Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On Dec. 10, 1862, Lt. Orville Chamberlain of the 74th Indiana Infantry wrote home to his family in Elkhart from his camp, 50 miles northeast of Nashville, Tenn. A few days earlier, the regiment had marched eight miles from its camp after hearing the sound of cannon to the east. “Our advance was cautious,” he wrote, “as we expected to meet the enemy.”

Instead, they came upon the casualties left on the field after a battle earlier in the day. “At first the sight of the dead and wounded was almost overpowering,” he wrote, but added: “but all feeling of humanity soon gave way to a careless indifference and the boys walked among the dead as if amongst so many defunct porkers.”

It was a dramatic change in scenery for the 20-year-old Hoosier. Only months before he had been a student on a bucolic college campus in northwestern Indiana, writing his family about the timeless concerns of any college student: learning to live away from home, classmates, studies, the quality and quantity of the food and — of course — the need for money. The Civil War changed everything for Chamberlain: he left school in the summer of 1862 and joined the 74th Indiana as a private; a year later he was a captain in command of a company. By war’s end, he had distinguished himself in battle and would earn the Medal of Honor for his bravery under fire at the Battle of Chickamauga.

The war likewise brought drastic changes for his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, which, like Chamberlain, was barely out of its teens when the war started. The school was founded in 1842 by Father Edward Sorin and a small band of Holy Cross brothers who came from France at the behest of Indiana’s bishop, who had asked for missionaries to minister to the state’s growing Catholic population. Thanks to its patrons, the support of the citizens of nearby South Bend, Ind., and the confidence and competence of Father Sorin, the school began to grow: from a handful of students and buildings in the 1840s to an impressive campus and hundreds of students on the eve of the Civil War.

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Sorin adapted well to his adopted country: he was patriotic (George Washington’s birthday was always a special day at Notre Dame; St. Patrick’s Day was not a school holiday until a decade after the war) and politically astute. A visiting journalist wrote of Sorin’s “quiet consciousness of power,” adding, “it was evident that he read the newspapers as well as his breviary.” Of his community’s influence, the good father boasted, “It is not necessary for us to vote … but the fact that we can do so whenever we choose, and defeat either party, is quite enough to make both treat us with a respectful consideration.”

Whether or not war was inevitable, the young men at Notre Dame were prepared for one. Military units had existed on many college campuses for years before the Civil War, and the tradition at Notre Dame can be traced to the 1850s, when the first student-organized company could be seen marching across campus. For his part, Father Sorin encouraged the exercises, not out of a martial nature, but rather for the “excellent physical training and gentlemanly bearing and manner which they were calculated to impart to the young men.” The young men styled their unit the “Notre Dame Continental Cadets” and adopted a dress that was “very picturesque, beautiful and showy,” in the style of the members’ revolutionary forefathers. In 1858, The Chicago Daily Times reported of the cadets: “Even in Chicago, a city which has always been noted for its military tastes and science, they would be called a remarkably fine looking body of young men.”

On April 19, 1861, just days after the surrender of Fort Sumter and President Abraham Lincoln’s first call for troops, one of the school’s priests, Neal Gillespie, wrote to his mother: “Here all are well except those who are taken violently with the war fever, which epidemic rages in these northern climes in spite of the gloomy weather as fiercely as in the sunny south.” Some of the students “perhaps will go to fight the battles of their country,” he added, but guessed that “the number will…be very small.” He reported, with chagrin, that “the excitement has sadly interfered with the lessons of some of the hotheaded ones,” but wrote with admiration of other boys who took “the matter coolly, as sensible young men” and did not “exhibit a very bellicose spirit nor vapor much about ‘blood and thunder’ and the ‘cannon roar’ and such like.”

Father Gillespie’s guess that only a few students would leave to fight was off the mark: dozens among Notre Dame’s students, alumni and faculty took up arms. They included Orville Chamberlain; the bellicose William F. Lynch, commander of the school’s Continental Cadets, who rose to the rank of brigadier general; Timothy Howard, seriously wounded at Shiloh, who returned to a career as a professor at Notre Dame and a noted Indiana jurist; and Felix Zeringue of New Orleans, who left Notre Dame just days after the firing on Sumter (with an unpaid tuition bill) and enlisted in the Confederate army.

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Indeed, Notre Dame’s participation in the war established a tradition of “Fighting Irish” tenacity on the battlefield by its student-soldiers and spiritual strength imparted by its priests and sisters. Few institutions of higher education can boast of the breadth of sacrifices made by the school: over the course of four years, Notre Dame gave freely of its faculty and students as soldiers, and sent its Holy Cross priests to the camps and battlefields as chaplains and dispatched its sisters to the hospitals as nurses. Some of the boys, men and women made the ultimate sacrifice and never returned. One, 17-year-old Frank Baldwin jumped on a train in the spring of 1862 with a friend and – despite the protests of his parents and a reluctant captain – joined the 44th Indiana Infantry. Baldwin, later promoted to sergeant, was killed at the Battle of Stones River on Dec. 31, 1862.

“None were braver men or truer patriots,” a wartime student wrote years later, adding: “Notre Dame is honored in her loyal soldier students, who showed, even to the shedding of their blood, how deeply inculcated were the lessons of patriotism which they had received from their Alma Mater.”

Though far from the battlefields itself, the war was still ever-present on campus. Notre Dame witnessed fisticuffs among its body of students from North and South. It provided a home to the children of the Union general William T. Sherman and sought to keep at least some of its dwindling religious community out of the fray. And, when the war was over, a proud Notre Dame welcomed back several bona fide war heroes and became home to a unique veteran’s organization: a Grand Army of the Republic post composed entirely of ordained priests or professed brothers.

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Sources: Orville T. Chamberlain Papers, Indiana Historical Society; Letter, Neal Gillespie to mother, April 19, 1861, Thomas Ewing Manuscripts, CEWI, Box 3, Archives of the University of Notre Dame; Thomas L. Nichols, “Forty Years of American Life”; Timothy E. Howard, “A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana”; “A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, Indiana from 1842 to 1892.”

James M. Schmidt is the author, most recently, of “Notre Dame and the Civil War: Marching Onward to Victory.” He blogs at notredamecivilwar.blogspot.com and civilwarmed.blogspot.com.