Confederate Stronghold

On a Charleston campus etched with palmettos, amid yellow Moorish buildings, some 1,900 young men in oldfashioned, ball-buttoned, long-tailed military uniforms will this week pass in review before South Carolina's Governor Richard Jefferies. The Citadel, known also as the Military College of South Carolina, which vies with Virginia Military Institute for second rank (after Annapolis and West Point) among U.S. military academies, will be 100 years old.

For the occasion Governor Jefferies will enrich the school's lavish regimental colors with a new set of eight battle-streamers marking the participation of Citadel men in as many operations in the Civil War. The school is also proud of a streamer (added in 1939) embroidered "Confederate States Army," for The Citadel is the nation's stanchest stronghold of the Grey traditions.

The Citadel traces its origins to the tense 1820s, when South Carolina feared a slave rebellion. A garrison at first, The Citadel became a military college in 1842 after South Carolina, filled with growing Nullification spirit, asked that federal troops be withdrawn from the state.

Citadel men fired both the first and last shots in the War Between the States. On January 9, 1861, Citadel cadets trained a battery of 24-pounders in Charleston harbor upon the federal ship Star of the West, which was steaming to the relief of Fort Sumter. This was the war's first hostility, though the struggle is usually dated from April 12, 1861, when Sumter itself was attacked. Each spring the best-drilled Citadel cadet is awarded tempo rary possession of a medal made from a piece of wood from the Star of the West.

The last organized Confederate resist ance east of the Mississippi was offered by Citadel cadets who engaged a band of raiders near Williamston, S.C. on May 9, 1865 -- just a month after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, where (says tradition) another Citadel man carried the flag of truce. Of The Citadel's 224 living graduates in 1864, some 200 served as Confederate officers.

When The Citadel in 1922 moved into new $3,500,000 quarters in northwestern Charleston its enrollment began growing from a mere 350 to nearly 2,000. Its scholastic stature has also grown under the presidency of General Charles Pelot Summerall, who retired from the U.S. Army (he was Chief of Staff) in 1931. About 60% of The Citadel's cadets now come from outside South Carolina, but most are still Southerners, by no means wholly reconstructed.

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