In 1873, a decade after his heroic defense of Little Round Top, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain faced another rebellion.  Upon taking office as president of Bowdoin College in 1871, Chamberlain had instituted mandatory military drill for all Bowdoin students.  Students complained about the military discipline and the expense of a military uniform (six dollars added to the cost of attending Bowdoin), and soon President Chamberlain had a full-scale rebellion on his hands. 

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).

Charles Rawn, a lawyer who lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, wrote over 11,000 daily entries between 1830 and 1865. The entire journal is now online thanks to the efforts of Pennsylvania University State Professor Michael Barton and the Historical Society of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. Rawn, who was born in Georgetown in July 1802, moved to Harrisburg in 1826 and got married seven years later. His journal entries largely contain notes about his daily life – from various legal matters to financial expenditures. While “he rarely mentioned grand ideas or personal feelings in his daily record,” Professor Barton argues that “[these] records are valuable guides to understanding everyday life in antebellum America.” Rawn was a “record keeper rather than a story teller,” as Baron explains. Yet Rawn’s journals include some interesting notes about political events in Harrisburg, including President-Elect Abraham Lincoln’s visit in 1861. On February 22 Rawn described:

“[Lincoln] rode in a Barouche drawn by 6 White Horses to Coverlys Hotel where he was addressed by Gov. Curtain & [replied?]. The enthusiasm of the people was perfectly and literally wild & unrestrainable…. Altogether it was such a day & time as Harrisburg has never before witnessed. The number Military here in time of the Buckshot Wars was approached nearly perhaps to the number here yesterday. Mr. L’s appearance is younger considerably than was generally expected and he is not so tall [nor so?] Rawboned as we had been given to believe from his pictures and what we had read.”

In addition, Rawn took detailed notes when he traveled into Virginia three months after Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in April 1861. On July 22, 1861, the day after the First Battle of Bull Run, Rawn observed:

“Dead, wounded and dying being brought in continually. I saw several of the wounded. One man with a Buck shot in the neck….From all accounts which of course are measurably wild and unforgettable [?] in a degree the slaughter on both sides has been immense—in the thousands. There was desperate fighting—desperate fright in some quarters and desperate getting out of the way in all many directions and in all imaginable disorder by some of our troops as I make out by the statements.”

The Dickinson College Class of 1860’s graduation marked for many students the beginning of a necessary transition into an divided country. Given that thirteen students hailed from Slave States and eleven from Free States, the transition differed for each student as they returned to their homes on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. This dynamic map features several notable alumni that served, and perished, on both sides of the battlefield during the Civil War. While some did not enlist in the military, more than half of the class members noted on this map served either the Confederate or Union armies in some way.

George Baylor, born in Jefferson County, Virginia, entered Dickinson College in 1857 and graduated with the Class of 1860. He initially returned home and became an assistant teacher after graduation, but once the war began he enlisted in the 2nd Virginia Infantry. By 1863 Baylor engaged Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley, was taken prisoner, and incurred various battle wounds. His reputation grew as a practical military leader and effective director of Confederate raids through Virginia in 1864. One such raid secured Baylor as a Dickinson legend. While in combat in Trevilan, Virginia, a Union soldier shot Baylor in the chest. Because Baylor wore his Union Philosophical Society badge in battle as a reminder of the organization he belonged to at Dickinson, the bullet did not penetrate his skin and he survived. The war ended soon thereafter, and Baylor sought out a profession in law.

John Henry Grabill followed a similar trajectory, for once the Civil War began he enlisted in the 33rd Virginia Volunteer Infantry centered near his birthplace in Mount Jackson, Virginia. In 1862 Grabill, at the age of twenty-two years old, recruited and trained his own unit of soldiers in the Shenandoah Valley. This unit went on to fight during the retreat to Appomattox Court House in 1865. Grabill fought in several key battles himself including the Battle of Brandy Station and Battle of the Wilderness. He elaborated on these engagements as part of his general service in the army in Diary of a Soldier of the Stonewall Brigade (1909). After the war Grabill entered the field of education as a superintendent in Shenandoah County.

Baylor, Grabill, and their classmates offered several stories that contribute much to one’s understanding of the Civil War and its lasting impact on Dickinson College and the surrounding area of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This dynamic map is one of several projects utilizing modern tools to examine these local and personal responses to the war.

Using free tools from Google Maps, we have launched a dynamic new map of Pennysylvania’s hallowed grounds that attempts to chart the burial locations of black soldiers from Pennsylvania who fought in the Civil War. In particular, this map-in-progress highlights cemeteries that hold the remains of the 100 Voices, or representative figures being memorialized by the 2010 PA Grand Review initiative. For example, three members of the 100 Voices are buried at Midland Cemetery in Steelton, Pennsylvania —Lemuel Butler, Andrew Hill and Charles Henderson. Visitors to the dynamic online map will find photographs and exact GPS coordinates of their headstones (courtesy of Calobe Jackson, Jr.) as well as background information on these men. Each online cemetery marker also includes information such as photographs or videos (where available) of the cemetery and whatever additional background information might be contained within Dickinson College’s House Divided research engine or at the Pennsylvania Grand Review website. This particular Hallowed Grounds map is ongoing project that needs your help. Please feel free to contribute photos, videos, GPS coordinates (obtainable through smart phones or GPU handsets) by sending them to us at hdivided@dickinson.edu. Other Civil War Era-related dynamic maps, such as one concerning the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania or Frederick Douglass’s childhood in Baltimore, have been posted here.

Nineteenth-century historian Robert Clemens Smedley labeled the town of Columbia, Pennsylvania as the birthplace of the organized structure that we now know as the Underground Railroad.  Smedley’s posthumously published account of the Underground Railroad’s presence in Pennsylvania, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania (1883), is available on Dickinson College and Mercersville University’s digital collection: “Slavery & Abolition in the US: Select Publications of the 1800s .”  Smedley narrates the story of the Underground Railroad with Columbia as a key station on the Underground Railroad because of its proximity to the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, just across the Susquehanna River. The Wright family, which founded Columbia in 1726, maintained a sympathetic ear towards the abolitionist cause reflecting their Quaker background. Today the Wright family home, Wright’s Ferry Mansion , is open to the public for tours. The founder’s grandson, William Wright, “an uncompromising hater of slavery,” became one of the first established agents of the Underground Railroad, setting up a network for escaping slaves in Columbia.  Fergus M. Bordewich, author of the comprehensive Underground Railroad book Bound for Canaan (2005) mentions Wright briefly as “hitting on the idea of passing fugitives along from one home to another at intervals of ten or twenty miles, with other friends designated to pilot them in between.” Wright’s network included Robert Loney (or Loonee), a free black man who “ferried fugitives across the [Susquehanna] river in the night at various places below Columbia, and gave them into the care of William Wright.” Loney went on to join Company I of the 32nd Regiment of the USCT in 1864 and is buried in Columbia’s recently restored Zion Hill Cemetery (5th & Linden Streets, Columbia, PA), the burial place of many local black Civil War veterans.  The Pennsylvania “Quest for Freedom ” tour, which maps the historic locations of abolition-related sites from Philadelphia to Chambersburg, includes a stop in Columbia that highlights the Zion Hill Cemetery.  The USGenWeb Tombstone Transcription Project also includes a Zion Hill webpage with recent photos of fourteen USCT headstones.

The Becker Collection is a great digital project from Boston College that contains over 600 drawings by Joseph Becker and others who worked for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. The “Featured Images” slideshow provides a nice introduction to what is available in the collection. These drawings cover a range of Civil War related topics, such as camp life, military ceremonies and discipline, panoramas and landscapes, and ships. Other topics include the Chicago fire, political cartoons, and the Trans-Atlantic cable. Biographies of the artists featured in this collection are also available.

The Denver Public Library has a nice digital collection of images related to various topics in Western history. While not available to download for free, each set of images can still be viewed as a slideshow – these include “Railroads,” “On the Trail and Covered Wagon,” “Western Life,” and “Wild West Shows.” Other digital collections from the Denver Public Library are available here.

William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers have a piece of digital scholarship entitled “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities” that analyzes Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania in the period just before the Civil War.  While the scope of the article is to relate how slavery affected these two small communities, it contains some important analysis of the election of 1860 as well.  The method follows closely that used by Ayers in his excellent book In the Presence of Mine Enemies.  Analyzing primary documents from these two small towns close to the Mason-Dixon line sheds new light on previously held notions of how the buildup to the Civil War affected everyday Americans.  Of particular interest in this article is the summary of Politics and the Election of 1860 and the “points of analysis” from these towns in the Campaign of 1860 and the Election of 1860.  The digital format of this article makes it particularly compelling as the authors’ points about each county can be summarized briefly in a side-by-side manner, and then expanded upon by clicking the link if more information is needed.  In this expanded view of the argument, there are links to all of the supporting evidence and historiography at the bottom.

The University of South Carolina has a nice digital collection of over two hundred broadsides from the Colonial Era to the present. One can find broadsides related to secession, the Civil War, and a number of other topics. Almost all of the broadsides in this collection were originally printed in South Carolina. Other digital collections are available through the South Carolina Digital Library.

When Delia Locke and her husband moved to northern California in 1855, she started a diary that she continued to write in until her death in 1922. Thanks to the University of the Pacific, her diary entries between 1855 and 1879 are available online. Locke not only recorded detailed observations about daily life, but she also commented on major political events. Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election was “good news,” as Locke noted on November 16, 1860. Four years later she still supported Lincoln. Even though she could not vote, she had strong opinions about the candidates. While Lincoln “[was] the representative of freedom,” Locke believed that Democrat George McClellan represented “slavery” and led a political “party which [was] composed of traitors at heart.” The University of the Pacific also has other interesting digital projects to explore, including “John Muir Journals,” John Muir Photographs, and several collections related to Japanese-American Internment Camps.