The lost, bizarre, and somehow true story of the time Pennsylvania’s teachers bought a cannon for Abe Lincoln
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I haven’t taken a poll on this. But if you asked someone to describe a teacher, the answers would likely revolve around intellectual, patient, or dedicated to the quiet pursuit of learning. You probably had a great teacher who made class exciting and inspired you. You probably had a bad one who made you dread a school year or an entire subject. But whatever image comes to mind when you think of the teaching profession, it does not even come close to capturing the spirit of Pennsylvania’s teachers in the summer of 1861.
When the Pennsylvania State Teachers’ Association held its annual meeting at Lewisburg in August 1861, the country was in crisis. The nation was mobilizing for war. The teachers, eager to do their part, passed a resolution of loyalty to the country. They debated the role of education in the great struggle that was to come. And then they did something else:
They decided to buy a cannon.
Explore the moment the Teachers’ Cannon began → See the Lewisburg vote, surviving proceedings, and full documentary timeline.
The Teachers Take Action
The proposal came from J. P. Wickersham, a prominent Pennsylvania educator whom the Pennsylvania School Journal jokingly described as a “half Quaker.” After noting his belief that the impending war would be a long and bloody struggle, his official motion was to take $300 currently sitting in surplus funds, buy a cannon with it, and “present it to the President of the United States, to aid in putting down the Rebellion.” The vote was unanimous. The $300 was set aside for the task, a call for subscriptions was sent out to Pennsylvania schools to raise additional funds, and Thomas H. Burrowes was assigned to the task of completing the purchase.
Within a week the news reached Pittsburgh. The Daily Pittsburgh Gazette noted that the state’s teachers were apparently no longer “content with ‘teaching the young idea how to shoot,’” and instead were “determined to aid the Government in shooting Rebels.”
Within weeks, the cannon idea was rolling along. Phoenix Iron Works, in Phoenixville, replied to an inquiry from Burrowes that they could supply the cannon he sought “at $330, which is the price the Government pay[s] each for 300 of them, and is considerably less than we sell them for to any other persons*.”
*It is unclear just who these other persons may have been.
There was an issue, though. While the cannon could be bought for $330, the carriage would cost an additional $300. With the procurement cost effectively doubled, Burrowes waited while additional contributions from individual educators trickled in.
A Cannon Meant to Be Fired
Over the winter months that stretched into 1862, teachers continued to spread the word. In March, Burrowes received an intriguing letter.
BUNKER HILL, VA., March 8th, 1862.
SIR:—I have been informed that a subscription is out among the Teachers of Pennsylvania for the purchase of a cannon, to be presented to the Government. The captain of this company, (E. W. Mathews) the Lieutenants, and nearly all the non-commissioned officers are old teachers, and respectfully petition, that the said gun when equipped be placed in our company organization. In consideration of our services the Government has presented us six new pieces called “the 3 inch wrought iron rifled regulation gun.” The reading public are aware of the services of this battery on the Upper Potomac. For the service of the gun, you can enlist one sergeant, two corporals and fourteen men. At the conclusion of this war the gun can be given back to the proper authorities. We are now ten miles from Winchester, in Banks’ Division, Williams’ Brigade.
Yours Respectfully,
C. B. BROCKWAY,
Lieut. Battery F., 1st Pa. Art’y.
Wickersham’s proposal was becoming something truly remarkable: A cannon bought by teachers, for an artillery battery led by a cadre of former teachers, and served by a freshly recruited seventeen-man detachment.
The War Moves Faster Than the Cannon
But as Burrowes closed in on bringing the idea to completion, complications began to mount.
Shortly after the Second Battle of Bull Run, Burrowes traveled to Virginia to meet with Captain E. W. Mathews of Battery F. He intended to arrange for final delivery of the teachers’ gun.
But the timing could not have been worse.
Lieutenant C. B. Brockway, who had requested the Teachers’ Cannon for Battery F, was now a prisoner of war. During the retreat at Second Bull Run, Brockway had been left near the Henry House with a single gun and orders to continue firing while the Union army withdrew. When the Confederates closed in, Brockway was captured.
Battery F as a whole had been badly mauled. Across Pope’s Virginia campaign, it lost eight men killed, fifteen wounded, and five captured. At Second Bull Run, only one of its guns was saved from the field.
Mathews, the battery’s captain and commanding officer, put the Teachers’ Cannon on hold.
He expected that the current three-inch wrought-iron rifles might soon be exchanged for Parrotts. A mismatched gun would be an impractical burden. He asked Burrowes to postpone the purchase until the matter was settled.
It was a reasonable request. It also cost them months.
While the question lingered, the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac.
At Antietam, Battery F took more losses. Four men were killed and fifteen wounded. Most of its horses were killed or wounded, and Mathews had his own horse shot from beneath him. Six days later, on September 23, illness forced him to leave the battery. He would never again resume command.
By then, the six-gun battery Brockway had described in March had been reduced to two guns. Brockway remained a prisoner. Mathews and another lieutenant, Case, were absent because of illness. The unit that had asked Pennsylvania’s teachers to send it a seventh cannon scarcely resembled the battery that had made the request.
Though he was still absent from field command in March of 1863, Mathews again asked Burrowes to delay pending resolution of the armament issue. Then came another spring campaign and Chancellorsville.
The war kept moving. And Burrowes waited.
The teachers, meanwhile, were growing impatient. Many of their own ranks had volunteered for service to the Union. The scale of that service would become clearer the following year: Wickersham later cited Superintendent Charles R. Coburn’s 1864 estimate that more than 3,000 Pennsylvania teachers had entered military service, a number equal to nearly half of the state’s male teaching force. The Association was eager to support them.
At the annual meeting in August of 1863, Burrowes provided the membership with a full accounting of the money received, the correspondence, and a timeline of events. The funds, now in excess of $700, were clearly sufficient. Despite the complications that had intervened, the teachers resolved to press on.
“The Gun Tendered, You Will Please Accept”
For more than two years, the Teachers’ Cannon existed mostly on paper. There were resolutions, subscriptions, committee reports, and battlefront correspondence.
Then, sometime after the 1863 meeting of the Pennsylvania State Teachers’ Association, something changed.
At last, Burrowes had an actual cannon: a three-inch rifled gun, manufactured at Phoenixville and paid for by teachers at a cost of $357.
In March, he triumphantly wrote to Edwin Stanton.
Stanton was gracious in his reply. He referred the matter to his Chief of Ordnance with instructions to complete the receipt of the cannon. Included with his reply was a letter from the President.
A Deep Crack
But the true legacy of the Teachers’ Cannon would prove to be more complicated. Upon arrival at Frankford Arsenal just northeast of Philadelphia, an initial inspection found a “deep crack commencing across the bottom of the bore.” Three test rounds were fired, and the crack continued to widen. There was an issue with the carriage, too. It had been arranged for breast chains and could not be used with the Army’s existing harness without alteration. The chains used to secure the rammer and sponge were also too light. As it stood, the Teachers’ Cannon was unfit for service.
Burrowes, of course, took the complaint to the manufacturer. The Pheonixville Iron Company was willing to provide a replacement, but the current backlog due to government demand would delay it several months. In April 1865, the war ended before the replacement could be delivered.
What Do You Do with “Teachers’ Cannon Money” When the War Is Over?
The Pennsylvania State Teachers’ Association now had an awkward problem. The war was over, but money collected for the Teachers’ Cannon remained. The Union no longer needed a gun to preserve it.
In 1865, the Association decided that the remaining “Teachers’ Cannon Money” should instead be devoted to a monument honoring Pennsylvania teachers who had died in the war.
But even that proved difficult. By the following year, a committee concluded that a suitable monument would cost at least $1,000 and recommended spending two or three times that amount if the project was to be done properly. Faced with a memorial far beyond the money then available, the Association began looking for another way forward.
The teachers had spent years trying to turn their money into a weapon. Now they were trying to turn it into memory.
Gettysburg: “A Perpetual Teacher of a Nation of Freemen”
A possible solution was close to home. On the final morning of the Association’s 1866 Gettysburg meeting, State Senator David McConaughy described the work of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association and offered an ambitious vision for what the battlefield might become:
“The Field of Gettysburg may become the Mecca of the American patriot, the perpetual teacher of a nation of freemen.”
Later that same day, the Association returned to the unresolved question of its teachers’ monument. After hearing the committee’s report, members discussed transferring the funds, including the remaining “Teachers’ Cannon Money,” to the Gettysburg Memorial Fund. Treasurer Amos Row was given discretion in the matter. He subsequently reported purchasing five $10 shares of Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association stock on behalf of the Association.
A fund that had begun with money collected to help arm the Union was now being directed toward preserving the battlefield where the Union had fought for its survival.
Walk Gettysburg with Pennsylvania’s teachers in 1866 →
“A New Speech”: Cemetery Hill
The timing and location of the 1866 gathering of the Pennsylvania State Teachers’ Association made the occasion ripe for reflection. The evening before McConaughy addressed the Association, members had joined many Gettysburg residents for a formal visit to Cemetery Hill. There, Association secretary Col. George F. McFarland, who had led the 151st Pennsylvania—the Schoolteachers’ Regiment—into battle at Gettysburg three years earlier, called the assemblage to order. Fellow Association member Major Harry T. Lee, who had served on Doubleday’s staff during the battle and had also been present for the dedication of the National Cemetery, was introduced. He addressed the crowd:
“In the presence of these graves, within sight of Gettysburg, upon this doubly consecrated spot, it is fitting that no word should be uttered save that which comes from the heart; and it has been thought appropriate that in this solemn presence we should let our martyred President speak again as once before he spoke to an assembled multitude upon this crowded hillside, many of them the friends and relatives of those who sleep around us.”
He proceeded to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Compare the Gettysburg Address the teachers printed in 1866 with the standard text →
A participant recalled “the appropriate character of these exercises, the witching beauty of the twilight hour, the passing loveliness of the landscape from which the battle smoke had long since lifted.” In that setting, the words of the deceased President took on particular force.
And now, in light of the sacrifice of so many, what duty did teachers owe the nation? Though little more than a year had passed since the war concluded, the gathering of teachers recognized Lincoln’s Address as a “new speech” for the canon of public education. The Association exhorted teachers across the state to “encourage your pupils to commit this ADDRESS to memory—never to be forgotten. Let the noble sentiment which it breathes become their life-long patriotic creed.”
This charge thus concluded the long arc of the teachers’ service in the struggle to preserve the Union. They met in the first year of the war and voted to purchase a cannon. Thousands left the classroom to become infantrymen, artillerists, and leaders on the battlefield. Now, for those who returned and for generations of teachers to come, there was a renewed urgency. McFarland gave that peacetime duty martial language, urging his fellow educators to “re-burnish your arms for new battles with ignorance and passion.” Later, writing 25 years after he first proposed the Teachers’ Cannon, J. P. Wickersham stated his firm belief that the “effort to make education universal among the people…will determine the success or failure of free institutions.” It is an effort in which we are still engaged, and which the teachers of Pennsylvania and the nation as a whole continue to so nobly advance.
Sources
- Daily Pittsburgh Gazette, August 14–15, 1861, “Education and Patriotism” and “Pennsylvania State Teachers’ Association.” Contemporary coverage of the Lewisburg convention and the Teachers’ Cannon proposal.
- Pennsylvania School Journal, vol. X (1861–1862), pp. 66, 82, 85–86, 186, 211. Contemporary reports on the Lewisburg resolution, Wickersham’s proposal, fundraising, and early procurement efforts.
- Pennsylvania School Journal, vol. XI (1862–1863), p. 129. Contemporary discussion of Pennsylvania teachers entering military service.
- Pennsylvania School Journal, vol. XII (1863–1864), pp. 75–79. Thomas H. Burrowes’s account of the cannon project, including correspondence from the Phenix Iron Works, C. B. Brockway, and E. W. Mathews, together with the project’s financial accounting.
- Pennsylvania School Journal, vol. XIV (1865–1866), pp. 54, 56–58. The postwar redirection of the “Teachers’ Cannon Money” and the complete committee report describing Lincoln’s acceptance, the Frankford Arsenal inspection, the cracked bore, and the proposed replacement gun.
- Pennsylvania School Journal, vol. XV (1866–1867), pp. 58–63, 95–96. Proceedings of the Gettysburg convention, including the visit to Cemetery Hill, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Battlefield Memorial Association, the disposition of the teachers’ fund, and George F. McFarland’s address.
- Gettysburg Compiler, August 6, 1866, “State Teachers’ Convention.” Contemporary local account of the teachers’ Gettysburg meeting and battlefield activities.
- Brig. Gen. James B. Ricketts, official report, September 21, 1862, on the Maryland Campaign. Contemporary military evidence concerning Battery F, 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery.
- Samuel P. Bates, History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–5, vol. I (Harrisburg, 1869–1871), First Artillery, Battery F. Postwar official history used for the battery’s wartime service and losses.
- James Pyle Wickersham, A History of Education in Pennsylvania, Private and Public, Elementary and Higher (Lancaster, Pa., 1886), especially pp. 549–550 and the dedication. Retrospective evidence concerning Pennsylvania teachers’ wartime service and Wickersham’s understanding of education and free institutions.
So Nobly Advanced 
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