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).

“The irrepressible conflict has rent the Democratic party asunder, and it has ceased to exist as a national organization.” – Chicago (IL) Democrat, May 1, 1860

When the Democratic National Convention opened on April 23, 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina, the delegates’ objectives were to set the platform and select candidates for the 1860 election. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas was one of the politicians who hoped to receive the nomination. While some Democratic newspaper editors considered him as the best hope for victory in November 1860, others argued that he exemplified the sectional divisions within the party. Douglas, as the New York Herald explained, was not “a moderate man who can unite the whole party.” The divide within the Democratic party became clear when the convention ended on May 1 without delegates selecting any candidates. Instead, Democrats would reconvene in Baltimore, Maryland on June 18. Republican newspapers like the Chicago (IL) Press and Tribune were quick to use the Charleston convention to characterize the Democrats as “an intensely sectional organization.” Abraham Lincoln, as the Press and Tribune noted, had predicted such a development during his debate with Senator Douglas at Galesburg, Illinois on October 7, 1858: “I see the day rapidly approaching when [Douglas’] pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be [crowded?] down his own throat.” While Northern Democrats eventually selected Douglas as their candidate, Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge.

When he was fifteen years old—before his right arm was shattered at Fair Oaks, before he saw action at Antietam and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and Chattanooga, before he marched to the sea with Sherman—General Oliver Otis Howard faced the the trial of his life: the entrance examination for Bowdoin College.  “I have passed though many ordeals since then,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but I do not think that any of them impressed me more than that preliminary examination.”

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).

According to the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, the farthest northern point attained by an organized body of the Confederate Army was present day Pennsylvania Route 34, about 1 mile north of Carlisle Springs. The Pennsylvania Historical marker, erected in 1929, states that on the morning of June 28, 1863, an organized band of the Confederate Army of Robert E. Lee reached the farm of Joseph Miller near Sterrett’s Gap. There is no evidence as to whose command these Confederates belonged to as none of their records from the Gettysburg campaign indicate an exploration near Sterrett’s Gap. Check out ExplorePAhistory.com for more information and details on the historical marker.

Another common conception of the farthest northern point or high-water mark of the Confederate Army was during day 3 of the Battle of Gettysburg. Union troops were positioned behind a small grove of trees within a confined area known as “The Angle” on July 3, 1863 during “Pickett’s Charge.” The first government historian of the Gettysburg battlefield, John B. Bachelder, conferred the title “High Water Mark of the Rebellion” to this small grove or “copse” of trees. Bachelder’s influence led to the creation of the “High Water Mark of the Rebellion Monument,” dedicated in 1892. For more information the National Parks Service website and the Historical Marker Database provides further details, maps and images.

In the western theater, there are several locations that stake claim as the northern most point obtained by the Rebels. During the Battle of Salineville on June 26, 1863 near Salineville, Ohio, Confederate Major General John H. Morgan evaded Union capture before finally surrendering near West Point, Ohio. A marker commemorating Morgan’s surrender and the northern most engagement of the Confederate Army is located on present day Ohio Route 39 about 3.4 miles west of Salineville. In Davis County, Iowa, a plaque observing a Confederate raid on October 12, 1864 led by Lieutenant James “Bill” Jackson is located in Bloomfield, Iowa, slightly north of the Morgan marker in Ohio.

Further north than all these locations is St. Albans, Vermont where on October 19, 1864, Confederate Lieutenant Bennett H. Young raided the small town from Canada located about 15 miles south of the border, robbing several banks with a small Rebel force. While there was never an engagement between Young’s forces and a Union force, the St. Albans Raid is considered the northern most point occupied by the Confederates.

On April 10, 1865, Charles Albright and George Baylor led their respective units against one another in battle near Fairfax Station, Virginia. The former commander employed his hard-driving personality when leading his Union troops on campaigns against Confederate soldiers in the South. Baylor, on the other hand, did not immediately convey the impression of a warrior given his slight frame and weight of only 120 pounds. Wounded, captured, and later released by Union forces, he proved himself as a resourceful and resilient leader in the Confederate army. These unlikely warriors shared experiences as students at Dickinson College, but the directions they took after leaving campus brought them together on the battlefield not as fellow alumni but as fervent opponents.

Albright, a devout Methodist who refused to smoke or drink, entered Dickinson in 1848 with the Class of 1852. He withdrew from the College in 1851 to study law and began to take a solid stance against slave-holding states. By 1854 Albright moved to Kansas with the Western Pennsylvania Kansas Company as part of a campaign encouraging an influx of families opposed to slavery and committed to temperance. Disappointed with the organization’s effectiveness, Albright concentrated soon thereafter on his law practice in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania.

In 1857, as Albright began to establish his law practice, Baylor entered Dickinson with the Class of 1860. Focused on the “intransient beauty” and enlightenment of human thought, Baylor did not demonstrate any resilience to his education in the North despite his origins in Virginia. Nevertheless, he enlisted in the Confederate army one year after graduation and committed to the full duration of the conflict. Over the four years that followed, Baylor gained a reputation as a bright and phenomenal young soldier, which he strengthened throughout 1864 and 1865 on his successful raids disrupting Union lines of communication. On April 10, 1865, one day following Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Baylor’s success fell short.

Learning of a planned raid near Fairfax Station, Albright pursued Baylor’s raiders and forced them to retreat, leaving behind some casualties, prisoners, and supplies. In addition to a later report of the short battle, Albright assured his superiors that he had “whipped [Baylor] like thunder.” Resistant to the commander’s satisfaction, Baylor retorted that Albright won an “exceedingly small” advantage and had no reason to gloat. The men never spoke of their shared experience at Dickinson. These men engaged in unforgiving combat, removed themselves from any shared experiences, and, as a consequence, transformed from alumni into enemies.

The Battle of the Crater (also known as The Mine) took place on July 30, 1864 in Petersburg, Virginia.  Union forces under the command of Major General Ambrose E. Burnside exploded a mine and created a large gap in the Confederate protection of Petersburg.  However, the Confederate Major General William Mahone and his forces responded with various counterattacks that resulted in high casualties for the Union forces, especially the United States Colored Troop Regiments present.  The National Parks Service website provides a detailed summary of the Battle of the Crater that includes several sketches of the battlefield.  The Civil War Preservation Trust’s website offers several resources on the battle such as an article on the Petersburg Campaign and short biographies of Union General Burnside and Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  John F. Schmutz recounted the battle in his book, The Battle of the Crater: A Complete History: 

“Whenever the first division attempted to advance out of the Crater, they were soon met by intense fire from the Confederate infantry, which had by then recovered its composure after the explosion and bombardment, as well as the Rebel artillery, which had found the range on the Federals in the Crater.  Many were hit not only from the exposed flanks, but also from the rear, as the Confederates reoccupied the transverses and entrenchments to the right and left of the Crater.  These men had recovered their equanimity and when the Union attempted to re-form on the Confederate side of the Crater, the Rebels faced about and delivered a fire into the backs of the Federals.  Coming so unexpectedly, this caused the forming line to fall back into the Crater.”

Another resource which may be interesting to browse is Edward Alexander Porter’s Fighting for the Confederacy: the Personal Recollections of General Edward Alexander Porter which provides a firsthand account of the battle from the Confederate perspective.  Also available on Google Books as a preview is Earl Hess’s In the Trenches at Petersburg which gives a summary of the action at the Crater as well as a map of the battlefield.  The Battle of the Crater could be connected to a lesson on United States Colored Troops in the Civil War as a previous post on Blog Divided gives details on the participation of the 43rd USCT Regiment during the battle.  For further reading, Gregory J.W. Urwin’s Black Flag over Dixie and John David Smith’s Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era both  provide an account of the experiences of black soldiers during the Battle of the Crater.

The Republican Party held its second national convention beginning at noon on May 16, 1860 in Chicago.  The presidential nominees included the veteran statesmen Edward Bates, Salmon P. Chase, Simon Cameron, and William H. Seward, as well as a new senator from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln.  Although Seward was the favorite going into the convention and led the nominees on the first two ballots, Lincoln won the Republican presidential candidacy. Republican delegates had looked to back the candidate they felt could generate the most electoral support.  Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, had the ears of 48 delegates.  Greeley’s battle cry was “anyone but Seward!” and initially gave his support to Bates.  According to Greeley’s recent biographer Robert Chadwell Williams, as Lincoln began closing in on Seward in the third ballot, Greeley shifted his 48 votes over to Lincoln, giving him the candidacy.

This Currier & Ives political cartoon shows Seward drowning of the pier after being pushed in by Greeley (the figure in the top hat). Drawn by Louis Maurer and published in 1860, “Impending Crisis” satirizes the influential role of newspapermen in Civil War-era politics.  Henry J. Raymond (in the police uniform), founder of the New York Times, also helped write the charter of the Republican Party in 1856 and later was a New York Representative.  James Watson Webb (on the left dressed as a newspaper boy), editor of Courier & Esquirer, recently threw his support behind the Republican Party.  The title of the cartoon refers the book written by Hinton Rowan Helper in 1857, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, which denounced slavery from an economic viewpoint—slavery prevented a diverse economy, disadvantaging poor Southerners. Although Seward is undergoing the crisis of losing the Republican presidential candidacy in this cartoon, he would become Lincoln’s Secretary of State, a member of a cabinet filled with Lincoln’s previous political rivals.

Richard Lee Turberville Beale, born on May 22, 1819 to a wealthy and well-known couple in Hickory Hill, Virginia, began his boyhood education in various academies in Virginia before moving northward to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. After graduating with the Class of 1838, Beale practiced law before being elected to the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat from Virginia. His two-year term (1847 to 1849) in office did not end his political career, as he served in the Congress again from 1879 to 1881. The intervening years included Beale’s service in the Confederate army. Enlisted in May 1861, Beale served in the 9th Virginia Cavalry until he became the leading colonel of the regiment. He recalled in his self-composed History of the 9th Va. Cavalry (1899), partially available on Google Books, his service during the army’s invasion into Pennsylvania and, later, Carlisle in 1863. The subsequent shelling of the town on July 1st evoked a nostalgic response, for as the “United States barracks blazed…[and] women screamed,” Beale noted that “recollections of boyhood were vividly recalled, as, when a student at Dickinson College, he had hunted over these grounds with his comrades, crossed the Yellow Breeches creek in a cider-trough and eaten lunch at a little spring up on the mountainside.”

Beale married Lucy Brown prior to enlisting in the army and raised six children. Because Beale owned thirty-eight slaves as well as farmland, he could provide for his family. (Of the slaves he owned, eighteen were male and twenty female, which included seventeen children and twenty-one adults.) Before he died on April 18, 1893, Beale saw his eldest son, George William Beale, marry and have children of his own.

After the Civil War ended, Beale’s account of the 9th Virginia Cavalry was found and, with assistance from George, became the published version of History of the 9thVa. Cavalry in 1899. George wrote in the introduction of the memoir that it provided an apt recognition of his father’s service and the “Southern devotion and valor” of other soldiers belonging to the 9th Virginia Cavalry.

George was born to Richard and Lucy between 1842 and 1843. He eventually entered the Civil War alongside his father in Company C of the 9th Virginia Cavalry as a lieutenant. Much of his service can be found in his own memoirs entitled A Lieutenant of Cavalry in Lee’s Army (1918). Much of his account of the war includes letters to his mother, including one that discussed the “conflagration at Carlisle” on the night of July 1st.

George and Mary A. Beale, married in 1879, raised five surviving children. George kept the Beale family’s prominence in Virginia, as seen in an address he gave in Montross, Virginia in 1910.

The Battle of Gaines’ Mill took place on June 27, 1862 in Hanover County, Virginia and was the third of the Seven Days’ Battles and its largest engagement. After the battle of Beaver Dam Creek, Union Major General George B. McClellan determined to change his base to the James River in order to protect his Army of the Potomac from what he felt was a much superior Confederate Army. Confederate General Robert E. Lee unleashed a relentless attack against Union Brigadier General Fitz John Porter throughout the day. McClellan driven by fear and indecision was convinced that his Union Army was vastly outnumbered and failed to provide adequate reinforcements for Porter’s V Corps. As the battle raged, the Confederate Army awaited the arrival of Major General Stonewall Jackson to turn the tide in the battle. Jackson arrived later than Lee expected which proved costly for the Confederate soldiers. By the time Lee executed his all out attack on the Union Army with Jackson present, it was 7 P.M. and darkness was approaching.

The final assault from the Confederate Army was successful in finally breaking Porter’s line. McClellan eventually provided reinforcements but only about one tenth of the forces he had at his disposal. The Union troops arrived just as Porter’s soldiers fell back into a retreat. The Confederate Army pushed McClellan’s army into a further retreat, ending the Union General’s hopes for capturing Richmond and gave Lee his first major victory of the campaign. The battle was not won without staggering losses from both sides. Estimated casualties for the Confederates totaled 8,700 while the Federals suffered 6,800. McClellan avoided a major defeat but felt that his Army was vastly inferior to the Confederacy, something that would plague McClellan and the Union Army for the rest of his tenure as general-in-chief of the Union Army. In a telegram sent to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, McClellan professed:

“I have lost this battle because my force was too small…The Government has not sustained this army….If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.”

The Civil War Preservation Trust website provides a wealth of information on the battle including images, maps, recommended readings, online resources and scholarly articles. The Official Virginia Civil War Battlefield Guide by John S. Salmon is partially available on Google Books and offers a clear overview of the battle with maps and gives directions and information for visiting the battlefield. One of best reviewed and definitive accounts of the battle is featured in Stephen W. Sears’ To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign. For primary accounts from both sides, consult volume 11 of the Official Records.

The Battle of Petersburg, also known as the Assault on Petersburg, took place from June 15-18, 1864 in the city of Petersburg, Virginia.  Led by Union General Ulysses S. Grant, the Union forces left Cold Harbor and attacked the Confederate forces under the command of General Pierre Beauregard.  General William F. Smith’s failure to take advantage of the low number of Confederate forces initially present allowed General Robert E. Lee to send reinforcements and the Confederates were able to defend Petersburg from capture.  This battle marked the beginning of the siege of Petersburg.  The National Park Service’s website includes an overview on the opening of the fighting as well as short biographies  on the commanding officers for each army.  The website also offers lesson plans, travel trunks, and information for teachers on planning a field trip to the battleground.  The Civil War Preservation Trust’s website  provides a list for recommended reading, historical articles, and quick facts on the Battle of Petersburg.  Beauregard commented  on the mistakes of the Union forces that prevented the capture of Petersburg:

“Strange to say, General Smith contented himself with breaking into our lines, and attempted nothing further that night.  All the more strange was this inaction on his part, since General Hancock, with his strong and well-equipped Second Army Corps, had also been hurried to Petersburg, and was actually there, or in the immediate vicinity of the town, on the evening of the 15th.  He had informed General Smith of the arrival of his command and the readiness of his two divisions- Birney’s and Gibbon’s- to give him whatever assistance he might require.  Petersburg at that hour was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander, who had all but captured it, and only failed of final success because he could not realize the fact of the unparalleled disparity between the two contending forces.”

Some other resources that may be useful are Armistead Long’s Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History and Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs which could provide opposing views of the Battle of Petersburg from the Union and Confederate commanding generals.  In terms of modern scholarship, James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is available as a preview on Google Books and contains a concise summary of the events of the battle.  The Battle of Petersburg could be related to a lesson on black soldiers and their role in the Civil War as the 6th and 43rd United States Colored Troop  Regiments either fought in this particular battle or in the following battles during the siege of Petersburg.  The National Park Service also provides an article on black soldiers at the siege which may be helpful to browse.