Joseph Packard Jr.
Doctor of Civil Law 1901
Click on either poem above to view the full file, Christopher M. McDonough, “Some Late Sonnets of Gildersleeve Found at Sewanee,” The American Journal of Philology 127, no. 2 (2006): 293-303.
Born in Virginia but a prominent Baltimore attorney, Packard was awarded his honorary degree in 1901. His obituary in the Baltimore Sun (November 25, 1923) eulogized him as a reform-minded civic leader, universally respected attorney, and “one of the leading laymen of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.” The son of the long-serving dean of the Virginia Theological Seminary, Packard graduated from Kenyon College in 1860 and surrendered a teaching post there in 1861 to join the Confederate Army, serving until the Confederate defeat. “He went from the battlefields to the law school of the University of Virginia” and then to Baltimore to launch his legal career in partnership with another Confederate veteran. The obituary noted that both men “were strong State’s rights men.” Fellow honoree and Confederate veteran Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve eulogized Packard upon his death in 1902 with several poems.
Matthew Page Andrews, Tercentenary History of Maryland, Volume 2. S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1925: 491.
McDonough, Christopher M. “Some Late Sonnets of Gildersleeve Found at Sewanee.” The American Journal of Philology 127, no. 2 (2006): 293–303. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3804913: 297.