A new book explores the College's unusual contribution—the blood and genius of its own men—to the northern cause in the War Between the States.—Nancy Niblack Baxter
AS THE WIFE OF A WABASH MAN I have come to view the Wabash College experience with respect, affection,
and what might be some envy. I’ve learned all the words to Alma Mater because I’ve heard it so often, admired the stately
processions at the graduations and the presidents’ portraits in the Chapel. I had never, however, fully understood what it was all about until I got closely acquainted with 500 students of an earlier era.
I met them as I helped edit 500 Strong: Wabash College Students in the Civil War, the new book Hawthorne Publishing which explores the College’s unusual contribution—the blood and genius of its own men—to the northern cause in the War Between the States. The book is the final product of an historical research project of 25 years by the College’s seniors, history majors of Wabash Professor Jim Barnes H’91, who edited the book with his wife, Patience.
I was publishing editor for the project, which has been for me a journey of fresh insights about both the war and Wabash.
AT FIRST IT WAS DIFFICULT for me to see how a small college in the Midwest could have sent 500 men to the Civil War. Harvard sent about 700, Yale only 500. How did Wabash College, in the middle of a farming area drawing some students who grew up in log cabins, equal the venerable Eastern institutions of learning, sending half an entire regiment? It seemed implausible.
The answer: Wabash had a preparatory school in those days as well as a four-year college. This group of 500 includes all the men who served in the war and ever attended the College, which could be for a half-a-year or full terms through the years of the 1840s on to the 1870s after they returned from war. Still, it is impressive, even more so considering the surprising and highly varied nature of their service and lives both before and after the war.
I’ve lived in 1863 for much of my life as a writer with my subject often the Civil War, but nothing prepared me for this collection of short, pithy yet highly personal biographies. Or for the absolute dismay and shock of the stories of young men who should never have died at such an early age in swamps and mountain-side battlefields but, in all honestly, seemed usually (not always) to do so willingly “for their country.”
I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming distillation of the essence of the war in human terms found in these 500 biographies assembled by Wabash College history majors under Professor Barnes from 1981 to 2005. As they visited libraries, dug into county histories, gazed at stones in country cemeteries and contacted descendants of the soldiers, these students must have found themselves pausing to consider, if only briefly, what their subjects’ lives were like. And they must have seen how the Civil War experience was different from theirs— and also the same.
THE PROJECT ALTERED my own understanding of this cataclysmic war. I was surprised that the College produced so many true leaders from among its students, men who went on to find fame during the war and whose names are known to “buffs” around the nation. These were generals I’d heard of, but I didn’t realize they had in their student days trod the halls of Forest and Center Halls.
I found out I knew very little about the campaigns in the Great West. Consider Colonel (later General) Edward Canby, commander of the federal forces in New Mexico. While not scoring decisive victories, his leadership at the Battles of Val Verde and Glorieta Pass saved the area from annexation by the Confederacy early in the war.
There was Colonel John Coburn, who at Wabash founded Beta Theta Pi fraternity. Surrounded in March of 1863 at Thompson’s Station in Tennessee with a bunch of other Wabash men, Coburn surrendered to save his men’s lives
and went with them to prison camp. Then the unit, some of them Wabash dorm-mates, redeemed itself later in the war.
There was Brevet Major Valentine Stone, who commanded Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, where the John Wilkes
Booth conspirators were housed. He and his wife died after caring for yellow fever patients during an epidemic out there.
Of course we have all heard of General Lew Wallace, and he is a major name in the collection.
But there’s also Brevet Brigadier General John Charles Black, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading his regiment against fortified Confederate positions for a last stand at the Battle of Prairie Grove, AR. His brother, William Perkins Black, was also a Civil War Medal of Honor recipient, and was after the war the lawyer for defendants in the notorious Chicago Haymarket trials.
THERE ARE ODD campaigns, strange anomalies. The Second Indian Brigade was commanded by a Wabash man and entered battles shouting with wild whoops. A handful of Confederate soldiers from Wabash also fought determinedly for their side. Several “Colored Regiments” were commanded by officers who had attended the College.
Yet the vast preponderance of average students went on to be average soldiers, living just to survive in camp and on the field. A sizeable number of the 500 evidently signed up for a few months or even days to help “save the state” when Morgan’s Raiders swept through southern counties in ’63. These summer soldiers served for a couple of weeks and then got their names added to the veterans’ roles.
There were Wabash officers and men who were alcoholics and ruined their careers, the dishonorably discharged, those who committed suicide, either in the midst of the war or later, the soldiers driven insane or sent to prison. They were, of course, a minority, but they are in the collection, sad fates and all.
Too many very young men are dead here. There are more than 130 battles represented in this collection of war biographies. Wabash men experienced the shock of seeing their comrades falling by their sides, too, because you went to war with your friends and fellow students. They were dying on famous fields like Chickamauga and on the hillsides near Antietam Creek, but also in little known burgs like Halltown, Virginia, or Spanish Fort, Alabama.
But much more often, they died in drafty tents with comrades yelling all around them in anguish as surgeons worked after the battles. Or they lay wasting away in quieter beds tended by angel women in a huge hospital or after being sent home to die of dysentery, malaria and consumption, with their own children around their beds.
THE CONTRAST with the Wabash College of their youth is stark. They describe scenes of pleasant boredom at Chapel, snoozing while some Presbyterian minister droned on as birds sang outside the window, or contending in spirited debates by lamplight, or experiencing the lovely sight of women in pretty hats picking up books in the bookstore downtown. Part of an entire generation who had loved the dignified halls, comradely weekends, and Sunday dinners of Wabash would end up lying face down in the mud, their lives shattered from shrapnel in the face or horses falling on them. Though about 90 Wabash men died officially in the war, at least 200 more probably died of war-related injuries.
Here are many successful civic leaders, attorneys and doctors and bankers and farmers who led their communities. Many mayors, attorneys general, and legislators are included. Not all led, not by any means, some foundered. But most of these Wabash alumni helped build a new, feisty America.
What can we glean about how the College affected wartime performance and the strong success of many of the veterans? How could sitting in the old buildings studying “forensics, ethics and logic” and Xenophon, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Tacitus help anybody when they had to dig trenches amidst the 107-degree heat and mosquitoes and swamps of the Mississippi campaign? Or keep a soldier from turning tail in the Wheatfield at Gettysburg? It was all a matter of comradeship and discipline and some leadership skills, pure and simple. And perhaps some sense of a larger purpose in life. Wabash taught those things to its students before and at the time of the Civil War. And it still does.
Editor’s Note: 500 Strong: Wabash Students in the Civil War will be released in August 2013by Hawthorne Publishing as both a print and an e-book. It will be featured at the College’s sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War September 27 and 28, near the time of the Battle of Chickamauga, where so many Wabash men fought.