Civil War and Reconstruction
During the American Civil War the name of the seminary was changed to The Florida Military and Collegiate Institute and began military training for students. Young cadets from the school, along with other soldiers from Tallahassee, defeated Union forces at the Battle of Natural Bridge in 1865. The students were trained by Valentine Mason Johnson, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, who was a professor of mathematics and the chief administrator of the college. By the end of the war Tallahassee was the only Confederate capital east of the Mississippi River not to fall to Union forces.
The Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps unit at Florida State University is one of only four ROTC units in the United States with permission to display a campaign streamer. The streamer reads . After the fall of the Confederacy, campus buildings were occupied by Union forces for over a month. The West Florida Seminary reverted to a purely academic purpose after the war, and began a period of substantial growth and development.
Read more about this topic: History Of Florida State University
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil and/or war:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“[Rutherford B. Hayes] was a patriotic citizen, a lover of the flag and of our free institutions, an industrious and conscientious civil officer, a soldier of dauntless courage, a loyal comrade and friend, a sympathetic and helpful neighbor, and the honored head of a happy Christian home. He has steadily grown in the public esteem, and the impartial historian will not fail to recognize the conscientiousness, the manliness, and the courage that so strongly characterized his whole public career.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“I have agreed to go into the service for the war ... [feeling] that this was a just and necessary war and that it demanded the whole power of the country; that I would prefer to go into it if I knew I was to die or be killed in the course of it, than to live through and after it without taking any part in it.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)