University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Yackety Yack Yearbook (Chapel Hill, NC)

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m. p d m j= o COL. ROBERT BINGHAM This volume of the Yackety Yack is dedicated as a memorial of affection and esteem to an illustrious and loyal son of the Uni- versity « ■iNNiiiiiiiiliiiiWiii

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Col. Robert Bingham COL. ROBERT BINGHAM, the fourth Headmaster of the Binfrl,:,in School, of the third generation since its foundation in 1793 (two years before the fduiidatiun of the University), was born September 5, 183S. He entered the Bingham Schuul when not quite eleven, the University when not quite fifteen, and graduated with hrst distinction, in the Class of 1857, when not quite nineteen. In July of that year he joined liis father and elder brother as junior partner in the firm of W. J. Bingham Sons. Soon after the Civil War broke out he rai.-ii ' d :i c(iiii|):iny of Vohniteprs, 128 in all, only four of them belonging to the l:i i-lii)lding class, :iimI II :i- ;i igncd tii till- 44th Regiment, in what became at lengtli M:iii;:i. ' - Iliinade, in Heth ' . I )i i inii, A. 1 ' . Hill ' s Curp.s, and he was one of General Lee ' s 7,892 arincil nun :ii Appo- mattox Coml House antl saw llie last smi rise on what was left of the Army of Northern u ' ginia. As he was never sick or wounded, he was on the firing line all the time. General MacRae always made the 44th Regiment the centre of his brigade, and when the only flag the regiment had ever had was so shot away as to be no longer an ensign, and a new flag was issued, the torn and tattered remnant of the old flag was given to RolxTt Bingham because he was the only officer in the regiment who had always been under fire with it. except when he was a prisoner for a while, a fine testimonial to brave and faithful service. And this fragment of the 44th ' s Regimental Flag, which is framed and hangs in Judge Robert Worth Bingham ' s office in Louisville, Kentucky, is to be handed down as a trophy from generation to generation of the Bing- hams. A detailed history of the men who followed Lee, and above all, an account of their de- velopment in every sphere since the war, would form a most valuable contribution, not only to the annals of the South, but to the record of American progress and expansion in the broadest sense. To call them by name as they rise in the retrospect of memory is an easy task; for age has not withered them, and they respond as I saw them with the dew of youth upon them — that same gray line which for fnin- years bore the cause of the South aloft on its bayonets. There is Robert Bingham, I lie liiir uf three generations of scholastic tradition, an intellectual power in the evolution of the Sciiiili, ilie reniiwn of whose great School, like that of Eton or Rugby, has passed beyond the seas. iSheiilierd ' s Life of R. E. Lee, p. 97.) When the Civil War ended, Robert Bingham returned to his place in the School, which his elder brolhei- had held together dtu ' ing the war under the most adverse conditions. At Col. William Bingham ' s death, in 1873, the School had only thirty-five tuitinn fees and pupils from only .seven States. In Robert Bingham ' s hands it has atlraeted pu]iils from the United States Army, from 39 States of the Union, from Canada, Mexico, HoiidiiiMs, and Nicaragua in North America, from two countries in South . nierica, from fmn- in Europe. Irum fom- in Asia, from Ciilia in the . tlantii-. and from the Phili|i|iines in the I ' arihe, an area of patronage second to none in the SuvUheni States, and equaled liy but few selmnls in the rmled States. But Robert Biughani has been more tlian a Confederate Soklier, and more than the Head- master of the Bingham School. In 1884 he was invited to read a paper before the National Educational Association in Madison, Wisconsin, which he called The New South. This paper was reproduced and was widely dis- tributed, and was called by nne of North Cai ' olina ' s most distinguished citizens, the finest brief he had ever seen on any . iilijeet. In 1900, Harpur ' s Miujuzine published Colonel Bingham ' s E.x-Slaveholder ' s View of Our Negro Problem, which has been acceiJted as a classic on the subject, and 3,000 copies of it have been called for from all over the country and abroad, and it has been repeated on several platforms, both Ib the South and in the North. In September, 1904, the North American Review, which up to that time had never accepted a paper by a North Carolinian, published Colonel Bingham ' s Sectional Misunderstandings, 10