Two pioneers of Oregon higher education fought together at Gettysburg

The Professors in Pickett’s Charge 

It was hot and muggy. Captain Hawthorne was damp in his gray wool uniform as he stood close by his brigade commander, General Armistead, and waited for the order to advance. Hawthorne had been given the honor of serving on the general’s personal staff. The sky was mostly sunny but thunder heads rose in the distance. The temperature stood at eighty seven degrees on that Pennsylvania summer day but the humidity and the damp wool made it feel as if it were over a hundred degrees.

It was loud, too.  Ungodly loud.  Nearly two hundred cannon had roared for an earth-shaking hour as the afternoon approached two o'clock.  Ben Arnold had been a student in his native Virginia, but today he was a soldier hearing the bellow of cannon.  His regiment, the 14th Virginia Infantry, had formed up between a peach orchard and a line of cannons that were pounding the Union position.  From where he was positioned, Arnold could not see his classmate, B.J. Hawthorne, but he knew Hawthorne would be up front, close by the general.

The two Virginia college alumni would survive the day that took the lives of thousands of their comrades. Though their escape would not be unscathed, they would live to teach together ten years and twenty-seven hundred mile away in Corvallis, Oregon where they would chart the course for Oregon State University.

The attack begins

Just after two o’clock on that hot July afternoon the cannons ceased firing. The silence seemed as deafening as the roar of the guns but the quiet lasted only a few moments before the beat of drums and the shouting of officers and sergeants broke it. Hawthorne, Arnold, and all of Pickett’s Division was moved forward, in front of the now silent Confederate artillery, and formed in a battle line on the edge of an open expanse of fields. On the other side of the field, three quarters of a mile away and clearly visible was the enemy line at the foot of Cemetery Ridge: The 2^nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac under the command of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock. In a poignant illustration of the brother against brother nature of Civil War, Armistead and Hancock were the closest of friends. They had known each other for twenty years and were serving together in California when the war began. Armistead said goodbye to his friend, resigned from the army and returned to Virginia. Hancock, a Pennsylvanian, returned to his home to fight to preserve the Union.

The Confederate battle line stretched almost a mile from one end to the other; twelve thousand five hundred infantry soldiers dressed in gray and butternut brown. Pickett’s four thousand Virginians were in the center of the line. To Pickett’s left stood General Johnston Pettigrew’s North Carolina boys and on Pickett’s right flank was Fightin’ Dick Anderson with his Alabama and Florida brigades. Bayonets were fixed, flags unfurled, and the men waited for the order to advance. A moment frozen in history.

Eyewitnesses to the Confederate formation described it as the most beautiful sight they had ever seen, rows upon rows of bayonets gleaming in the sun. Never again would the flower of the southern military tradition be arrayed in such glory. William Faulkner, the quintessential southern novelist, would write of that exact moment eighty-five years later: “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.”

The order to advance was given and the line of men in gray with their red battle flags moved out in parade like order, shoulder to shoulder at a marching pace. General Armistead’s brigade, which included Hawthorne and Arnold, was in the second line of battle, arranged to plug any gaps that might open and to maneuver for tactical advantage. As the Confederates advanced, the Union held its fire until the men in gray reached the halfway point of the assault, the Emmitsburg Road. Then, the Yankee artillery opened fire. Anderson’s Florida and Alabama men were hit hard by cannon barrages from Union guns positioned on Little Round Top and were forced back which exposed Pickett’s right flank to enemy attack. The Union’s Vermont Brigade, moving quickly, exploited the opening on the flank and opened fire on the side and back of Pickett’s Division, decimating them with withering musket fire.

The Virginians pressed forward with General Armistead leading the attack on foot with his hat on the end of his sword. As they approached the Union troops, who were protected behind a low stone wall, Union artillery located on the front line loaded double canister, hundreds of round balls that turned their cannons into giant shot guns. On command eleven cannon and seventeen hundred Union muskets fired at once. Entire regiments disappeared. Historian

Shelby Foote described that instant: “When those cannon discharged some southern towns just did not have young men any more.” Ben Arnold’s regiment, the 14^th, was repulsed by brutal combat with the men of the 19^th Massachusetts. The 14^th Virginia’s colonel, major, and adjutant were all killed. Seven out of the ten company commanders were killed, wounded or captured and the regiment was forced to retreat. Arnold made his way back to safety but it is not known whether he was wounded or not.

Further up the Confederate line, Armistead’s brigade charged with bayonets and forced the Federal troops to fall back. The general himself, with troops that included B.J. Hawthorne’s 38^th Regiment, climbed over the low stone wall where the barrier made a ninety degree turn known as the Angle, and seized some of the Union cannon positioned behind the wall. In a little less than ten minutes of hand-to hand fighting, with rifle butts and bayonets the weapons of expediency, every man in the vicinity of the Angle, blue or gray, was killed, wounded, or captured. Union General Hancock, Armistead’s friend, was shot off his horse as he rallied his men. Captain Hawthorne was shot down before he reached the wall. General Armistead was personally trying to turn the Union guns around to fire on the retreating enemy when he was shot in the leg and in the shoulder. Men of the Philadelphia Brigade had reformed and counter charged the Confederates retaking the wall at the Angle and capturing the battle flag of Hawthorne’s 38^th Virginia Regiment. Hawthorne himself, though badly wounded, was able to retreat back across the field as his friend Ben Arnold had done. Hancock, who refused to be moved from the field until the battle was decided, recovered from his wounds. Armistead was taken captive but would die of his wounds in a Union field hospital two days later.

The whole fight was over in less than an hour. The furthest advance of Armistead’s brigade into the Union line is known historically as the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy”. Of the twelve thousand Confederate soldiers that began the assault, less than half made it back to safety. General Pickett was devastated. When Robert E. Lee encountered Pickett after the battle, he ordered him to see to his division. Pickett replied “General Lee, I have no division.” At six o’clock in the evening the thunderclouds that Hawthorne had noticed earlier in the day, moved in and dumped rain on the blood soaked fields. The sound of the thunder seemed muted compared to the roar of cannons but the Battle of Gettysburg had ended. The wagons carrying the Confederate wounded during Lee’s retreat stretched for seventeen miles.

College classmates enlist together

Benjamin Lee Arnold and Benjamin James Hawthorne knew each other at Randolph Macon College. Both were graduates of the Class of 1861 with Arnold, age twenty-one, earning his degree in philosophy and religion and Hawthorne, three years older than Arnold, receiving his degree in romance languages. Both men were from Mecklenburg County, Virginia and upon graduation they joined the Confederate army together. They enlisted in the 38^th Virginia Infantry Regiment, Company G, known as the Mecklenburg Rifles. Hawthorne was elected as the company’s lieutenant while Arnold was chosen to be a sergeant. Sergeant Arnold’s enlistment in the 38^th lasted just three months when he received a disability discharge due to injury. Hawthorne was later promoted to captain and he became the commander of Company G until just before the Battle of Gettysburg when General Armistead asked him to serve on his brigade staff.

There has been some confusion over the details of Arnold’s military service. Arnold himself claimed to have served at Gettysburg and Appomattox. Arnold’s military record has been researched by this author and also by Brent Jacobs of the Oregon Sons of Confederate Veterans, and examination of the facts support Arnold’s claims. It appears that Arnold recovered from the injury that forced him out of the 38^th Infantry and that he re-enlisted in a Mecklenburg County artillery unit then transferred to the 14^th Virginia Infantry, which was also from Mecklenburg County. Arnold was assigned to Company F, known as the Chambliss Grays, and he was reunited with Hawthorne a year later when both the 14^th and 38^th regiments were assigned to Armistead’s Brigade.

Following Gettysburg, Hawthorne recovered from his wounds and returned to command Company G of the 38^th Virginia. General Seth Barton replaced Armistead as brigade commander but Pickett’s Division was never as effective as it was before the famous charge. On April 9, 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. The 14^th Virginia surrendered with just fifty-seven of its sixteen hundred men still in service. Ben Arnold’s company was the largest company in the 14^th with ten of its original one hundred men able to report for duty. B.J. Hawthorne and his 38^th Virginia surrendered with seventy-three men. Although the terms of surrender allowed the defeated rebels to keep their horses, the Union Army confiscated Hawthorne’s mount and he was forced to walk back home.

Ex-soldiers begin teaching careers

Upon his return home, B.J. Hawthorne married, began raising a family and then moved to Louisiana to teach romance languages at the Collegiate Institute in Baton Rouge. Hawthorne and his wife Emma would have two sons, Edgar and Wistar, and a daughter named Emma after her mother. Ben Arnold also married and started a family but his wife Addie died and left him a widower with a four-year old son. Arnold left his son Harry with his wife’s family in Virginia and took a job teaching at West Tennessee College in Jackson where he distinguished himself as a professor of mathematics and natural science.

When struggling Corvallis College in Oregon needed a new president in the summer of 1872, the bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church South asked Professor Arnold to come west. Arnold would serve as president of the college for twenty years and remains a giant figure in the history of Oregon State University.

President Arnold changed the name of Corvallis College to Corvallis State Agricultural College and then to Oregon Agricultural College. Early in his tenure as president, Arnold asked his army colleague B.J. Hawthorne to join the faculty. Professor Hawthorn accepted the offer and made the journey from Louisiana to Oregon by wagon in 1874.

During President Arnold’s administration, he introduced the study of scientific agriculture at the school and authorized agricultural experiments for the purpose of helping farmers in the state. Faculty and students spent eight hours a day in the classroom and were required to work on the college’s farm during after-school hours. The college was organized into two departments subdivided into different schools with a faculty member heading each department. Arnold also established an alumni association for the school and introduced intercollegiate athletics when he allowed the formation of a baseball team, breaking the long-standing tradition in which debate was the only authorized student social activity allowed outside the classroom.

Ex-Confederates on Corvallis campus

Arnold introduced military science to the curriculum and hired an active duty Army officer to lead the cadet corps. This precursor to the modern R.O.T.C. was the first instance in the United States of a commissioned officer serving on a college campus as a professor of military science while on active duty. When the Army reassigned its officer to another post, old soldiers Hawthorne and Arnold would personally drill the cadet corps. The cadet uniforms, chosen by Arnold were Confederate gray.

Professor Hawthorne quickly became the star of the O.A.C. faculty. As the first Chairman of Agriculture Department he taught horticulture and botany; collected, tested, and museum mounted seeds, grasses, fruits, and injurious pests. He also taught zoology, care of domestic animals, and stockbreeding.

In addition to Arnold and Hawthorne, a number of other early leaders of O.A.C. had Confederate connections. Among them were mathematics professor John Letcher, the son of Virginia’s Civil War governor; and Rev. J.R.N. Bell, a member of the Board of Regents and a veteran of the 26^th Virginia Infantry.

Among Arnold’s accomplishments as president was to move the campus form fifth street to the present location of OSU. He supervised the fundraising and construction of the first college building on the new site, today known as Benton Hall. President Arnold fell in love and married one of his students, Minnie White. After his marriage, Arnold sent for his son Harry in Virginia and the two were reunited after an eight-year separation. Arnold would father another son, Ernest, with his new wife. Both of the Arnold sons would graduate from O.A.C.

In 1892 Arnold fell ill while speaking to the Oregon Senate in Salem. He was rushed home on a special train arranged by the governor but died at his Corvallis home on January 30^th. He was just fifty-two years old but his twenty years as president are the second longest tenure of any president in the history of Oregon State University. President Arnold’s epitaph is written on a bronze tablet of the second floor of OSU’s Benton Hall: It says: "Benjamin L. Arnold, a true friend, thorough teacher, and useful man."

Another veteran of the Civil War succeeded Benjamin Arnold as college president. The new president, John McKnight Bloss was a Union man, a veteran of the 27^th Indiana Volunteer Infantry who, like Arnold and Hawthorne, had been in the fight at Gettysburg. One of new college president’s first acts was to change the uniform of the Cadet Corps from Arnold’s favorite gray to Union blue.

Professor Hawthorne moves to the University of Oregon

After eleven years heading the agriculture department in Corvallis, Benjamin Hawthorne became increasingly eager to teach classes of a more academic nature. The University of Oregon offered him the opportunity and in 1884 he moved to Eugene to teach romance languages. The Board of Regents gave Hawthorne permission to spend his summers back east taking courses in psychology at Johns Hopkins University. After several summers of study Hawthorne felt confident enough in his abilities to establish a formal curriculum of psychology at Oregon. With $150 approved by the Regents, Hawthorne outfitted a lab in what is now the University Club and in 1895 founded the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon.

Hawthorne retired from teaching in 1908 after a career that spanned more than forty years during which he taught over thirty different courses. Hawthorne found retirement boring, so at the age of seventy-four, he enrolled in the U of O law school from which he graduated in one year. He was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Eugene for years.

The Rebel Yell is heard on the streets of Eugene

Hawthorne was a popular instructor at Oregon and a well-known and respected member of the Eugene community although he had a reputation for being eccentric. He was an unrepentant rebel who would show up at the annual parade of the Grand Army of the Republic in a full Confederate dress uniform and holler rebel yells at the Union veterans as they marched down the streets of Eugene.

Benjamin J. Hawthorne lived until the age of ninety. He died on February 3, 1928 and is buried in the Eugene Masonic Cemetery south of the U of O campus. An impressive black granite monument marks Hawthorne’s grave. His son Wistar Hawthorne, who died in the Spanish America War, is buried next to him. President Benjamin Lee Arnold is buried beneath a large white marble cross at Crystal Lake Cemetery in Corvallis, not far from the OSU campus. Neither man’s monument mentions their service in the Civil War. Today both men are best remembered for their contributions to higher education in the earliest years of the Oregon college system … but they were soldiers once.

See also: The Minister and The General

© 2008 Randy Fletcher