Lt. Col. (Later to be Brev. Brig. Gen) John Fraser

From: The Blessed Place of Freedom: Europeans in Civil War America, by Dean B. Mahin

John Fraser was born in Cromarty in Scotland in 1827 and came to America in the late 1840s. By 1861 he was a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, and enlisted 100 former students in the 140th Pennsylvania. He commanded the regiment at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, was wounded while leading a frontal attack at Spotsylvania, and was captured while commanding a brigade at Petersburg. In a Confederate prison in Charleston, he diverted the minds of the starving prisoners by reciting from memory scenes from the works of Shakespeare. Released in a prisoner exchange, he rejoined the army, and ended the war as a brigadier general. After the war he was chancellor of the University of Kansas, state superintendent of schools in Kansas, and profesor at the institution that became the University of Pittsburgh.