Seventy-one Harvard alumni served in the Confederate military 1861-65 yet are not recognized today in that institution’s Memorial Hall. In late January 1922 two donation checks were received for the Lee-Memorial Chapel at Lexington, Virginia – one from Boston Herald editor Robert L. O’Brien and a Harvard professor who had “asked the privilege of contributing to this fund.”
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com
Harvard’s Southern Club
“One of the most pleasant literary occasions of my experience was a dinner in Boston given by the Southern Club of Harvard in honor of Thomas Nelson Page and Hopkinson Smith, who were then on a tour giving readings from their own works. At this dinner the honored guests held the center of the stage.
At the Southern Club I met many undergraduates; these acquaintances introduced me to others on the outside, who in turn sometimes took me to their clubs, the most interesting perhaps being the Hasty Pudding with its large collection of things theatrical.
Many of the law students ate at Memorial Hall . . . I recall . . . Bart Gatlin[g] of Raleigh, son of the inventor of the Gatlin[g] Gun; [and] John C. Breckinridge, grandson and namesake of a vice-president of the United States.
At my own table sat a student prematurely bald whom we called “the bald-headed infidel” because he was fond of spouting his atheistic ideas, who in turn took delight in speaking of the Southern Club as “the Secesh Club.”
(Son of Carolina, Augustus White Long, Duke University Press, 1939, pp. 196-199)