For, curiously enough, personal relations of a certain character
held with this institution would have given me, even in 1853, a sense of
acquaintance with it such as individually I had with no other
institution of similar character throughout the entire land. It in this
wise came about. At that period, preceding as it did the deluge about to
ensue, it was the hereditary custom of certain families more especially
of South Carolina and of Louisiana,--but of South Carolina in
particular--to send their youth to Harvard, there to receive a college
education. It thus chanced that among my associates at Harvard were not
a few who bore names long familiarly and honorably known to Carolinian
records,--Barnwell and Preston, Rhett and Alston, Parkman and Eliot; and
among these were some I knew well, and even intimately. Gone now with
the generation and even the civilization to which they belonged, I doubt
if any of them survive. Indeed only recently I chanced on a grimly
suggestive mention of one who had left on me the memory of a character
and personality singularly pure, high-toned and manly,--permeated with a
sense of moral and personal obligation. I have always understood he died
five years later at Sharpsburg, as you call it, or Antietam, as it was
named by us, in face-to-face conflict with a Massachusetts regiment
largely officered by Harvard men of his time and even class,--his own
familiar friends.
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