During the Civil War, a “battle of the bands” generally took place in the evening, when two opposing armies had gone into bivouac, and the bands on either side played back and forth across the lines.  Sam Seay, of the 1^st Tennessee Infantry, described one especially poignant “battle of the bands”on the eve of the Battle of Stones River (the Battle of Murfreesboro) on December 30, 1862:

Just before ‘tattoo’ the military bands on each side began their evening music. The still winter night carried their strains to great distance. At every pause on our side, far away could be heard the military bands of the other. Finally one of them struck up ‘Home Sweet Home.’ As if by common consent, all other airs ceased, and the bands of both armies as far as the ear could reach, joined in the refrain. Who knows how many hearts were bold next day by reason of that air?

The modern 1^st Brigade Band was founded in 1864, one hundred years after the original 1^st Wisconsin Brigade Band marched to the sea with Gen. William T. Sherman.  During that campaign, the band found itself in a hard-fought “battle of the bands” with another Union brigade band from Michigan.  Here’s how bandmaster E.O. Kimberly described the “battle”:

“They were a very fair band: they would play a piece and then we would.  After playing 3 or 4 pieces, we then played a new piece we had just learned, a fine thing; after finishing it ,they struck up with the same thing, which of course was considered an insult.  Our boys then swore they would run them out, determined to play the last piece, and the other band also made the same determination that they would play the last piece and run the d….d Badgers out.  Of course on such occasion both bands had been drinking pretty freely and were excited and maddened to no low pitch.  We kept on, as soon as they finished a piece we were ready to start in, playing every piece they did if we had it.  They sent a man over to see what we had to play and we had done the same.  Their colonel was with them and swore that he would hang the first men that gave out.  The whole affair was just like a hard contested battle.  At one o’clock we were still going at it, as quick as they would stop, we would start right in.  We were determined to play until 8 o’clock in the morning if necessary.  The Doctor said he would get us some breakfast.  Liquors were set out on a table for the boys to drink just when they had a mind to.  Both bands kept on until 3 o’clock: it was their turn to play but they failed to come out; we waited patiently.  Our spy came back and informed us they had given up.  We played ‘Yankee Doodle’ double quick.  The boys shouted Victory!  We had whipped them and forced a retreat.”

In Northfield this weekend, the Newberry Victorian Cornet Band retired from the field after a rousing rendition of “Dixie,” which you can listen to here. 

You can find a history of the 1^st Brigade Band on the modern band’s website, and photographs of the original band members in the digital collections of the University of Wisconsin.  The Library of Congress American Memory collection has an excellent online exhibit of “Band Music from the Civil War Era,”including audio files of some of the music and downloadable scores. 

Click here for a small slideshow (six photos) of the 2010 battle of the bands in Northfield, and here for a video of the battle of the bands during the 2006 Vintage Band Festival in Northfield.

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and received his first schooling from his father, who was a Presbyterian clergyman and newspaper editor.  Young Gildersleeve was reading ancient Greek fluently at the age of twelve, and at nineteen had graduated from Princeton (class of 1849) and had set off for Göttingen, Germany, where he earned a doctorate in classical philology in 1853.  He was a professor of Greek at the University of Virginia from 1856 until 1876, when he left to become the first professor of Greek at the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. 

From 1861 to 1864, Gildersleeve served as a staff officer with General John B. Gordon.  A staunch supporter of the Confederacy, he also contributed regular wartime editorials to the Richmond Examiner, edited by John Moncure Daniel, which have been collected by Ward W. Briggs, Jr. in Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War  (University Press of Virginia 1998).  Gildersleeve’s service with the Confederate army ended in September 1864, during the Valley Campaigns, when a bullet shattered his leg. 

“I lost my pocket Homer, I lost my pistol, I lost one of my horses and, finally, I came very near losing my life,” he later wrote.  General Gordon, in his memoirs, praised Gildersleeve’s “courage and composure” under fire, and Gildersleeve claimed that the general’s praise meant more to him than any of the academic honors he had received.

At Johns Hopkins after the war, Gildersleeve founded the prestigious American Journal of Philology, wrote a Latin grammar that would become a standard for generations to come, and reflected on the Civil War in essays like “The Creed of the Old South,” which promoted the idea of the Lost Cause. (Writing about Demosthenes in the American Journal of Philology in 1906, Gildersleeve called the Greek orator “a champion of a lost cause,” and added, “some of us who have championed lost causes are not so enthusiastic about other people’s lost causes.”) In “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War,” quoted above, Gildersleeve reflects on the American Civil War in light of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict in the fifth century BCE between the northern Greek Athenians and the southern Greek Spartans.

“States rights were not suffered to slumber,” he wrote in that essay.  “The Southerner resented Northern dictation as Pericles resented Lacedaimonian [i.e., Spartan] dictation, and our Peloponnesian War began.” 

For more on Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve online, see James Stimpert, “Hopkins History: First Greek Prof., Basil Gildersleeve,” The Johns Hopkins Gazette, September 18, 2000; and Michael Dirda, “To Understand Ourselves,” Johns Hopkins Magazine, August 27, 2009. Both “The Creed of the Old South” and “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War” can be read on Google Books.

“A prodigy,” Lucretia called him. 

In 1850, Lucretia left the Geauga Seminary and enrolled in the new Hiram Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio.  The following year, Garfield also enrolled at Hiram, and Lucretia experienced the unexpected thrill of meeting “a pair of eyes…as once I looked up from a hard sentence somewhere in the fore part of the Greek grammar.”  It wasn’t exactly love at first conjugation—both she and James were recovering from painful break-ups—but in 1853 James surprised Lucretia with a letter written during an excursion to Niagara Falls, and soon the two were engaged in a full-fledged correspondence. 

At first, they addressed each other as Brother and Sister.  They wrote about the books they were reading, and about their shared enthusiasm for teaching.  James was teaching Latin and Greek at Hiram, and Lucretia was teaching at a public school in Chagrin Falls, and attempting to keep pace with James’s Latin class in reading Virgil. 

“I would like to know how many hundred lines the Virgil class are ahead of me,” she wrote to James in November 1853.

“Today, the Virgil class finished the third book and are going about 50 lines per day,” Jame wrote back on December 8.  “Are you ahead? I presume so.  Won’t you come in to both Greek and Latin in the spring? We miss you very much in these two classes.  What are your views with regard to studying the classics?  Have you reconciled yourself to devoting a few more years to them? I would like to hear your reasonings on the subject.”

Replying six days later, Lucretia confessed that she had laid aside Virgil for the winter.  As to the study of classics in general, she wrote: “Candidly, I will confess that thus far I have prosecuted the study of them without any argument in their favor which appeared to me conclusive.”  She admitted that the study of Greek and Latin provided “rigid mental discipline,” but she wondered if there might be other means of acquiring that discipline. 

“I wish you would convince me of their superior merit if they really possess it,” she wrote; “for I do not like to give them up—neither do I like to continue in them feeling that precious moments are being wasted…”

This discussion continued in several letters over the following months.  Meanwhile, James quietly dropped the pretense of calling her Sister, and soon Lucretia was sending James her “warmest love.”  In March 1854, the subject of marriage was raised.

James A. Garfield—veteran of Shiloh and Chickamauga, Union general, and twentieth President of the United States—courted his wife with a debate over the value of a classical education. 

The correspondence of James and Lucretia Garfield can be found in John Shaw, ed. Crete and James: Personal Letters of Lucretia and James Garfield (Michigan State University Press 1994).  For a biography of Lucretia Garfield, see John Shaw, Lucretia (Nova History Publications, 2001).  On James Garfield’s study of the classics, see Susan Ford Wiltshire’s essay, “The Classicist President” (.pdf).

When he saw Forrest in the role of Spartacus in 1846, Walt Whitman wrote that the play was “as full of ‘Abolitionism’ as an egg is of meat.”  Whitman continued: “It is founded on that passage of Roman history where the slaves—Gallic, Spanish, Thracian and African—rose against their masters, and formed themselves into a military organization, and for a time successfully resisted the forces sent to quell them. Running o’er with sentiments of liberty—with eloquent disclaimers of the right of the Romans to hold human beings in bondage—it is a play, this ‘Gladiator,’ calculated to make the hearts of the masses swell responsively to all those nobler manlier aspirations in behalf of mortal freedom!”

But Bird, the playwright, was no abolitionist.  He was afraid of the violence abolitionism would bring down upon the nation.  In his 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, for example, he portrays the institution of slavery as essentially benign, and his fictional slaves as content with their servitude until stirred to insurrection by an abolitionist pamphlet.  The spectre of a slave uprising haunted him. 

The Gladiator was first performed in April 1831, five months before an actual slave rebellion, under the leadership of Nat Turner, erupted in Virginia.  As the news of the rebellion reached Bird, he wrote in his diary: “At this present moment there are 6[00] or 800 armed negroes marching through Southampton County, Va. murdering, ravishing & burning those whom the Grace of God has made their owners—70 killed, principally women & children. If they had but a Spartacus among them—to organize the half million of Virginia, the hundreds of thousands of the other States and to lead them on in the Crusade of Massacre, what a blessed example might they not give to the world of the excellence of slavery! What a field of interest to the playwrites of posterity! Someday we shall have it; and future generations will perhaps remember the horrors of Hayti as a farce compared with the tragedies of our own unhappy land! The vis et amor sceleratus habendi [force and criminal love of gain] will be repaid, violence with violence, & avarice with blood…”

Meanwhile, Edwin Forrest continued to pack houses with his portrayal of Spartacus.  And in 1860, Matthew Brady produced a series of photographs of Forrest in costume for his most popular roles, including Spartacus.  The National Portrait Gallery has a web exhibit of Brady’s photographs of Forrest.  Fellow photographer Marcus Aurelius Root called them Brady’s “most remarkable productions…for artistic effect.”

Eventually, after he lost the support of the college trustees, Chamberlain was forced to back down.

Chamberlain was himself an 1856 graduate of Bowdoin.  He had prepared for his entrance examination by working with a private tutor and spending as many as seventeen hours a day teaching himself ancient Greek.  He also spent a year, when he was fourteen, attending the Military and Classical Academy in Ellsworth, Maine, where he was drilled by headmaster Charles Jarvis Whiting.  From the former Army engineer, Chamberlain received his first taste of military discipline.

As President of Bowdoin after the war, Chamberlain not only instituted military drill, he also turned his attention to improving the college’s offerings in the practical disciplines of science and engineering.  He began to urge Maine’s wealthy former governor, Abner Coburn, to endow a new “scientific department” at Bowdoin.  He told Coburn: “I took this place [as college president] simply because I thought I could here soonest and best try the experiment of a liberal course of study which should tend to the widest practical use in life.  The great demand of the times is that knowledge, instead of being turned inward, and shut up in the cloister, should face outward towards the real work of life” (The Grand Old Man of Maine, pp. 53-4)

Chamberlain admired the accomplishments of educators like Ezra Cornell and Harvard president Charles William Eliot, who were leading the effort to modernize higher education in America. Ezra Cornell had founded the university that bears his name in 1865, under the provisions of the Morrill Act, the Civil War era legislation which provided federal land grants for colleges.  The act required land-grant colleges, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”

The period from 1840 to 1880 brought to prominence practical-minded men like Eliot (a chemist and businessman), Cornell (the founder of Western Union), and Chamberlain, who realized that the traditional classical curriculum, with its focus on Latin and Greek, was insufficient for a practical, democratic society like the United States.  Ironically, the period ended with the election of James A. Garfield—the first and only professor of classical languages to serve as President of the United States.  

Bowdoin College maintains an informative digital archive of resources related to the life and career of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, including documents, photographs, and a “biographical map” using Google Maps or Google Earth. The most recent biography of Chamberlain is Edward G. Longacre’s Joshua Chamberlain: The Soldier and the Man (Da Capo Press 2003).

Howard passed the examination, on the condition that he work on his scansion of Greek and Latin poetry—that is, his ability to read the poetry aloud in the proper meter.

Like most college-bound boys in the nineteenth century, Howard had attended a private academy offering a college preparatory course that emphasized Greek, Latin, and mathematics.  Until late in the nineteenth century, proficiency in Greek and Latin was a requirement for admission to college.  The Dickinson College statutes for 1830, for example, specified that “applicants for admission into the Freshman class, must be approved by the Faculty, on an examination in Latin, in Caesar’s Commentaries, the Orations of Cicero against Catiline, and the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid: in Greek, on the Gospel of John, and Dalzell’s Collectanea Minora [an anthology]: and in Arithmetic as far as the Double Rule of Three.”

O. O. Howard was prepared for Bowdoin at the North Yarmouth Classical Academy, where the headmaster was Allen H. Weld, author of the popular Latin textbook Latin Lessons and Reader (1845).  Weld’s career in many ways illustrates the evolution of education in America in the nineteenth century from predominantly private to predominantly public education.  Born in Braintree, Vermont, in 1809, Weld graduated from Yale and began his career teaching in private academies like North Yarmouth, where he served as headmaster from 1837 to 1848. It was during this period that the common school movement—the movement toward universal public education—began to gain traction under the leadership of Horace Mann.  In 1858, Weld moved west, to Wisconsin, where he became the superintendent of the public schools in St. Croix County, and in 1874 was intrumental in establishing  the state normal school, or public school teacher’s college, in River Falls (now the University of Wisconsin—River Falls).