Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War

4. Admissions: Geography, Service, Morality

128 William H. Lynch, a lieutenant in the Thirty-second Missouri Volunteer Infantry (USA), returned to his home state in August 1865. But instead of going to his hometown of Houston, he headed one hundred miles north to Columbia. There he enrolled at the University of Missouri. He spent the next year studying Greek, Latin, mathematics, and surveying . He won election as an o∞cer in one of the student literary societies. He attended local churches and a Sunday school. He paid university tuition with his army wages. In several ways, Lieutenant Lynch was a typical student of post–Civil War America. He appears not to have had much money; in his diary he listed army wages as his only financial resource.1 He also joined many veterans who went to college after the war. His church attendance fit with the religious atmosphere and requirements of many colleges. Finally, he made an increasingly common choice when he enrolled at a university in his home state. The Civil War influenced more than the racial, gendered, and class makeup of college students. It a≠ected two other social facets of admissions . By making travel di∞cult, raising the cost of housing, and promoting the establishment of modern state universities, the war led students more often to select institutions in their own states. The growth of institutions in the West also enabled more young people to attend college near home. Complicating the usual image of the war’s nationalizing American culture, colleges became more locally based, their students less geographically diverse. Meanwhile, by creating a large population of veterans, the war raised the question of how they would readjust to civilian life and rejoin the civilian economy. Both college leaders and state legislators  FOUR  Admissions Geography,Service, Morality 129 ADMISSIONS: GEOGRAPHY, SERVICE, MORALITY saw higher education as one solution, especially for veterans who had su≠ered injury or illness on the battlefield. So, much as they partnered to create universities for farmers and engineers, colleges and governments also partnered to provide and pay for higher education for veterans. By rewarding military service with educational opportunity, they attracted men who shared the maturing experience of war and who often were older than traditional students. The war brought localized enrollments and veteran students to all parts of the country. Until 1860 colleges in some areas had been drawing increasing numbers of students from a distance, but the Civil War ended those regional trends. Thereafter colleges everywhere attracted more of their students from within their own states. The influx of veterans, of course, was a national phenomenon. Men from all states had fought in the war—on one side or the other—so colleges everywhere welcomed veterans as students after 1865. Both Northern and Southern state governments helped the veterans to attend. As colleges admitted new types of students, they faced the question of whether to hold these students to the same moral and religious expectations as their relatively homogeneous antebellum populations. On these moral criteria for admission, in contrast to social criteria, college leaders decided against change. They continued to require applicants to prove their moral character. Denominational colleges also continued to stress their Christian mission. Nonreligious youths could attend, but they knew to expect attempts at conversion. Even as students arrived with nontraditional class, gendered, and racial backgrounds, more local origins, greater maturity, and the experience of fighting in a war, professors and trustees expected them to behave and believe as college students always had. Geography: The Emergence of the Local College Historians often emphasize the Civil War’s nationalizing impact on American life. Secession forced the Union to build a stronger federal government that could win a di∞cult war and that afterward would play a much more visible role in states’ and individuals’ activities. The experience of fighting the war, the Union’s military and ideological victory, Lincoln’s idea of a free nation premised on the Declaration of Independence, and the project of reincorporating and reconstructing the former Confederacy promoted a new national identity. Americans began to see themselves primarily as Americans, rather than as Missourians or New Yorkers, and to use United States as a grammatically singular term: this was one nation, 130 RECONSTRUCTING THE CAMPUS not a union of independent states. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution made that vision o∞cial, declaring Americans to be citizens of the nation, not just of their...