KAPPA ALPHA: THE VERY BEGINNING

(Excerpt from LEE: THE LAST YEARS by Charles B. Flood)

On a starlit May evening shortly before final examinations began, two freshmen walked up Lexington's Main Street, talking intently, and sat on the doorstep of a merchant named William White to continue their earnest conversation.

The younger of the two was Jo Lane Stern, a great favorite of the Lee's. On one occasion when Lee was out of town, Lee's daughter told Stern that he could ride Traveler if he would go out to a friend's farm and bring back some celery to be used in the salad at the Episcopal Church Fair. It is doubtful that Lee would have approved of anyone else riding his horse, even for a worthy cause, but Stern had the distinction of being the only Washington College student to mount Traveler. Three years before this May, when Stern was fifteen, a Confederate Officer had asked him to carry a message through an area just north of Richmond in which Sheridan's calvary was operating. On the eve of the Battle of Yellow Tavern, Stern strolled past Federal patrols, carrying the message in his pocket. A fifteen-year-old boy ambling along a road was not the kind of Confederate courier they expected.

The older of the two was a veteran named Samuel Zenas Ammen, a descendant of Swiss-Germans who had settled in neighboring Botetourt County. He had served in both the Confederate Army and Navy and, near the end of the War, as a member of a mounted guerrilla unit operating along the West Virginia border. Ammen was to gain a reputation as the "Most Intellectual Collegian" in the school; in time he would become the editor of the Baltimore Sun.

Ammen and Stern were discussing the tiny, struggling fraternity to which they belonged. Four Washington College students had founded Kappa Alpha in December of 1865; seventeen months later, there were only twelve members in good standing, and they did not even have a room of their own in which they could regularly meet. Of the twelve members, Ammen and Stern were the most interested in what they called "The Lodge", but even they were profoundly discouraged. On that doorstep on quiet Main Street, Ammen said, "The question we discussed was 'Shall we let the Lodge die?' We sat long considering the matter....Whether to succumb to our discouragement , or fight on. Had we decided on KA's death, it had died. But we decided to keep up the fight, and from that time on our prospects improved."

Ammen had a vision of something different from the other fraternities that existed at Washington College and elsewhere. Like all his fellow students, he was intensely aware of Lee: "We likened him to Agamemnon, and we were his Achalol, battling on the windy plains of Troy. Spiritually , then, he thoroughly dominated us." To Ammen and those who would join him in increasing numbers, Lee represented an ideal - "The chivalrous warrior of Christ, the knight who loved God and country, honours and protects pure womanhood, practices courtesy and magnanimity of spirit, and prefers self-respect to ill-gotten wealth."

These two young men sitting on a doorstep in Lexington on a night in the postwar era were thinking toward a Southern equivalent of what was once said of Confucius: "He saved the blueprints of Chinese civilization." They wanted to preserve what they saw as being best in their nearly destroyed homeland, and they believed that the surest way to do it was to become spiritual followers of Lee. "Something might thus be saved," Ammen wrote, "from the wreck of material interests and political rights caused by the War."

Adopting the terms and rituals of Chivalry, this handful of young men in Lexington became the Kappa Alpha Order. Alone among American fraternities, Kappa Alpha would dedicate itself to emulation of the character of an individual, Lee. Their fellowship would grow beyond imagining of two young friends who "decided to keep up the fight" on an evening in 1867; one hundred and thirteen years later, Kappa Alpha would be a national fraternity with more than seventy thousand living members, and chapters at one hundred and fifteen colleges and universities throughout the United States.

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