The Annals of the Civil War Written by Leading Participants North and South
Alexander Kelly McClure, Ed.

[194] and while the doctor resigned his position, and went North, the students formed a volunteer company, and marched to the front under Professor White as their captain. Even Dr. Junkin's own sons threw themselves heartily into the Confederate struggle, while his son-in-law left his quiet professor's chair at Lexington to become the world-famous “Stonewall Jackson.” The president of Hampden-Sidney College, Virginia (Rev. Dr. Atkinson), entered the service at the head of a company of his students. Major T. J. Jackson marched the corps of cadets of the Virginia Military Institute from the parade-ground at Lexington at precisely twelve o'clock on the day he received orders from the Governor of the Commonwealth, and all these young men entered active service. Indeed, every college in Virginia, and throughout the South, suspended its regular exercises, and the “midnight lamp” of the student was exchanged for the “camp-fires of the boys in gray.”

There might have been seen in the ranks of one of the companies a young man who met every duty as a private soldier with enthusiasm, but who carried in his haversack copies of the Greek classics, which he read on the march or around the camp-fires, who has, since the war, borne off, at a German university, the highest honor ever won there by an American; who now fills the chair of Greek in one of the most important universities at the South, and who has already won a place in the very front rank of American scholars. I remember another (a Master of Arts of the University of Virginia), whom I found lying on an oilcloth during an interval in the battle of Cold Harbor, in 1864, oblivious of everything around him, and deeply absorbed in the study of Arabic, in which, as in other Oriental languages, he has perfected himself, since the war, at the University of Berlin, and by his own studies in connection with the professorship he fills, until he has now no superior, and scarcely an equal, in that department in this country. In winter quarters, it was very common to organize schools, in which accomplished teachers would guide enthusiastic students into the mysteries of Latin, Greek, modern languages, and the higher mathematics.

One single shot of the enemy, at first Fredericksburg, mortally wounded Colonel Lewis Minor Coleman (professor of Latin at the University of Virginia), who was widely known and loved as the accomplished scholar, the splendid soldier, the high-toned gentleman, and the humble Christian; Randolph Fairfax, one of the most accomplished young men and brightest Christians in the State; and Arthur Robinson, a grandson of William Wirt, and a worthy son of an illustrious sire.