Georgetown's rowing colours, blue and gray, were chosen to heal a Civil War split
Founded in 1789 by Bishop John Carroll, Georgetown is America's oldest Catholic university and its first with a federal charter. During the Civil War 1,141 of its students and alumni joined one army or the other, and when its rowers organised in 1876 they picked Union blue and Confederate gray to signal peace between them.
Catholic schooling in colonial Maryland had a rocky start. Jesuits helped found the colony in 1634, but after the Royalist defeat in the English Civil War, anti-Catholic laws saw missionaries like Andrew White expelled and their school destroyed, and for most of the colonial era Jesuit schools ran in secret. After the Revolution, and on Benjamin Franklin's recommendation, Pope Pius VI named John Carroll the first head of the American Catholic Church. Carroll bought the Georgetown site in January 1789, the first student, future congressman William Gaston, enrolled in 1791, and classes began in January 1792.
Money was tight at first. President James Madison signed the congressional charter on 1 March 1815, letting the college award degrees. In 1838 the Maryland Jesuits sold some 272 enslaved people to plantations in Louisiana, both to end their slaveholding and to raise funds, a history the university has since begun to address through a reconciliation fund and, in 2023, a new centre for studying slavery and its legacies alongside $27 million in commitments with the Jesuits.
The war was devastating for enrolment. The Union army occupied campus buildings, some 1,400 troops were quartered there when Lincoln visited in May 1861, and only seven students graduated in 1869. Recovery came under Patrick Francis Healy, president from 1873 to 1881, who was born enslaved in Georgia and became the first person of African descent to lead a predominantly white American university. He reformed the curriculum, lengthened the medical and law courses and built the landmark later named Healy Hall, earning the title second founder.
The twentieth century brought a School of Foreign Service, founded by Edmund A. Walsh in 1919, and full coeducation from 1969. Henry Kissinger taught there after leaving the State Department in 1977. Georgetown claims more US diplomats among its graduates than any other university, including at least 92 ambassadors, and its basketball team, the Hoyas, plays in the Big East.
Source: Georgetown University
