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 clouds rolling up from the southward in 1860. Yet even in this case the general rule was holding good. Though there was much excitement in the community on the subject of secession, the idea of actual bloodshed was almost incredible. Besides, if active revolt should break out, was there not the regular army to cope with it? The people, then, made no such active and prolonged preparations as were made ninety years before—and the students followed suit. To a young graduate of the Harvard Law School, James Prentiss Richardson, LL.B. 1855, belongs the everlasting credit of organizing the Cambridge company of volunteers who, on the morning of April 17, 1861, marched first in response to Lincoln’s proclamation issued two days before. But though his company was the earliest of its kind in the country, he had not even proposed it in the papers until January 5, 1861; and not until April 13 had he succeeded in enlisting the sixty men required for its formal acceptance by the State. Several Harvard graduates were in its ranks, but not a single collegian.

Electrified by the amazing news that Sumter had been fired upon, and with the splendid example of Richardson and his citizen soldiers fresh before them, the College sprang into warlike action again. Early in