The Civil War was a significant time for the college ; among its alumni were four generals , six colonels ( including Shaw ) , and five captains serving in the Union Army ; twelve men from Fordham also served in the Confederate Army . Three Jesuits from St. John 's served as army chaplains . Lincoln 's assassination deeply affected the student body , and even southern students attending the college mourned his loss . As Richard S. Treacy of the class of 1869 later recalled , " The morning we received the news of the death of President Lincoln gloom settled over the entire college , even the southern boys , who before had censored him , now felt that they had lost a valuable friend whose great qualities would be missed in the coming reconstruction . " Fordham 's baseball team , which played its first game on September 13 , 1859 , made several contributions to the history of baseball in the nineteenth century , and played a key role in introducing the game to Cuba and Latin America . On November 3 , 1859 Fordham played the first college baseball game with modern nine-man teams against the now-defunct St. Francis Xavier College in Manhattan . Fordham won the game 33 – 11 . Steve Bellán , the first Cuban and Latin American to play major league baseball , learned to play the game while a student at Fordham from 1863 to 1868 . After playing for several American major league teams , he returned home and played in the first organized baseball game in Cuba on December 27 , 1874 . Charles , Henry , and Frederick Zaldo , brothers from Havana who founded the Almendares Baseball Club , one of the three original Cuban baseball teams , also learned the game while attending Fordham from 1875 to 1878
Lincoln 's assassination
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Fordham University