Harvard memorial biographies ...

Edgar Marshall Newcomb.

I53

EDGAR MARSHALL NEWCOMB.
Corporal 19th Mass. Vols., August, I86i; Sergeant-Major; Second
Lieutenant, June 18, 1862; First Lieutenant, November 13, 1862; died,
December 20, 1862, of wounds received at Fredericksburg, Va., December 13.
DGAR MARSHALL NEWCOMB, son of John J. and
Mary S. Newcomb, was born in Troy, N. Y., October 2,
1840. When he was a few months old, his parents removed to
Boston, which city was from that time his home. Having received his early education at the Grammar and Latin Schools,
he entered Harvard College in 1856.
He had during that year become a member of Park Street
Church, Boston. This step was in his case, at least, no idle
ceremony. While he was faithful in the prosecution of his
studies, his college course was more prominently marked by
the unusual rectitude and purity of his life - and by a religious
activity, earnest without obtrusiveness or arrogance - than by
high intellectual triumphs. These were, indeed, precluded by
the state of his health, which failed in the latter part of the
Sophomore year, so that it was only by the utmost perseverance
that he kept up with his Class, and literally fought disease
away. Unable to study more than an hour at a time, and that
as the result of the most careful regimen, and at times confined
to his bed by severe sickness, he yet resolutely prosecuted his
studies, and graduated with his Class in 1860. Before graduation, however, he sailed for Europe, and spent the summer
and autumn in travelling on foot through England and France,
in the hope of regaining health.
Returning in November, of the same year, with strength
partially restored, he entered his father's counting-room, and
engaged in active business, with the hope of soon commencing
a course of preparation for the Christian ministry. In this
position he remained till the ensuing summer, when the call
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