The University in the Civil War — Chaplains, Cadets and the Armies

1861–1865 · and the memory after

Seven chaplains, named whole. The base fragment carries the war at survey size; the roster at depth is this article's first business. Father Arthur Hope's centenary history names the seven Holy Cross priests Sorin sent: Paul Gillen, James Dillon, William Corby, Peter P. Cooney, Julian (Zepherin) Bourget, Zepherin Lévêque and Joseph C. Carrier — the same seven the jubilee history names, with the name-forms varying slightly between the two tellings, as printed here. Gillen was the first to go: he was at Washington in the late spring of 1861, overtook the 22nd New York volunteers on the eve of First Bull Run, heard confessions until the advance was ordered, gave general absolution to those who had not reached confession, and served, in the magazine's accounting, all four years from Bull Run to Appomattox — the longest service of the seven. James Dillon joined the 63rd New York of the Irish Brigade on 20 October 1861 and at once wrote for help; Corby, who had been prefect of discipline at the college, resigned that post and joined the 88th New York. Cooney, born in County Roscommon in 1822, was appointed chaplain to the 1st Regiment of Indiana volunteers — the 35th Indiana, the "1st Irish" — and chronicled his whole tour in regular letters from camp, the best-documented service of the seven. Three of the seven did not survive it: Dillon, Lévêque and Bourget died of diseases contracted in the service, Bourget while caring for soldiers recuperating at the Navy hospital at Mound City, Illinois. The Irish Brigade, Hope notes, was never without at least one Holy Cross priest throughout the war.

Corby and the absolution. William Corby's war is the university's most told Civil War story, and the record supports the telling at its documented points. At Antietam in September 1862, with the Irish Brigade ordered into the fight at a full run, Corby rode along the line calling on the men to make an act of contrition and gave absolution as they went. In June 1862 he had himself nearly died of fever aboard a steamer carrying sick and wounded up Chesapeake Bay, and returned to the front. The absolution at Gettysburg came on 2 July 1863, before the brigade went into the Wheatfield fighting: Corby stood on a rock, explained that the general absolution was conditional on contrition and a firm purpose, and blessed the brigade — an act General St. Clair Mulholland, who witnessed it, described in words the jubilee history prints and the base fragment carries. Corby repeated the absolution before other engagements. His Memoirs of Chaplain Life, written thirty years after, appeared in 1893; New York decorated him that year as a Gettysburg veteran. A bronze of Corby in the absolution pose stands on the Gettysburg field at the place of the act, placed in 1910, and a copy of the statue and a large painting of the scene are kept on the campus — the war's memory in bronze belongs to the postwar decades, and it is a chaplain's memorial, not a soldiers' cloister; the university built no Civil War memorial cloister or door, and the famous inscribed door of the church — "God, Country, Notre Dame," the east door of Sacred Heart — is the First World War's memorial of 1924, carried in the next article and not to be antedated into this one.

The sisters and the students. The congregation's second army was its sisters. Under Mother Angela Gillespie, Holy Cross sisters staffed Union hospitals across the South and West; by the war's end more than sixty sisters had served in ten military hospitals, and Holy Cross sisters were the first women to serve aboard a United States Navy hospital ship. At home, the Continental Cadets — formed in the spring of 1859 under the student William F. Lynch, drilled in buff-and-blue Revolutionary uniform — supplied soldiers out of proportion to the college's size: Timothy Howard, who enlisted in a Michigan regiment in 1862 and was wounded at Shiloh before returning to a long Notre Dame professorship, recalled almost every member of the cadet company enlisting early in the war, some forty to fifty preparatory or college students, near a fifth of the entire student body. The modern accounting built on James M. Schmidt's Notre Dame and the Civil War (2010) counts more than one hundred students and alumni in the armies in all, present in virtually every major battle of the Army of the Potomac and of Grant's Army of the Tennessee — most for the Union, but two identified Confederates, Michael Quinlan of Virginia and Felix Zeringue of Louisiana, stand in the record beside them. Lynch recruited and led the 58th Illinois, was captured with his men at Shiloh and held six months, and rose to brigadier general before his death of wounds. Orville Chamberlain, who had taken an accounting degree in the spring of 1861, won the Medal of Honor at Chickamauga in September 1863 for carrying orders through a two-and-a-half-mile circuit of trenches under fire. The Notre Dame company itself never served as a unit; the university's war was fought by individuals, chaplains and sisters.

Sorin's wartime course. Sorin governed the home front on three documented lines. He kept the peace inside the school: privately calling the conflict a wicked rebellion, he forbade war talk among the students. He fought the draft for his clerics: bearing arms conflicted with the religious vocation, and the college could not lose its priests and brothers and remain a college at all; he appealed through channels that reached Generals Sherman and Grant, wrote to President Lincoln on 28 September 1863, and kept his religious out of the ranks. And he took the war's families in: in the fall of 1862 General William T. Sherman enrolled a son at Notre Dame and a daughter at Saint Mary's, and in 1865 Sherman addressed the graduates. The enrollment surge the base records had documented causes the magazine's history names: the school's reputation for firm discipline, steam heat introduced in 1863, distance from the front, and a notable inflow from the border states of Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee. After the war the veteran priests and brothers formed their own post of the Grand Army of the Republic, Post 569, photographed with Corby and Cooney at its center in the 1890s — the war's institutional memory at Notre Dame was a veterans' post of religious, which is the truest summary of how this university had fought it.

Sources:

1. Arthur J. Hope, Notre Dame — One Hundred Years (1943), chapter IX, University Archives — the seven chaplains named, Gillen first and at Bull Run, Dillon's 20 October 1861 joining and his call for Corby, the draft difficulty and Colfax.
2. Notre Dame Magazine, "Echoes: Gettysburg, 1863" — Corby's June 1862 fever voyage, Antietam, the chaplains' comparative service, the cadets' enlistment and Howard's recollection, the two Confederates, Chamberlain at Chickamauga, the Sherman enrollments, three of seven dead of wartime disease; facts summarized, no text lifted.
3. University of Notre Dame Archives, military-history pages (sites.nd.edu) — the Continental Cadets of 1859, Sorin's draft effort and the support of Sherman and Grant, students for both armies, GAR Post 569 and its c.1894–97 photograph.
4. Review of James M. Schmidt, Notre Dame and the Civil War (2010), Michigan Historical Review via Project MUSE — more than one hundred students and alumni, two for the Confederacy, the sisters in ten hospitals.
5. A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895), as carried in the base fragment — the chaplains' roster and deaths, Mulholland's Gettysburg account, Mother Angela's nurses, the wartime enrollment.