Alan Taylor Premature Independence October 2017

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Premature Independence: Virginia Students and National Crisis

On the night of October 1, 1825, fourteen masked students gathered on the central lawn

of the newly created University of Virginia in Charlottesville. They sought to irritate their

professors, most of them newcomers from Europe. Some students bellowed, “Down with the

European Professors!” and “Damn the European Professors,” while the rest make a racket designed to awaken and startle. Two foolhardy professors ventured out of their homes in pavilions scattered among the student dorm rooms. One grabbed the loudest rioter, who hollered

that “the damn’d rascal has torn my shirt,” while his friends hurled sticks, bottles, and a brick at the beleaguered professors.1

Noisy outbursts by drunken, raucous, and masked students had escalated in September.

Their theatrical performances were, Professor George Tucker noted, “inviting and defying the

notice of the Faculty.” On September 30, the evening before the great riot, a student hurled a

deck of cards and a bottle filled with urine through the window of the pavilion where Professor

George Long lived. Jefferson’s daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, noted that the culprit was

“a rich fool” who cursed “the ‘European professors’” and challenged them “to come out that they

might be taken to the pump” – evidently to shame them with a dousing.2

On the day after the great riot, most of the students charged the faculty with provoking

the violence: 65 (of 112) signed a remonstrance accusing the two professors of attacking a lone

student guilty only of too much glee. One rioter, Edgar Mason, explained “that if a Student is

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forcibly attacked by a Professor, he is justified in resisting.” Every student refused to cooperate

with any investigation, lest they reap the odious reputation of informers.3

The riot threatened to undermine the new university. Many wealthy parents reconsidered

sending their sons away to Charlottesville. One father barred his son’s matriculation because “It is reported that the young men have acted in a manner unworthy of savages.” Any diminution in students imperiled the tuition fees the university relied on to cover expenses, including faculty salaries. Two professors – Key and Long- resigned, and the rest threatened to follow suit unless provided with better protection by the university’s governing board of visitors. Their resignations would discredit the institution, which had recruited them just a year before at great cost and with exuberant celebration in the press.4

NATION

Virginia’s leaders had a great deal invested in the new university, which they created at a

difficult and pivotal period for the state. After decades of ignoring higher education, during the

late 1810s, the state legislature made an unprecedented investment by authorizing and funding an

elaborate new university. By 1828 the buildings alone had cost the state $294,427 – a stunning

sum for the day. That investment was especially remarkable because incurred during a

prolonged economic depression which deflated the values of Virginians’ principle assets: land

and slaves. From 1818 to 1821, Virginia’s exports fell by 56 percent, compared to 42 percent for

the nation as a whole. As foreign demand dried up, the price paid for farm produce in Richmond

declined by 48 percent. Having borrowed heavily, Virginians struggled to pay their debts when

they could no longer sell their crops for a decent price. Bankruptcies and foreclosures surged.

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From Richmond in early 1820, Francis W. Gilmer mourned, “Things here grow worse & worse –

the merchants all failed – the town ruined – the banks broke – the Treasury empty – commerce

gone, confidence gone, character gone.”5

Persisting deep into the 1820s, the depression compounded a pervasive sense of gloom sparked by Virginia’s accelerating decline from past greatness. The Union’s most populous and powerful state in 1800, Virginia slipped to third in numbers behind two more vibrant northern states: New York and Pennsylvania by 1820. Virginians obsessed over the published census returns, which shook their longstanding assumption that their primacy was natural and perpetual.

Unable to attract many immigrants, Virginia lost much of its natural increase to outmigration, as ambitious young people moved south and west to seek larger farms of more fertile land.6

The demographic and economic decline cost Virginia clout in Washington, D.C., where congressional power shifted toward the industrializing North, which was growing in numbers and wealth. In 1788 Virginia had narrowly and reluctantly ratified the Federal Constitution, drawn in by James Madison’s optimism that a stronger union would amplify the state’s power on

a continental scale. The War of 1812 put that promise to the test, and Virginians bitterly

complained that the federal government neglected their defense, exposing the shores of

Chesapeake Bay to British raids which had liberated thousands of slaves. If the Union could not

fulfill Madison’s promise to Virginia with Madison as president, what could the state expect

from a northern leader in the future?7

The gloomy answer came in 1816, when northern congressmen secured a protective

federal tariff which benefitted their industrialists at the expense of southern farmers, who relied

on imported consumer goods. Gilmer warned his fellow Virginians that they would have to

“submit to have the fruits of your industry taken away to support Yankey manufacturers, who

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send us wares unfit for use; to encourage their shipping which comes here to corrupt our slaves

& rob our people. And all this for the glorious cause of the Union, which has itself spoiled and

persecuted us, without ever having done any one act to deserve our gratitude or thanks.” Many

shared his alienation from the Union as a vehicle for northern domination.8

That alienation deepened in 1819-1820, during the Missouri Crisis, when many northern

congressmen also sought to reserve most western territories for settlement by free, white farmers.

Restriction seemed to dishonor the southern states as insufficiently republican because tainted by slavery. Virginians felt insulted and marginalized if discouraged from moving throughout the union with their enslaved property. That restriction seemed especially ominous during the depression, when they felt the greatest need to move westward to seek new opportunities or to sell slaves southward to cancel debts.9

Virginians feared becoming entrapped at home with a growing black majority that

eventually would erupt in bloody revolt. They were unsettled by the revelation in the 1820

federal census that the state’s eastern, Tidewater counties had black majorities as a consequence

of accelerating white flight. The future president John Tyler warned that restriction would

increase the “dark cloud” of slavery “over a particular portion of this land until its horrors shall

burst.” Virginians defended the interstate slave trade as essential to release the demographic

pressure generated by the growing black numbers, which they dreaded would bring on a race

war. Thomas Jefferson revealingly declared that the Missouri Crisis, “like a fire bell in the

night, awakened and filled me with terror” – for Virginians associated a fire bell’s alarm with a

slave revolt.10

Virginians perceived restriction as a cynical ploy to unite a northern majority against the

Southern states. The people of both regions agreed that the United States took shape through

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western expansion. “It is indeed not a question of freedom or slavery, but a question [of] who

shall inherit our rich possession to the west,” Isaac A. Coles explained. The North could control

the Union’s future by preempting that vast and promising region for its own people and

institutions. Dabney Carr warned that once empowered by the West, a northern-dominated

Union could “draw a cordon round us & when they had cooped us up on every side . . . then

should we feel the full weight of their tender mercies!” If restricted from the western outlet,

Virginia would become a claustrophobic corner of growing poverty and weakness in the Union.

Then, Jefferson warned, the congressional majority could impose abolition everywhere, “in

which case all the whites South of the Patomak and Ohio must evacuate their states; and most

fortunate [will be] those who can do it first.”11

Virginians became alienated from the Union and regarded Congress as an adversarial

cockpit of clashing interests, which increasingly threatened their way of life. In 1821, the state’s

preeminent newspaper, the Richmond Enquirer declared that Virginians and New Englanders belonged to distinct and rival nations: “The internal policy of Massachusetts or Connecticut is as widely different from that of Virginia or South Carolina as that of England is from that of

Prussia.” New England and Virginia were, in this view, uneasily yoked within a Union that, at its best, could negotiate a coexistence premised on mutual non-interference. If that inter-regional consensus broke down, all bets were off for the Union, so Virginia’s leaders insisted. In any case, the newspaper concluded, “it is impolitic in the extreme to send our sons into those states,” where they might defect to strengthen the north and thereby doubly weaken Virginia.12

Feeling alienated from Yankees, leading Virginians rejected an American identity and

routinely spoke of their state as their nation. Francis W. Gilmer referred to the rest of the union

as “foreign states.” He and other reformers hoped to revitalize their declining nation before

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Yankees could subordinate Virginia. Virginians worried that their neglect to fund schools

contributed to an educational gap that left them vulnerable to tricky northerners venturing south.

Gilmer warned, “These rascals are overrunning the country; squatting everywhere, turning

teachers, politicians, &c. and our legislature will soon be filled with them.” Virginians worried

that northern instructors would take over their common schools and academies, corrupting their

nation’s youth with northern values.13

With the revolutionary generation of Jefferson and Madison advancing in years,

Virginians worried that the next generation of leaders lacked sufficient learning to replace them.

In an increasingly adversarial union, Virginia needed better-trained legislators to fend off

Yankee subversion within and domination without. In 1815, the Norfolk newspaper addressed

the state’s college students: “It is the growing and rising generation who must fill up the chasm

which death has made in the ranks of our patriots. You are coming to the front of that generation

– it is for you to say, whether you will honour or disgrace your country.” That country was

Virginia.14

To close the educational gap with the north, Virginia needed a first-rate university, a counterpart to Yale and Harvard. In 1822, Thomas Ritchie, the savvy editor of The Richmond

Enquirer, explained that Virginia “must make up by the intelligence of her sons what she is losing in her census. Her moral force must supply the place of numbers.” Leading Virginians invoked the slogan “knowledge is power” to oppose traditionalists who balked at spending public funds on higher education. Such penny-wise policy threatened to complete Virginia’s decline into the bottom ranks of a conflictual union. Jefferson warned, “If our legislature does not heartily push our University, we must send our children for education to Kentucky or

Cambridge. . . . All the states but our own are sensible that knolege is power, while we are

Alan Taylor Premature Independence October 2017 sinking into the barbarism of our Indian aborigines, and expect like them to oppose by ignorance the overwhelming mass of light & science by which we shall be surrounded. It is a comfort that I am not to live to see this.” Without enhanced education, Virginians would, Jefferson warned, lack the cultural strength to face the sectional crisis “which is to burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later.” The best defense was to build a great university “worthy the station of our State in the scale of its confederates and of the nations of the world.”15

A new university might even reverse Virginia’s declining influence, restoring her preeminence. General Blackburn assured the legislature that a first-rate university could attract students from throughout the South and the West. That collection would rebuild a federal leadership that shared Virginia’s values. Then the Yankees could shrink back into their proper place as a feeble minority unable to meddle in western and southern affairs – thereby restoring the glorious situation that had prevailed during Jefferson’s presidency. Blackburn explained that, by recruiting out-of-state students, a university would “imperceptibly spread the influence of

Virginian opinions, habits and manners, which . . . will ultimately silence sectional feelings; abolish party distinctions, and unite us under the common denomination of Americans.”

Virginians could become Americans again once a university rendered America into one big

Virginia.16

COLLEGES

In 1820, Virginia had three colleges: Washington College in Lexington, Hampden-Sidney in Prince Edward County, and the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. Washington

College and Hampden-Sidney were new, small, and underfunded Presbyterian schools with scant

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influence in state government. Chartered in 1693, William and Mary was the state’s oldest and

best endowed college. It had trained Virginia’s preeminent lawyers and legislators, including

Thomas Jefferson.17

By 1820, however, most leading Virginians had written off William and Mary as a lost

cause because of its unhealthy climate, mediocre faculty, and turbulent students. Lacking any

other economic base, Williamsburg was a ruinous, apparently dying town. Malarial, stagnant,

and impoverished, the Tidewater region was losing migrants, capital, and political leadership to

the more vibrant Piedmont counties to the west. That shift had accelerated with the relocation of

the state capital from Williamsburg to Richmond in 1779, when Jefferson had been the governor.

Some critics accused the college of preaching the impiety known as “infidelity,” while others

hurled the inconsistent charge that it had been recaptured by the unpopular Episcopal Church.18

In 1818 Gilmer toyed with becoming the college’s president, which alarmed his mentor

Jefferson. Determined to build a new university to replace the college, Jefferson warned his

protégé: “I trust you did not [for] a moment seriously think of putting yourself behind the door of

W. & M. college, a more compleat cul de sac could not be proposed to you. No, dear Sir, you are

intended to do good to our country, and you must get into the legislature; for never did it more

need the aid of all its’ talents.” Gilmer reassured Jefferson: “If I had any hope of being able from

the ruins of this decayed corporation to revive the nearly extinguished ardor of Virginia I should

be strongly tempted to make the sacrifice which it would cost me. But I fear the old college is too

far gone to be resuscitated.”19

Rampant drinking and sporadic violence roiled the College of William and Mary – to the embarrassment of the state’s leaders. Pundits exhorted students to mend their ways, lest they complete Virginia’s decline and fall. In 1815, a Norfolk newspaper asked and exhorted: “Shall

Alan Taylor Premature Independence October 2017 the eye of Virginia be put out? Students of William and Mary! Much rests with you. . . . As

Virginians, who sigh over the fading glories of our native State, we entreat you to put forth all your powers.” Students needed to resist the allure “of dissipation and sensuality” by embracing industry and order. Because few heeded such sermons, the college’s decayed reputation threatened Virginia’s revival. In 1818, an older friend warned a young man to steer clear of

William and Mary because “every thing seems to be in confusion there. I fear we shall never abandon the habits of a riotous and licentious people, and shall banish all foreigners from our dominion by the imprudence of the young people.”20

Many wealthy parents instead sent their sons to study at northern schools, particularly

Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. Parents often did so reluctantly because northern universities seemed ideologically alien: infected by both the bad old Federalism and the alarming new antislavery activism. The straying youth might put down northern roots or come back with northern ideas to ridicule or even reform Virginia ways. Francis W. Gilmer warned that northern graduates “returned with foreign manners, habits, &c., to preach up for the edification of their parents and family, the miseries of slavery, to praise pumpkins and laugh at hominy; in short. To like everything foreign and hate every thing domestic.” One southern father warned his Harvard- bound son: “Carry in mind, that whenever a general emancipation takes place . . . you are a ruined man and all your family connexions made beggars.” The Virginia directors of the

Literary Fund (devoted to education) warned that students sent to the north “return in a degree aliens to their native land.”21

If William & Mary could not compete with northern schools, then Virginia needed a new university. With his trademark hyperbole, Jefferson insisted that 500 young Virginians were studying in the North and “imbibing opinions and principles in discord with those of their own

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country. This canker is eating on the vitals of our existence.” Others calculated that the brain

drain also cost Virginia $300,000 annually in monies expended by the Virginian-born to travel to

and study at northern schools. The prevailing depression enhanced the urgency of keeping every

dollar at home in Virginia. By creating and building a University of Virginia, legislators sought

to repatriate the expenditures and minds of their students in the North.22

STUDENTS

But building a university seemed far easier than filling it with tractable students given the

pervasive disorder of American collegians, North and South. But even in the North, southern

students bore the blame as alleged ringleaders. Princeton was the most troubled university in the

North. In 1807, students seized control of the main college building, Nassau Hall, smashed its windows and fought off townsmen trying to drive them out. Only by evicting half of the students could the president restore his authority. Princeton also had the largest proportion of southern students – which administrators considered causal rather than coincidental to the turmoil.23

The turmoil was greatest at southern universities. At the University of North Carolina

students shaved the tail of the president’s horse, toppled his outhouse, and stole and hid away

deep in the woods his cart and garden gate. A North Carolina student thought his peers the most

dissipated, profane, and defiant in the land. His father partially disagreed, “The dissipation you

speak of pervades all the States where Slavery abounds. Were you conversant with the habits of

So[uth] Carolina or Georgia University, you would find darker traces there than at Chapel Hill.”

Indeed, at South Carolina College, the students staged “blackrides” where they blackened their faces, stole the horses of faculty, and galloped about campus while holding flaming torches.

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After exhausting a horse, the rider dismounted and slipped into the midst of their fellows, who hid their persons and identities from all investigation. The blackriders delighted in demonstrating the impotence of frustrated professors.24

Most observers regarded southern students as more undisciplined, dissipated, and defiant than their northern peers. In 1820, Thomas Cooper, left his professorship in Pennsylvania to become the president of South Carolina College. In February 1822, Cooper reported that students stole his horse for a “blackride,” broke his house windows, and even fired guns to startle him.25

A former radical democrat, he had been jailed by the Federalists during the late 1790s, but Cooper hardened into a reactionary in response to student defiance, which he deemed “the offspring of Democracy run mad. No professors of any reputation will stay at an institution where their authority is so disputed inch by inch and their lives put in jeopardy if they resist the encroachment of a hot headed set of boys.” In a letter to his friend Jefferson, Cooper even endorsed the sentiments of a former antagonist, the arch-Federalist president of Yale, Timothy

Dwight: “Dr. Dwight prophesied that no collegiate institution could be permanent south of [the]

Potowmack. In my own opinion, the parental indulgence to the south renders young men less fit for college government than the habits of the northern people; and the rigid discipline of the northern seminary must be put in force inexorably in the south.” Jefferson must have been astonished to read this in a letter from an old friend. The last thing Jefferson wanted was to introduce northern ways to reshape southern youth. On the contrary, he meant his university to defend Virginia against social change on northern terms.26

Cooper noted the links between slave mastery, parental indulgence, and the dissipation and defiance of southern students. Southern gentry taught sons that honor and gentility won respect in a society led by the masters of slaves. Gentry defined their freedom and honor as

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complete because denied utterly to the enslaved, cast as polar opposites. Young men were

supposed to learn how to command slaves, lead families, and win votes and debates in politics.

They did so by defending their personal honor against any insult, however slight or unintended.

Anyone who tamely swallowed a slight or insult behaved like a slave and forfeited the respect of

true gentlemen. By treating sons indulgently, fathers encouraged them to become assertive, willing to submit only to the tyrannical social code of their genteel peers.27

At college, young men were testing and refining their genteel masculinity – and probing

one another for weaknesses. Southern gentlemen attended college primarily to hone social skills

and cultivate social networks by winning peer approval – and only secondarily to develop

intellectual gifts. They valued flashy and fashionable attire, elegant posture, polished manners, lavish generosity at buying drinks for friends, witty conversation, prowess at cards (but grace at both winning and losing). Genteel style mattered more than attention to schoolwork. External appearances and performances seemed more real and important than abstract knowledge.28

Southern students built a powerful peer culture that pressured all to seek approval from one another instead of professors. A South Carolina College graduate recalled that the student

“sees his professors for an hour or two only every day. There is no social relation between them.

The student herds with the boys alone.” Seniors set a tone that new students emulated. The graduate recalled, “The raw freshman . . . is ambitious to emulate the high spirited example of his senior. He makes rapid advances in smoking, chewing, playing billiards, concocting sherry cobblers, gin slings and mint juleps.” Peers shunned and insulted the rogue student who failed to join them in defying the morality preached by professors. A few painful examples prodded the rest of the new students into line with the peer culture.29

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The student culture reversed the prescribed power dynamic of the college. Rather than accept faculty governance, students flamboyantly defied rules meant to control their behavior.

Young masters disdained overeducated professors unwilling to duel if insulted. Engaged in work for pay, the professors resembled menials of the mind, lacking in honor, clumsy in manners, and relatively shabby in dress. Such men seemed distressingly Yankee in their middle-class ethos of work and self-discipline. A Virginian at Yale dismissed the faculty as “a diminutive and low- minded set.” Such lowly grinds regarded learning mathematics as more important than polished manners and fashionable clothes. Many students treated faculty as social inferiors, as servants hired to teach whenever the students consented to learn.30

Young gentlemen disdained the striving student who cultivated faculty esteem through

hard work and classroom deference. In 1822 Cooper complained that his senior class had

“prohibited every Student of that class from applying to any Professor for information, or for the

explanation of any difficulty, regarding it as evidence of a design to curry favour with the

faculty, and as taking any unfair advantage. Hence also the students are forbidden to visit the

Professor’s houses or to have any intercourse with them.” We also see this asserted solidarity in

the jar of piss hurled through a University of Virginia professor’s window when he hosted

students – who were deemed class traitors in both senses by their peers.31

Above all, students covered for one another by refusing to testify against a peer accused of any infraction. Nor would any student admit to his own misdeed when pressed by a faculty

investigation. He deemed any questions about others as impugning his sacred honor never to

betray them. A Virginian at Yale denounced northern students willing to testify against peers: “If

a young man so far violated the laws of propriety as to go and inform against a fellow student,

the very fact would blast his every prospect of living, much less of distinction, in the South; it

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should be so; the name character and votaries of Judas Iscariot will ever be condemned and

despised, for shame! For shame!”32

Colleges, particularly in the South, became trapped in a spiral, where defiant students

provoked faculties and their superintending boards of visitors into imposing more detailed and

draconian codes meant to forbid the behaviors seen as triggering that defiance. Those rules

banned drinking, gaming, dueling, wearing dandy clothes, keeping guns, dogs, and slaves on

campus, frequenting prostitutes, staying out late, sleeping in to skip classes, and making a racket

to rouse sleeping townspeople. The rules thrust the conflict with professors into the rooms and

taverns of students. By mandating expulsions for violation, the new codes also increased the

stakes of that conflict. Enforcement fell on the beleaguered faculty. In addition to their full days

in the classroom, they had to become the nocturnal monitors of younger, spryer malcontents –

who outnumbered the overwhelmed professors. By defying the new rules, the students defended

their own turf, where they could more readily humiliate the faculty as ineffectual. Indeed, the

blackrides and masked processions sought to bait professors into nocturnal confrontations that confirmed faculty impotence.33

College leaders tried to enlist parental support by sending home reports after every term

on every student, including particular complaints against the hardest cases. More often than not,

however, parents sided with sons, favoring their stories of innocence persecuted by bullying and

dishonorable professors. When push came to shove, genteel parents blamed the faculty for

failing to set genteel examples that could inspire students without resorting to coercion. Few

southern fathers wanted their sons to forfeit the esteem of genteel peers by submitting to strict

rules that compromised personal honor. The honorable and genteel student reflected better on

their parents than did the mean fellow who studied in his room and told a professor whatever he

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wanted to hear. And family ties were too sentimental and precious to southern parents to

consider siding with any outsiders at the expense of a son’s reputation.34

In 1814, John Augustine Smith became the president of the declining College of William

and Mary, which he sought to redeem by breaking the student culture of defiant solidarity. He

refused to accept the popular dictum “that young Virginians were absolutely uncontroulable; that

they sucked in with their mother’s milk, such high spirited notions, as to be ever after

ungovernable.” Smith insisted that he “would much prefer” that the faculty “should be ourselves

the sole occupants of this venerable pile, than see it crowded with a lawless host of ungovernable

students.” During the ten years of Smith’s tenure, the college expelled 77 students, about a fifth

of the total attending, and more than twice as many as in the preceding thirty years.35

Smith enforced a college statute that required any suspected student to swear under oath

to his innocence or guilt. If none confessed, then in stage two, he could demand of any other

student whether he knew anyone to have lied under oath. Students howled that this statute

coerced them to act as informers. When many fathers sided with their sons, Smith replied that no

student had to testify “to the disadvantage of a Fellow-Student, until that Fellow-Student has told

a public, deliberate, solemn falsehood. Let him object to the law who wishes his son to acquire

or to retain a friend capable of such an act.” Virginian opinion especially resented Smith’s

policy, when he foolishly cited the similar statutes enforced at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale: the

bastions of Yankeedom.36

Smith tried to suppress student pranks, particularly the nocturnal practice of breaking into the college belfry or the steeple of the parish church to ring the bells to the disquiet of town and

faculty. In 1816 and 1817, he complained of “disorders . . . impossible either to detect or to

punish. That night after night the repose of the town had been disturbed by whooping and

Alan Taylor Premature Independence October 2017 shouting, by the ringing of the church-bell, and the firing of cannon.” When summoned to testify, no student would confess or implicate others. Smith sputtered that “these deliberate violations of truth, so far from exciting the indignation of the virtuous part of the students, were becoming matters of mirth.” Nothing so enraged the vain Smith as becoming the butt of student jokes, so he suspended ten suspects for refusing to testify. Yet the nocturnal disorders persisted.

One night in May 1822, Smith ventured out to trap the culprits. Instead, he charged into an ambush of hurled plaster and blows from sticks. Able to identify four assailants, he secured their expulsion, one for a term and three forever. But bell-ringing resumed in early 1824, when Smith suspended another eight students for refusing to testify.37

Smith’s crusade backfired, undermining his brief revival of the college’s prospects. From a mere twenty-one enrolled in 1814, the student body increased to ninety-two in 1817. In a newspaper puff piece, Smith boasted, “Contemplate now the great, the rapid, the delightful change, and the heart of every Virginian and of every Republican must exult at the recollection that WILLIAM & MARY IS AGAIN RESTORED.” Perhaps Virginia did not need a new university after all. But the expulsions and controversy crushed those hopes, as enrollment plummeted to 50 in the fall of 1818 and to half of that by 1824. Most elite Virginians refused to send their sons to a college that coerced them to become informers, imperiling their sacred honor.38

Critics blamed Smith and his favorite statute for the college’s renewed decline. The most powerful critic was John Tyler, a graduate of the college, member of the governing board of visitors, and a leading state legislator (and a future United States president). In 1824, he defended the students in a legislative report which declared, “To inform against his fellow, is to sever at once the cords of intimacy which have bound them together as one.” The college’s

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Board of Visitors agreed, dropping the statute in July 1824, to Smith’s dismay. But the damage

had been done, for student enrollment failed to revive that fall. Early in the next year a new

university would open with a new design and governance meant to solve Virginia’s web of

economic, demographic, and political problems. That new university had to succeed where

William and Mary had failed: by inspiring students to cooperate with a collegiate code of

discipline.39

JEFFERSON

Southern leaders worried that their way of life paradoxically bred young men incapable

of defending it against northern aggression. Indeed, the younger generation seemed to have

declined from the high standards set by their revolutionary fathers. In 1809 David Ramsay of

South Carolina sardonically said of southern college students: “The elder citizens have

successfully contended for the rights of men. Their sons, too little accustomed to the discipline of

a strict education, seem equally zealous for the rights of boys.” In 1823, Joseph C. Cabell, a

Virginia state senator (and key figure in founding the university), wrote to an expert on European education for advice: “I am particularly anxious to be informed on the best mode of governing a large mass of students, without the use of the bayonet.”40

Indeed, Jefferson also feared student disorder as the greatest threat to his new university.

Writing in 1822 to his friend Cooper, Jefferson listed inadequate state funding as his first

challenge “but a second, a greater, and a more desperate one, is the spirit of insubordination and

self will which seizes our youth so early in life as to defeat their education, and the too little

control exercised by indulgent parents.” Jefferson worried that student turmoil might ruin the

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new university: “I look to it with dismay in our institution, as a breaker ahead, which I am far

from being confident we shall be able to weather.” He concluded, “The article of discipline is

the most difficult in American education. Premature ideas of independence, too little repressed

by parents, beget a spirit of insubordination, which is the great obstacle to science with us, and a

principal cause of its decay since the revolution.”41

It is jarring to read Jefferson write of the “premature independence” of the young and of a post-revolutionary decay, for we associate him with confidence in the people and a serene belief in progress. And we credit him with the national Declaration of Independence. But Jefferson

was never entirely comfortable with people in Virginia as they already were. His confidence lay

in a potential people whom he longed to improve through education. Such an enhanced citizenry would still need elite guidance from a meritocracy developed through education rather than empowered by birth into wealth. Their superior merit would then be certified by popular election to high office. Jefferson believed that relatively few men with especially able and well- trained minds (like his) could master the advanced knowledge of “science,” for him a comprehensive category which included law and governance. A republic could only endure if both voters and leaders mastered the information and rationality appropriate to their distinct roles.42

To tame disorderly young men, he sought to strengthen the hand of university authority

within a velvet glove, lulling students into a dutiful attention to their education. Devoted to

Enlightenment principles, Jefferson had a great confidence that the right arrangement of

buildings, rules, and people could enable the young to grow into their full and proper potential.

He broke with the tradition of one big college building, such as the so-called Wren

Building that housed most of the College of William and Mary. “Much observation & reflection

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on these institutions have long convinced me that the large and crouded buildings in which

youths are pent up, are equally unfriendly to health, to study, to manners, morals & order.” As

an alternative, he designed an “academical village,” which arranged student room and the

professors’ pavilions in parallel rows which faced across a lawn, with a grand rotunda as the

head and lynchpin connecting the rows at the north end. Behind each facing row lay a second

which featured “hotels” as well as more student rooms; the hotels would provide several places

for students to dine.43

This design was beautiful but inefficient, slow-to-build, and very expensive. The design strained his relation with state legislators who wanted a cheaper structure and a faster opening to the university. In part, he justified the design as aesthetic and didactic, teaching a higher order of architecture to provincial Virginians. But he also insisted that the arrangement would promote “peace & quiet.” By dispersing students and scattering professors among them at night as well as by day, Jefferson meant to discourage student combinations and increase faculty influence: “It would afford that quiet retirement so friendly to study, and lessen the dangers of fire, infection & tumult. Every professor would be the police officer of the students adjacent to his own lodge.”44 He also located this academical village far from the corrupting influence of a substantial

town or city, which Jefferson always distrusted as dens of strife and vice and indolence. Far

better, he thought, to isolate students in a rural setting in the heart of the state, and ideally no

more than four miles from Monticello and subject to his daily visit and supervision.45

Jefferson also wanted a first-rate faculty who could command respect by their superior

learning and reputations. He initially tried to recruit a pair of young geniuses from New England

– Nathaniel Bowditch and George Ticknor – as a ploy in a zero sum game, that would weaken

Harvard while boosting Virginia. But when they turned him down, he refused to consider

anyone of lower standing from the distrusted north. Indeed, Jefferson dreaded reaping northern

derision of his university as of the second tier. As an alternative, he persuaded his fellow visitors

to recruit most of the faculty from Britain, where he expected to find more first-rate minds

untainted by Yankeeism. He assured the lead recruiter, Francis W. Gilmer, that foreign

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professors would better dazzle Virginians: “They would be preferable to secondaries of our own

country, because the stature of these is known to be inferior to some in other seminaries; whereas

those you would bring would be unknown, would be readily imagined such as we had expected,

and might set us a going advantageously.”46

To further moral reform of the students, Jefferson also excluded the very youngest, who

were the most boisterous and inattentive. The College of William and Mary of his youth and its

troubled 1810s had too many adolescents masquerading as students. In 1818, Jefferson

explained, “No greater obstruction to industrious study could be proposed than the presence, the

intrusions and the noisy turbulence of a multitude of small boys.” Jefferson vowed to accept no

students younger than sixteen – a radical restriction by Virginia standards. 47

Jefferson also sought to reduce the grievances that led students to riot elsewhere: the

wretched meals offered by central dining facilities and a mandated curriculum that trapped

students in classes which they despised. He proposed free market solutions to both. The university would subcontract meal services to hotel keepers, who had to compete for student customers. If a keeper stinted on bread or served rancid beef, the students could shift to another hotel – but in no case would the university have to deal with their complaints. The University similarly offered a form of course electives, where a student had to enroll in, and pay for, only those subjects that interested him.48

Jefferson also appeased students by renouncing the controversial informant statute that

had so troubled Smith’s presidency at the College of Willian and Mary. In 1825, the university’s

founding enactments declared “When testimony is required from a student, it shall be voluntary

and not on oath, and the obligation to give it shall be left to his own sense of right.”49

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Finally, Jefferson proposed to include the students in the disciplinary process to a degree,

a very limited degree. In 1825, the university’s enactments reserved jurisdiction over the major

violations and their punishment to the faculty, subject to approval of their sentences by the Board

of Visitors. “Minor cases may be referred to a board of six Censors, to be named by the Faculty, from among the most discreet of the students, whose duty it shall be, sitting as a board, to enquire into the facts, propose the minor punishment which they think proportioned to the offence, and to make report thereof to the Professors for their approbation.” Such a board had little real authority and was fatally compromised by subordination to the faculty.50

Indeed, although cast as liberal, the university’s enactments were longer on forbidden

behaviors than on concessions to student autonomy. Students could neither possess nor consume

any alcohol or tobacco. No student could have a servant, a horse, a dog, or a gun or gamble at

cards. Anyone who dueled or assisted in a duel would suffer immediate and permanent expulsion. Every student must immediately open his door and expose his room to inspection by a professor or risk having the door broken down. Subsequently, Jefferson and other founders insisted that they had erred on the side of indulgence in framing the enactments. But a close reading of the enactments reveals an effort thoroughly to micromanage the students, allegedly for their own good.51

In July 1825, Jefferson praised the success of his measures at mollifying and motivating

the students:

We have great reason to be satisfied so far with the success of the

principle we adopt for the government of the Institution. We receive

and treat our students as gentlemen and friends. They meet us gratefully

on that ground and endeavor to merit and to cherish the respect we manifest

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for them. Two thirds of them are 19 years of age and upwards. They can need

no government, but of their own discretion, and their example soon fashions

the younger third . . . . We have had no occasion as yet even to form our board of

Censors, on whom we shall chiefly rely for the preservation of order. It is agreed,

by all who judge from their own inspection, and not from the idle tales they hear,

that they have never known a more orderly collection of young men.

The disorders of September and October soon made a mockery of Jefferson’s sunny self- congratulation in July.52

TROUBLES

Far from taming students, Jefferson’s measures irritated or emboldened them. By dispersing faculty housing among the students, the “academical village” design weakened

authority. Rather than controlling the students, the arrangement exposed professors to nocturnal

harassment. Instead of policing the students, the faculty became intimidated by them.53

Isolation from a major city also bought no escape from vice, for Charlottesville had

plenty of taverns to entice students to linger, drink, and gamble. Those outlets became all the more tempting as students became bored at the restrictive academical village. One student said of his peers “Instead of attending to their Books, they are sauntering about from one day’s end to another in all kind of rascality and mischief.”54

Rather than commanding respect, the foreign professors reaped contempt. All were inexperienced teachers struggling to master their subjects while failing to master the students.

Their superior learning offered no offset for foreign accents and inferior gentility (by the lofty

Alan Taylor Premature Independence October 2017 standards of Virginia). Jefferson had ignored the warning from his old friend Wilson Cary

Nicholas that he was unlikely to find foreign scholars with enough gentility to “command the respect of these they are to instruct & govern.” For adult examples, the students preferred the hotelkeepers, who were Virginians and favored gambling and drinking, joining the students at both, rather than alienate their student customers. Consequently, the free market in dining was no solution to disorder, for it enhanced student power to the detriment of university authority.55

Worse still was Jefferson’s pride and joy: his proposed board of censors. In July,

Jefferson declared that the board was unnecessary because the students were so orderly. In fact, it never went into effect because none would agree to serve. Indeed, the mere proposal touched the rawest of nerves: the students’ defensive solidarity. An invitation to serve on the censors was an insult, for it summoned some young men to betray their peers, by assisting the faculty in ferreting out violations and levying punishments. Edmund Wilcox Hubard was a relatively moral student troubled by the many cheating gamblers and boastful brawlers among his peers.

But he added “that there is a grade below them . . . . I shall call them Tattlers, a name in itself detestible and sufficient to infuse in us all the contempt they so justly merit. . . . .They pump you of every thing you know, when you least expect such a thing; ask your opinion of various persons, &c., so they continue like a Fly to glut themselves.”56

Jefferson’s greatest mistake, however, was to deny the students the summer vacation offered by other universities. The 1825 enactments stipulated: “There shall be one vacation only in the year, and that shall be from the 15th day of December to the last day of January.”57

In March 1825, the college had opened a month later than expected because so many professors had been delayed in reaching Virginia, thanks to their long and stormy voyage from

Britain. Jefferson felt that the students needed to make up for lost time, and he worried that

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dispersion, after just three months, would unravel their new habits of industry. He preferred to

keep them at work through the dog days of a Virginia summer. Jefferson also wanted to score

points against William and Mary, which he had derided as a malarial hell-hole in summer.

Keeping students at the university through the summer reinforced and promoted his insistence

that Charlottesville was the healthiest and happiest place on earth. Keeping the school open also

served to catch and recruit more students, as they returned to Virginia for the summer from their

northern schools: “At the summer vacation of the other schools, many will become disengaged,

and bring us a considerable accession.” With only 64 students on board in April, he wanted to

raise the total to over 100, for the University needed their fees and tuition for operating costs.

The university’s visitors sought student revenue because they had spent all the state funding on

grand buildings, particularly the Rotunda whose construction ran far over budget. By seeking to increase numbers, Jefferson forgot the warning by his late friend, Wilson Cary Nicholas, that student defiance would grow with their numbers.58

Jefferson also ignored the savvy advice from Francis W. Gilmer, about the need for a

summer vacation. A year before, Gilmer had warned that the “unprecedented length of the

session you propose is . . . a dismaying circumstance” for recruiting potential faculty from

Britain. “If the heat is insufferable in England, what must it be in our July, August, &c., when

there is to be no vacation.”59

As a young man at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson had astonished professors

and fellow students with his self-disciplined devotion to study, as rare in Virginia as a comet. A

classmate, John Page of Rosewell, recalled that Jefferson “’could tear himself away from his

dearest friends, to fly to his studies.’” Rather than relax, Jefferson had devoted his vacations to

intense study. Rarely able to imagine the thoughts of lesser mortals, he expected the young

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gentlemen of 1825 to emulate his relentless diligence at school, although no other Virginian had

ever done so.60

The UVA students resented staying put when their friends and kin were relaxing and hob-

nobbing at the fashionable spas in the cooler mountains of western Virginia. Trapped at the

university, they began to act out. On the morning of June 18, the faculty met to condemn the

“abandoned miscreants” who had during the night “shamefully mutilated” cows belonging to university officials. But the faculty failed to identify the culprits. Ten days later, the faculty

received a polite petition, signed by almost all of the students, “praying for a vacation of 10 days

or more, according to the discretion of the Professors, to commence on the 4th [of] July.” They

cited “the unusual length of the session and the immoderate heat of the weather.”61

The professors consulted with Jefferson, who abruptly rejected the request. He insisted

that the policy sought “to avoid the common abuse by which two or three months of the year are

lost to the Students, under the name of Vacations, the thread of their studies is broken, and more

time still to be expended in recovering it. This loss, at their ages from 16 and upwards, is

irreparable to them. Time will not suspend its flow during these intermissions of study.” To

cover themselves, the professors had Jefferson’s letter read to the students. Thereafter

disturbances accelerated to their climax on October 1.62

Jefferson’s rules had failed to shake the defiant solidarity of Virginia students. On the

contrary, he had made it worse by unrealistic measures. Saving Virginia from itself would take

more than a new university.

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NOTES

1 Novak, Rights of Youth, 126; G. Tucker, “Autobiography,” 137-38; Faculty Minutes, Oct. 5,

1825 (“Down” and “Damn” and “damn’d rascal”), “Jefferson’s University: The Early Life,” website at the University of Virginia. The seven professors of 1825 were George Blaetterman

(German), Charles Bonneycastle (English), Robley Dunglison (Scottish), John P. Emmet (Irish),

Thomas Hewett Key (English), George Long (English), and George Tucker (Bermudese). Only

Emmet and Tucker had been in the United States for more than two years. Less fearful of the students than the others, they were the two professors who intervened against the rioters.

2 G. Tucker, “Autobiography,” 137-38 (“inviting”) G. Tucker, Life of Thomas Jefferson, vol.

2:480; Faculty Minutes, Sep. 20, 22, and 26, Oct. 6, and 14, 1825, “Jefferson’s University: The

Early Life,” website at the University of Virginia; Martha Jefferson Randolph to Ellen W.

Randolph, Oct. 13, 1825, Jefferson Family Letters, website at the International Center for

Jefferson Studies.

3 Faculty Minutes, Oct. 3, and 5, 1825 (“that if”), “Jefferson’s University: The Early Life,” website at the University of Virginia. The 65 signers represented a majority of the 112 students then in attendance.

Alan Taylor Premature Independence October 2017

4 G. Tucker, “Autobiography,” 137; St. George Tucker Coalter to St. George Tucker, Oct. 14,

1825, Bryan Family Papers (MSS 3400) Box 1, Special Collections, University of Virginia;

Faculty Minutes, Oct. 2, 1825, “Jefferson’s University: The Early Life,” website at the

University of Virginia; Board of Visitors Minutes, Oct. 3-4, 6, 1825, Founders Online, National

Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5569). For the overseas

recruitment of faculty, see R. B. Davis, ed., Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and Francis

Walker Gilmer, 22.

5 Haulman, Virginia and the Panic of 1819, 3-4, 8-11, 18-19, 51, 57-61; Francis Walker Gilmer to Peachy R. Gilmer, Jan. 16, 1820 (“worse & worse”), quoted in Gutzman, Virginia’s American

Revolution, 178; S. Dunn, Dominion of Memories, 7-8. For the cost to build the university see

Jennings L. Wagoner, Jefferson and Education (Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Foundation,

2004), 126.

6 Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello (Boston: Little, Brown,

1977), 387; “Memorial of the Richmond and Manchester Auxiliary Society for Colonizing in

Africa, the Free People of Colour of the United States,” in John Holt Rice, ed., The Evangelical

and Literary Magazine vol. 8 (Richmond: N. Pollard, 1825), 30-35; Gudmestad, Troublesome

Commerce, 35-36; Haulman, Virginia and the Panic of 1819, 23; Jordan, Political Leadership,

205-24; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union, 228.

7 Schoene, “Calculating the Price,” 177, 184, 194-200; Taylor, Internal Enemy.

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8 Francis W. Gilmer to Peter Minor, Jan. 29, 1821, in R. B. Davis, ed., Francis Walker Gilmer,

153.

9 Mason, Slavery and Politics, 193, 199; Thomas Jefferson to Charles Pinckney, Sep. 30, 1820,

in P. L. Ford, ed., Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12:165; Onuf, Mind of Thomas Jefferson,

214; Lowery, James Barbour, 118; Wolf, Race and Liberty, 175-78.

10 Spencer Roane to James Monroe, Feb. 16, 1820, in [Anonymous], ed., “Letters of Spencer

Roane,” 174-5; John Tyler quoted in Freehling, Road to Disunion, 151 (“dark cloud”); Onuf,

“Domesticating the Captive Nation,” 37-38; S. Dunn, Dominion of Memories, 48; Thomas

Jefferson to John Holmes, Apr. 22, 1820 (“fire bell”), and Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, Dec. 26,

1820, in P. L. Ford, ed., Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12:158, 187-8; Mason, Slavery and

Politics, 203.

11 Henry St. George Tucker to James Barbour, Feb. 11, 1820, in [Anonymous], ed., “Missouri

Compromise:“Letters to James Barbour,” 11; Isaac A. Coles to Cabell, Dec. 20, 1820 (“not a

question”), Wickham Family Papers, box 1, VHS; Dabney Carr to John Coalter, Feb. 18, 1820

(“draw a cordon”), Grinnan Family Papers, sec. 4, VHS; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union, 232-

34; Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, Dec. 26, 1820 (“in which case”), Founders Online,

National Archives, (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1705).

12 “Academus,” Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 25, 1821.

13 [Francis W. Gilmer], “Necessity of a Better System of Instruction, IV,” Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine, vol. 1 (Richmond: N. Pollard, 1818), 316 (“foreign states”); Gilmer to

Alan Taylor Premature Independence October 2017

Peter Minor, Mar. 25, 1821, in R. B. Davis, ed., Francis Walker Gilmer, 153; “Gen. Blackburn’s Speech, in the House of Delegates,” Richmond Enquirer, Apr. 24, 1821.

14 [Norfolk] The American Beacon and Commercial Diary, Nov. 22, 1815; Glover, “’Let Us

Manufacture Men,’” 24-27; Glover, Southern Sons, 3-4.

15 Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, Jan. 22, 1820 (“If our legislature”), Founders Online, National archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1031); Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 3, 1822 (“She must”); Thomas Jefferson to James Breckenridge, Feb. 15, 1821, in Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01- 02-1839): (“which is to burst”); Report of the Central College Visitors, Jan. 6, 1818, in Cabell, J.C. Early History of the University of Virginia (1856), 401 (“worthy”).

16 “Gen. Blackburn’s Speech, in the House of Delegates,” Richmond Enquirer, Apr. 24, 1821.

17 Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790-1830 (Knoxville: U of Tennessee Pr, 1972), 54-57.

18 Ruby Orders Osborne, The Crisis Years: The College of William and Mary in Virginia, 1800- 1827 (Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1989): 194; “William & Mary College,” Richmond Enquirer, Nov. 24, 1814; John Augustine Smith, “Extract from the Address of the President of William and Mary College,” Richmond Enquirer, Nov. 24, 1814; Dr. John Augustine Smith, “Address to the House of Delegates,” Richmond Enquirer, 5 Feb 1825.

19 Francis W. Gilmer to Thomas Jefferson, Mar. 18, 1818, and Jefferson to Gilmer, Apr. 10, 1818, in R. B. Davis, ed., Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and Francis Walker Gilmer, 58, 60.

20 [Norfolk] The American Beacon and Commercial Diary, Nov. 22, 1815; Peachy R. Gilmer to Nicholas P. Trist, Mar. 21, 1818, “Jefferson Family Letters,” website hosted by the International Center for Jefferson Studies.

21 “William & Mary College,” Richmond Enquirer, Nov. 24, 1814; John Ball quoted in Glover, “’Let Us Manufacture Men,’” 27 (“Carry in mind”); Glover, Southern Sons, 52-53; [Francis W. Gilmer], “Necessity of a Better System of Instruction, IV” by “A Provincial Protestant,” Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine, vol. 1 (Richmond: N. Pollard, 1818), 315; Literary Fund directors quoted in William Arthur Maddox, The Free School Idea in Virginia Before the Civil War: A Phase of Political and Social Evolution (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1918), 53.

22 “Academus,” Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 25, 1821; Thomas Jefferson to James Breckenridge, Feb. 15, 1821, in Founders Online, National Archives

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(http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1839): (“imbibing”); Glover, “’Let Us Manufacture Men,’” 28-29, a North Carolinian quoted on 29; Glover, Southern Sons, 53-58. North Carolina created the first public university in 1795. South Carolina followed suit in 1805. To Jefferson’s dismay, Virginia did not begin to act until the late 1810s.

23 David F. Allmendinger, Jr., “The Dangers of Ante-Bellum Student Life,” Journal of Social History, vol. 7 (Fall 1973): 75-76; Novak, Rights of Youth, 17-23, 176n1; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); 25; Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 126, 151; Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson, Princeton, 1746-1896 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946), 136-43. In 1807 at Princeton, the lead protestor was Abel P. Usher of Virginia, who later became Secretary of State in the federal administration of his countryman John Tyler.

24 Glover, “’Let Us Manufacture Men,’” 39-42, George Swain quoted on 42 ; Glover,Southern Sons, 64-72; Horowitz, Campus Life, 27-28; Louis P. Towles, “A Matter of Honor at South Carolina College, 1822), South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol 94 (Jan. 1993): 6-18.

25 Malone, Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 251-58; Thomas Cooper to Thomas Jefferson, Feb. 14, 1822, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-2662); Glover, “’Let Us Manufacture Men,’” 36-37; Glover, Southern Sons, 77; Towles, “Matter of Honor,” 6-18.

26 Thomas Cooper to Thomas Jefferson, Feb. 14, 1822, Founders Online, National archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-2662).

27 Glover, Southern Sons, 45-46, 64; Greene, “Intellectual Reconstruction,” 230; Friend and Glover, “Rethinking Southern Masculinity,” x-xi; Glover, “’Let Us Manufacture Men,’” 29; Glover, Southern Sons, 22-34; Stowe, “Rhetoric of Authority,” 933.

28 Glover, Southern Sons, 98-110; Glover, “’Let Us Manufacture Men’”: 29; Stowe, “Rhetoric of Authority,” 921-22.

29 William J. Grayson quoted in Towles, “Matter of Honor,” 12; Glover, Southern Sons, 2-3, 65- 71, 98-110; Stowe, “Rhetoric of Authority,” 921-22.

30 Hugh Blair Grigsby quoted in Flournoy, Fitzgerald, “Hugh Blair Grigsby at Yale,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 62 (April 1954): 166; Glover, “’Let Us Manufacture Men,’” 24-26; Glover, Southern Sons, 65-71, 83-89; Kett, Rites of Passage, 58-59.

31 Thomas Cooper to Thomas Jefferson, Feb. 14, 1822, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-2662); Glover, Southern Sons, 64- 65, 85.

32 Thomas Cooper to Thomas Jefferson, Feb. 14, 1822, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-2662); Glover, Southern Sons, 76;

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Hugh Blair Grigsby quoted in Flournoy, “Hugh Blair Grigsby,” 174: John Augustine Smith, “Commencement Address,” Richmond Enquirer, July 20, 1816.

33 Roger L. Geiger, “Introduction: New Themes in the History of Nineteenth-Century Colleges,” in Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000): 10-12; Glover, Southern Sons, 59-60; Horowtiz, Campus Life, 26-28; Towles, “Matter of Honor,” 13-16; “Convention of the Visitors and Governors of William & Mary College,” Richmond Enquirer, Sep. 22, 1809; Osborne, Crisis Years, 203.

34 Allmendinger, “Dangers of Ante-Bellum Student Life,” 78; Geiger, “Introduction,” 12; Glover, Southern Sons, 12-14, 42, 60-62; Sterling Ruffin to Thomas Ruffin, May 5, 1803, in J.G. de, Roulhac Hamilton, ed., The Papers of Thomas Ruffin, 3 vols (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Co) vol. 1:45.

35 John Augustine Smith, “Extract from the Address of the President of William and Mary College, at the Commencement,” Richmond Enquirer, Nov. 24, 1814 (quotations); Smith, “Commencement Address,” Richmond Enquirer, July 20, 1816.

36 John Augustine Smith, “Commencement Address,” Richmond Enquirer, July 20, 1816; Smith, “William and Mary College,” Richmond Enquirer, Aug. 12, 1817 (“to the disadvantage”). For the number of expulsions, see Smith, “Address to the House of Delegates,” Richmond Enquirer, Feb. 5, 1825. For negative commentary, see “William and Mary College Again,” Richmond Enquirer, Oct. 19, 1824.

37 John Augustine Smith, “William and Mary College,” Richmond Enquirer, Aug 12, 1817 (quotations); Osborne, Crisis Years, 263, faculty quoted on 275 (“formed”).

38 Osborne, Crisis Years, 206, 210, 231; John Augustine Smith, “William and Mary Quarterly,” Aug. 12, 1817 (“Contemplate”); Smith, “Communication: William and Mary College,” Richmond Enquirer, July 18, 1823; Smith, “Address to the House of Delegates,” Richmond Enquirer, Feb. 5, 1825.

39 John Tyler, “William & Mary College,” July 13, 1824; Osborne, Crisis Years, 283.

40 Ramsay, History of South Carolina, vol. 2:385-86 [[check]]]; Joseph C. Cabell to David

Baillie Warden, Apr. 1, 1823, in Hoyt, William D., Jr., “Mr. Cabell, Mr. Warden, and the University,

1823,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 49 (Oct. 1941): 352-53.

41 Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, Mar. 9, 1822, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-2705); Jefferson to Cooper, Nov. 2, 1822, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98- 01-02-3317).

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42 Holly Brewer, “Beyond Education: Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Republican’ Revision of the Laws Regarding Children,’” in James Gilreath, ed., Thomas Jefferson and the Education of a Citizen (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1999): 48-58

43 Thomas Jefferson to Trustees of the Lottery for East Tennessee College, May 6, 1810, in Looney, et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 2: 365-66 (“Much observation” and “academical village”); Thomas Jefferson, Report of Central College Visitors, Jan. 6, 1818, in, Cabell, J.C. Early History of the University of Virginia (1856), 400; Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1352); Mark R. Wenger, “Thomas Jefferson, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 103 (July 1995): 366-68.

44 Thomas Jefferson to Trustees of the Lottery for East Tennessee College, May 6, 1810, in Looney, et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 2: 365-66 (“It would afford”); Jefferson to Wilson Cary Nicholas, Apr. 2, 1816, in Looney, et al, eds., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series vol. 2: 623-29:(“peace & quiet”). For controversy over the cost and design, see “Gen. Blackburn’s Speech, in the House of Delegates,” Richmond Enquirer, Apr. 24, 1821.

45 [Literary Fund President and Directors,] Sundry Documents on the Subject of a System of Public Education for the State of Virginia (Richmond: Ritchie, Trueheart, and Duval, 1817), “Report of the President and Directors of the Literary Fund, to the General Assembly, in December, 1816,” 29; Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-3111): Monticello 24 Oct 1822 TJ to Maria Hadfield Cosway; Looney, et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 2: 365-66 (“Much observation” and “academical village”) Wenger, “Thomas Jefferson, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Virginia,” 371.

46 Thomas Jefferson to Francis W. Gilmer, Oct. 12, 1824, in R. B. Davis, ed., Correspondence of

Thomas Jefferson and Francis Walker Gilmer, 106-7. Jefferson reserved only one faculty post –

the most important and politically sensitive – for an American: the Professor of Law. But that

American had to be a Virginian, for no northerner would do. And he had to be a staunch

Republican, for a Virginia Federalist or even moderate Republican might betray the holy cause

of the university meant to defend the true political faith of Jeffersonian Virginia.

47 Rockfish Gap Report, Aug. 4, 1818, in Joseph C. Cabell, ed., Early History of the University of Virginia (1856), 438-39; Enactments by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

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for Constituting, Governing and Conducting that Institution (Charlottesville: C.P. M’Kennie, 1825), 6.

48 Enactments by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, 6-7; Jefferson to George

Ticknor, Apr. 7, 1825, Founders Online, National Archives

(http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5119).

49 Enactments by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, 10.

50 Enactments by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, 8 (“Minor Cases”);

Wenger, Mark R., “Thomas Jefferson, the College of William and Mary, and the University of

Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 103 (July 1995): 369-70; Jefferson

to George Ticknor, Apr. 7, 1825, Founders Online, National Archives

(http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5119).

51 Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello, (Boston: Little, Brown,

1977): 425

52 Thomas Jefferson to Robert Greenhow, July 24, 1825, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5403).

53 For the faculty’s intimidation by the students, see Nicholas Philip Trist to Thomas Jefferson, Sep. 18, 1825, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5543).

54 Philip St. George Cocke to John H. Cocke, Oct. 12, 1825, and Edmund Wilcox Hubard to Robert Thurston Hubard, n.d., c. Nov. 1825 (“Instead of”), Jefferson Family Letters (online), ICJS.

55 Wilson Cary Nicholas to Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 25, 1819, in Founders Online, National Archives, (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-0065).

56 Nicholas Philip Trist to Thomas Jefferson, Sep. 18, 1825, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5543); Edmund Wilcox Hubard to Robert Thurston Hubard, n.d., c. Nov. 1825, Jefferson Family Letters (online), ICJS.

Alan Taylor Premature Independence October 2017

57 Enactments by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, 7.

58 Wilson Cary Nicholas to Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 25, 1819, in Founders Online, National Archives, (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-0065); Thomas Jefferson to George Ticknor, Apr. 7, 1825, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5119).

59 Francis W. Gilmer to Thomas Jefferson, July 20, 1824, in R. B. Davis, ed., Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and Francis Walker Gilmer, 93.

60 Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. 1: 56-58, John Page quoted on 58.

61 Faculty Minutes, June 18, (“abandoned” and “shamefully”), June 23, June 28 (“praying” and

“unusual length”) and Aug. 6, 1825, “Jefferson’s University: The Early Life,” website at the

University of Virginia.

62 Seventy-eight students signed the June 28 petition. The troubles of September induced the hard-pressed faculty on September 26 to beg Jefferson and the Board of Visitors to reconsider, introducing a second vacation during the following summer. The visitors dared not back down after the major riot of October 1, reiterating the policy of one brief vacation (in winter). They did not reconsider until six months after Jefferson’s death. On December 16, 1826 the visitors authorized a second vacation to begin on July 10. Thomas Jefferson to Robley Dunglison, June 29, 1825, Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5343); Faculty Minutes, June 28, 30, Sep. 26, 1825, and Dec. 16, 1826, in “Jefferson’s University: The Early Life,” website at the University of Virginia.