William Gilham - Virginia Military Institute

Virginia Military Institute

In 1846, he became a professor at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), then a recently-founded state military college in Lexington, Virginia. During the next five years, he developed VMI's departments of Chemistry and Agriculture, taught infantry tactics and served as the Commandant of Cadets. To lighten the load on Major Gilham, in 1851, VMI hired another professor, Major Thomas Jonathon Jackson, later better known as "Stonewall" Jackson, who was also a graduate of West Point, and a veteran of the conflicts in Florida and Mexico.

As a professor, Gilham was interested in geological matters. In 1857, his Report on the Soil of Powhatan County, Virginia was published in Richmond by Ritchie & Dunnavant. A copy of a request he made to the same year for the legislature to fund acquisition of "a complete collection of minerals and fossils for the use of my classes" is in the collection of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.

Majors Gilham and Jackson taught together at VMI for the rest of the decade. In November 1859, at the request of the Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, Major Gilham led a contingent of the VMI Cadets Corps to Charles Town to provide an additional military presence for at the execution by hanging on December 2, 1859 of militant abolitionist John Brown following his raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Major Jackson was placed in command of the artillery, consisting of two howitzers manned by 21 cadets.

In response to the raid on Harper's Ferry, Governor Wise ordered Gilham to write a manual to train volunteers and militia. Finished in the fall of 1860, it was entitled Manual of Instruction for the Volunteers and Militia of the United States and was initially published in Philadelphia.