Thomas M. Gunn was born in Shelbyville in Shelby County, Kentucky on March 17, 1840. He was the youngest son of William and Francis Adams Gunn.  William Gunn, a presiding elder of the Lexington District of the Presbyterian Church, died when his son was only thirteen years old.  Thomas Gunn was still able to enter Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1858 with the class of 1860.  While at the College, he was elected to the Belles Lettres Society and graduated with his class in the early summer of 1860.
 

DEBOW, James Dunwoody Brownson, journalist and statistician, was born at Charleston, S. C., July 10, 1820. He was descended from distinguished colonial and revolutionary ancestors, who were among the earliest settlers of South Carolina. His father, Garrett DeBow, whose ancestors, James and John DeBow, were soldiers in Washington's army, was a native of New Jersey, but removed when quite young to Charleston, S. C. , where he became a wealthy merchant.

Jesse Bowman Young was born in Berwick, Pennsylvania on July 5, 1844 to Jared and Sara Young.  In August, 1861, just turned seventeen, he joined his uncle, Major Samuel Millard Bowman (1815-1883) in the Fourth Illinois Cavalry and saw action with the Western Army under Grant.  When Major Bowman assumed command in 1862 of the 84th Pennsylvania Volunteers - drawn largely from Blair, Lycoming, Dauphin, and Westmoreland counties -  he was commissioned in the 84th's Company B.  The regiment then fought with distinction in many of the most significant encounters of the war,

He considered that his own life, so far as it related to public affairs, had ended in 1865, and that the exposition of the war and of his own part in it, must be left to history. But, although silent, he was conscious that from the hour when he assumed command of the army of northern Virginia up to the moment when he laid it down, he could not fairly be said to have lost a single battle. H declined offers to become president of corporations and business associations and of several institutions of learning, but finally accepted the presidency of Washington College, Lexington, Va.