III. Students of the First Session
If the Faculty which exhibited all this practical capacity
was a remarkable body, the students who attended
their lectures, during this first session, were, in the mass,
worthy of equal respect and admiration. With the failure
of the Confederacy, there sprang up among Southern
parents an intense solicitude to give their sons all
the benefits which an excellent education at least would
confer as some compensation for the destroyed prospect
of an inheritance. The very first money which could
be rescued from the debris of their shattered fortunes
was set aside for this sacred purpose. The young men
who matriculated were fully aware of the privations
which their fathers and mothers had cheerfully endured
in order to accumulate the sums that would be needed
to pay for tuition and board; and remembering the sacrifices
which had been made for their sake by the people
at home, they showed, in their entire conduct, a degree
of earnestness and sobriety unusual at that period of life.
No doubt, too, this spirit was deepened by the sadness
of the times.
The memory of William Wertenbaker went back to
the foundation of the University. He had been associated
with the institution, in one capacity or another, during
forty years at least. Session after session, during
that long interval, he had possessed the fullest opportunity
to observe the spirit of the successive waves of students.
In his report as librarian written in June, 1866, he remarked
that he had never before perceived so keen a
desire on the part of the young men to make the utmost
use of the advantages which the library had to offer,
whether for purposes of general information or of
special research. The same attitude was discernible in
all the departments. "The legal and medical lecturerooms,"
says a student of this session, "the moot court,
the dissecting rooms, and the academic schools, were
crowded with countenances as eager to seek as the
professors to impart knowledge. When the lecture was
over, hurrying throngs hastened back to their respective
rooms, not for play or idleness, but to transcribe notes,
refer to authorities, and secure the full benefit of what
had been taught."
But it was not simply the shadow of this intense assiduity
which invested these earnest young men with such
an extraordinary degree of interest. Many of them had
won distinction in the war as officers of high rank in the
service. There were colonels who had led the most
famous regiments of the Confederate armies to battle;
majors who had commanded battalions of artillery or
squadrons of partisan rangers; adjutants of brigades and
divisions; captains of batteries and captains of cavalry
and infantry; and private soldiers who had fought from
First Manassas to the last volley at Appomattox. Many
of these veterans still wore their Confederate uniforms,
now faded and threadbare from long use; some lacked an
arm or a leg; and there were few who could not show on
some part of their persons the scars of wounds caused
by a bullet or fragment of shell. "And yet," says
W. Gordon McCabe, the comrade of many of them in
bivouac, skirmish, and battle, "and yet they were a
cheerful set, with a natural exultation that they had done
their duty as good soldiers; that they had stuck to Ole
Mars Robert to the last, and seen the thing through.
And so they buckled to their tasks, with hearts as high as
when they charged with Stuart at Aldie, and went up
the slopes of Cemetery Ridge. They wanted so little
that they felt that they still had much; even if things
were ill today, it would not to be so tomorrow. Hadn't
Horace said this identical thing nearly two thousand years
ago; 'non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit'?"
These youthful veterans,—youthful in years, but not
in fortitude and feats of bravery,—could claim as
former comrades in the field, and on the march, at least
three of the men from whose lips they were catching
the learning which they had come, at so much sacrifice,
to accumulate for their own equipment for the struggles
of practical life. There was Venable, who, as an aid to
Lee, had borne many an order from his chief to the most
dangerous angles of the battlefield; there was Peters,
who had led his regiment through many a scene of carnage;
there was Gildersleeve, who had been struck down
under fire and permanently crippled. "Not seldom,"
says Colonel McCabe, "would this great scholar relax for
a brief space his inexorable syntactical grilling and enliven
the close of the lecture-hour by reading aloud his
own exquisite and inspiriting translations of the marching
songs of Tyrtaeus, the rush of whose swift anapaest
recalled to his delighted hearers the lilt of their own warsongs,
which they had sung, it seemed but yesterday, to
the rhythmic beat of tramping feet, as they swung down
the Valley pike under old Stonewall."
