USA > Ohio > Butler County > Oxford > Old Miami, the Yale of the early West > Part 8
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Still a fourth organized body of Miami men went out to war, once more com- manded by popular Captain Mac. This time, however, the ratio of gown to town was much smaller and to this corporal's guard Professor MacFarland was not obligated so closely as before. He soon
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became Lieutenant-Colonel of the regi- ment, which was his old 86th, reorganized for six months more of duty. Once again the little Miami delegation was the leaven of the grimy blue lump, and a sore temptation to its former captain to show rank favoritism in his new authority. These youngsters drilled and plodded faithfully through the routine of war, volunteered among the first for danger- ous assignments, and cheerfully over- stayed their time two months just to break the stubborn resistance of Cumber- land Gap. That little siege was a clever one though; and only a great-browed mathematician, skilled in permutation and combination, would have hit upon the final plan of shuffling numbers on the soldiers' caps, till the Southern spies be- lieved the handful of regiments a vast and crushing army. Some veterans of Tennessee are wondering yet what be-
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came of all the Yanks who besieged that pass.
In the course of the war, more than four hundred Miami men, young and old, in dusty blue and spattered gray, tried out their courage in the field. They found every grade of service, from major gen- eral of volunteers to high private in the rearmost rank; and you might well have met a few of them ably driving commis- sary mules. It is an open question whether in those four grim years the real life of Miami was being lived along the wind-swept corridors of the old Main Building, or about the camp-fires of Georgia and Tennessee. The local heroes of many college generations had become at a leap swift-moving ministers of awful vengeance to the enemy. No wonder that the paltry narrative of schemes and escapades and rainbow-hued romance is soon
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forgotten when the minstrel strings his harp and chants passionately of such martial deeds. Unfortunately for us, no minstrel arose when these stirring songs were fresh and new, to weave from them the heroic epic of Miami in the War; and only a fragment or so must serve us now.
Probably the oldest offspring of Miami in the conflict, and certainly the most exalted, was General Robert C. Schenck. He had done so much before the war began, and reached such national prominence, that his very honors won in politics almost thwarted a military ca- reer. All the opposition papers shook their yellow sides and howled with glee when Schenck was appointed brigadier- general, over the heads of a score or so West-Pointers who knew the manual of arms backwards. "Turn him over to an orderly-sergeant," they shrieked, "and make him drill like the Devil for a month!
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Maybe then he'll know enough of war to command a company." Schenck only sawed wood. Out on the London and Hampshire Railroad there were signs of trouble, and before long he was sent to patrol the line with a force of men on flat-cars, and a locomotive pushing in the rear. They ran straight into an am- bush of several times their own num- bers; and the engineer, at the first shots, unhooked his couplings and left them to fight it out. General Schenck fought much like a man who knew how, and a clean victory against great odds showed the wisdom of Lincoln's choice. But his friends the papers took care to belittle the conflict, and tacked upon him the well-earned title "Hero of Vienna." Only they gave it a queer sarcastic twist sometimes discerned lately in such honorable expressions as "Hero of San Juan Hill."
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Maybe the old political campaigner had much to learn of the technicalities of real war. Anyhow he had mastered one fundamental fact worth knowing: the necessity of the soldier's absolute obedience to orders, no matter what the cost. Some of his younger, book-taught critics were a bit unsteady in this sort of underpinning. The first battle of Bull Run, where Schenck commanded a brig- ade, gave a mighty good exhibition of the fighting stuff that men had in them. Just as the Northern retreat began, the General got orders to withdraw his troops as far as Centreville, halt there, and arrange to hold that point against the enemy. He did so as a matter of cours., just as he might have put away his supper or polished his boots for pa- rade. But his regimental officers took occasion to look about them. Beyond them and on either side panted and
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struggled a retreating horde of wild- eyed, panic-stricken men in blue. Hot in pursuit came the Southern forces, eager, confident and overwhelming. It was suicide to halt here, said these colo- nels among themselves, and then they formally protested against the order. But the old General had learned his one lesson well. This position at Centreville must be maintained. The colonels per- sisted; Schenck threatened them with court-martial. Off in the distance there was a sound of rebel musketry, and regi- ment after regiment was rapidly thrown once more into rough marching order and headed straight for Washington. General Schenck was left to hold Centre- ville with his immediate staff and one orderly! Fortunately he soon received fresh orders, relieving him from the un- pleasant necessity of surrounding and capturing the whole Southern army.
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But here lies the point. Military ex- perts have since decided that this was the critical moment and Centreville the strategic point at which the Northern re- treat might have been turned into vic- tory, and all the discouragement and an- guish of that disaster prevented. If this much-maligned son of Miami had been supported by his men, the hero of Vienna would have been hailed by the united North as savior of his country. As it was, several of the retreating colonels got to Washington in time to be pro- moted for gallant and meritorious con- duct.
A fine old fellow was Schenck, always ready where the nation needed him. For a time he did a charmning imitation of St. Patrick, and entirely freed Baltimore of a plague of "copper-heads." Then he plunged into the fight once more, and had his sword-hand shattered at the sec-
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ond battle of Bull Run. Here his old stubbornness blazed out again, in another Quixotic trick. As his hand fell limp and useless at his side, the sword lie was brandishing flew out of his grasp and was lost sight of. But Schenck wanted that sword. He was in the most exposed portion of the field, with bullets whistling all around him. His men were trying their best to get him to the rear out of further danger. Yet he would not budge an inch till the sword was found and restored to its bloody scabbard. This accident ended his military career, for during convalescence he was elected once more to Congress and persuaded that his larger usefulness lay there.
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In the course of the war, it is a fair estimate that there were several thou- sand retreats stopped-or almost stop- ped, charges led, ramparts taken, and days saved. Time has a way of playing
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strange pranks with military reminis- cences into the bargain. But it is sur- prising, when you go to figuring on these psychological moments of conflict-as the novelists say-how many times you find a man from little old Miami right at the pivot of the whole event. This is no place to try to cite them all. Somebody would be sure to be omitted and his rela- tives would feel hurt. You are familiar already with the few that follow.
In the engagement at Stone River fought a young Colonel of Cavalry, Minor Millikin by name. In college he was the Adonis of his class, the nimblest athlete and the politest gentleman about the campus. In the few years since graduation he had studied and traveled abroad, and founded him a home almost in the shadows of the Oxford hills. Dur- ing the battle his regiment was ordered to repel the attacks of Rebel cavalry
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upon the rear. These had become so serious that nothing but a charge would. affect them. The enemy's forces were much larger, but Millikin himself led the regiment in a mad gallop across the fields. In a few minutes he found him- self, with a handful of followers, cut off from his command. Surrender was not thought of; they must cut their way out. The Colonel was a master of sword-craft, and was fast making way against a group of desperate foes; but just as safety was in sight, one angry opponent whipped out a pistol and shot him dead, while he was parrying the fierce thrusts of the others.
The fortunes of war spared another child of Miami, with the same signs upon his shoulders, to lead his regiment of Ohio lads in the charge that made Stone River a Northern victory. Thus it happened that when the Army of the
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Cumberland entered Murfreesboro, it was Col. Thomas C. Bell-once just Tom Bell, of '57-that rode in triumph at the head of the column. Col. James H. Childs was paid in different coin for the daring he displayed, plunging his troops into the fatal chaos of Gettysburg. His was the coin that Millikin accepted, the pure red gold of heroic sacrifice.
Enough of this empty tabulating. Turn to a like picture whose details were stamped for life on the receptive mind of our own soldier-poet, and are re- counted by him with the stirring old-time eloquence at which Runkle is adept enough. "How well I re- member," runs his reminiscence, "that 15th of May, 1864, now more than forty years agone, when at Resaca the division in which I was serving swung into column and moved to the support of the 4th corps attacking the enemy's en-
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trenchments. Wounded men were being hurried to the rear: ambulances stream- ing blood drove rapidly past us. Moving into line we, there in full view, waited and watched the ebb and flow, the surg- ing rush of battle; saw the long blue lines with flying colors-nowhere do those colors stand out so magnificently grand as in the tumult of battle-with flying colors move up through the withering fire, while the throbbing guns, like trem- endous heartbeats, kept time to the battle stride. Forward and back and for- ward, again and again, swayed the lines; heavier grew the pall of gray smoke while the deadly rattle of the rifles and shriek of shells told that men were dying in red anguish by the hundred. At last the Union lines swept over the works; the battle flags leaped clear of the smoke as their bearers sprang on the parapets. The enemy gave way. Cheers rang down
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the charging lines and rolled back to the supports as out of the confusion and car- nage came the remnant of a volunteer brigade with four captured guns; and the leader who took them in, and brought them out victorious, was Ben Harrison of Miami. When he was made President of a saved Republic a great man found his reward."
Side by side with the heroism and the suffering must come the romance of war. Somehow Runkle always suggests that combination, whether you look upon him today with his wavy diadem of grey locks above his glittering regimentals, or picture him maimed and left for dead at Pittsburg Landing, while "Agate," scrib- bling out a reputation at the front, paused in his grisly enumeration of dead and missing to publish to the world his tribute to the man he fought and loved in college halls. Reid, too, suggests in his person
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and career the romance of the conflict. When the first gun was fired he was a rather delicate stripling of twenty-three, recently promoted from a country news- paper to a staff position with the Cincin- nati Gazette-stipulated salary, $6.00 per week. Almost as soon as he settled upon West Virginia with pad and pencil, his vividly picturesque correspondence be- gan attracting national attention.
He praised McClellan until that gen- tleman was called to Washington and pro- moted. Later he criticised him till the Gazette owners were called upon to apolo- gize. He followed Rosecrans and com- mented on certain weaknesses in the Gen- eral's policy in a way that was particu- larly pleasing to the Rebel commanders who read Northern newspapers. In Donelson and Shiloh Reid found his rarest opportunity, and the fine virile pic- tures of those intense struggles which he
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scratched off amid the din of battle, not only enthralled his eager public then, but are still known as masterpieces of their kind. From the field to Washington; from reporter to editor and proprietor; from journalist to diplomat: such prog- ress reads like a fairy tale. But the wise ones will tell you how they predicted all of it, some fifty years ago, in the old top- floor sanctum of the Erodelphian Society.
This very day there is in Oxford a fine old family that is never without a re- spectable and well-mannered cat at its fireside. And the name of this cat is al- ways Joe Battle. When newcomers ask foolish questions, they learn that the name is a tradition of the household, run- ning back before the war, when Grand- father Cone kept the now dismantled Mansion House and knew and loved the Miami boys. His favorite was Joel Allen Battle, a lithe, keen-eyed dare-devil of a
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Southerner, with a silver tongue, a tender heart and a temper of fire. Nobody ever. questioned Battle's ability. The faculty never ranked him with the "Dignissimi." He hadn't time for that. But in the liter- ary hall he found few to match him in the tangles of debate; and often amused himself, when he had floored a ratlier easy victim, by coming back with a telling ar- gument in behalf of the opposition.
Joe Battle was a fellow of strong likes and dislikes. His circle of friends fairly worshiped him. Outside the circle, un- der the stress of those hot-headed ante- bellum days, he often strained his temper to the breaking point and got his name on the faculty minutes. Apparently his was a name that had a real significance. Dear old Ben Battle, of glorious memory, was never intended more definitely to be a "soldier bold." The process of getting used to war's alarms came soon enough.
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Preparatory to it came a series of pranks and wilder escapades, winding up with a specimen of the manly art of self-asser- tion which sent little Dutchy Roemler in- to arnica and bandages for a period of days.
Finally Battle was graduated in due order with the class of '59. He soon mar- ried a girl from the North and settled in Cincinnati to study law. He realized that a national conflict was impending, and frequently declared to friends that when it came he could not fight against the flag, nor yet against his kinsfolk, and would probably go abroad during the struggle. But the call of the South, echo- ing in the guns about Sumter, came to him, as to many another fine young fel- low, in the tone that could not be ignored or disobeyed. He became adjutant of his father's regiment, the 20th Tennessee, and received his first wound at the battle of Mill Springs
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It was Tuesday morning, the eighth of April, 1862. The 41st Illinois and the 31st Indiana were encamped on opposite sides of a crude roadway through the woods about a mile from Pittsburg Land- ing. For miles about were the relics of the great conflict. Nine thousand corpses from both armies strewed the battle-field, and fifteen thousand wounded were re- ceiving such care as was possible. Out of a tent on the Indiana side staggered Clifford Ross, a bit unsteady from the scalp wound of some days before. Two Union men were plodding up the road with an inert mass in gray between them. They paused to rest, laying their burden at Ross's very feet. Such attention to Confederate gray aroused his curiosity and he drew back the edge of the blanket. Ross had been at Miami with the class of '59, and for the past two nights in his . delirium had mingled and conversed with
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the jolly dogs back there. Now he blamed it to the fever, as he looked straight into the sightless eyes of that jolliest of all, Joe Battle.
The detail explained how it was. An Ohio surgeon, who knew Battle, had found him dead upon the field, and sent them with the body to their own camp. With broken voice Ross persuaded them to entrust to him the proper disposal of the remains. He recalled that another Miami man, Lewis of Illinois, was en- camped across the way, also slightly wounded. Between them they hunted out several others of the old college crowd and proceeded to their mournful duty. The coffin was rudely constructed of cracker-boxes. The monument was a massive oak, beneath whose branches the shallow grave was hollowed out. Name and date were burned into a board, which was nailed to the tree. "The means avail-
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able were rough," says one of that little group, "but I could not have asked for. a brother's more than we did for his body." And he adds: "I believe no more brave and noble soul left its body on that bloody field." Thus did the brother-love from old Miami reach across the gulf of war, faithful to the very end.
As Miami men knew how to fight, so did they know how to win-or lose. When the articles of peace were drawn, and Johnny, swarthy and bewhiskered, came marching home again, to scorn feather-beds and retrieve the family for- tunes, there were none more reliable amid the delirious chaos than these college men. Those who had graduated before, and been maturing in these campaign ex- periences, stepped naturally to the front in their commun ties, and soon Captain So-and-So, and Colonel Somebody-else- college men and good soldiers, sir-were
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headed for the Legislature or for Con- gress, to swell the honor-roll of Miami's men. Others of the younger set, their education interrupted by the years of war, drifted back to the living green of that old campus on the hill, to wash away the stain of battle in its Pierian springs.
Bob Adams, for instance, big, strap- ping, red-haired Bob, who had led the file in the old University Rifles, and near- ly walked the little fellows off their legs -wonderful fortunes of war were his! After his first three months he had or- ganized a company in his home town, and soon became its captain in the 81st Ohio. He was promoted rapidly to Lieutenant- Colonel,-then to the command of the regiment. In the Atlanta campaign he commanded a brigade and was brevetted Brigadier-General at the close of the war. Then what? Back he came to old Miami, took up his books and lessons just where
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he had thrown them down, earned and received his sheepskin, and went out into the world to preach the peace of God that . passeth understanding.
There is another side to it. Not all Miami men came back from the war. Some young careers of splendid promise ended there in the deafening conflict, and none can ever estimate the value of the toll Death took. The ashes of mourning on new household altars, the tears of heart-seared mothers and young wives express the anguish of it all. But while we reckon up the list of those who made the final sacrifice, we only wonder what those youthful heroes might have lived to be.
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T HE war was a sore trial for Miami in more ways than one. Not only did she give of her best, and offer up her sons on reeking altars. Her regular at- tendance fell away badly and the area of her patronage and influence was nar- rowed. The South, for instance, was cut apart from her forever. Her land rents had been long before prevented by law from ever increasing beyond a beggar's pittance; while other colleges, springing up all over the land with the revival of confidence and prosperity, lavislied money on salaries and equipment. Peo- ple professed to find the good old curricu- lum away out of date, but there were no funds in the Miami treasury to establish
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new chairs and add new furbelows. Tui- tion rees helped some, but depleted rolls meant depleted income. The state dil arrange to pay the tuition of such of her soldiers as cared to attend college, and Miami profited considerably by these. But her buildings were obviously in de- cay, her campus was untended, and her whole material outfit cramped by chronic poverty.
Among other things there was a change of administration, with some bitter feelings. Doctor Hall, a fine South- ern gentleman of the old school, who with rare tact and splendid self-control had di- rected the affairs of this patriotic north- ern college, found at last, when the struggle was over, that hostility had arisen and his usefulness was ended. President Stanton, his successor, was an able manager not given to mincing words about necessities. Witness this from his
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inaugural address: "But the main edi- fice, crowning yonder beautiful elevation, in which is the chapel, with the library, the society halls, the grammar school, and certain recitation rooms, is a dilapi- dated pile, presenting its broken panes to the howling winds of autumn, its shat- tered roof to the drenching rains of sum- mer, and its doorless halls to the drifting snows of winter; the butt and jeer of all passers-by, fair game for the ruder boys, a grand old monumental pile for preserv- ing the quaint architecture of a bygone age, but repulsive to every gentleman who brings his son to the University, and a standing reproach and a shame-I say it respectfully-to every one who claims the University as his alma mater."
As you might infer, this dolefully realistic tale was prelude to a money- getting scheme, which was projected at that time, and prolonged, with numerous
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modifications, through the entire admin- istration. For a short time the skies were roseate. Funds were secured for con- siderable repairs, culminating in a new west wing, and therein a new chapel with real stained-glass windows. The state legislature was being petitioned at each session to extend aid to this child of its adoption, and everybody assured every- body else that some day this aid was com- ing. Uncle Sam had created his Agricul- tural College fund for the states, and Miami people sat up nights figuring what to do with their share of that-when they should get it. On the whole the Stanton administration opened auspiciously, to close with renewed discouragement.
Through all the darkest days of finan- cial stress, students were on hand in at least confortable numbers. The quaint architecture of bygone days looked just as good to them as the stained-glass win-
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dows of awful artistry-even as it has to some people since that time. The fac- ulty might have been few in number, but they were great men and noble teachers, and from each one of them flowed cease- less currents of inspiration and benedic- tion. Stoddard was still there, pottering about his little laboratory, and leading Presbyterian singing on Sunday. Bishop was there, shrewd, kind-hearted, and sharp of tongue, zealously guarding the campus from all live-stock but his own. MacFarland had laid aside his regimen- tals and was absorbed as of old in orbits and eclipses, but never to the neglect of the boys he loved. Soon was to appear one Andrew D. Hepburn, to create the new department of English Language and Literature, on the strength of father McGuffey's assurance that he was a promising young man. Who cares for a purple window-pane more or less in such
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an environment? No wonder those boys stayed through their four years of royal associations, and gladly sent back others to partake of the privileges.
Whatever anxiety may have preyed upon faculty or trustees about the some- what clouded future of the University, . no care sat brooding over student hearts. Every fellow in the crowd felt sure that money would keep coming, since money had already appeared for some first im- provements. They knew little of the vigorous feats of man-handling and pan- handling resorted to in securing this pit- tance, and less of the constant, crying need for more. Anyhow, no poverty could limit that richest gift the college student ever knows-the sheer joy that comes from living young life to the limit of its exuberant possibilities. Literary societies flourished as of old, and their public exhibitions were still the marvel
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of the countryside. The female colleges were prospering, and social gaveties were rampant. The Miami Student became the regular college publication. The Recensio was inaugurated as a college annual. Greek fraternities enrolled large membership and acquired new confi- dence. The Dekes, for instance, invested good money in putting a third story on a long narrow business house then going up in the village, and thus acquired a Mahomet's coffin of a chapter-hall,`tlie first fraternity property owned in Ox- ford.
Many things among this student body were growing distressingly modern. The annals of the time are filled-would you believe it ?- with such things as glee clubs and baseball! And in the Miami Stu- dent for December, 1867, there is a long and formal article decrying the atrocious practice Miami men have of assembling
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about church doors after divine service to stare at the college girls as they file out! That glee club, by the way, was a flourishing institution, and had a regular habit of badly financed concert trips. Of one of these a college poet has warbled, somewhat maliciously :
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