George S. James, who was an Erskine student in the mid-1840s, gave the order for the firing of the first shell on Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12, 1861, an event generally considered to be the opening of the Civil War, according to a report prepared in 1893.

The Civil War had a dramatic effect on Upstate schools like Anderson University and Erskine College…

Erskine College gave its students to the war effort. William Moffatt Grier, the son of an Erskine College president, was a teen fighting for the Confederacy in 1862 when he suffered an injury serious enough that one of his legs needed to be amputated.

At the age of 18 or 19, Grier was captured by Union forces, said Lowry Ware, who has written books on the history of Due West and of Erskine College. But Grier was then cared for by a Union family and doctors. He in fact formed long-term friendships with several of them, said James Gettys, who like Ware is an Erskine professor emeritus.

Grier was one of many Erskine graduates to fight in the Civil War, a conflict that left the Due West school’s buildings in bad condition and ended the school’s first great period of growth, Ware wrote in “A History of Erskine College, 1839-1982.”

The school, established in 1839, was not able to operate in 1861 when three-fourths of its students entered into Confederate service, according to Ware. Erskine would not reopen until 1866.

“It devastated the financial structure of the institution,” Gettys said of the war.
About 35 members of the Erskine graduating classes in the years leading up to the war, through 1860, lost their lives in the conflict, Ware wrote.

George S. James, who was an Erskine student in the mid-1840s, gave the order for the firing of the first shell on Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12, 1861, an event generally considered to be the opening of the Civil War, according to a report prepared in 1893. Dr. Robert Lebby presented the report to the Historical Commission of South Carolina.

James was from Laurens, S.C. He did not graduate from Erskine, although the college catalog shows he made it into his senior year there, before he began fighting for the Confederacy, Ware said.

James had already served in the Mexican War. With four companies from Laurens District, he formed the Laurens Battalion at Camp Hamilton near Columbia in November 1861, according to an article by Lebby published in 1911 in The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine.

On Sept. 14, 1862, as part of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Maryland Campaign, “Just as night approached and firing began to cease, Colonel James was pierced through the breast with a Minnie ball, from the effects of which he soon died,” according to the article.

Boys and men who lived around Erskine in the Due West area made up a significant part of Company G of Orr’s rifles. The company suffered major losses of men in June 1862 at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill in Hanover County, Va., Ware said. More than 30 people from the Due West area were killed in the battle.