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1. Dwellers beside the Sea: Colleges at War
- University of Virginia Press
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19 When Sallie Love received her college diploma, she may well have heaved a sigh of relief. Few knew the di∞culties of attending college in wartime better than she. When the Civil War broke out, the Love, Mississippi, native was attending the State Female College in Memphis, Tennessee. Upon the surrender of Tennessee’s Fort Donelson to Northern troops in February 1862, however, the college closed, fearing a Union invasion. Love briefly returned home, then enrolled at Berryman College in Hernando, Mississippi. But one afternoon that summer she and her classmates watched the Confederate army retreat through the streets of Hernando; that night Union troops entered the town and began looting . The college immediately disbanded, and Love left for home the next morning. Sallie Love’s father, however, was determined that she should obtain a college education. So he, Sallie, and his enslaved driver set out for the train station in the middle of the night, fearing encounters with Union troops during daylight. The Loves boarded the last train south before the Northern army shut down the line and made their way to Marion, Alabama , intending to enroll Sallie in the Judson Institute. But the very night they arrived, they learned that Union troops were headed in their direction . The institute would likely close. So they fled by boat, then carefully made their way to Macon, Georgia, home of Wesleyan Female College. They arrived there on Christmas Eve, 1862. Love remained at Wesleyan for a year and a half. But at the end of the summer vacation in 1864, the Union general William T. Sherman’s march through Georgia made it too dangerous for her to return there. So she enrolled instead at Aberdeen Female College in Aberdeen, Mississippi. ONE Dwellers beside the Sea CollegesatWar 20 RECONSTRUCTING THE CAMPUS There, at the fourth college she had attended and the fifth to which she had traveled, Love finally graduated in June 1865. Her and her father’s time, money, and risk to their lives paid o≠ in the form of a liberal arts degree.1 Sallie Love’s circuitous wartime journey underscores the challenges of attending college, especially in the South, during the Civil War. Someone less determined than she or her father would have given up much earlier . Her journey also underscores the challenges colleges faced in staying open amid battles and troop movements. Love witnessed the closure or impending closure of three institutions. At the same time, though, her story reveals that some students and families valued higher education enough to defy invading armies and that some colleges managed to keep classes in session. The Civil War did not destroy American higher education, though some individual institutions closed, temporarily or permanently. But the war did engulf and impair it for the duration. The experience changed it forever. Between 1861 and 1865 colleges across America refashioned themselves as vehicles of war. Even as the war did severe harm to some institutions , they harnessed the strengths of a college campus and adapted these to serve wartime needs. The combination of colleges’ willing contributions to the war, combatants’ attempts to make use of the colleges, and the unforeseeable and uncontrollable e≠ects of the war both hindered and changed higher education. After the war ended, colleges would continue to adapt to recover from wartime damage and to serve a nation changed by civil war. When the Civil War began in 1861, America’s college communities reacted in varied ways. Many students, along with a few professors , rushed o≠ to join the fight. Others left to participate by peaceful means, such as nursing wounded soldiers or taking up farmwork vacated by enlisted relatives. Many stayed on campus but sought other ways to contribute to the military e≠ort. Virtually all remained keenly aware of the war, often discussing or writing about the sectional crisis both before and after Fort Sumter. But many students and professors resisted the pull of the war. They continued attending classes, teaching them, and going about the daily activities of a college as in peacetime. Women’s colleges, to some extent, became microcosms of the antebellum world, refuges from the disrupted world surrounding them. Colleges in the Far West, separated from the front by high mountains and an unfinished railroad, hardly noticed the war. [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:51 GMT) 21 DWELLERS BESIDE THE SEA Most colleges, however, could not escape the nation’s greatest con- flict. Whether they embraced...