Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War

2. The Curriculum: Teaching the Arts of Peace and War

52 On September 30, 1859, the lawyer and failed senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln spoke to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society at its annual fair in Milwaukee. Although conceding that he was “in no sort a farmer” himself, Lincoln pointed to what he saw as some of the most important issues of the day relating to agriculture. He speculated on the value of new technologies and internal improvements for growing and transporting produce. He compared the meanings of free and slave labor. And, toward the end of his speech, he broached the question of education for farmers. “Cultivated thought,” he argued, could make possible more “thorough work” in agriculture. He looked forward to a time when people would value agricultural learning above all other types: “This . . . conforms to what must occur in a world less inclined to wars, and more devoted to the arts of peace than heretofore. Population must increase rapidly—more rapidly than in former times—and ere long the most valuable of all arts, will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil.”1 In terms of educational expansion, Lincoln was prescient yet mistaken . In the coming years and decades, agricultural training would grow far more important in America’s colleges. So, too, would other forms of vocational training, for engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and scholars . The emergence of universities that taught these occupations alongside the undergraduate classical curriculum was among the most important developments in higher education in the late nineteenth century. Yet, contrary to Lincoln’s expectation, training in these arts of peace did not come at the expense of the art of war. War, of course, dominated his presidential administration. And even as colleges added programs in civil  TWO  The Curriculum Teaching theArtsof Peace and War 53 THE CURRICULUM vocational training, they also added military curricula. Lincoln, in fact, signed a law that promoted the expansion of both agricultural and military education in colleges. The experience of war fostered the growth of curricula for both peace and war. Most colleges survived the Civil War. In the North, they generally managed to stay open through the conflict, albeit with fewer students and perhaps an unbalanced gender ratio. In the South, most colleges that closed during the war reopened after it. While they might struggle with a continued military presence and physical damage to the campus, they nevertheless resumed the work of teaching and learning. That work, however, had changed. Students after the war did not learn exactly the same material as their antebellum predecessors. College curricula , and with them institutional structures, changed rapidly beginning in the 1860s. The war encouraged both educational and political leaders to explore new goals and forms for higher education. In an e≠ort to ensure colleges’ survival and their value, they redesigned curricula to better serve a postbellum nation. The Civil War drove two major changes in college curricula. One involved teaching the art of war; the other, the arts of peace. Both stemmed, in part, from the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862. First, colleges began to conduct military drill and teach military tactics. These jarring additions to the classical curriculum grew out of the new partnership between colleges and the federal government that began during the Civil War. During the war, the government forced colleges to give up their students and buildings to serve military needs. Beginning with the Morrill Act and increasingly after the war, the partnership became less one-sided. As the federal government grew increasingly powerful and attentive to many aspects of American life, it partnered with colleges in ways that related more to education and that benefited both the colleges and the government. In terms of curricula, colleges and the government cooperated to expand military training. They combined their resources to turn civilian colleges into training grounds for soldiers. Students learned new skills as the nation prepared for the next military crisis. More happened in the South. Military education, in part a federal project, spread throughout the country. But just as the war’s immediate impacts had disproportionately a≠ected colleges in the states where the war was fought, the war also a≠ected Southern curricula more in the long term. Southern colleges had endured many more government intrusions and accidental e≠ects of the war. More students had enlisted in the mili- 54 RECONSTRUCTING THE CAMPUS tary. The Confederate and Union armies had...