The University Greys: The Highwater Mark of Misplaced Hope

Published On: January 11, 2025 Updated: January 13, 2025 BY Will Dabbs

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes

I have attended the University of Mississippi three different times. Though I always hated school and was never just lyrically good at it, I have indeed done it a lot. I am also descended from Ole Miss royalty.

Mom was Miss University. She deserved that. She was and is gorgeous. Dad played tight end for Johnny Vaught from 1958 through 1962. His team won the national championship and went undefeated. The argument could be made that it was that magnificent football team that kept the place from literally burning to the ground during the 1962 riots. That was when James Meredith became the first black student admitted to any Mississippi state university.

Grey Space
Young People are Stupid
The University Origins
War
Philosophy
University Aspirations
Campaigning On Campus
University Greys
Ruminations

The informal motto of the University of Mississippi is that we have never lost a party. While that may or may not be true, Ole Miss certainly lost a war.

Grey Space

I’m nothing special, but I have extraordinary parents.

My own family reflects the weird dichotomy that is Ole Miss history. I am incredibly proud of my parents. They are both such amazing people. They love Jesus, and they did a superlative job of raising me and my brothers. Neither of them is racist, despite having spawned from this morally ambiguous institution at a particularly morally ambiguous time.

You can see something similar on a much grander scale embodied within the conflicted history of the school itself. Though the nuances are lost on a modern generation of lamentably binary Americans, imbedded within the school’s history we see the possibility that very good people might support some very bad causes. Today I intend to attempt the impossible. I am going to try to paint the young men who went off to fight and die for the Confederacy in a positive light. Strap in. Here we go…

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Young People are Stupid

I daresay most of these folks have absolutely no idea the true nature of the cause they are supporting. It was similar vapid idealism that sent the entire Ole Miss student body off to fight for the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

There is a reason our society does not let children buy beer or handguns. In our youth, every last one of us was irretrievably stupid. Don’t believe me? Look no further than the recent protests over the Israeli incursion into Gaza.

Much of life is complicated. This is not. On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 Israelis. Scaled up for our population, that would be the equivalent of 44,000 dead Americans…in a day. In response to the 911 attacks that claimed the lives of 2,977 of our countrymen, we directly and indirectly killed nearly a million people.

I’d be willing to bet that most of the college kids out protesting can’t intelligently articulate the finer theological differences between Sunni and Shia. They would likely struggle to locate the West Bank on a map. Yet they are screaming about the injustice of leveling a place where the rank and file population still actively supports Hamas.

Perhaps stupid is too strong a word. Gullible might be more accurate. However, this tragic, lethal, intractable gullibility is indeed a timeless scourge. It was certainly most profoundly manifest on the Ole Miss campus back in 1861.

The University Origins

The roots of antebellum Southern culture once ran deep at the University of Mississippi. I myself recall the cheerleaders throwing Confederate flags into the stands at Ole Miss football games when I was but a wee lad.

The University of Mississippi accepted its first freshman class of 80 young men in 1848. They eventually called the place Ole Miss. The term, “Ole Miss” originated in 1897 as the title of the school’s first student yearbook–The Ole Miss Annual. A coed named Elma Meek won a contest to suggest the name. She explained that she had oft heard of slaves on Southern plantations referring to the plantation matron as “Ole Miss” to distinguish her from the “Young Misses.” That strikes me as a curious name for a school, but it stuck nonetheless.

For its first 23 years, Ole Miss was Mississippi’s sole institution of higher learning. In 1854, it became the fourth state-supported law school in the country. That same year, the university launched one of the country’s earliest engineering programs. Ole Miss broke new ground in 1882 with the admission of its first female student. Three years later they hired their first female faculty member. This may not seem like much today. It was quite the big deal back then.

War

It is inexplicably easy to glorify stuff like this. I do it myself most every week in this very space. Truth be known, we should all revile the very concept of war.

In late 1860, war was looming large. Much smarter folk than I have spilt oceans of ink exploring the many manifest origins of the American Civil War. Apologists focus on states’ rights. Most understandably fixate on the institution of slavery. Reality is no doubt more nuanced than either position might intimate. However, as I said, ours is a lamentably binary society these days. We no longer do nuance terribly well. Regardless, the nation’s ire was rising, and the young people in particular were swept up in its unstoppable fervor.

On 9 January 1861, Mississippi seceded from the Union. This was an unprecedented, heady era for those who lived it. Time had consumed most of those who had known the previous war of revolution as well as that of 1812. An entire generation had not itself tasted the bitter tincture of combat. That was all about to change.

College then was not like college today. Nowadays many in government have come to view higher education as some sort of intrinsic natural right. Back then, however, college was a privilege of the most rarefied sort. The student body in 1861 was small, wealthy, and fortunate. They were also headstrong and patriotic. This turned out to be an explosive combination.

Philosophy

It is an innate sense of tribalism that drives our young men to strip off their shirts and transform themselves into sweaty, goofy, inebriated billboards. If you could tolerate some advice, guys–you need to hit the gym.

Human beings are tribal. This peculiar sense of tribalism is what makes you climb up to scrub your sister’s name off an overpass, even if she was a turd to you when you were kids. It drives us to take pride in our families, our nation, and our sports teams. It also sends young men off to war.

As soon as war clouds appeared on the horizon, the Ole Miss student body began to prepare. They organized into units, privately purchased arms and uniforms, and began drilling in the grassy circle in front of the Lyceum, the university administration building. When these young men began to volunteer to go off to fight, there were voices suggesting that perhaps the Ole Miss student body was too valuable to lose.

If this thing went sideways, the South would need a seed–a core of intelligent, driven young men to repair and rebuild. Those voices opined that the Ole Miss student body should perhaps sit this one out. These misguided young studs were having none of that.

University Aspirations

This is Corporal L. Purnell of Co I, 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. He is typical of the youthful University Grays who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy.

These students actually went to great lengths to earn the privilege of spending themselves on the battlefield for their country. The letters of entreaty they penned to Governor JJ Pettus have survived. They reflect a naïve, misplaced fervor common to all young men. With the benefit of hindsight, they also simply drip with pathos. Here is an example dated 19 March 1861—

Sir:

I have learned that an attempt has been made to rule out this regiment, Capt. Lowry’s Company, here at the University after they have been regularly mustered into service and received their arms. I think it would be a great injustice to do so. They are all young men it is true, but many of them are of legal age, all of them eligible for military service, and they are exceedingly anxious to enter the service. As a company they are really better skilled in military tactics than any company I know of. Many of them have been educated at military schools. I hope therefore they will not be ruled out.

With highest respect I have the honor to be your

Obt. Servt.,

Wm. Delay, Capt., Comdg. Lafayette Guards

P.S. This Company has also been at considerable expense in procuring uniforms &c.

Captain Delay ultimately got his wish.

Campaigning On Campus

William Delay was eventually laid to rest back in Oxford right down the road from the University of Mississippi. His tombstone is one of many of his era in the sprawling local cemetery.

On 4 May 1861, two months after William Delay’s letter was posted to the governor, the entire student body save four souls mustered in front of the Lyceum and enlisted in the Confederate Army en masse. Those remaining four students were inadequate to justify the resumption of classes, so the school was temporarily shuttered. Prior to this moment, those 135 young boys were college students drawn from all over the state. Afterwards, fifty-five of them became Company A of the 11^th Mississippi Infantry assigned to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

This company was designated the University Greys. A further seventeen served with the Lamar Rifles, a local militia drawn from the Lafayette County area surrounding the school. The rest were assigned piecemeal to other state regiments. Of those fifty-five original Greys, forty-eight came from slave-owning families.

Pickett’s Charge was unfettered slaughter. The argument can be made this was the nearest the Confederacy came to victory during the American Civil War.

University Greys

The Greys saw action in several campaigns. However, fate placed them in the vanguard of Heth’s Division of AP Hill’s Corps in the summer of 1863. The University Greys led the infamous Pickett’s Charge that came so close to breaking the Union lines on the third bloody day at Gettysburg.

The last man standing fell some twenty yards from the far right edge of the Union line. 3-inch ordnance rifles parked hub-to-hub poured double canister into the rows of butternut, cutting the Rebels down by the dozens. Those last to fall were Company A of the 11^th Mississippi. The University Greys advanced farther than any other Confederate combat unit during the American Civil War. Earning that distinction cost them every single member of the company. The Greys were obliterated to a man.

Of the thirty-one university students who started the charge across that bloody field at Gettysburg, fourteen died where they fell while the other seventeen were grievously wounded. The few who eventually recovered were folded into the Lamar Rifles. The University Greys had been attritted to literally nothing.

Ruminations

The Confederate soldier statue at the University was first erected in 1906. In 2020 it was moved to an obscure part of campus so nobody would have to think about it any more.

Great hay has been made over the veneration of Confederate luminaries from the Civil War. Statues have been defaced, displaced, defamed, and toppled. Forts Bragg, Benning, Hood, and Rucker are all called something else today. There is a concerted effort in our myopic binary world to obliterate the memories of these young men along with those of the other 258,000 patriotic Southerners who gave their lives for their misguided cause.

Today this stained glass memorial stands in Ventress Hall at the University of Mississippi to commemorate the simply breathtaking sacrifice of the University Greys. There are those who would passionately prefer plywood.

Politicians and Generals make strategy. Soldiers supply the blood. In the trenches, young men rarely fight and die for lofty causes. They bleed for their brothers on either side. They perish not for their countries but for their friends. In the summer of 1863, the University Greys fell to a man. While the righteousness of their cause is certainly ripe for debate, none should ever doubt the purity of their devotion.

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