Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/137

Rh battle, the professor left his chair and the teacher his school, the preacher gave up the pulpit in the church to minister to the imperiled flock in the field, the student exchanged the "midnight lamp" for "the camp-fires of the boys in gray,"—and all classes rallied round the "stars and bars" not mercenaries, not men bought up with "bounty money," but the very flower of our Southern chivalry, the bone and sinew, the brain and brawn, the wealth, education, social position and moral worth of our Southern manhood.

Within the space allotted me, I can only cull a few illustrations from the very large mass of material at hand—a volume would not suffice to do the subject full justice. Rev. Dr. Junkin (father-in-law of Stonewall Jackson, an able and admirable man, a Northerner and a Union man), who was then president of Washington college at Lexington, Va., called his faculty together and asked them: "What are you going to do about that rag on the dome of the college?" alluding to a Confederate flag which the students raised as soon as they heard of the secession of Virginia. Prof. James J. White, whom Col. William Preston Johnston once characterized as "the learned head of the Greek department, who combines in his one person the subtlety of Ulysses and the proportions of Ajax," at once replied: "I do not know what the other gentlemen propose to do about it, but for myself, I say let it wave and I propose to fight under it." Accordingly he organized that day among the students a company called "the Liberty Hall Volunteers," thus reviving and assuming the name of the company, from the academy out of which Washington college sprung, that did valiant service in the Revolution of '76. This company was afterward attached to the famous "Stonewall" brigade, and rendered gallant service from First Manassas to the close of the war. Hampton-Sidney college also organized a company of students. In the expedition which moved on the evening of April 17, 1861, the day on which Vir-