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1861–1865 · the Civil War
Seven Holy Cross priests went to the armies as chaplains, and the jubilee history names them: William Corby, Peter P. Cooney, Joseph C. Carrier, Paul Gillen, James Dillon, Joseph Leveque, and Bourget. Three of them — Dillon, Leveque, and Bourget — died of diseases contracted in the service. Corby's general absolution of the Irish Brigade at Gettysburg on 2 July 1863 is told in the history at length, in General St. Clair Mulholland's own words — "perhaps the first time it was ever witnessed on this continent" — and Corby was decorated by New York in 1893 as a Gettysburg veteran; his Memoirs of Chaplain Life were in print by 1895. Mother Angela led sisters from St. Mary's as nurses in the hospitals of the South and West. At home the students drilled: the Continental Cadets, formed in the spring of 1859 under the student William F. Lynch and trained under Colonel Elmer Ellsworth in buff-and-blue Revolutionary uniform, and the Washington Cadets after them; nearly every Continental Cadet became a soldier, Lynch a colonel of the 58th Illinois and then a brigadier general, fatally wounded, and Robert W. Healy a general valued by Grant.
The war swelled rather than emptied the college. Two hundred thirty students were registered on 3 November 1863, the night, the history records, when every window was lit with its separate candle; then 300, 400, and 500 pressed in, until Washington Hall itself was appropriated to college uses. Sorin, who had labored to keep his clerics from conscription into the ranks, presided over an institution the war made larger — the direct premise of the great rebuilding of 1865. The community's own industries had grown with it: brickmaking was among the first of the religious' trades, and by the middle 1860s the kilns were firing some 800,000 bricks a year, with tuition standing at $100.
- A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
- University of Notre Dame, campus history, Civil War