The clash of two armies at a place that one side called Bull Run and the other Manassas was supposed to end a war before it began. But when the battle was over, 900 soldiers lay dead on the fields of Virginia, and a man on a mission of mercy from Ithaca, who four years later would found a great university, was running for his life.

The details of this journey by Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell University, were described in a letter he wrote to his wife from Washington, D.C., on July 23, 1861, the day he and three companions completed a harrowing 35-mile march from the site of the first battle of the Civil War, a battle that the Union was confident it would win.

The letter was presented to the university by Carolyn Blair Sheffield, Cornell's great granddaughter, who recently came across the document in family papers. Cornell President Hunter Rawlings, accompanied by his wife Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings, visited Sheffield last week in her home in New York City to accept the letter, which will be housed in the Rare and Manuscript Collections of the University Library.

Now in her 80s, Sheffield is the daughter of Charles Hildreth Blair Jr., a native of Ithaca and 1898 graduate of Cornell, and granddaughter of Charles Hildreth Blair Sr., 1872 Cornell graduate, director of the Ithaca Rail Road and president of the Ithaca Clock Co. Blair Sr. married Ezra Cornell's daughter Emma in 1873, and in 1882, moved his family and law practice to New York City, where he was Republican candidate for Congress from the 12th District in 1890. Carolyn Blair in 1934 married Frederick Sheffield, who was the son of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico and great-grandson of the governor of Ohio during the Civil War.

"I felt I was holding history in my hand," Rawlings, a native of Norfolk, Va., said of the moment when Sheffield gave him the letter. "We read the letter with her, and it was quite exciting, since the letter is very dramatic -- an eyewitness, minute-to-minute account of the first battle of the Civil War."

Ezra Cornell, then 54, traveled to the Bull Run battle site from Washington with his son Oliver Hazard Perry Cornell and two companions to deliver medical and other supplies to the men of the 32nd New York Regiment, which included volunteers from Ithaca. They arrived by railroad at the Fairfax, Va., station and reached the battlefield "just in time to see that division of our army make its panic stricken retreat," he wrote in his letter to Mary Ann, his wife.

The letter describes the Cornell group's own retreat with the defeated Union soldiers and their bedding down at the home of a "secessionist farmer." Fearing capture after hearing noises outside the house, Cornell and his companions fled in the middle of the night and began a rain-drenched march of 25 miles back to Alexandria. After a short sojourn there, they walked another 10 miles back to Washington, where Cornell wrote to his wife from Willards Hotel. He also sent a longer dispatch reporting on his group's adventure to the Ithaca Journal, which published his report of "extraordinary circumstances as unexplainable as it is unmanly and disastrous" on July 31, 1861.

Cornell reported to Mary Ann, "The 32 Reg has got back to camp all well none killed or wounded. I think the Ithaca boys have safe officers and wont require any hospital stores." And, he assured her about their 19-year-old son, "Perry thinks he has seen enough of war."

Rawlings was struck by several insights into Cornell's character that emerged from the letter.

"He was always an active participant in every venture he undertook and this is a perfect example," Cornell's 10th president said of the university's founder. "He was right there with the soldiers and obviously felt protective of the Ithaca boys -- he genuinely looked out for their welfare. He also endures any hardship that anyone else does, and he clearly places himself in danger."

Trustee Ezra Cornell of Ithaca, a direct descendent of the Founder, who examined the letter in the Cornell Library, was struck most by the way in which Cornell ended his letter to his wife, "Yours affectionately." "How often do we say that to our spouses?" he mused. "He writes so beautifully and honestly about what he's seen."

In an interesting twist, Rawlings himself visited Bull Run last summer, unknowingly walking the same terrain that his Cornell predecessor did 137 years earlier. While envisioning the bloody scene that occurred in the 19th century, Rawlings' purpose in his walking tour was to get a better understanding of a 20th century conflict involving the area -- a proposal by the Walt Disney Corp. to build a giant theme park development on land very near the Manassas National Battlefield Park.

"I think this site, where a second battle was fought in 1862, has a lot of meaning for Americans and extra meaning for Virginians," Rawlings said, adding that he was pleased that the Disney proposal was later withdrawn in the wake of impassioned public protest.

The Civil War, as the Disney controversy revealed, has a special resonance in American society even today, with re-enactors portraying its battles on original sites, Confederate flags still flying in many places and books and movies with the war's themes becoming hits. Why?

"That war was first of all fought for the essential American values -- freedom vs. slavery and one country, e pluribus unum," Rawlings said. "It was a bitter struggle for the American soul."

University archivist Elaine Engst, who maintains Cornell's large Civil War collection, noted that the War Between the States was the first conflict well-documented through photographs and the growing American press.

"People were very literate then," she said. "People kept their letters, they were seen as important and the letters found their way to libraries and historical societies. Even the smallest local historical society ususally has something connected with the Civil War, and Cornell has outstanding holdings."

"The Civil War caused more suffering and loss than any other war in American history by far," Rawlings said. "More Americans died in that war than in all the wars of the 20th century put together. It was a bloody conflict with enormous suffering and loss, all in this country."

Out of that blood and loss emerged "a new birth of freedom," as President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg two years later. Cornell University owns one of five existing copies handwritten by Lincoln of that famous address.

In some of the darkest days of the Civil War, July 1862, Rawlings noted, Lincoln signed one of the most far-reaching documents passed by Congress, the Morrill Act, which established the nation's land-grant universities. Ezra Cornell, working with scholar Andrew Dickson White, three years later procured New York's land-grant status for the new university he was building on farm land overlooking Cayuga Lake. Cornell University, founded in 1865 as a place where "any person can find instruction in any study," educated many veterans of the Civil War and is considered the first truly American university, where admissions were steeped in democratic principles.

"The discovery of this letter from our founder adds further depth to our understanding of the remarkable role he played in 19th century America," Rawlings said, "and gives us new details on his selflessness and generosity of spirit."

Some of the Civil War materials in Cornell Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections include:

• One of five existing copies of the Gettysburg Address handwritten by Abraham Lincoln in 1864.
• A framed manuscript presentation copy of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolishing slavery, signed by Abraham Lincoln and members of Congress who voted for the resolution.
• Rebellion Miscellany, scrapbooks kept by Andrew Dickson White of everyday items with Civil War themes, including the "Game of Secession."
• The Samuel Joseph May Anti-Slavery Collection, a major collection of more than 6,000 pamphlets, books and newspapers documenting the political, social and polemical viewpoints of the Anti-Slavery movement.
• Letters and diaries, including a diary kept by a member of the 126th New York Volunteers; the second-from-last entry describes his unit's march toward Gettysburg; the last entry is written by his brother, who discovered the diarist's body on the battlefield at midnight.
• Muster rolls, regimental histories and a scrapbook of military telegrams that document Lee's surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
• Photographs, including an army surgeon's albums of horrific, but often non-fatal, gun-shot wounds.