page_title: History of Georgetown University
section_title: The Civil War
hierarchical_section_title: History of Georgetown University / The Civil War
caption_attribution_description: English: David Edgar Herold at the Washington Navy Yard after his arrest, 1865. Half-length portrait, facing right. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c21530
context_page_description: The history of Georgetown University spans nearly four hundred years, from the early European settlement of America to the present day. Georgetown University has grown with both its city, Washington, D.C., and the United States, each of which date their founding to the period from 1788 to 1790. Georgetown's origins are in the establishment of the Maryland colony in the seventeenth-century. Bishop John Carroll established the school at its present location by the Potomac River after the American Revolution allowed for free religious practice.
  The role of the Society of Jesus in the school's operation has evolved from that of founders and financiers to faculty and advisers. Their focus on liberal studies and religious pluralism have helped to give the school its identity. Georgetown was also affected by its times, including the American Civil War, which disrupted the growing school and significantly changed its student body. University presidents like Patrick Francis Healy modernized the institution into an active research university with several graduate and undergraduate schools, and oversaw the expansion of educational opportunities on campus, around the city, and abroad.
context_section_description: The Civil War was an important and tragic time for the University. Beginning on December 11, 1859 the Philodemic Society debated whether or not the southern states should secede. The debate lasted weeks, and after the Society affirmed secession, a brawl ensued, and debates were canceled for the rest of 1860. Fist fights on campus between northern and southern students soon became common. Beginning in 1861, many students left their studies to join the war. 925 students ultimately enlisted with the Confederate Army and 216 with the Union Army; between them 106 died in the war. Enrollment dropped from 313 students in 1859 to only 17 late in 1861. By 1862, Georgetown only had 120 total students, about ten percent of what it was just a few years earlier. Only seven students graduated in 1869, down from over 300 a decade prior.
  Responding to lack of adequate hospital beds and housing for soldiers needed to protect the District, the Union commandeered University buildings, and by the time of President Abraham Lincoln's May 1861 visit to campus, 1,400 Union Army troops were stationed in temporary quarters there. Of these 1,300 were from the 69th Infantry Regiment, which established itself in Maguire Hall from May 4, 1861 to June when the unit was replaced by the 79th New York Volunteer Infantry. The occupation ended in July when the unit left to fight in the First Battle of Bull Run, but the university remained home to soldiers as an infirmary for the remainder of the war.
  Georgetown would later be connected to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Several of John Wilkes Booth's conspirators had associations to Georgetown: David Herold, who accompanied Booth in his escape, attended the school between 1855 and 1858 and received a certificate in pharmacology in 1860, while Samuel Arnold, who conspired with Booth to kidnap Lincoln, attended in the mid-1840s, and Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set Booth's broken ankle following the assassination, studied medicine between 1851 and 1854. Charles H. Liebermann, one of the founders of the medical school, was among the doctors who treated Lincoln the night he died.
  The war drastically changed Georgetown, making it both more northern and more Catholic. Increasingly larger percentages of the student body came from northern cities, more populated with Catholic immigrants, while the student body had been primarily southern before the war. This dynamic is expressed in Georgetown's official school colors. In 1876, Georgetown College Boat Club, the school's rowing team, adopted blue, from the uniform of the Union Army, and gray, from the uniforms of the Confederate States military forces, as their team colors in order to signify the peaceful unity between students from the North and those from the South. Students at Georgetown Visitation wove the first blue and gray uniforms for the team. Georgetown's motto Utraque Unum, "both into one," though used before the war, helped capture the unity spirit.
caption: Student David Herold at the Washington Navy Yard after his arrest
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