Columbia University Archives: Columbia and the Civil War

University documents

• To understand the University’s (then Columbia College) policies and positions, the best place to start is to consult the Minutes of the Board of Trustees. The Trustees were actively involved in all of the College’s day-to-day operations (In-person)
  • You can consult the minutes by looking at the volumes by date: for example, look for President Barnard’s resolutions on the death of President Abraham Lincoln, April 17, 1865 (two days after the assassination).
  • You can consult the indices to the minutes. The first set of cards covers the minutes from 1755 to 1890. For example, under “Lincoln, Abraham,” you will find that the Trustees voted to award the President an honorary degree (LLD) on May, 20, 1861. Or that the subject of “Civil War - Students, going to the army” can be found in Volume V, 427.
• In addition to the Minutes, the University Archives also has the documents submitted for the trustee meetings and the administrative correspondence with the Trustee and other members of the administration. You can search the Columbia College papers for these documents by looking for individual names. (In-person)
  • The items in this collection are identified by letter writer, addressee and date, which means most of the contents and subject matter remain unidentified. For example, Professor Richard S. McCulloh, who occupied the Chair of Physics, went South to fight for the Confederacy. He notified the Trustees of his resignation via letter. You can find his resignation letter in this collection listed as “McCulloh, Richard Sears to the Trustees, Richmond, Va. 1863 September 25” in Box 32 (see image below) with no mention of the resignation or how he claimed to be “born and reared a Southerner.” (For more documents created during this timeframe and organized in the same manner, see the Columbia University manuscript collection.)
• Hamilton Fish CC 1827 served as Chair of the Board of Trustees from 1859 to 1893. The Hamilton Fish letters serve as companion to the official College records. In these letters, Fish and his fellow correspondents (fellow trustees, College presidents, faculty members, etc.) speak candidly about current events and the college matters. If the Trustee minutes are the official record, the Hamilton Fish letters provide the side-conversations and unfiltered commentary. (In-person)
• Before there were yearbook, Columbia College students would collect photocards of their classmates and professors and put together  a Class Album: the photos (in order of the commencement procession) are the same, but the albums vary in size and shape. You can find albums from the Civil War era classes in the Class Photograph Albums Collection, 1856-1902. The Class of 1862 album includes photos of John Fulton Berian Mitchell in his uniform. The Class of 1862 album in Box 4 includes Civil War photographs in the last few pages of the book. (In-person)
• In 1898, as the students were again being called to serve in the Spanish-American War, the College published a pamphlet, War Records, listing the graduates and students of Columbia who served in the army and navy during the Civil War. The volume contains 395 names, starting from the Class of 1824 to 1880. (Online).
• In addition to the students and graduates, many Columbia faculty members also served in the war such as John W. Burgess, Francis Lieber, John Strong Newberry and Francis Laurens Vinton. To find information about the faculty members who served, start with the Historical Biographical Files. (In-person)
  • To find additional information about faculty members, check out the Faculty Search research guide.
  • The Historical Biographical File on Abraham Lincoln has materials about his honorary degree, in abstentia, Francis Lieber’s account on when he presented Lincoln with his diploma at the White House, and Lincoln’s letter, which only arrived at the Archives in 1983 (Box 185).
• In 1917, the Columbia Alumni News invited alumni prior to 1870 to send in for publication any information about Columbia in the (Eighteen) Sixties.  The collected letters were published as part of Columbia in the Civil War: Reminiscences and Historical Details Recalled, Columbia Alumni News, 9 November 1917, Volume IX, pages 155-160. (Online).