The start of the Civil War in 1861 followed by Tennessee’s secession from the Union and the lodging of wounded Confederate soldiers on campus did not close East Tennessee University. By spring 1862 when the trustees finally suspended operations, the majority of students had joined the military, President Joseph Ridley had resigned, and two professors had left the university. Wounded Confederate soldiers were lodged at university buildings after the January 1862 Battle of Mill Springs in Kentucky, known as the Battle of Fishing Creek to the Confederacy. In the fall of 1863, Union troops forced the Confederates out of Knoxville. On the Hill, the Union Army enclosed the three university buildings with an earthen fortification they named Fort Byington in honor of an officer from Michigan who was killed in the defense of Knoxville. They used the buildings for their headquarters, barracks, and a hospital for Black troops. Despite a Confederate attempt to retake the city by siege—climaxed by a bloody, abortive attack on Fort Sanders on November 29, 1863—the Union held and occupied Knoxville for the rest of the war. During the battle, the Hill was hit with artillery fire from Confederate guns located in a trench at the site of UT’s present-day Sorority Village. Campus also sustained a great deal of damage caused by the Union Army. Troops denuded the grounds of trees, ruined the steward’s house, and destroyed the gymnasium with misdirected cannon fire aimed at Confederate troops across the river. After the Civil War ended in 1865 and the Union Army left campus, Thomas Humes was elected university president. The university reopened in 1866 and operated for six months downtown in the Deaf and Dumb Asylum while repairs began at the damaged campus. A petition to the federal war department for monetary compensation for campus damage done by the Union Army undoubtedly received more favorable consideration because of Humes’s known Union loyalty throughout the war. A Senate committee which considered the bill for damages also noted that East Tennessee University was “particularly deserving of the favorable consideration of Congress” because it was “the only educational institution of known loyalty…in any of the seceding states.” However in 1873, President Ulysses S. Grant vetoed the bill that would have provided $18,500 to the university because he felt it would set a bad precedent. The bill was redrafted specifying that the payment was compensation for aid East Tennessee University gave to the Union during the war. On June 22, 1874, President Grant signed the new bill and the trustees accepted the funds the same day with an agreement to release the government from all claims. (More than a century and a half later, a buried Union trench was located in 2019 on the north side of the present-day McClung Museum with the use of ground-penetrating radar.)