Sigma Alpha Epsilon was founded on March 9, 1856, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Our founders were eight young men, five of them seniors at the university; the other three were juniors. The leader of the eight was Noble Leslie DeVotie, a young Alabamian of splendid promise. The original idea to found a new Greek-letter fraternity was clearly DeVotie's, as he had written the Ritual, devised the grip, and chosen the name. His motive was simple: to perpetuate through the organization the warm friendships he and his friends had already formed on the campus of the university.

It is not recorded when DeVotie first conceived the idea of establishing a fraternity, but it is known that during the autumn days of 1855 he talked about it with a few of his closest friends as they walked along the banks of the Black Warrior River that edged the campus. In the months that followed, DeVotie revealed to the other seven his conception of a new fraternity. A few preliminary meetings were held at the Tuscaloosa home of one of them, John Webb Kerr. By late winter their plans matured. So it came about that, in the late hours of a stormy night, the friends met in an old schoolhouse and by the flicker of dripping candles organized ΣАЕ.

Eight men founded Sigma Alpha Epsilon. In addition to DeVotie there was John Barratt Rudulph, John Webb Kerr, Nathan Elams Cockrell, and Wade Hampton Foster of the Class of 1856, and Abner Edwin Patton, Samuel Marion Dennis, and Thomas Chappell Cook of the Class of 1857.

When the founders met at what was then called the Mansion House on the evening of March 8 it would be the early hours of March 9 before they adjourned only seven men were present. One of them, Thomas C. Cook, had left the University in January to enter Princeton University, but was a few weeks later voted a founding member and sent a ritual that he might initiate himself. He has always been considered one of the founders.

Founded in a time of intense sectional feeling, ΣАЕ confined its growth to the southern states. Extension was vigorous, and by the end of 1857, the fraternity numbered seven chapters. Its first national convention met in the summer of 1858 at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with four of its eight chapters in attendance. By the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, 15 chapters had been established.

Kentucky Chi at Kentucky Military Institute was only a few months old when the War came. It was a chapter full of young cadets gathered from all parts of the South. Among the most outstanding of these ΣАЕs was a young man named John B. Kent.

Less than a thousand feet from the old K.M.I. campus was the home of the Pattie family, long-time residents of the country and known and respected far and wide. Their home was a favorite place for the young cadets and with none more so than John B. Kent and his close friend, Ben Marston, both devoted to the interests of Kentucky Chi. At the Pattie home the boys could be comfortable to enjoy respite from the rigors of military discipline. There they met the Pattie children, young Coleman who would himself be an SAE in the future years, and dark-haired Lucy.

The war came in April. Within a matter of days K.M.I. was virtually emptied. The boys of Kentucky Chi scattered, each member going to a different part of the country to enlist. Kent and Marston were the last to leave, as there were matters they had to arrange. Because the Institute had closed down, they stayed with the Patties for two or three weeks while completing their preparations. To Kent had been left all the affairs of the chapter, and he was understandably very solicitous concerning the constitution, ritual, and other papers of Kentucky Chi. As they day drew nearer for him to leave, he felt more strongly the need to provide for the care of these documents. He finally determined to entrust them to young “Miss Lucy.” He knew her well, and he was certain she would keep and protect them through the time of war.

There was a rustic bench near an ancient stile on the family farm, and here Kent explained the importance of the papers to Miss Lucy and handed them to her. She promised to seal them safely and hide them “where neither friend nor foe might find them.”

The years passed, but Lucy Pattie never forgot the solemn injunction with which John Kent entrusted the papers to her: “Keep them, Lucy, ‘til I come back, but if I never come again, give them to no one unless he can give you this grip of the hand.”

There were years of anguish and sorrow as the blood of the sons of North and South were shed in the worst of all conflicts, a brothers’ war. Two years passed, and one dark day there came the word to the Pattie farm that John Kent had fallen in the cruel charge at Shiloh. Those were sad hours beneath the blue Kentucky sky.

At last the drama of the civil strife was ended. Back to old K.M.I. came young faces that were new, and the thread of life was taken up where it had been dropped a few years before. Kentucky Chi, too, revived as a few of its old members returned. More than one of them walked over to the Pattie farm to talk to Miss Lucy about the secret papers, but she adamantly refused to hand them over until one of the cadets would give her the proper grip of the hand. Only when she was finally satisfied by an embarrassed and hesitating young man named Albert McMahan, did she return the documents. She had been faithful to her trust.

The gratitude and delight of the young brothers at her devotion and care of their ritual and other private papers was so great that their first meeting they voted Lucy Pattie a member of the Fraternity and gave her the badge.

The fraternity had fewer than 400 members when the Civil War began. Of those, 369 went to war for the Confederacy, and seven fought with the Union forces. Seventy members of the fraternity lost their lives in the War, including Noble Leslie DeVotie, who is officially the first man on either side to give his life in military service.

The miracle in the history of ΣАЕ is that it survived that great sectional conflict. When the smoke of the battle had cleared, only one chapter at tiny Columbian College in Washington, D.C., survived, but it died soon thereafter.

When a few of the young veterans returned to the Georgia Military Institute and found their little college burned to the ground, they decided to go to Athens, Georgia, to enter the state university there. It was the founding of the University of Georgia Chapter and the University of Virginia Chapter at the end of 1865 that led to the fraternity's revival. Soon, other chapters came back to life and, in 1867, the first post-war convention was held at Nashville, Tennessee, where a half-dozen revived chapters planned the fraternity's future growth.

The reconstruction years were cruel to the South. Southern colleges and their fraternities shared in the general malaise of the region. In the 1870s and early 1880s, more than a score of new chapters were formed, some of them at exceedingly frail institutions. Older chapters died as fast as new ones were established. By 1886, the fraternity had chartered 49 chapters, but scarcely a dozen could be called active. Two of the 49 were in the North. After much discussion and not a little dissent, the first northern chapter had been established at Pennsylvania College, now Gettysburg College, in 1883, and a second was placed at Mt. Union College in Ohio two years later.

It was in 1886 that things took a turn for the better. That autumn, a 16-year-old youngster by the name of Harry Bunting entered Southwestern Presbyterian University in Clarksville, Tennessee, and was initiated into the Tennessee Zeta Chapter, which had previously initiated two of his brothers. In just eight years, under the enthusiastic guidance of Harry Bunting and his younger brother, George, ΣАЕ experienced a renaissance. Together they prodded ΣАЕ chapters to increase their membership. They wrote encouraging articles in the Fraternity's quarterly journal, The Record, promoting better chapter standards and, above all, they undertook an almost incredible program of expansion of the fraternity, resurrecting old chapters in the South (including the mother chapter at Alabama) and founding new ones in the North and West. In an explosion of growth, the Buntings were responsible for founding nearly 50 chapters of ΣАЕ. When Harry Bunting founded the Northwestern University chapter in 1894, he initiated as a charter member William Collin Levere, a remarkable young man whose enthusiasm for the fraternity matched Bunting's. To Levere, Bunting passed the torch of leadership, and for the next three decades, it was the spirit of "Billy" Levere that dominated ΣАЕ and brought the fraternity to maturity.

When the Supreme Council met regularly in the early 1930s at the Temple, educator John O. Moseley, the fraternity's national president, lamented that, "We have in the Temple a magnificent school-house. Why can we not have a school?" Accordingly, the economic depression notwithstanding, in the summer of 1935, the fraternity's first Leadership School was held under the direction of Moseley. The first such workshop in the fraternity world, it was immensely successful, and today nearly every fraternity holds such a school. It was probably John Moseley more than any other whose leadership carried ΣАЕ forward during the next 20 years until his untimely death in 1955. The last years of his life he served the Fraternity as its executive secretary, capping a distinguished academic career that had included two college presidencies.

Adapted from The Phoenix, Ninth Edition, edited by Joseph W. Walt, and unknown publications by the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity Service Center.