One day during an interval in the battle of Cold Harbor in June, 1864, I went to see a college mate who had entered the army as a private soldier, but was now chaplain of a Georgia regiment. He was a brilliant master of arts, had completed nearly the whole of his theological course, and was under appointment as missionary to Japan when the war broke out and changed all of his plans. I found him lying on an oil cloth deeply absorbed in a book which I supposed might be some volume of light literature that had been captured from the enemy. But when I asked him what he was reading he replied : "My wounded have all been sent to the hospitals in Richmond, and as there is no fighting going on now, I thought I would amuse myself with this a little. "I found that he was studying Arabic, and I thought that a man who could amuse himself studying Arabic in an interval between the terrific fighting along the Cold Harbor lines, had a power of application beyond anything of which I had ever conceived. After the war he spent several years in study at one of the German universities, was for many years professor of Hebrew in the Southern Baptist theological seminary, and has been for some years the able and accomplished head of the department of oriental languages in Harvard. When President Elliot was asked why they had put "a rebel soldier" in a chair at Harvard, he replied, "We did not select him because he was a rebel soldier, but because Prof. Crawford H. Loy is unquestionably the first scholar on the continent in that department."
Many other individual examples of the intellectual cast of the Confederate army might be put in evidence, but it must suffice to state that a correct list of the professors in our Southern colleges and universities that served in the Confederate armies shows that at least nine-tenths or them had been Confederate soldiers. And a very large proportion of the students in universities, colleges and theological seminaries were "men who wore the
