Francis Miles Finch

Francis Miles Finch (June 9, 1827 – July 31, 1907) was an American judge, poet, and academic associated with the early years of Cornell University.

He was educated at Yale University, where, according to a contemporary, he was a "thoughtful scholar in the class-room, a prizeman in the essay competitions, an influential editor of the Yale Lit an impressive speaker in the Linonian Society, hail-fellow-well-met on the campus, sedate, impulsive, big-hearted, wise, witty, everywhere he was the ideal collegian."

[4] He also lent the university his literary skills, as a contemporary relates: "His indignation at the attacks upon Mr. Cornell by the enemies of the university aroused him to fight strenuously and successfully in the courts, in the press, and in public meetings, while the music of the university chime, heard at dawn, noon, and nightfall above the ripple or roar of the adjacent waters, inspired him to write songs which have been sung by Cornell students from their first arrival forty years ago until the present hour.

"[2] Early in Ulysses S. Grant's first presidential term (circa 1870), he was appointed collector of internal revenue for the Twenty-sixth District, New York, which office he resigned after holding it for four years.

"[5] Perhaps his best known poem, "The Blue and the Gray", written in remembrance of the dead of the American Civil War, was inspired by a women's memorial association in Columbus, Mississippi, who on April 25, 1866 tended the graves of Confederate and Union soldiers, treating the dead as equals despite the lingering rancor of the war.