Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/138

124 ginia seceded, for the capture of the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, there were two companies of students of the university of Virginia, and of the over 600 students who were at the university that session, fully nine-tenths of them enlisted in the Confederate armies. The president of the board of trustees of Howard college at Marion, Ala., Judge Porter King, organized and led to the front a company of students of that college. The university of North Carolina, the university of Georgia, the university of Alabama, the university of Mississippi, South Carolina college, the citadel of Charleston, the university of Louisiana, and the colleges generally throughout the South, sent their students and the flower of their alumni to the Confederate armies. On the day and at the very hour designated by the governor, a quiet professor at Lexington, Va., marched to the front of the whole corps of cadets of the Virginia military institute and came not back again until he was borne to his burial in "Lexington, in the valley of Virginia," while two continents were ringing with the fame of "Stonewall Jackson."

The famous Rockbridge artillery was organized in Lexington, Va., and drilled by Rev. Dr. W. N. Pendleton, a graduate of the military academy at West Point, but then rector of the Episcopal church of the town. It was recruited from young men all over the South. Dr. Pendleton, afterward General Pendleton, Lee's chief of artillery, was made its first captain, and it won fame on nearly every battlefield from First Manassas to Appomattox. This company illustrated the hold which the Confederate cause had on the intellectual and moral classes of the South. My own first personal knowledge of its complexion was obtained when a part of the Confederate army was in line of battle at Darkesville, in the lower valley of Virginia, July 4, 1861, expecting an attack from General Patterson, who, instead of attacking, allowed Gen. J. E. Johnston to completely outgeneral him and