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While many institutions of higher education made great sacrifices during the Civil War, few can boast of the dedication and effort made by the University of Notre Dame.

For four years, Notre Dame gave freely of its faculty and students as soldiers, sent its Holy Cross priests to the camps and battlefields as chaplains and dispatched its sisters to the hospitals as nurses. Though far from the battlefields, the war was ever-present on campus, as Notre Dame witnessed fisticuffs among the student body, provided a home to the children of a famous general, responded to political harassment and tried to keep at least some of its community from the fray. At war's end, a proud Notre Dame welcomed back several bona fide war heroes and became home to a unique veterans' organization.

When the Civil War erupted, the Union and the Confederacy faced the challenge of organizing huge armies of volunteers with little or no military experience. Crucial to this task was finding generals, and Indiana answered this call with nearly 120 of them. Although a competent division and corps commander, Ambrose E. Burnside's leadership of the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg proved disastrous. Jefferson Columbus was a relentless commander, but murdering his superior in a Louisville hotel halted his probable rise to major general. As commander of the Louisville Legion, Lovell H. Rousseau was the only Civil War general commissioned by a city. Compiling years of research, historian Carl E. Kramer provides biographical sketches of every identifiable Indiana general who attained full-rank, brevet and state-service status in the tragic struggle.