, who invited them whole-heartedly to
enter their homes, and with alacrity, placed upon their
tables the best that their larders had to offer. It was
midnight before the advance was resumed. Box-cars
were now provided for the troops, and by dawn they had
arrived at Harper's Ferry and disembarked in the town.
But they soon found that they were too late, for anticipating
the invasion, the Federal forces had set fire to the
arsenal, and had thus destroyed, not only the building

with its machinery, but many thousand stands of arms.
Numerous muskets, however, had been hidden away in
the houses of the citizens, and these were surrendered to
the soldiers, who discovered in them a handy substitute
for their antique flintlocks.

The old dépôt near the end of the railroad bridge
was assigned to the use of the Southern Guard and the
Sons of Liberty. One of their number,[6] describing in
after-life their experiences, told, in a spirit that demonstrated
that their sense of the ridiculous had not been
chilled by war, "how they would be turned out at the
least alarm; how they stopped and searched all passing
trains; how one night, just as they were about to settle
themselves to rest in their barracks, the long roll beat,
and they were sent on a long march up Loudoun Heights
to support a battery (Imboden's), which an imaginary
enemy could not have reached possibly from the other
side of the Potomac, and which had been so placed that
it could not possibly have lowered its guns to hurt any
one; how, next morning, they scrambled from the face
of the mountain in preparation to repeat their lengthy
tramp, and returned to barracks much used up by their
first bivouac at night in the open air."

The University companies were detained at Harper's
Ferry four days only (April 19–22). On Monday,
April 23, they were ordered, along with the rest of the
battalion, to entrain for Charlottesville; and on their
arrival there, they disembarked at the crossing near
the University gate; but they were not permitted by
Major Carr to break ranks until, after a complimentary
speech, he had formally recommitted them to the Faculty.
The brief taste of war's excitement which they had just
obtained in the excursion down the Valley whetted their

appetite for more, and they promptly offered their services
to the military authorities of the State. The reply
was sent back that there was "too much good material
for officers in the ranks of the students to concentrate
it in a single organization." After a few drills, the
companies, which had been required to give up the rifles
delivered to them at Harper's Ferry, were quietly disbanded.
Many of their number returned at once to
their native States, to enroll themselves in local battalions
and regiments. Others joined the forces now operating
in Virginia. Among the latter were to be found men
who, like William J. Pegram and Alexander S. Pendleton,
were to win distinguished names in the war.

The Sons of Liberty and the Southern Guard were
not the only military bodies associated with the University
in these times of hurry and tumult. We are indebted
to Professor Francis H. Smith for a diverting
picture of the company, or rather squad, which was composed
of the members of the Faculty. Schele, as we
have seen, had been trained to military discipline in his
youth, and although he had not smelt gunpowder smoke
or handled a musket for many years, he cheerfully and
confidently undertook to exercise his sedate and scholarly
colleagues. "Wisely for a time," says Professor Smith,
"the company performed its evolutions in a private
room; but, later on, grew bold enough to appear on the
Lawn, to the boundless amusement of the better drilled
students. Armed with old-fashioned flintlock muskets of
antiquated pattern, gotten from a revolutionary residue
long kept in the State arsenal at Lexington, which they
held at all inclinations to the vertical, they presented
the most wonderful variety of movements for each word
of command. It was too much for human composure to
see the pairs of optics converged upon Mr. Schele, when

he gave the sharp, convulsive command, 'Attention,
Squat,' as it sounded to us. Unfortunately for the Confederacy,
this squad, calculated to be so formidable to
its foes, was never called to the field."

But there was a second organization, with a student
membership alone, which really served in an actual campaign.
This company does not appear to have, like its
two predecessors, assumed a definite name. It was under
the command of Captain J. P. Crane, of Maryland,
who, for skill and gallantry, was afterwards promoted to
the rank of Lieut.-Colonel. The lieutenants were James
L. Dinwiddie, James G. Wheatley, and W. W. Old.
After its first formation, accessions were made to it from
schools situated near the University, and from the ranks
of the alumni beyond the precincts. There were two
masters of arts enrolled in its youthful line, and at least
one bachelor of arts. Both Crane and Old had been
educated in military academies. These young volunteers,
after being put through an energetic series of
drills, petitioned to be ordered to the field, and in response
were instructed to join General Wise, who, at
that time, was operating, at the head of a considerable
force, in the wild mountain region of Western Virginia.
They received the command to attach themselves to the
regiment of Colonel Henningsen. Henningsen, a Scandinavian
soldier of fortune, had borne arms under Don
Carlos in Spain; had taken part in an excursion into Circassia;
had been an officer in the unsuccessful Hungarian
War of 1848–9; and had accompanied Kossuth on his
visit to the United States. He had also been a companion
of Walker in the famous filibuster expedition to
Nicaragua. The lieutenant-colonel had also shared the
perils of that romantic but unfortunate campaign.
General Wise, who was in supreme command, had been

as dashing a free lance in the domain of politics as his
subordinates had been on the battle fields of foreign countries.
Such in brief had been the adventurous careers
of the men who were to become the leaders of the
youthful and untried soldiers from the University of
Virginia.

The company did not set out until after the close of the
session in July.[7] The final celebration was held on the
6th of that month, and on that occasion, thirty coveted
parchments were delivered to members of the organization.
The diploma of master of arts was won by two,
the diploma of bachelor of arts by one, and one also
received the diploma of doctor of medicine. Flushed
with these academic successes, the company, fifty strong,
marched that night to the station in Charlottesville, and
went aboard the train for Clifton Forge, at that time the
terminus of the Central Railway. Wise was now encamped
in the vicinity of Gauley Bridge far to the west.
The company on their arrival at Clifton Forge, having no
tents to protect them from the weather, were compelled
to find improvised beds on the floor of the station.
This was their earliest experience of the privations of
the soldier's life, but it was to a degree so ameliorated,
that they afterwards looked upon the bare roof and
walls that had sheltered them beyond the mountains at
their back as falling little short of a positive luxury.
They patiently climbed up through the passes of the Alleghanies,
halted for a breathing spell at the White Sulphur
Springs, and on the third day, marched into Lewisburg,
where they were met by an officer on a foaming
horse, with orders to continue their advance at once to
Gauley Bridge. It was not until the 20th that they
were formally mustered into service.

Their first taste of warfare was disheartening. Wise
considered it discreet to withdraw from his position.
The bridge over the river was burnt, and the troops
fell back to the White Sulphur Springs. In the army,
as it thus retreated, there seems to have been an insubordinate
company of rangers, which had been placed
under surveillance. The duty of carrying this out was
imposed on the University students. In the retirement,
the rangers attempted to leave their guards far behind
by having recourse to the quick step; but they soon found
out that those youthful legs were fully competent to
keep up the same rate of speed as their own more hardened
ones. Beginning by disliking their custodians, they
ended in becoming their fast friends. The watchfulness
was relaxed, and the rangers either acted as substitutes
for the young men in keeping guard, or they
made sweeping excursions into the adjacent country and
brought in supplies of food.

Wise's Legion was reorganized at the White Sulphur
Springs. The University contingent was now designated
as Company G of the Second Regiment. It took an
equal part in the campaign which the small army soon
started upon through this rough region, in which sickness
turned out to be more destructive than the bullets
of the enemy. At Sewall's Mountain, the company came
under fire for the first time. It was stationed at the
summit of that height while the forces of Rosecrans had
posted themselves on its north flank. There was a
clearing on the top, and to this the young men were
ordered to march for a drill. Just below this open space,
there ran a turnpike, which, from that point, was concealed
by a heavy fringe of trees. As the young men
were crossing the edge of the clearing, a volley of musketry
was emptied at them from the screen of trees below;

and this was several times repeated. The company
was ordered to rush the wood, and drive out the
enemy, but before they could do so, the sharpshooters
had vanished. A few days later, while the youthful
soldiers were employed in discharging the duty of pickets,
they were again fired upon; and again the wood, when
entered, was found to be vacant. When Rosecrans retreated
westward, the Confederate forces fell back eastward
to the neighborhood of Lewisburg, where harsh
weather soon set in. Here the members of the University
company erected rude chimneys at the side of their tents,
cut their own fuel, learned to knead dough, and to
patch their tattered uniforms. They brightened the
tardy hours by gaily trolling out the old college songs.
One was in Latin, and it was sung to the tune of Maryland,
my Maryland, or of the Marseillaise. The most
popular of all began with the lines, the first of which
was suggestive of their own situation,

Bonnie Blue Flag, Dixie, and other songs which were
popular during the war, were made to echo from the
high and wooded mountain walls. The boys, it seems,
had an insatiable thirst for buttermilk. As they marched
for exercise along the turnpike that wound in and out
between Lewisburg and Gauley Bridge, they would pause
in front of a log cabin by the side of the road, and sing
one of their songs at the top of their voices, and then
call out lustily for buttermilk. If the shouted request
was stolidly received, they would say,

This threat or warning, we are told by the historian
of the company, was always successful in opening the
reluctant hand of the mountaineer even though only a
cup-full remained in the bottom of his pail.

In December, 1861, it was decided by the military
authorities that the young men should be distributed
among the regiments that had been recruited in the vicinity
of their homes. They were, however, first
marched back to Charlottesville, under the command of
Julian Pratt; and on January 13, 1862, were formally
mustered out.

V. Sacrifices for the Confederate Cause

At least two companies were formed for drill during
the remaining months of 1861. But these do not
appear to have retained their organization,—instead,
the students composing them were afterwards drawn into
the war as members of different battalions. One of
these companies was under the command of Robert E.
Lee, Jr., a son of the General of the same name; the
other, of Charles W. Trueheart. Both W. H. Young
and John H. Maury, the son of Matthew F. Maury, the
pathfinder of the seas, were at one time enrolled as the
principal officers in charge. Major George Ross, subsequently
a distinguished physician in civil life, who had
received his military training at the Virginia Military
Institute, served as commandant. Every collegian whose
age was above eighteen was subject to conscription. The
Faculty endeavored to induce the Secretary of War to
put off until after commencement the operation of this
law for all who had passed that age; but their petition
was unsuccessful; and the like failure befell a similar application,
at a later date, which asked for exemption for

all students under seventeen until the end of the session
in which they should reach their eighteenth birthday.

It has been estimated that five hundred and fifteen of
the young men in attendance in 1861 joined the armies in
the field before the close of that year. There were
approximately nine thousand matriculates entered on the
University rolls between 1825 and 1865, and it is calculated
from the records that not less than twenty-seven
per cent. of the survivors of this number,—about
two thousand, four hundred and eighty-one approximately,
—took an active part in the hostilities, whether
occurring on land or sea. About thirteen hundred of this
proportion served in the capacity of officers. It may be
roughly stated that about five hundred of the University
alumni perished in the service. During the session of
1860–61, there were eight hundred and thirty-three matriculates
enrolled at Harvard as compared with six
hundred and thirty enrolled at the University of Virginia,
and yet the loss among these six hundred and thirty alone
was equal to nearly one half of the loss which fell upon
the entire body of the alumni of Harvard so far as they
were eligible for enlistment. There were only nine hundred
and thirty-eight graduates of Harvard in the service.
Of these, only one hundred and seventeen,—according
to the inscription upon the tablets in the memorial
hall at Cambridge,—were killed or died of disease.
It is estimated that about eighty-six of the young men who
left the University of Virginia to enter the war in 1861
perished in the field or hospital. Placing the loss among
the Harvard graduates at one hundred and thirty-eight,
—the figure mentioned in some of the records,—the proportion
of deaths among them was about four and a

half times smaller than the proportion among the sons
of the University of Virginia, in consequence of their participation
in the same conflict.

Among the graduates of the latter institution who
fell were twelve masters of arts, two bachelors of arts,
nine bachelors of laws, and two doctors of medicine.
The heavy mortality among them was chiefly due to the
fact that, in the beginning, the great body of these alumni
took their place in the line along with the gallant yeomen
of the South. If promotion followed, as it did in so
large a number of instances, it was accepted with satisfaction;
but if it did not follow, the duty of the common
soldier was discharged with cheerfulness to the end.
Rarely has there been found in a modern army an element
comparable to this,—an element that could count
upon its roll so many graduates in arts and letters, in
the languages, in the physical sciences, in the higher mathematics,
and in the learned professions.

Apart from the peril to life and health which threatened
these graduates at every step after they were mustered
into service, what were the conditions that surrounded
them? What had they to expect beyond the
gratification of their patriotic ardour and the satisfaction
of their consciences? "Eleven dollars a month was the
stipend," says Randolph H. McKim, one of the bravest
and most devoted of that band, describing his own experience,
which was the experience of all. "Flour, bacon,
and peanut coffee was their bill of fare; the hard earth,
or three fence rails tilted up on end, their bed; their
knapsacks, their pillows, and a flimsy blanket their covering;
the firmament of stars generally their only tent;
their clothes a thing of shreds and patches. There was
no provision in the Confederate army for recognizing,
either by decoration or by promotion in the field, distinguished

acts of gallantry. Scores of these men (alumni
who perished) would have been entitled to the Victoria
Cross if they had been serving in the British Army.
Their only reward was the consciousness of duty done."

The youthfulness of the greater number of the graduates
who perished during the war imparts an additional
pathos to their last crowning act of self-sacrifice. The
ages of at least one hundred and seventy of those whose
names are inscribed upon the tablets attached to the
walls of the Rotunda are known,—only thirty-nine of
that number were over twenty-four years of age when
killed; the remainder were under that age. There
were nineteen under twenty-two years, fifteen under
twenty-one, sixteen under twenty, eight under eighteen,
nine under seventeen, and three under sixteen. It is
reasonable to presume that the same proportions are
true of the entire list preserved upon the eloquent face
of the bronze.

Among the alumni embraced in the roll of youthful and
gallant spirits who rushed to the field with such high enthusiasm,
only to perish there, how is it possible to make
a choice when all were equally unselfish, equally devoted,
and equally brave, and when all, with equal cheerfulness,
offered up their lives upon the altars of their native commonwealths?
In the long series of chapters in which
the services of the South to the cause of freedom and
patriotism are written, there is not one which contains a
more splendid record than that which relates the story
of the sons of the University who died during the War
between the States. The memorial volume descriptive
of their heroic careers has all the romantic flavor of the
legends of the Round Table; and naturally so, for these
men were, in another age, and upon another battleground,
as brave and chivalrous as the shining knights

who followed King Arthur. The epitaph engraved upon
the tomb of Joseph E. Cox, of Chesterfield county, one
of their number, epitomizes the lives of his comrades:
"Born a gentleman, bred a scholar, and died a Christian
soldier." We shall confine our references to a few of
his companions in arms who seem to typify, with most
fidelity, the character and the spirit of that glorious company
of youthful paladins and martyrs.[8]

VI. Paladins and Martyrs

Dabney Carr Harrison was sprung from a family of
great distinction, which had been associated with the
soil of Virginia from the earliest colonial era. Even
in childhood, he was remarkable for his knowledge.
At nine years of age, he had read Hume's History of
England from its beginning to its conclusion; and was
so far advanced in his studies by fifteen, that he was
able to enter the sophomore class at Princeton University.
After a course in the School of Law at the University of
Virginia, spread over two years, he returned to Martinsburg,
in Jefferson county, where the members of his immediate
family were residing. At this time, when he
stood upon the threshold of his majority, he is said to
have possessed a countenance that was classical in feature,
and serene and contemplative in expression; a nature
that was at once frank, cordial, and fearless; and manners
singularly gentle and refined. His disposition had
always been softened by a profound but unobtrusive
piety; and he soon came to the decision that the ministry
of the gospel was to be his real vocation in life.

At twenty-seven years of age, Harrison was stationed
at the University of Virginia as the chaplain of the institution.

His incumbency was marked by the establishment
of the Young Men's Christian Association, and by
a revival of religious feeling, that was largely attributable
to his own saintly example, untiring zeal, and boundless
sympathy, in responding to every call for spiritual
assistance. He appeared like a youthful apostle returned
to life from the infancy of the Christian faith,
with a spirit touched with the primitive simplicity and
devotion that glorified that younger age. "I never knew
him," said an intimate friend of these years, "to neglect
a duty or even to postpone one. He was always faithful
to his country, and faithful to his God." "Who
that heard his last prayer amongst us," exclaims Dr.
McGuffey, "can ever forget the man or his manner as he
stood in the pastor's pew in front of the pulpit at the
close of the sermon (by another), and pleaded with God
for his country and the enemies of that country."

The war had now begun, and in a short time, the news
arrived that two of his cousins, men of brilliant promise
and graduates of the University, Holmes and Tucker
Conrad, of Winchester, had been killed. Then followed
the announcement that a third cousin, Carter H. Harrison,
had fallen, then that his own brother also had perished.
"I must take his place," was his quiet response
to this last fateful message. After he had participated
in the tumult of the actual battlefield, he said, with that
instinctive courage, and that impulsive charity, which
were combined in his nature in equal proportions, "I
can fight for my country, but I cannot hate my enemy."
Promoted to a captaincy as a reward for his fidelity and
intelligence in the discharge of the military duties assigned
him, he took quick advantage of every opening
to administer as pastor to the spiritual wants of his soldiers.
"While in camp in Richmond," we are told by

Dr. Hoge, "he moved about as one whose superiority
was tacitly acknowledged without exciting ill-will or envy;
and when he left us, he was regretted as one whose
place was not to be filled again." The men of his company
detected in his character the purity of womanhood
blended with the valor of manhood; and he is said to
have given them, in his example, an impression of the
power and sweetness of religious principles far deeper
than any they had previously experienced. "You ought
to be braver than the rest of us," remarked an officer to
him, who had observed his perfect self-possession on the
field of battle. "Why so?" was the response. "Because
you have everything settled for eternity. Because
you have nothing to fear after death."

It was asserted of him by the troops that served under
him, that he never gave them the order "go on." It
was invariably, when they were about to advance against
the enemy, "come on." His commands were always
delivered from in front of them; never from behind
them. He fell at last shot through the lung, after
three bullets had passed through his hat, and one across
his temple, leaving a bloody streak in its course. "I die
content and happy," he said not long before he expired,
"trusting in the merits of my Saviour, Jesus Christ. I
commit my wife and children to their Father and mine."
A short feverish sleep preceded his last breath. "Company
K," he cried out, starting up in his bed, "you have
no captain now, but never give up, never surrender."
"A gentleman, a scholar," was the comment of the Rev.
J. M. Atkinson, his associate in the ministry, when told
of his death, "a martyr to his conscientious conviction
of public duty and uncalculating devotion to his country.
Among the deified heroes of ancient song, in the golden
record of Grecian fame, in the stirring chronicle of the

mediaeval knighthood, in the ranks of war, in the halls of
learning, in the temple of religion, a nobler name is not
registered than his, nor a nobler spirit mourned."

Randolph Fairfax, the grandson of the ninth Baron
Fairfax, of Cameron, was sprung from a family which
had been conspicuous in England and America through
eight centuries,—representatives of its various branches
had won distinction at the council-table, in the camp, on
the bench, and in the church. Through his mother, a
descendant of Archibald Cary, he was a near kinsman
of the Randolphs, Lees, and Carters, and other eminent
families long associated with the social and political history
of the State. When the war began, he was a student
at the University of Virginia, and joining the
Rockbridge Artillery, was thrown, in its ranks, with
many of the bravest and noblest spirits that entered the
Confederate armies, young men of remarkable talents,
of finished education, and of the highest social station.
In the long interval between March and December, 1862,
—during which time there occurred a succession of desperate
campaigns,—he never asked for a furlough, and
was very rarely off duty. The searching trials, in the
form of the almost unprecedented perils and privations
which he was called upon to pass through, left his spirit
serene and unshaken. His comrades spoke of him as
the model soldier, "because he was scrupulously exact in
the discharge of every order, exemplary in his endurance
of hardship, brave, self-possessed, and efficient in
action."

"Morally, I have not known his superior, and intellectually
he was one of the first young men of his day,"
was the tribute of the Rev. J. P. McGuire, his former
teacher. "A faithful soldier of his country and of his
God," said Kinloch Nelson, a comrade, who was himself

the personification of the Christian warrior, "modest
in manners, unselfish in disposition, never swerving from
the path of duty. In many situations, I have seen him
tested, and in all he evinced the same heroism." "If
there was one trait in him more striking than others,"
we are told by Berkeley Minor, another comrade, "it
was his calm, earnest, trustful demeanor in time of battle,
resulting, as I believe, from his abiding trust in the
providence and love of God." "I have never known a
young man," said Colonel Poague, "whose life was so
free from the frailties of human nature, and whose character
in all its aspects formed so faultless a model for
the imitation of others." And General Lee himself,
who must have witnessed ten thousand acts of gallantry
and self-sacrifice performed by his soldiers on the battlefield,
wrote to the stricken father, when he heard of the
son's death, "I have watched his conduct from the commencement
of the war, and have pointed with pride to the
patriotism, self-denial, and manliness of character he has
exhibited."

In all that splendid roll of youthful martyrs, there
was not one who exemplified more fully than Lewis M.
Coleman did the brief and simple but noble legend upon
the tomb of Joseph Cox, which we have already quoted:
"Born a gentleman, bred a scholar, and died a Christian
soldier." He was sprung from the family which numbered
in its membership the most distinguished headmaster
in the history of Virginia, Frederick W. Coleman;
and he himself exhibited, almost from childhood, the
tastes of an acquisitive and discriminating scholar.
When he went up to the University of Virginia in 1844,
still a youth in years, he was so thoroughly prepared for
his new classes, his habits of application were so matured
and so fixed, his enthusiasm for every branch of academic

knowledge was so consuming, that he took at once a
position in the very first rank of his fellows. He closed
his career in those halls as a master of arts. We have
already described the extraordinary value of his educational
work as principal of Hanover Academy, the reward
of which was his appointment to the vacant chair of
Gessner Harrison. As our previous narrative has revealed,
Harrison was the most famous teacher of the
ancient languages of his day in the South, and no higher
professional compliment could have been paid his former
pupil than to single him out as the proper successor of
so great an instructor.

Coleman had been trained in the school of the straightest
states-rights, but it was not alarm for the safety of
these principles, but rather resentment at the invasion
of his native commonwealth, which prompted him to
resign his professorship and enter the army. He was
elected to the captaincy of a company raised by his own
energy; and soon showing himself to be an expert in
drill, and in the science of artillery also, to which arm of
the service he belonged, and exhibiting too an unusual
capacity to control and direct men, he was advanced to
a majority, after he had passed without a scratch through
two of the most sanguinary campaigns of the war.
When the Army of Northern Virginia was reorganized
in 1862, the opportunity to go back to his former duties
at the University was again open to him, but he refused
to leave his post, and, in the end, died of a wound received
in one of the assaults during the battle of Fredericksburg.
As he lay on his last bed, he said, in a moment
of transient hopefulness, that, should he recover,
he would at once take his station again at the front with
his surviving comrades.

In becoming a soldier, Coleman had brushed to one

side all the alluring things to which his heart was devoted,
—books, kindred, friends, family, home. "Without
compulsion or persuasion," it was said of him at the
time, "he embraced a life of hardship, toil, want, and
danger, alike uncongenial with his habits and unsuited
to his tastes. No ardor for military glory urged him to
this course; no desire to win the applause of men; but
simply the sense of duty, which actuated him throughout
life. Neither the solicitations of friends, nor the sorrow
of separation from his beloved home and family, nor
hardship, nor sickness, nor wounds, nor death, had power
to shake the settled purpose of his soul." Throughout
his military service, he never omitted, as each Sunday
came around, to call the members of his command together
for religious worship, and his last words were,
"Tell General Lee and General Jackson that they know
how Christian soldiers can fight. I wish they could see
now how a Christian soldier can die."

Cotesworth Pinckney Seabrook, of South Carolina, a
student of 1860, was, in the memory of all who had
known him, as inspiring a figure as Coleman. "He
seemed raised up from among the mediaeval dead and
set in the midst of us," said W. Gordon McCabe, his
companion in college and comrade in arms, "to give proof
that the spirit of knightly courtesy, constancy, and valor
had not departed from our times." All these high
qualities had been inherited from an ancestry which embraced
a distinguished roll of names, among which were
those of Governor Seabrook and Charles Cotesworth
Pinckney, of the Revolution. During his sojourn as a
student at the Universty of Virginia, he showed a vivid
interest in the spiritual welfare of the rude mountaineers,
and, every Sunday, was in the habit of walking many
miles to conduct religious services for their benefit.

Even during this early period of life, he was remarkable
for his gentle humor and exquisite sensibility. Promptly,
when the telegraph announced that his native State had
voted to withdraw from the Union, he decided to return
to Charleston and volunteer as a soldier. The night before
his departure, his college mates hastened to his
room, and joining hands, sang Auld Lang Syne with all
the impulsive loyalty and fervor of their years. "Not
one of those who stood within that circle," says Colonel
McCabe, "failed to serve his country in arms. Not a
few of the brave young hearts then beating strong with
health and hope, and all the joyous valor of youth were
soon to be stilled on the field of battle."

But before that fate overtook Seabrook, he had many
opportunities of drinking deeply of all the perilous delights
of the warrior. "We had the satisfaction," he
wrote after first Cold Harbour, "of charging through
grape, canister, and bullets for half a mile." He spoke
of it, like the great Admiral Nelson, as if it were some
pleasant pastime that had suddenly and unexpectedly
fallen in his way. Frayser's Farm, Malvern Hill, Cedar
Mountain, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg,
—he fought upon all these fields; and wherever the
flying shots were thickest and the affray bloodiest, there
his youthful figure was to be descried, his spirit still as
full of "satisfaction" as it had been in the midst of the
rush and roar of Cold Harbour. "Have no fear for
me," he wrote his mother, "for I have no fear for myself.
My trust in God is always strong enough in such
circumstances as these to keep me cool and confident."

The following day,—the day of Chancellorsville,—
he was struck down; and at his burial, the entire regiment
assembled to honor his memory by their presence.
Wrapped around with his soldier's blanket, his body

was committed to the ground on the spot where he was
killed. His gay humor had never flagged under hardships
and privations; and his smile seemed only to grow
more radiant and more care-free, the more deadly the
perils of shot and shell which surrounded him. Thus
passed away a warrior, who, to his lamenting comrades,
represented the rarest union, as one of them said, "of
gentle and soldierly virtue, humble piety, splendid
courage, unstained purity, and complete self-abnegation."

John Morris was admitted to the University in 1858,
and would have won the degree of master of arts had
not the war interrupted his studies. He was soon enrolled
in the Goochland Artillery; and having been appointed
sergeant, took charge of a gun. Not a thought,
not an aspiration, of the man but was embarked in the
success of the cause; and it was said of him that he was
as anxiously interested as the captain in increasing the
efficiency of his company. His devotion to his gun was
as personal as if it had been a sentient and conscious
thing. The expertness which he exhibited in manipulating
it, and his perfect equanimity when under fire, aroused
the admiration and riveted the confidence of his officers
from the start. The only complaint made of his conduct
was that he was too indifferent to his own safety.
As a reward for his skill, tenacity, and bravery, he was
advanced to a captaincy; but he refused to accept this
higher station,—he was now lieutenant of ordnance,—on
the ground that it would compel him to remain too far
in the rear while his men were fighting hand to hand in
front. His insensibility to danger so often seemed so
rash and so unnecessary, that his comrades, in their solicitude
for his life, remonstrated with him; but he refused
to listen. When he heard the first roar of the
guns at Gettysburg, he hastened towards the advance line.

"Passing the hill upon which some officers were standing,
and which commanded a view of the whole field,"
says one of his fellow-soldiers, "he inquired of me for
Pegram's battalion of artillery (of which he was the
ordnance officer). Pointing out its position, I again
referred to his useless risking of his life. He made no
reply, but putting spurs to his horse, his erect and graceful
form soon disappeared, and was lost in the smoke and
tumult of battle. Half an hour later he was killed."

William Fauntleroy Cocke, of Oakland, Cumberland
county, Virginia,—an estate which had descended in his
family unbrokenly from the original grant from the
King,—was a grandson of Edmund Randolph, Secretary
of State in Washington's cabinet, and a near kinsman of
General John Hartwell Cocke. The spirit of his childhood
and youth was colored and moulded by the traditions,
habits, and convictions that prevailed in the typical
plantation home of his native State in the era of slavery.
Oakland offered a completely rounded picture of all the
finer feudal aspects of the old regime of the South,—a
large and devoted domestic circle, several hundred slaves,
a broad expanse of acres, abundance, ease, culture and
hospitality unbounded. Cocke, while still a boy, became
an expert in the numerous sports and accomplishments
of the country gentleman of that day,—was a fearless
rider, a tireless angler, and an unerring shot. But these
amusements did not divert his mind altogether from his
serious studies,—it was asserted of him that Virgil,
Xenophon, and Euclid even then divided his hours with
horses, dogs, guns, and fishing rods.

So vigorous was his frame, and so firm were his muscles,
in consequence of these previous exercises in the
open air, that, during his studentship at the University
of Virginia, he possessed the reputation of being the

strongest man within the precincts, although his competitors
were at least five hundred in number. No harsh
or rude expression to either child or servant, it was stated
of him at this time, could be recalled by anyone who
knew him. No college mate could justly accuse him of
an act of injustice, or impropriety, or even of ordinary
thoughtlessness. No professor had ever to reprove him
for any failure in study,—for he never failed,—and
yet he moved about among his comrades as lighthearted,
as genial, as free from any conscious pretension
to goodness, as the most popular leader in the neverending
frolics of college life. He was among the foremost
in every branch of sport which was then open to the
students' enjoyment; and at the same time, he shirked
none of the obligations of the lecture-room. Indeed,
so successful was he with his text-books that he graduated
in the four separate courses, upon the acquisition of
which he had concentrated his powers during his single
collegiate year.

Returning to Oakland, Cocke entered at once upon
the duties of a planter's life. The owner of an ancestral
home, the master of many slaves, the proprietor of farspreading
fields and woods, he responded, with all his
remarkable energy and intelligence, to the practical requirements
of his station. But yet he never suffered his
taste for classical literature to grow rusty by neglect.
It was said of him that he never mounted his horse in
the morning to ride over his farm in order to superintend
the operations of his servants without first slipping
a volume of Virgil or Horace or Ovid in his coat-pocket
to read by the way. It is even intimated that he
would sometimes become so absorbed in the Odyssey as
to be oblivious of the fact for the moment that his overseer
was impatiently awaiting his coming for the day's

instructions; and it was even asserted that the wit of
Aristophanes had been known to make him indifferent,
for the time being, to his black foreman's sage prognostications
upon the crops or the weather.

When war was declared, this young man was in the
possession of every gift which a benignant fairy could
bestow; an honorable family name, a beautiful inherited
home, a broad domain, troops of loyal and contented
bondsmen, youth, health, culture, independence, popular
esteem,—all were his in abundance. Without hesitation,
without reluctance, without apparently a natural
sigh in looking back upon all that he was to leave behind,
he entered the army as an unassuming soldier in the regular
line. Although he might have aspired to rank, he, in
his modesty and self-forgetfulness, asked no favor of his
fellow-soldiers, but took his place quietly among them,
equally the comrade of those who filled the most conspicuous
social position in the community and of those
who occupied the humblest. The landed proprietor, the
overseer, the blacksmith, the carpenter, every difference
in social station was swallowed up as they shouldered
their muskets and marched side to side to resist the invading
enemy, gallant brothers all in their sublime devotion
to the Southern cause.

There was no form of hardship, no variety of privation,
which the gently-nurtured, highly-educated Cocke
was not ready to undergo with a smile that never lost its
bright spontaneity. It was said of him that no man,
however brawny of arm and hardened to gross manual
labor, could, in digging trenches, make the dirt fly with
more energy than he. He led the stalwart line here
as he had led it in the athletic field at college. In the
midst of the rough incidents of camp life, and the impending
perils of skirmish and battle, he never lost that bearing

of exquisite courtesy, that spirit of unaffected benevolence,
which had distinguished his conduct in times
of peace. In the fight at Williamsburg, a portion of a
shell struck his hat from his head. So tattered became
his shoes from the roughest tramping, that, by the time
he joined his regiment in Richmond, his feet could be
seen through the holes. Injured severely in the knee at
Second Manassas, he was only able to hobble about during
several months, which interval he spent at home.
While passing his last days there, he became a member of
the church, and from this time until his death, a copy
of the Greek Testament, which he constantly read, was
carried upon his person. His comrades at the front
used the occasion of his absence to elect him a lieutenant
of their company,—a promotion which they knew
he would have refused had he been present at the meeting.
Before the lameness that resulted from his wound
had been cured, he reported again for duty. He took
part in all the battles and marches that followed the
month of January, 1863, and in the end, perished in the
holocaust of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg.

VII. Paladins and Martyrs, Continued

William T. Haskell, of South Carolina, was the
grandson of an officer who had received the formal thanks
of Congress for his brilliant participation in the resistance
to the British when they invaded that State during
the Revolution. So soon as the passage of the ordinance
of secession at Columbia was reported by telegraph
to the University of Virginia, young Haskell, like Seabrook,
dropped his books and hurried to Charleston to
join the forces which were already concentrating for the
defense of that city. He was quickly commissioned a
captain in the regiment of Colonel Gregg, which comprised

many members of the historic families of the
State. The subordinate officers of his own company,
for instance, were Lieutenants John G. Barnwell, Grimke
Rhett, and Pinckney Seabrook, youthful paladins through
whose veins coursed the blood that had descended from
generations of men distinguished by their services to the
commonwealth.

It was said of Haskell that, from this time forward,
he displayed his heroic qualities as conspicuously in enduring
all the horrors of hunger and cold as in confronting
the advancing ranks of the enemy. It was no rare
experience for him,—so constantly did he expose his
person,—to have his clothes perforated by bullets, his
cap knocked from his head by a flying ball, his sword
battered by a fragment of shell. His skill, his boldness,
his perfect imperturbability in the midst of peril, led
to his promotion to the command of a battalion of sharpshooters.
Through a succession of great battles he
passed unscathed, although, during their progress, he had
been posted at the most dangerous points. Cold Harbor,
Manassas, and Chancellorsville,—all left him without
a scar; but, like Cocke, he fell at last at Gettysburg,
where he had serenely brought himself under the hottest
fire on the front line while engaged in choosing the most
favorable strategic spot for his troops to occupy. The
mail that carried the news of his death to his mother, also
carried to her the announcement of the death of another
son, and of her brother, Langdon Cheves. It was noticed
that Haskell was one of the first to administer at
the bedside of the wounded. "He brought into the
dreary hospital," we are told, "the tenderness of a
woman, and with a touch like hers, softened the hard
pallet to the sick. His actions were animated by Christian
principles and illuminated by Christian faith."

William B. Newton, acting Colonel of the Fourth Virginia
Cavalry, was a grandson of Judge William Brockenbrough,
of the Court of Appeals. After his graduation
at the University of Virginia, he became a member of
the bar of Hanover county, and at once took a very high
rank in his profession. Even as a young practitioner,
he was remarkable for legal acumen, for clear and vigorous
eloquence, and for brilliant powers of wit, humor,
and satire. A keen intellect, combined with firmness of
character, goodness of heart, and purity of morals, won
for him such popular esteem, that, in 1859, he was
elected to the General Assembly without a ballot being
cast in opposition to his candidacy. At this time, the
fundamental interests of his life were not limited to
law and politics,—he displayed a decided taste also for
agricultural experiments. He found too an unceasing
enjoyment in literature, and contributed frequently to
periodicals and newspapers of standing. It was very
generally acknowledged, in spite of his youth, that he
was the most talented citizen of the State; and this reputation
he sustained by an address which he delivered in
the Legislature, during the session of 1859–60, on a resolution
to place the Commonwealth at once in the posture
of self-defense; and by a speech at Hanover Court-House,
after the election of Lincoln, on the now disturbed outlook
for the whole country.

When a cavalry company was organized in the county
a short time after the adoption of the ordinance of secession
by the Virginia Convention, Newton was elected to
the first lieutenancy. At the time of the reorganization
of the army in 1862, he was the most popular member of
his regiment, and, had he so chosen, could have supplanted
anyone of his superior officers by election. He
positively refused to accept any promotion, unless adjudged

to him for meritorious conduct on the battlefield.
He did this in order to set an example which he considered
essential to the success of the cause. Captured
at Williamsburg, he reported to the colonel of his regiment
on the second day after his release. When he was
chosen captain of his company, he was requested to take
position in front of his men, now drawn up in line. So
soon as he had done so, a sergeant, leading a superb
horse, fully equipped, advanced to the spot where he was
standing. The animal was then formally presented to
him, and the gift was accompanied by a speech from a
chosen spokesman expressive of the esteem and affection
in which he was held by his comrades.

From that gratifying hour, Newton's life was passed
in the midst of fighting until the end. Fredericksburg,
Chancellorsville, Gettysburg,—wherever the cavalry of
the two opposing armies clashed, there he was to be
found; and through it all, so bravely did he act on the
battlefield, so courteously and uprightly did he bear himself
in the camp, that he was called the Chevalier Bayard
of his division. His company always rode at the head
of the column; and he at the head of his company,—now
boldly attacking the enemy in one quarter, now
firmly repelling him in another. He fell on the Rapidan
as he was leading his soldiers; and the Governor of
the State sent a special message to the General Assembly,
which lauded his gallantry and his virtues, and
lamented his death as a public loss.

William Wellford Randolph was sprung from stock
that had long occupied a position of social and political
distinction in his native State. As a member of the
Nelson Rifles, he took part at First Manassas in the
capture of the Henry House, the key to the battlefield,
which, in the end, threw the victory to the side of the

Confederate army. He was chosen the captain of his
company under remarkable circumstances. He had
boldly rescued a slave who had fallen into the hands of
a couple of bullies. These men, when Randolph's name
was brought up for election, endeavored to discredit him
by saying, with a sneer, that he had taken a black man's
part against a white man's. Standing in front of his
company, Randolph gave the reasons that had caused him
to interfere, and branding all statements to the contrary
as lies, challenged the negro's principal oppressor to a
duel. He was elected to the captaincy by a unanimous
vote.

Through all the great battles which followed,—the
Valley campaign, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg,
the Wilderness,—he passed unharmed, but with
an ever growing reputation for courage. It was not
many months before he won the extraordinary distinction
of being called "the intrepid Randolph" in an army
that numbered such a host of gallant soldiers as the
Army of Northern Virginia. Fear was an emotion that
was foreign to his breast, and he was pointed out by the
troops as the officer with the charmed life, for no matter
how often he exposed his person, no bullet found
lodgment in his body. At Gettysburg, so hot was the
fire at one time, that his men took temporary refuge behind
their breastworks. The enemy were just forming
in ranks for a charge. Leaping out on top of the embankment,
Randolph walked backwards and forwards,
waving his sword and crying out to his soldiers to follow
his example. They clambered up from the trenches,
delivered a volley into the mass of advancing Federals,
and then rushing towards them with the wild rebel yell,
drove them back in confusion.

Throughout his military career,—which ended at the

Wilderness, after his promotion to the colonelcy of his
regiment, which had already lost three commanders,—Randolph
seems to have been inspired with the primitive
piety and the sublime courage of Chinese Gordon.
Always on the front line in battle, leading and animating
his men, he breathed his last, after cheerfully uttering
the grand words worthy of the hero who perished at
the fall of Khartoum, "Jesus can receive the soul of the
warrior from the battlefield as well as from the softest
couch."[9]

Leonard A. Henderson, of North Carolina, was killed
before he had passed his twenty-third year. He belonged
to a family that had furnished a long roll of
famous lawyers, statesmen, and teachers to the service
of his native commonwealth. Returning to the University
of Virginia with his company from the excursion
to Harper's Ferry, in 1861, he, just as soon as it was
disbanded, hurried off to Wilmington, where he was mustered
in as a private soldier. He had asked his father
with great earnestness to solicit no promotion for him,
as his preference was for the line. "I left college," he
said, "not to seek office, but to defend the old North
State." When Plymouth was stormed, he was one of
the three officers,—for he was advanced, in spite of his
protest,—who led the column. Wounded in the thigh,
later in the war, at Drury's Bluff, he refused to retire
to the rear, but partially disabled in limb as he was, and
enfeebled by loss of blood, he insisted on remaining at
the head of his soldiers. Before he had fully recovered,
he was, at his persistent request, placed in command of
fifty skirmishers. On one occasion, the whole line of
sharpshooters were ordered to go forward, but by some

error of the officer bringing the order, Captain Henderson
alone received it. Forming his company at once, and
without support, he led it in a charge upon the enemy's
rifle pits, and carried them, although the foe had endeavored
to halt his men by a fire directed simultaneously
from in front and from either flank.

William J. Pegram was a member of the University
law school in 1860, and, at that time, was nineteen years
of age. He became, as we have already stated, an
officer in one of the University companies; but his active
service began with his election to a lieutenancy in the
Purcell Battery, which was constantly engaged from first
Manassas down to the defense of Petersburg. During
all this interval of fighting and marching, Pegram was
enrolled in its membership. "With such an executive
officer," said Lindsay Walker, its captain, "commanding
a battery,—which is one of the most troublesome
things in the world,—becomes a pleasure." After
Walker's promotion, Pegram was chosen captain, to
succeed him. At Mechanicsville, he was brought under
the fusillade of a large body of infantry and the converging
broadsides of six gun batteries at the same moment;
but he held his ground long after night had fallen,
although four of his own field-pieces had been shattered,
half of his artillery horses struck dead and two of his
officers wounded. Fifty of his cannoneers had either been
killed or disabled. Shortened as he was in men and
guns,—for only two guns remained in use,—he earnestly
asked General Hill for permission to lead the advance.

His battery, throughout the Seven Days' Battles, was
to be found in the centre of the affray; and so conspicuous
did he become for gallantry and efficiency that his
reputation spread throughout the army. "He blushed

painfully," a comrade said of him, "whenever anyone
spoke of his exploits." "This is simply disgusting," was
his comment upon a laudatory paragraph about himself
which he read in the newspapers. "Every man at the
front will be laughing at it." At Cedar Mountain, he
pushed his guns to a point barely eighty yards from the
enemy's first line. "Pitch in, boys," he called out to his
men, "General Jackson is looking at you." Eighteen
Federal field-pieces had concentrated their balls upon him,
but he was immovable; and it was not until ten at night
that he fired his last round. At Sharpsburg, his bugler
was wounded and disabled, but Pegram soon learned to
sound the call himself. At Fredericksburg, the cord of
his bugle, as it hung from his shoulder, was shattered by
the fragment of a shell, and the bugle fell to the ground.
He coolly dismounted, in spite of his exposure to a galling
fire, quietly picked it up, and remounted as leisurely as if
he were on parade.

He had been reared in an atmosphere in which religion
was reverenced. While resting in winter-quarters before
the battle of Chancellorsville, he was instrumental
in building a rude log chapel, and here, at the services,
he was to be seen seated in the midst of his men, and
singing from a hymn book shared with some private,
from whom he had always exacted the observance of the
strictest discipline.

At Chancellorsville, owing to the great number of
officers disabled, he found himself in command of sixty
guns. "The stern joy of that fight," we are told by his
biographer, Colonel McCabe, one of his closest comrades
in battle and camp, "never faded from his mind."
"What day do you count your happiest, Colonel?" he
was afterwards asked. "Oh," said he, "the day I had
sixty guns under me at Chancellorsville galloping down

the turnpike after Hooker and his people." He rose
from his bed, before recovering from a fever, to join
his regiment. "General Hill," said General Lee, "I
have good news for you. Major Pegram is up." "Yes,"
replied Hill, "that is good news." At Gettysburg,
eighty horses harnessed to his batteries were killed.
During the following winter, he was promoted to the
rank of lieutenant-colonel, and from the opening of the
campaign of the Wilderness down to March 25, 1865, it
is stated that hardly a day went by that his person was
not directly exposed to shot or shell. "As the struggle
grew closer and more desperate," says Colonel McCabe,
"his utter devotion to his God and to his country shone
forth with such steady lustre as gave encouragement to
many other brave hearts in that army."

On September 30, 1864, a regiment stationed ahead
of his command was pressed hard by the Federals and
fell back. Pegram, seeing this, quickly rode forward
through a breach in the line, snatched the colors from an
ensign, and advanced with them straight into the face
of the hostile troops. When he had gone about fifty
yards beyond the Confederate line, he halted, and placing
the flag staff at rest on his stirrup, he dropped his reins,
and turning in the saddle, and waving his hat, cried out
at the top of his voice, which rang out like a bugle across
the intervening distance, "Follow me, men." "It was
a scene never to be forgot," says his biographer. "With
a rousing yell, the brigade advanced, and never after
gave back a single inch. The color-bearer ran out to him
with tears in his eyes. 'Give me back my colors, Colonel,'
he cried, 'I'll carry them wherever you say.' 'Oh, I am
sure of that,' he answered cheerily. 'It was necessary to
let the whole line see the colors. That's the only reason
I took them."'

A rumor reached his ears that Virginia was to be
abandoned. "I would rather die," he exclaimed when
he heard it, "than to see her given up even for three
months. But I will follow the battle flag wherever it
may go." On the day that he was killed, being overcome
with fatigue, he was sleeping among his guns, when
a loud volley wakened him. Mounting into his saddle,
he galloped down in front of the battle line to take position
on the spot assigned him. As the long ranks of
blue-coated soldiers advanced upon his guns, he called
out, "Fire your canister now, men." It was the last
order that he ever gave. He suddenly reeled in his saddle,
and fell headlong to the ground. It was the death
which he had always counted as the most honorable for
mortals.

Such were the military records of a few of the alumni
of the University of Virginia, whose names we have selected,
not because they were more patriotic, more courageous,
or more self-denying, in the course of the war,
than their comrades, who also sacrificed their lives for
the South, but because their devotion, their gallantry, and
their hardihood, were conspicuously representative of
the spirit which animated the whole body. Another list
taken from the same shining volume, and chosen altogether
at random, would have constituted a precisely similar
roll of youthful paladins of the same noble temper.
All those personal attributes that impart a romantic
flavor to character, they possessed preeminently: they
were in the earliest flush of their manhood; they had been
ripened by the influences of cultivated ancestral homes;
they had been trained in the midst of the most splendid
traditions of scholarship; they were drawn to the battlefield,
not by ambition, not even by conscription in the beginning,
but by an enthusiastic determination to defend

their native soil from invasion to the last gasp of their
breath. There was no privation that they did not smilingly
endure and there was no peril which they did not
face with unshaken firmness. If they had ambition, it
was subordinated to the serene supremacy of their sense
of duty. They had the vigor of their right arms to give
to the cause and they had also their lives to lay down
for it. That strength they put forth without one thought
of self, and those lives they poured out without one
pang of regret. Although they perished in their youth,
they had, in dying, apparently only the one sorrow: that
they had not more that was precious to them to sacrifice
in the defense of the South.

VIII. Fidelity of the Professors

Although not liable to military summons, several of
the professors were enrolled, at one time or another,
in the service. Lewis M. Coleman, as we have seen,
died of wounds received at Fredericksburg. "His place
in the army may be filled," said the sorrowing Faculty,
in their memorial resolution, "but how shall the
vacancy in our midst, which we expected him to resume,
be supplied?" Gildersleeve dropped his study of the
Peloponnesian and Punic wars to snuff gunpowder smoke
and hear the guns roar on a real battlefield. As a member
of the staff of General Gordon, in the last campaign
in the Valley, he rode up and down in the shadow of the
Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, and brought back to
the quiet halls which he had deserted, a shattered leg as
a permanent proof of his bravery and devotion. Indeed,
he was crippled for life, like some veteran of
Fabius who had striven to do his part towards driving
the Carthaginian invader from his native soil.

Professors Cabell and Davis, and Doctor Allan, the

demonstrator of anatomy, during many hours of each
day, walked to the hospital at Charlottesville, and administered
faithfully and skilfully to the needs of the Confederate
wounded. Whatever money they received from
the Confederate government for this employment of their
time and experience was cheerfully deposited by them in
the impoverished treasury of the University. Professor
Bledsoe was in attendance at one time in the War
Department as assistant secretary, and was afterwards
engaged in literary work for purposes of publicity. Holcombe
occupied a seat in the Confederate Congress.
Robert J. Massie, who had, for a time, filled Bledsoe's
vacant chair, died while performing the duties of an
engineer, for which he had been so fully equipped.
Professor Schele, in the course of 1863, obtained the
consent of the Board to visit Europe, to which he was to
be sent on an important mission of the State Department;
but events seem to have intervened to prevent his departure
from Virginia.

As early as May 27, 1861, the Visitors were sanguine
that the professor of chemistry and the laboratory at the
University could be made serviceable in the manufacture
of fulminating powder for the charging of caps and
fuses; and they formally offered to the Government at
Richmond, for this purpose, all the appliances and materials
of that character then in the possession of the
institution. This offer was accepted, and the Faculty
were instructed to carry it into effect at once. There is
no evidence, however, that the University turned out a
large proportion of the articles of this nature which
were used by the Confederate armies.

During the same month, the Board decided that the
hour had come when a school of military science should
be established. The practical plans which Captain Matthews,

the military instructor of an earlier period, had
been so solicitous to enforce, were now, under the influence
of actual hostilities, adopted. In the new school,
the science of war in all its branches, and the principles of
civil engineering, were to be taught; and the lectures and
exercises were to be continued even during the interval
of vacation. It was optional with a student to pursue
both or only one of the two courses. It was probably
expected by the Board that these new studies would,
not only serve a useful purpose by giving a military training,
but also add to the depleted attendance of young men
at the University. No instructor seems to have been
elected to fill the chair, and it is possible that some of its
duties were performed by the professor of mathematics.
In September, 1861, it was spoken of as the provisional
military school, and the receipts from it,—no doubt, in
the form of matriculation fees,—at the beginning of that
session, were two hundred and sixty-five dollars, which
would indicate that the department of civil engineering
at least had attracted pupils. It was, perhaps, under
the general supervision of the officers who had charge of
this military department, that the active training of several
companies was carried on, during the summer of
1861.

In the summer of 1862, the University buildings were
converted into a military hospital by order of Dr. J. P.
Smith, the Confederate Medical Inspector; and here
were brought so large a number of the wounded, after
the Battle of First Manassas, that not only were the
dormitories on the Lawn and in the Ranges filled, but
also the rooms in Dawson's Row, the apartments in the
Rotunda, and the spacious public hall itself. In some
instances, several patients occupied a single room. This
occurred in a dormitory in Bachelor's Row. One of the

three wounded soldiers sheltered in this apartment was
a Federal prisoner. "Hello," said a visitor who, so soon
as he crossed the threshold, had noticed the blue uniform,
"how did this Yankee get in here?" "Leave him
alone," was the reply of his Confederate companions in
misfortune, "we are brothers now through suffering."

The attitude of the Board and Faculty towards this
use of the buildings does not seem to have been in harmony
with the prevailing spirit of self-sacrifice. They
protested to the Confederate Government against such
an appropriation of the premises; they requested that
the wounded should be removed; and they even went so
far as to demand compensation for the damage which
had been caused by the presence of so many disabled
men. The explanation of this apparently unpatriotic
conduct on their part is to be found in the almost fanatical
anxiety of the University's authorities to keep the dormitories
and lecture-halls always wide open to students.
If the Confederate Government could convert the buildings
into a hospital after one battle, like First Manassas,
they could do so after every battle which should
follow, and there would be an irresistible temptation
to continue such use of the rooms in the absence of convenient
hospital facilities. This use was, therefore, certain
to be repeated if the earliest instance of it was accepted
by the Board and Faculty as a condition to be
submitted to cheerfully because a matter of course.

During the summer of 1862, the presence of several
hundred wounded in the dormitories seemed to put an
end to the prospect of admitting students at the opening
of the approaching session. Not only were all the
rooms occupied, but the presence of the diseases that
follow wounds was certain to leave behind the germs of
danger to health, even if the apartments should be vacated

in time for the matriculation of young men in October.
The members of the Board were as acutely interested
in the success of the Confederate cause, and as
quick to make personal sacrifices for its advancement as
any equal number of citizens in the community; but they
believed that the University buildings were not indispensable
to the medical department of the army, and they
felt that it was their positive duty to preserve those buildings
for the exclusive purpose for which they had been
erected. A resolution was adopted by the executive committee
in July, 1862, which declared that the welfare of
all the people demanded that the institution should continue
its functions as freely in war as in peace; and the
Faculty were instructed to advertise, that, in spite of the
presence of the wounded within the precincts during the
summer, the usual courses of instruction would be begun
in the autumn. Twelve months afterwards, when the
Board convened, every member of it registered his clear
opinion that it would be unwise to close the University,
however small might be the attendance at any time while
hostilities were in progress.

The Faculty had reached the same conclusion. "To
have suspended the operations of the University," they
said retrospectively, in 1865, "was to break up the organization
of the institution; to expose the public property
to trespass and injury, and perhaps to destruction; and
to jeopardize the maintenance of the peculiar plan and
methods of instruction to which so much of the success
and reputation of the institution had been due in the past."
Influenced by these convictions, no less than by the advice
and authority of the Board of Visitors, they remained at
their posts in spite of the smallness of the number of students
who were now able to resort to the lecture-rooms,
and in the face of the severest sacrifices and privations,

—to which they were to be more and more exposed as
the war should drag on to an end. The salaries which
they received, owing to the steady fall in the purchasing
power of the paper currency, failed to supply their families
with a sufficient quantity of the necessaries of life,—
indeed, they hardly possessed a comfort beyond what was
afforded by their furnished pavilions; and even these
were in a state of serious disrepair. They met their
classes from day to day with as strict regard to the hour
of convening, and with as scrupulous fidelity to the tenor
of their duties, as if they still looked down upon long
rows of attentive young faces, as in the happier times that
prevailed before the war.

As early as September, 1861, the Board of Visitors
had declared, that, as the South was engaged in a struggle
in which everything precious to its people was at stake,
"every institution and every man should yield to every
inconvenience and sacrifice required by the public service;"
and that the form which the patriotism of the
University and its remaining Faculty should assume was
"the doubling up of the chairs." When Coleman withdrew
to the army, the original School of Ancient Languages
was restored, and its combined duties were taken
over by Gildersleeve, who was as fully competent to
teach Latin as he was to teach Greek. During the session
of 1863–4 and 1864–5, Smith, in addition to occupying
his regular professorship of natural philosophy, was
also the incumbent of the professorship of mathematics.
Minor once more assumed the entire task of instruction
in the School of Law. Maupin, Howard, Cabell, Davis,
McGuffey, and Holmes continued to deliver lectures in
their usual courses. Down to January 1, 1862, David
K. Tuttle remained in charge of the department of practical
chemistry. Wertenbaker was still the secretary

of the Faculty, and R. R. Prentis, besides filling the office
of proctor, served as librarian after the retirement
of Thomas B. Holcombe. William A. Pratt acted as
superintendent of buildings and grounds until January 1,
1862, and after an interval of one year's absence, discharged
its duties until the close of the war.

During the autumn of 1861, the Faculty convened on
the first day of each month, and continued to do so,
throughout the remainder of the session, down to June 1,
1862. During that month, they assembled on three
separate occasions; and they also came together once in
July, and also once in September, once in November, and
once in December. At each one of these meetings, not
less than six members were present, and sometimes eight.
In 1863, the Faculty convened at least once during every
month of the twelve, except June and August. As Bledsoe
returned to his chair temporarily in the spring of
that year, the attendance rose to an average of eight.
In 1864, the Faculty failed to assemble once a month
only in August, September, October, and November.
They met on three different occasions in May, and twice
in July. There was now a regular attendance of at
least seven professors. Gildersleeve, who was then serving
on General Gordon's staff, was absent from the
meetings held after July, 1864. In 1865, before the
close of hostilities in April, the Faculty convened on
January 5, and March 1 and 6. On the latter date,
the professors in attendance were Maupin, McGuffey,
Howard, Smith, Davis, Cabell, Schele, and Minor.
Throughout the entire course of the war, Professor Schele
was absent from the Faculty table only on three occasions;
Professor Howard only on two. Professor McGuffey
rarely allowed any cause to keep him away from
his seat.

IX. Salaries of the Professors

As early as 1862, a resolution of Franklin Minor
brought up before the Board the question of restoring
the method of remunerating the instructors which had
prevailed under the original rules, and which Professor
Minor, his relative, had so persistently advocated long
before the war began, namely, that the head of each
school should receive all the tuition fees which his pupils
should deposit when matriculating. The Board declined
to countenance this suggestion. In July, 1863, Colonel
John B. Baldwin, one of its members, proposed that the
University's income should be drawn upon first to defray
the general expenses, and that the surplus should
then be divided equally among the members of the Faculty
in settlement of their regular salaries. This arrangement,
had it been adopted, would have made those
salaries still more precarious. As it was, the emoluments
of each professor, at this time, were calculated to be
equal in purchasing-power to three hundred and nineteen
dollars in gold; and each month now was witnessing
a further shrinkage in the value of the paper dollar as
compared with the value of coin. The Board, very much
disheartened, debated at this meeting whether they
should not close the doors of the University for an indefinite
period. The Faculty very naturally opposed
the adoption of such an extreme course as this, while
they flatly refused to approve the plan which made their
salaries dependent on a contingency. They suggested,
as a means of reducing the expenses, that the number of
executive officers should be cut down until it was in proportion
to the number of students; and they also urged
that an appeal should be sent to the General Assembly
for a more generous annual appropriation.

The hour was opportune for such a petition. The
volume of Confederate currency at this time was regulated,
not by a careful estimate of economic resources,
—there were none more substantial than the phantasms
of hope,—but by the ability of the government mill to
manufacture paper. It was more easy for the treasury
of the State to appropriate thirty thousand dollars
now than it had been to appropriate fifteen thousand in
an earlier and more stable era. On March 4, 1864, the
General Assembly passed an act which assured to the
University thereafter an annual sum of thirty-seven
thousand, five hundred dollars; and it was also provided
that each member of the Faculty should receive a sum
not to exceed three thousand dollars, in addition to
such fees as the Board should decide to allow him. The
terms of the act were to continue in force as long as the
war should last. The only condition imposed was, that
all soldiers, whether privates or officers, who had been
disabled, should be admitted to the University lecturerooms
without charge for instruction.

The professors were very much encouraged by this
prompt and generous response to their appeal, and as
a new set of Visitors had been appointed, they decided,
in compliance with the Board's request, to draw up a
report on the subject of the salaries and fees and submit
it to that body. The chairman of the committee named
to draft this report was Professor Minor, and its tenor
fully reflected the view which he had always expressed;
namely, that the fees received from the students belonged,
not to the University, but to the members of the Faculty.
It is not necessary to reiterate the substance
of his argument in support of this opinion. The interesting
feature of the report is that, although the war
was not yet closed, and no prediction could be offered

as to the time when it would terminate, the authors of
this document were deeply concerned about that tranquil
future which lay far beyond the troubled present. "It
could not be hoped," they remarked, "that more might
be done, while the fighting was going on, than to keep
the college in being. But we must gather up our energies
for a great effort when peace is restored."

Now what was this "great effort" expected to overcome?
First, that languor and inaptitude for literary
pursuits which was almost certain to follow upon the
entire lack of preparation for the higher seats of learning
that had resulted from conscription and the destruction
of the former academies; second, the popularity of
military seminaries; and third, the determination of the
lower institutions of the South to hold their students even
after the young men should be sufficiently equipped to
enter the higher. Although it would have been presumed
that the spur of all these obstacles to success
would have been enough to confirm their own and their
colleagues' resolution to maintain the primacy of the
University of Virginia, yet the committee thought that
the engrossment of all the fees for their private enjoyment
was also needed to stimulate them to extraordinary
exertion in order to secure the dominance of their own
institution. The Board, they declared, should return
to the old principle of remuneration without delay,—
with this modification only, that there should be no assessment
up to two thousand dollars of the income of each
school from tuition fees; but on the third thousand,
there should be a levy of fifty per cent., and on the
fourth, of seventy-five, for the benefit of the professors
whose lectures should be slimly attended.

It was clearly recognized by the committee that the
general interests of the University, apart from the emoluments

of the professors, must also be considered. How
was it possible to cover up the deficiency which would inevitably
be created by the withdrawal of that surplus
from the tuition fees upon which the institution had so
long and so safely relied? By imposing heavier charges
upon the students. This, the committee said, could be
done by increasing the rents of the dormitories and hotels,
the matriculation fee, the library fee, the public room
fee, and the diploma fee. The duties of the offices of
proctor and superintendent of buildings and grounds
should be united and discharged by one man. The professors
should pay all the expenses to be entailed by
advertisements and the printing of catalogues; and they
should also be liable for the wages of the janitor, for
the cost of lighting the precincts, and even for the salaries
of such tutors as the expansion of the schools might call
for.

But the committee was not satisfied with the proposal
that the professors should be made the financial partners
of the institution,—they also suggested that no question
should be decided by the Board without first receiving the
Faculty's views, and that the Board should practically
abandon the exercise of their executive functions to that
body and its chairman. The Visitors, probably discouraged
by the darkness of the times,—they assembled
in May, 1864,—and not looking quite so far into the
future as the committee, adopted the latter's scheme in
the main. This act, as we shall see, arose to plague a
new Board when the War had ended and the incomes
of the professors who lectured to large classes were mounting
to a point inconsistent with the financial needs of the
institution. It was then repealed, just as the original
provision was repealed after 1850, when the tide of prosperity

in the world outside had begun to be reflected in
the condition of the University of Virginia also.

During the remaining year of the War, the Faculty
derived no advantage from their committee's success in
restoring the original scheme of remuneration. The
average income, during the whole of the year 1864, did
not exceed one hundred dollars in value. Not one cent
apparently was received by the professors in the interval
between January 1 and July 1, 1865. The following
table drawn up by them as a body shows the
amount of their salaries for each year of the great conflict.

         

	Face value in paper currency	Real value in gold
1861–2	$1,392.24	$1,113.79
1862–3	1,274.10	318.82
1863–4	2,845.90	113.80
1864–5	1,757.72	31.95

X. The Students

The number of students who matriculated at the University,
during the course of the war, fluctuated but
little from year to year. The attendance was as follows:
during the session of 1861–2, sixty-six were present;
during the session of 1862–3, forty-six; of 1863–
64, fifty; and of 1864–5, fifty-five. Of the first sixty-six,
sixteen only were passing through their second year,
and three through their third; of the second forty-six,
five were entered for their second year, and three for
their third; of the third fifty, nine were in their second
year and two in their third; and the proportion for the
attendance in 1864–5, when forty-one students were present,
was ten in their second year, and three in their

third. The total number of matriculates admitted during
the four years of war was two hundred and seventeen.
Of these, forty reached their second year in their
attendance; eleven, their third; three, their fourth.

The regulation which required that the academic student
should enroll his name in three schools at least was
relaxed during the war. He seems to have entered as
few or as many as he chose; now we find one attending
the lectures on Greek or chemistry; now another, the
lectures on Latin and mathematics. Sometimes a student
would be satisfied to apply himself to Latin only,
or moral philosophy, or anatomy, or natural philosophy,
or chemistry, or history and literature. The entire number
of students entered in each school during the whole
of this period was as follows:

   
   

   

School of Latin	90	Department of Physiology and Surgery	52
School of Greek	50
School of Modern Languages	76	Department of Anatomy and Materia Medica	55
School af Mathematics	98	School of Moral Philosophy	19
School of Natural Philosophy	73	School of History and Literature	20
Department of Medicine	52	School of Law	31

The number of graduates from year to year was small.
In 1862, there were only eight, and, in 1863, only fifteen.
Several won the diploma of bachelor of laws and several
the diploma of doctor of medicine, but no one remained
long enough to win the degree of master of arts.

One hundred and sixty-six of the two hundred and
seventeen matriculates during the war were Virginians.
The remainder were drawn from the other Southern
States, with the exception of one who was enrolled from
Canada,—doubtless, the son of a Confederate agent

stationed in that distant country. Of those admitted who
had not yet taken, but were afterwards to take, an
energetic part in the prevailing conflict, Joseph Bryan,
William A. Anderson, and Robert E. Lee, Jr., may be
mentioned. Among others present who were also to become
men of prominence in after-life, were Micajah
Woods, James N. Dunlop, John B. Whitehead, James
L. Greenlee, W. M. Perkins, Philip P. Pendleton, Robert
L. Harrison, and J. J. Pretlow. George L. Christian
matriculated after receiving a wound so severe that
he was incapacitated for performing further military service.

We learn from a student who has published his recollections
of these four years, that his companions comprised
"only a few boys and poor fellows who were disabled
in their first battles, and who had to fit themselves
to be lawyers and teachers to make a living."
And another witness, during these unhappy times, has
spoken of the "pitiful array of boys of fifteen too young
to enlist, and pale, wasted veterans of twenty, minus an
arm or leg," who walked or stumped along the almost
deserted arcades on their way to the almost empty lecturerooms.
Of those enrolled in the School of Law, during
the session of 1864–5, there were four who had lost
a leg in battle, and two, an arm. Four, in addition, bore
on their bodies the scars of terrible wounds that had
permanently crippled them. These ten made up three-fourths
of the group who were sitting under Professor
Minor. The matriculates who had not yet joined the
army rarely passed, young as they were, more than
twelve months in the University,—the next year found
them private soldiers in the ranks, and exposed to all the
dangers of the field. If they returned the third year, it

was because they had been so maimed by shot or shell,
that they were no longer capable of rendering service to
the Confederate cause.

The Faculty perceived the need, in those impoverished
times, of relaxing the rule that required a prompt payment
of the matriculation fee; and they also permitted
a settlement graduated to the months or weeks of actual
attendance. Some of the students who were refugees
from homes situated within the Federal lines obtained
the privilege of entering without the exaction of any fee
at all at the moment. The right of gratuitous enrollment
was still possessed by State scholars and candidates
for the ministry. The number of the former had, by
1861, sunk to two. Under the provisions of the enactment
of March, 1864, young men who had been incapacitated
by wounds were relieved of all charges for
tuition, should they be able to show that they were lacking
in the means to defray them.

It is one of the interesting facts in the University's
history during this arrested period,—a fact too which
proves that the foremost aim of the Faculty was not to
assure their own personal profit, but the continued maintenance
of the institution as a working entity,—that the
tuition fees were not increased as the purchasing power
of the Confederate currency declined. Towards the
end of the war, they would have been justified in demanding
hundreds and even thousands of dollars where before
a very modest sum would have been asked; but no change
was made, in spite of the enormous advance in the prices
of all the articles which the professors were compelled to
buy for the support of their families. The only modification
in the charges for the lectures that was suggested
was that they should be paid in the form of agricultural
products, like corn and wheat, or in manufactured

products, like bacon, flour, and meal. The Board were
of the opinion that this plan of exchange was practicable;
but they announced that no one desiring to enter the
University should be excluded because he insisted on following
the normal rule of paying his fees in Confederate
greenbacks. This was in August, 1864, when that currency
was already tending to sink to the valuation of mere
paper.

How to meet the charges for food was a far more
perplexing question for the student to decide. Naturally,
the boarding-house keepers, who had to make all their
purchases in open market, were unwilling to overlook the
fall in the value of the Confederate dollar. Their rates
must follow the shrinkage, or they would be compelled
to become bankrupts. Miss Mary Ross was the only
hotel-keeper who held out until 1864, and she then announced
that she would be forced to advance her terms
from one hundred dollars to one hundred and fifty by the
month. A committee, composed of Professors Maupin
and Davis, called upon her, with some solemnity and
formality, to ascertain whether there was not at least
one bill of fare which could be adopted that would stave
off the threatened additional expense. She replied emphatically,
that, without this augmented charge, she would
have to face the certain prospect of an increasing deficit,
which she would be unable to make up.

For the most graphic picture of the conditions that
surrounded the student at the University, during the latter
part of the war, we are indebted to George L. Christian,
afterwards a lawyer and judge of distinction, and still
surviving. Christian had been a gallant soldier, and at
the Bloody Angle had lost one entire foot and the heel
of the other, in the storm of balls and shells which were
fired by the two hostile lines at close quarters. He matriculated

along with three soldiers who had been maimed
or severely wounded like himself. It was only by the use
of crutches that he was able to walk; and all the clothing
which he possessed he had brought with him from camp.
It consisted of one suit, one blanket and one oil-cloth. A
sum of money, amounting nominally to one hundred dollars,
but, in reality, to two dollars and a half in gold, made
up, with his monthly pay,—equal in value to thirty-five
cents,—the entire extent of his financial resources. He
had borrowed the one hundred dollars from a friend for
the purpose of covering his most pressing expenses in entering
the School of Law.

Professor Minor received him with the tenderest consideration,
and insisted upon his remaining under his roof
until he could find a place of permanent shelter. Christian,
in the end, obtained the use of a dormitory at the
rate of twenty dollars a month; but it was unfurnished;
and there was, at the moment, no money left to be spent
in the purchase of the few articles which he would need.
His roommate was W. C. Holmes, of Mississippi, who
had been so crippled in his right arm by a ball that he
was unable to copy Professor Minor's notes from the
blackboard. The two young men made an exchange of
such of their respective physical powers as remained unimpaired,
—Christian assisted Holmes in taking down
the notes, and Holmes aided Christian in walking.

Like Christian, Holmes still possessed his army blanket.
At night, the two youthful heroes would make a bed for
themselves by spreading Christian's blanket out on the
floor, and then covering themselves up with the blanket
which belonged to Holmes; and the floor continued to be
their bed during the remainder of the session. These
hardships aroused in them not the smallest feeling of soreness
or discontent. "As we did not have to get up when

it rained to fetch our tents," said Christian, "or what was
worse, were not awakened by the water running in under
us, which we had so often experienced in the army, we
deemed ourselves fortunate and slept soundly." They
borrowed a basin from Professor Minor, until, with a renewal
of their limited funds, they were able to purchase
one of their own. A blacking brush cost them six dollars
in paper money,—a very reasonable price at that inflated
hour. By hook or by crook, they contrived to procure
two split-bottom chairs and also a small, rudely made pinetable
to hold their books. Their only candlestick was
an empty bottle. There was no other furniture, either
for use or ornament, to be found in the room.

Their fuel consisted of chestnut sticks supplied by the
University. The fagots into which these were split, were
disposed while burning, to pop with some violence, but as
there was no carpet on the floor to be burnt, this characteristic
was taken with philosophy. The two young soldiers
lighted their own fire in the morning, and replenished
it themselves, from time to time, throughout the day.
They swept their own floor; brought from the cistern the
water which they needed for bathing; and cut their own
wood to the proper lengths. As Christian lacked a foot
and Holmes practically an arm, the wielding of the axe
was accompanied with difficulties. Christian could only
handle it successfully by leaning on his knee on the floor.
Fortunately for his comfort in this attitude, a friend had
presented him with some pieces of sheepskin, which he now
used as pads. While he chopped away at the chestnut
sticks, his friend would be sweeping the dust from the
floor.

As disabled soldiers, they were entitled to a small fixed
quantity of rations from the Confederate commissary department;
and this they obtained once every fortnight

from the supplies collected at the Delavan Hospital in
Charlottesville. Their only store-room was a large pinebox,
which they kept in a corner of their dormitory. The
food was neither abundant nor nourishing, but "as it was
the best that our poor country had to offer," said Christian,
they accepted it with grateful feelings, and contrived
by means of it to satisfy their appetites. They studied
their text-books assiduously, sang the popular Confederate
songs with fervor, and were not unhappy, in spite of
their privations and hardships. "We knew," said
Christian, "that we had done our duty to our country,
and were then honestly striving as best we could to fit
ourselves for the further struggles and duties of life,
looking forward confidently to the time when our country
would have won its independence, and be able to care
for us when old age had rendered us unable to care for
ourselves. We never dreamed for an instant that the
just cause for which we had fought, and sacrificed so
much, could by any possibility fail."

XI. Paralysis

A complete paralysis fell upon most of the University's
activities during the war. The Young Men's Christian
Association, for instance, ceased to elect any officers. Its
doors were closed. There was no chaplain. The debating
societies sank into an unbroken silence. Two numbers
only of the University magazine were published.
Although the library was still in use, no appropriation
was made annually for additions to its collection of books.
A committee appointed, in July, 1863, by the Board of
Visitors to report upon its condition, stated that, at that
time, the room and its contents were kept wih "neatness,
system, and care" by the acting custodian, R. R. Prentis;
and they recommended that the funds due it, under the

former regulation, should be paid just as soon as the state
of the treasury should allow this to be done. The door
should be left unlocked at least one hour in the course of
each week. Towards the end of the war, neither the
books nor the room were preserved with the same scrupulous
fidelity to the existing rules as had been formerly
noticed. Wertenbaker complained that, in summer, the
great circular apartment became, from its remarkable
coolness, a popular place of resort for the ladies of the
professors' families, and the numerous refugees who had
found an asylum in the vicinity of the precincts. These
visitors failed very frequently to register the volumes
which they were supposed to have borrowed from the
University. Many of these volumes that contained
costly engravings were irretrievably damaged by the negligent
manner in which they had been handled.

In September, 1862, the duties of the superintendent of
buildings and grounds were divided between the chairman
of the Faculty and the proctor, but the executive
committee were empowered to fill the vacancy whenever
the necessity for doing so should arise. Under this provision,
W. A. Pratt was, in 1863, reappointed, and he
remained the incumbent of the position throughout the
remainder of this period. His most difficult task, at one
time, seemed to be to find the means of shutting all wandering
cattle out of the Lawn, where they were tempted
to browse by the growth of greensward. A disfiguring
postfence was finally erected to prevent them from entering.
Serious damage was caused to the various buildings
by their use as a hospital. Many of the doors remained
wide open after the soldiers were withdrawn;
most of the window frames were removed; and the glass
still remaining was smashed. The floor continued to be
littered with straw. The trees and shrubs were scarred

or broken down. It was this shattered and disordered
condition which led to the reappointment of Mr. Pratt,
for it was seen that the services of a superintendent were
indispensable.

The Board decided, in 1864, that it would be an advantage,
from several points of view, to rent the larger
structures. Not only could the income of the University
be increased by this means, but the entire round of buildings
would be made safe from destructive trespass by
their occupation by families who could be held responsible
for their preservation. The following were the
monthly rates which were offered: twenty-five dollars for
a hotel, fifteen dollars for a cottage in Dawson's Row,
and one dollar for a dormitory. During all these years,
a janitor remained in the employment of the University.
His name was Martin Tracy; and after the war was
ended, he said that he had, at one time or another, served
in at least three additional capacities,—he had not only
been the janitor, but also the tinsmith, the locksmith,
and at intervals, the superintendent.[10]

XII. The Federal Army Arrives

While hostilities were going on, the University had, on
several occasions, been threatened with incursions of the
enemy. The Faculty on July, 1864, went so far as to
ask the Board of Visitors to authorize them to remove
the institution to a place of greater security whenever this
should be made necessary by the approach of Federal
raiders. At one time, there was reason to think that an
attack would be launched from the East, and all the professors
who were not either superannuated, or already
engaged in fighting at the front, took part with the home-guard
of boys and elderly men, with spade and shovel, in
throwing up breastworks, beyond the Rivanna, at a spot
which the foe would have to pass. This mixed contingent
remained in the field during three days and nights,
but returned without having seen the faces of the expected
invaders.

In March, 1865, the enemy, who had so often been expected
to come, actually arrived in the shadow of the Rotunda.
There were numerous persons, who, remembering
the burning of the barracks of the Virginia Military
Institute by General Hunter, were apprehensive lest the
pavilions, dormitories, and lecture-halls of the University
should be given over to the torch, applied either deliverately
by a military squad, or furtively by the hands of
camp-followers seeking plunder. The Faculty decided
that it would be wisest to appoint a committee, who
should, in person, solicit of the Federal commander a
promise to protect the buildings from his troops, if necessary,
as well as from irresponsible marauders, who were
the ones to be most feared. By March I, it was known,
through Confederate scouts, that Sheridan was rapidly
marching eastward, after dispersing Early's disorganized

forces in the Valley. It was thought that he would
reach Charlottesville certainly by the morning of the 3rd;
perhaps by the evening of the 2nd. Professors Maupin
and Minor, and Colonel Preston, the rector, were authorized
to meet him on the confines of the grounds.

The morning of the 3rd dawned; the day drew on to
ten o'clock; and yet the enemy had not been seen. In
reality, the roads had been made so heavy by rain and
the rivers had so overflowed their banks, that the progress
of the Federal troops had been delayed. Two Confederate
scouts rode by who said that they were going
as close to the enemy as the positions still held by the
Confederate pickets would allow. "I enjoined them,"
records Professor Minor in his diary, "to come by on
their return and let me hear definitely what was the situation.
I can only await the result with a trust in the
Divine Providence that has hitherto preserved me and
mine. I betook myself to the boys' room to hear their
lessons." One of the scouts entered the house, after
a short interval of absence, and informed him that the
vanguard of the Federal army would arrive within an
hour at the furthest. By this time, a committee of the
municipality of Charlottesville had hastened to the University,
and were ready to join with the Faculty's committee
in asking protection of the Federal commander
from the depredations of stragglers and camp-followers.
The two committees, grouped together near the site of the
present Gothic chapel, quietly awaited his arrival. A
flag of truce was held in hand by one of the party, to
be waived so soon as it was likely to become visible to
the enemy.

The first of the Federal troops to be observed were
scouts, who were seen making their way forward with
extraordinary caution. They had then reached the spot

where the toll-gate formerly stood. Videttes were soon
descried creeping up to every high position in the vicinity
of the highway. When the Federal advance guard
caught sight of the flag of truce, which was now held
up to view, they cast off their distrustfulness of movement,
and in a band of fifteen or more, put spurs to
their horses, and with cocked pistols presented, galloped
down into the little valley of the ice pond, and thence
up the hill to where the members of the two committees
were standing. Here they abruptly halted; and when
they were asked to detail some of their number to protect
the University buildings, they answered that General
Custer would soon pass; and that he would, no doubt,
set the solicited guard. Having been told that the town
had been evacuated by the Confederate forces, they
started off again at a gallop in that direction, and all further
parley with them came to an end.

They had vanished only a few minutes when the adjutant-general
of General Custer rode up, and in reply
to the same request, courteously promised that the required
guard should be granted, and that private property
would not be molested. Before this conversation
had terminated, Custer himself arrived, his progress emblazoned
with the display of three Confederate battleflags,
which had been captured from Early's scattered and
disheartened army. Two members of his staff left the
line of march to assure the University committee that
no damage to the buildings would be tolerated; and that
a squad would be assigned to furnish the amplest protection.
Professors Minor and Maupin decided that
it would be more prudent to accompany the town committee
to Charlottesville in order to obtain this squad
in person; but as they were about to leave on their mission,
Minor observed a couple of soldiers desert the

main road, and turn in towards the rear of his pavilion.
He hastened towards his home, and as he entered the
back-gate, was confronted by the two bluecoats, who had
dismounted, and were talking with his wife, who had
boldly stopped them. It seems that, when they first entered
the lot, they had questioned the negro servants
as to whether any silver plate was concealed on the
premises, but they pretended to Mrs. Minor to be in
search only of firearms. As soon as they were told that
a guard was to be stationed on the grounds, the two
men remounted their horses, and rode off.

XIII. The University Under Guard

When Maupin and Minor arrived at Charlottesville,
they were informed that the main body of the Federal
troops had continued their march to the Rivanna river
for the purpose of setting the torch to the public bridge
and the Woolen Mills, but that a guard had been dispatched
to the University to assure the safety of the buildings
and the professors' families. At first, this guard
consisted of several men, but, by the afternoon, all, except
one, had been ordered away. This man was posted
at the arcade corner nearest to the Anatomical Hall. He
proved to be both willing and useful. The Federal
provost-marshal visited the grounds as evening approached,
and thinking that further protection would not
be needed, was about to withdraw the soldier, but at
Professor Minor's earnest request, finally consented to
allow him to remain during the night. A stable was
opened for his horse, and shelter for himself was found
in the parlor of one of the hotels which was now in the
possession of a family of refugees. Several hours after
darkness had come on, Professor Minor and this guardsman
started out together to inspect the entire round

of the University precincts. The need of this precaution
had been just demonstrated by the experience of Colonel
Preston, whose home was situated on the neighboring
heights. His house had been robbed of many valuable
articles, and his own person had been rifled of watch and
purse. All his horses had been driven off, and some of
his servants lured away. Professor Minor and the guard
found that a profound quiet prevailed. On their return,
the soldier withdrew to his sleeping quarters, but throughout
the night, Minor remained awake and dressed in
order that he might be able to detect any band of marauders,
who might enter the grounds, before they should
have time to rob or commit any other kind of depredation.
Fortunately, a heavy rain fell up to an early hour,
but the sun rose in a cloudless sky. About six o'clock,
the guard mounted his horse and departed.

At nine, a long column of Federal soldiers were seen
advancing along the Lynchburg Road. They had left
Charlottesville for the purpose of tearing up the railway
that ran southward. Minor and Maupin, apprehensive
lest the unprotected state of the premises should tempt
stragglers from this moving body to sneak in and frighten
the resident families, went in haste to the headquarters of
General Sheridan in town. There they were referred to
General Merritt, who, at their request, ordered a squad
of soldiers to be despatched to the University at once.
Accompanied by the two professors, they arrived in the
nick of time, for already the plunderers had not only entered
the dispensary, but had also threatened several of
the households in the pavilions. It was not until a company
of twenty-five men had been placed on guard that
the danger to the public buildings and private property
was entirely removed. This company formed a part of
a regiment of Michigan cavalry, and was under the command

mand of a captain from the same State, a plain and illiterate
man, but courteous in his deportment and kindly
disposed in spirit.

It seems that Professor Minor owned a female mule,
somewhat aged, but still vigorous in limb and lung. Her
keeper and companion, an old servant of the house, had,
at the first alarm, solemnly led her off to the wooded fastnesses
of Observatory Mountain; but her bray,—probably
raised in protest at her being torn from her comfortable
stable within the University grounds,—seems to
have betrayed her, for her whereabouts, in spite of the
screen of tangled bushes, became known, and the Federal
officer advised that she should be brought back to her old
place of shelter as the only way of keeping her out of the
clutches of Federal stragglers. It was thought by Professor
Minor that she would be safest in the cellar of his
pavilion, and so here she was stalled as soon as darkness
allowed her to be returned without being observed.

But the mule, with the perversity of her species and
her sex, objected to these Cimmerian quarters because she
had never been accustomed to them, and soon showed a
disposition to kick with great violence, and to make many
strange and alarming noises at unexpected and ill-considered
moments. The evening following her arrival, the
Federal officer was taking supper with the Minor household.
The atmosphere was one of peace and serenity,
in spite of the depression of the times. The captain was
gracious and conciliatory, and the professor courteous
and agreeable. In the midst of their conversation, there
came suddenly the sound of some extraordinary commotion
that was happening beneath the floor of the diningroom.
The uproar was so loud and so confused that it
was impossible to distinguish its cause, and the Federal
officer, disturbed and suspicious, rose from his seat. He

seemed to be apprehensive of a personal attack from without;
but before he could make his way to the door, Professor
Minor was so far able to suppress his merriment
as to tell him that the noise which had been heard was
the sound of the mingled kicking and braying of the old
mule, now determined to break out of the dark cellar, if
the united efforts of hoof and voice could accomplish it.
The meal was resumed by guest and host amid hearty
laughter over the one humorous episode which lit up the
dark clouds that enshrouded the hour.

A report reached the ears of Professor Minor that
the University buildings were to be sacked that night
(March 4). This was, no doubt, a groundless rumor,
but it caused the Federal officer to increase the vigilance
of his protection by posting sentinels at every point of
entrance. Notwithstanding this fact, his host refused to
go to bed when everyone else had retired, so sharp was
his anxiety for the safety of the pavilions and dormitories,
and for the security of their inhabitants. The ensuing
day was Sunday, and the whole framework of the earth
appeared to be flooded with sunshine, and filled with the
soft influences of dawning spring. "But," commented
Professor Minor in his diary at the time, "how futile is
the glow of the sunshine to inspire our hearts with cheerfulness!"
It was with a deep sense of relief that he received
the message from General Sheridan, who was still
in Charlottesville, that he was determined that the University
should be preserved from every kind of injury;
and that he was ready to remove any cause for complaint
which its authorities had to offer. During the afternoon
of the same day, Colonel Sherman, the Inspector-General,
visited the grounds, and made a thorough search for firearms,
but the examination was conducted with perfect
civility. No weapon was found besides an ancient musket,

the presence of which Professor Minor himself reported.

Monday, the 6th, was a day of renewed anxiety, as the
Federal army was expected to resume its advance, which
would require the withdrawal of the existing guard from
the University, and the consequent abandonment of the
premises to the plundering camp followers and stragglers
who would remain behind. Only a small section of the
Federal troops had vanished southward, when this guard
left the precincts. Professor Minor, as a brigade passed
him on the march, boldly stepped up to the commanding
officer, and asked him to order a squad to be placed on
the ground. This request was promptly complied with.
The officer, as he was about to ride on, suggested that
the request should be repeated as each brigade came up,
so that, as one squad rejoined the rear of its own brigade,
another from the van of the following one would be ready
to take its place. By this plan, there was a succession of
squads for protection until the whole Federal army had
passed on. "Thus," remarked Professor Minor, in a
memorandum made at the time, "we escaped the dangers
which threatened us, and upon the whole, have lost very
little." As the last Federal soldier was seen tramping
along in the distance, several members of General Rosser's
command, who had been hovering on the flanks of
the enemy, appeared in sight and drew rein near the
grounds.

The only student who remained at the University after
the arrival of the Federal army, was W. C. Fowlkes, a
member of the law class, who had lost a leg in the war,
and who, in after-life, became a distinguished judge of the
Supreme Court of Tennessee. A Federal sentinel was
stationed at the top of one of the flights of steps that
broke the level of the East Range walkway. Fowlkes in

a spirit of mischief, determined that he would test the
courage of this soldier. He always hobbled along with a
large black cane. Furtively taking position out of sight,
beneath one of the arches just above the flight where the
sentinel stood, he suddenly poked the cane around the
wall from his hiding-place directly at the head of the man,
as if it was his intention to thrust a musket in his face and
fire it. Supposing it to be a real gun, the sentinel tumbled
down the flight of steps and nearly broke his neck.
Before he could recover from the confusion of the fall,
Fowlkes had escaped into one of the dormitories.

An incident occurred after the war had ended which
disclosed the spirit of the times. Captain A. F. Higgs,
the commandant at Charlottesville during 1867, had reason
to complain to General Schofield that he had been
treated with rudeness by the students. Schofield, who
was the officer in charge of District No. 1, forwarded this
complaint to the Faculty in a courteous communication,
which elicited the following prudent and discreet reply:
"The authorities of the institution heartily appreciate the
importance of inculcating in the young men committed
to them respect and submission to the government under
which they live. We believe that these sentiments are
shared by the students." An expression of regret was
sent by them to Captain Higgs also, not only because,
they said, he was entitled to official respect, but also because
he had, by his fair and wise administration of his
delicate functions, won the esteem and regard of the entire
community.

A permanent bronze memorial of the alumni who perished
in the war was placed on the front wall of the
Rotunda in 1906. This was the gift of the Confederate
Memorial Association and the Albemarle Chapter of the
Daughters of the Confederacy. "It is fit and proper,"

remarked President Alderman in accepting the two tablets,
the work of Zolnay, "that these names should shine
in immortal youth on the front of the building recalling
in its antique beauty the grandeur of the older world,
as their mighty sacrifices recall unselfish consecration and
love of country, the antique virtues of that same older
world."