Curran, Robert Emmett

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Conversations on Jesuit Higher EducationVolume 45 Article 6April 2014Jesuit Colleges and the Civil WarRobert Emmett CurranFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversationsRecommended CitationCurran, Robert Emmett (2014) "Jesuit Colleges and the Civil War," Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education: Vol. 45, Article 6.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol45/iss1/6Conversations 11The restoration of the Society of Jesus in theUnited States marked the emergence of a conti-nental Jesuit educational empire during theantebellum period. In 1805, shortly after five ex-Jesuits received permission from Rome to joinup with the Jesuits’ Russian province, whichhad evaded the suppression of 1773, Bp. JohnCarroll turned over Georgetown College for therevived Society to operate. Over the five decades after 1808,15 Jesuit colleges were established. Jesuits began or tookover eight colleges from 1843 to 1853. At the beginning ofthe Civil War, Jesuits conducted 14 colleges fromMassachusetts to California.These colleges were predominately preparatory schoolsfor students ages 6 to 16. The overwhelming majority of thestudents at the largest Jesuit college, Xavier in Manhattan,were in the lower department. In 1860 Spring Hill College,with an enrollment surpassing 230, graduated two students.For the 1860-61 academic year, collegians made up less thanten percent of those enrolled at St. Ignatius in San Francisco.Almost all of these colleges offered either the traditional clas-sical course or the commercial course that afforded studentsthe opportunity for practical education. Seven of the 14 schools had boarders as well as day students.Georgetown, St. Louis, Xavier, among others, had heavyenrollment from the South. Even at Holy Cross and Fordhamin the Northeast, southerners accounted for a fifth of theenrollment. A majority of these southerners were non-Catholic. Non-Catholics typically accounted for at least athird of the student body.War’s ImpactThe closer a Jesuit college was to a theater of the Civil War,the greater it felt the war’s impact. But whether a schoolfound itself in the path of conflicting armies, as St. Joseph’s,Bardstown, did in the late summer of 1862, or thousands ofmiles removed from the fighting, the war brought fundamen-tal change to all the colleges.At the outbreak of the war the superior general of theSociety of Jesus, Peter Beckx, issued an order to Jesuitauthorities in the United States to make sure that none oftheir subjects would say anything publicly about the conflictand its issues. To understand this gag policy one must appre-ciate the sense of being under siege that Jesuits had so acute-ly had under the pressure of anti-Catholic and nativisticforces over the past generation that had spawned bloodyriots, church burnings, tarring and feathering of Jesuits, andassaults on the civil rights of Catholics and immigrants.Behind the policy imposing silence was a primal fear thatcivil war would somehow untap raw emotions, launching anew “Protestant Crusade” that would especially take aim atthe Society of Jesus as the chief culprit for the nation’s woes.The gag policy worked among the Jesuit faculty every-where except at Spring Hill, Alabama, where they were openand enthusiastic Confederates. Controlling the speech andRobert Emmett Curran, a professor emeritus at GeorgetownUniversity, has written extensively on the Civil War,Reconstruction, immigration, and the American South. Jesuit Collegesand the Civil War By Robert Emmett Curran00621_conversations #26   12/13/13  5:37 PM  Page 111Curran: Jesuit Colleges and the Civil WarPublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 201412 Conversationsemotions of the students proved to be another matter. AtGeorgetown student passions about the issues tearing thenation apart long preceded the actual outbreak of war. InDecember 1859, just days after John Brown’s hanging hadbrought to a head the outrage North and South experiencedover the slave insurrection that Brown had attempted, thedebating society at Georgetown chose the topic: “Should theSouth now secede?” That topic proved so provocative thatthe debate extended over the next two weeks, with the affir-mative prevailing. A free-for-all broke out, which the facultyquelled. As the Confederacy took shape in the Deep Southand war loomed, students from that region headed home,culminating with the mass departure of the southern collegeseniors in April 1861. Student interest in the war was closelyrelated to how immediate the war’s impact was on the cam-pus. In Baltimore, Loyola students organized drill companiesin April 1861 in the immediate aftermath of the bloody clashless than a mile away between Union troops andConfederate sympathizers. The prosecessionist student mili-tia was forming as part of the effort to defend Baltimoreagainst any further attempts to transport troops from theNorth to subdue the rebelling states. Their drilling incited acounterattack from Loyola students committed to the Union.In the border city of Cincinnati, students at St. Xavier formedmilitia units, some of which likely responded to the gover-nor’s call for volunteers to defend the city from theConfederate armies sweeping through Kentucky inSeptember 1862. At Fordham, life went on “as though therewas no war,” the students oblivious of alumni like RobertShaw and James R. O’Beirne, whose heroic action would winthe former iconic fame and the latter the Medal of Honor.By one measure the Jesuit colleges equally shared in thewar: that of providing chaplains for the Union and Confederateforces. Of the 54 identified Catholic Chaplains for the Federalarmies, at least nine were Jesuits from their colleges. Jesuitscomprised a fifth of the known Catholic chaplains that servedthe forces of the Confederacy. Fr. Joseph O’Hagan of HolyCross and Georgetown was with the Army of the Potomacfrom the Peninsula Campaign to Appomattox and witnessedsome of the most brutal fighting of the eastern theater atFredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg.The War Comes to CampusBeing in the nation’s capital, Georgetown became the firstJesuit campus to be “militarized” in the wake of civil conflict.In early May, the 1400-man New York 69th Regiment tookover most of the college buildings and grounds. During theirthree-week stay, President Lincoln as well as members of hiscabinet reviewed the troops on campus. In August the fol-lowing year, the government once more appropriated mostof the college’s buildings for 500 wounded from the SecondBattle of Manassas. Hundreds of them converted toCatholicism, including virtually all of the more than 100 whodied. Georgetown continued to function as a military hospi-tal for the remainder of the year. Across the country colleges adapted to serve wartimeneeds. For the medical department at Georgetown, the warproved a huge boon for enrollment. As the only medicalschool in the capital, it became the major training center forsurgeons and other medical personnel for the Union army. Forsome colleges, necessity rather than opportunity prevailed. AtSt. Joseph’s, Bardstown, government officials appropriated thevacant college buildings for a military hospital. When both sides introduced a draft in 1862 to raisetroops, very few students in Jesuit colleges were affectedsince the vast majority were under the age of 18. Jesuitsthemselves, particularly scholastics and coadjutor brothers,were subject to it. The drafting of Jesuit scholastics andpriests led Jesuits John Early (Baltimore) and Peter De Smet(St. Louis) to use their connections with Secretary of WarEdwin Stanton to secure exemptions for religious drafted inthe Union army. Jesuits in the Confederacy were also subjectto the draft that the Confederate Congress had enacted buteventually were also exempted.Survival, Inflation, and ShrinkingEnrollmentsStudent enlistments for both sides significantly reducedenrollment in most Jesuit colleges. For Spring Hill, the occu-pation of New Orleans by the Federal Army in the spring of1862 cut off its principal market for both students and provi-sions. St. Joseph’s of Bardstown, whose boarders were over-whelmingly from the Deep South, lost most of its out-of-staters when the war came. The greatly reduced enrollmentand the near impossibility of collecting the fees of the stu-dents from the Deep South led to a financial crisis whichcaused classes to be suspended. It marked the end of St.Joseph’s as a Jesuit institution. Dependent as it so deeply was on a southern constituen-cy, Georgetown felt the war’s impact at the beginning ofschool in the fall of 1861, when only 50 students enrolled, asixth of the number on the books the previous year.Salvation for Georgetown’s enrollment crisis came from avery local source: the District of Columbia, whose popula-tion had more than doubled since the war’s start. By 1864,district residents accounted for over half of the college’s stu-dent body, many of them the sons of artisans or business-men and the children of those in government service. Galloping inflation forced substantial increases in tuitionand other fees. Georgetown hiked tuition by 70 percent,even as financial aid was cut. Holy Cross had to imposeincreases of similar scale. The rise in tuition at Santa Clarabrought about a class shift in its student body, as the sons ofthe wealthy replaced those of the middle class. Bp. JosephAlemany lamented that “very, very few of my Catholic peo-ple” could now afford Santa Clara. To provide an accessible00621_conversations #26   12/13/13  5:37 PM  Page 122Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, Vol. 45, Iss. 1 [2014], Art. 6http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol45/iss1/6Conversations 13alternative, the bishop in 1863 founded Saint Mary’s Collegein San Francisco. Remarkably, by war’s end, the number ofJesuit colleges was the same as in 1861, with the opening ofclasses at Boston College in 1863 offsetting the closing of St.Joseph’s, Bardstown.Assassination and Consequences ofthe WarOn the evening of April 9, 1865, the college building at HolyCross was aglow with candles illuminating its many win-dows. Lee had surrendered in Virginia just hours before; thewar was over. There were no such illuminations atGeorgetown, Bardstown, or St. Louis, to our knowledge. Formost of the Jesuits and students at these institutions in the“middle ground,” the end of the Confederacy brought at bestrelief and resignation, not joy and celebration. Six days later,and three days since thousands of federal forces had occu-pied his campus, the president of Spring Hill College enteredthe study hall to inform the students that President Lincolnhad been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. He tried toimpress upon them what a despicable murder this was aswell as the danger they would court with the federal soldiersthroughout campus should they betray any sympathy withthe assassin. Three Georgetown alumni were eventuallyimplicated in the assassination, including David Herold,Booth’s accomplice in his abortive attempt to escape intoVirginia, and Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated Booth after hebroke his ankle fleeing Ford’s Theater. Herold was one of thefour conspirators executed. Mudd received a life sentence.For some Jesuit colleges in the aftermath of the war, theloss of their traditional southern market forced a new concen-tration on prospects near at hand. Xavier of Cincinnati had suc-cess when it discontinued boarding just before the war. St.Louis found it increasingly necessary to replace the heavilyProtestant students from the Deep South with Catholics fromits metropolitan area. Three factors were at play here: theincreasing availability of institutions of higher education in theSouth, the post-Appomattox poverty that consumed the vastmajority of planters and professionals who had traditionallysent their sons north, and the growth of a Catholic middle classin greater St. Louis. The pauperization of so many of theCatholic planting families that had been the bulwark of SpringHill outside of Mobile, compounded by the smallpox and yel-low fever epidemics that struck the region in the late 1860s andthe general instability that characterized Reconstruction, led toa sharp drop in enrollment from a peak of 300 in early 1865 toless than half that number by the end of the decade.Michael David Cohen (Reconstructing the Campus: HigherEducation and the American Civil War) found that the Civil Warcreated the forces that have shaped modern higher educationin America. The Morrill Land-Grant College Act set the stan-dards that have increasingly defined American higher educationas having a diverse student population and a curriculum thatprivileges vocational preparation and military training. There isa symbiotic relationship between state and school in which thelatter assumes a growing role in the public arena. For mostJesuit colleges outside the formal public sphere, the war pro-duced the opposite effects. Their students became increasinglyhomogeneous; classical education reigned supreme; and theybecame much less involved with government and the largersociety – islands unto themselves, isolated from the social andeducational mainstreams.  ■An engraving of St. Joseph’s, Bardstown. Image courtesy of the Missouri Province.00621_conversations #26   12/13/13  5:37 PM  Page 133Curran: Jesuit Colleges and the Civil WarPublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 2014

Jesuit Colleges and the Civil War

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