Alumni Record, 1857-1905

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LAWRENCE IN THE CIVIL WAR. BY J. S. ANDERSON, '70. The Tumult and the Shouting dies, The Captains and the Kings depart, Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Oh Lord of Hosts be with us yet Lest we forget, Lest we forget. When the civil war opened in 1861, Lawrence University was a small college in a new country. It was a day of small things. The land to the south, east and west was dotted at wide intervals with log cabins and straggling hamlets, while to the north lay an almost unbroken wilderness. Its students came long distances over rough roads, by stage or wagon, some even on foot, carying their satchels on their backs. It had graduated but four classes, and its alumni numbered forty-two in all, of whom fourteen were women. But there was nothing small or provincial either in the college management or the student body which gathered there. The early settlers of Wisconsin were of the choicest stock of New England and the Middle States, and there had come to its rich lands by the lake a large infiux of the Germans who had taken part in the revolution of '48, bringing with them a love of liberty and hatred of slavery, equalling in intensity that of the native-born descendants of the revolution. The young men and women of the frontier state were eagerly seeking for advanced education, and just before the war Lawrence was filled to its full capacity, with acute, eager, loyal and patriotic young men and women who watched and studied anxiously the trend of public affairs, and utterly abhorred the encroachment of the slave power. When the news came to the university that Fort Sumter and the fiag had actually been fired upon, the intensity of feeling that prevailed, found expression in a meeting held in the college chapel soon after. Co...