Cornelia Phillips Spencer and the University

Remembering Reconstruction at Carolina - The University of North Carolina in Peace, War, and Reconstruction A lecture prepared for Remembering Reconstruction at Carolina, October 1-2, 2004 James Leloudis, Department of History October 2, 2004 © 2004 James Leloudis When Harry Watson contacted me last spring, he asked if I‟d be willing to offer some reflections on Carolina‟s 19th-century history, from the years preceding the Civil War through the tumultuous time of Reconstruction. That seemed easy enough. But then I began to wonder, what would I say? How would I summarize the story of that era? How would I distill it into simple historical lessons? The problem is that this university‟s history is anything but simple. It has been bound up with some of the most important questions in American life—not the least of which are questions about the meaning of citizenship, freedom, and equality in a democratic society. That, then, is the history that I want to recount, contested and contentious, still full of significance for our own time. We should begin, I think, by recognizing that on the eve of the Civil War North Carolina was less a democracy than an oligarchy. That meant that political and economic power rested in the hands of a network of wealthy slaveholding families rather than in those of the citizenry at large. The principles of oligarchy were written into the state's constitution. The proportioning of seats in the state legislature favored the slaveholding east over the Piedmont and western mountains. Until the late 1850s, there were property restrictions on the right to vote in some elections, and through the time of the Civil War, similar restrictions applied to the right to hold high government office. The same pattern also held at the county level, where the state constitution permitted voters to elect only two local officials—the sheriff and the clerk of court. The rest of county government was controlled by justices of the peace who were appointed by the governor and the legislature. And as you might suspect, those state officials tended to choose men who shared their social and economic views. From the county courthouse to the state capitol, the slaveholding gentry formed a tightly knit ruling class. This University stood at the head of that hierarchical social system. Leaders of the antebellum University had no doubt about their mission: it was to make young men into masters, in all of the varied meanings of that word. Sons of a slaveholding elite ventured to Chapel Hill from every corner of the South. By the 1850s, nearly forty percent of the student body came from out-of-state, and with an enrollment approaching 500, this college ranked second only to Yale in size. As defenders of human inequality in an age of natural rights, the University‟s patrons felt uneasy with the ideas of reform that were spreading throughout much of the western world. Parents sought for their sons an education that affirmed the fixity of human relations and instilled a habit of command. Young men came to Chapel Hill to confirm their place in society, not to discover a prescription for remaking their world. That purpose was reflected in the routines of the classroom. Faculty at the antebellum University viewed knowledge as a body of established truths, rather than as methods of inquiry and investigation. The course of study was fixed, and recitation—that is, memory work—was the favored method of instruction. By the time of graduation, college men had stored away the poetry of Horace, the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes, and the epic tales of Homer and Virgil. They had learned to seek knowledge in authoritative texts before their own interrogation of the world. And most important of all, in a society in which power was exercised primarily by means of the spoken word—in the pulpit, at the bar, in the legislative hall—graduates of the University had acquired the ability, as one alumnus put it, to "speak and act as a man." Such learning served the University and its alumni well during the years before the Civil War. By the late 1850s, Carolina could claim among its graduates a President and Vice- President of the United States, twenty governors, eight United States Senators, forty-one members of the House of Representatives, and innumerable local judges and state legislators. But the Civil War and emancipation changed everything. When fighting began in 1861, Carolina‟s president, David Lowry Swain, committed himself to keeping the institution open. He succeeded, for instance, in winning from the Confederate government a draft exemption for many of the school‟s students. Even so, faculty and student ranks dwindled. The Union strategy was to throttle the Confederacy by blockading it major ports on the Atlantic coast, taking control of the vital Mississippi River, and then marching steadily northward to conquer the remaining inland territory. North Carolina was one of the last sections of the Confederacy to fall, and as a result, it bore a brutally disproportionate share of the war‟s burden. Nearly one-fifth of the men drafted into the Confederate army came from this state alone. In 1865, after the Confederate government‟s evacuation of Richmond and Union victory over Joseph Johnston‟s army at Bentonville, Sherman‟s troops began a final march toward Raleigh and Chapel Hill. Both were spared the fate of other cities in the Union army‟s path when President Swain and Carolina alumnus William Alexander Graham surrendered the state capitol and the university to Sherman. President Swain and North Carolina‟s old guard managed to cling to power during the years Presidential Reconstruction immediately after the Civil War. But in 1867, Republicans in Congress, angered by the continuing defiance of ex-Confederates, took matters into their own hands. With passage of the Military Reconstruction Acts in March of 1867, they set the stage for political upheaval in North Carolina. The acts called for continued military occupation of the South and instructed army commanders in the region to organize elections for constitutional conventions that would return the rebel states to the Union. A special provision in the act gave black men—who would not be granted general suffrage rights until passage of the 15th amendment—a one-time right to vote for convention delegates. The seemingly impossible now became imaginable. A new state Republican party, organized in 1867, brought together former slaves and roughly one-fifth of the white electorate—the largest percentage of white voters in any southern state to cross the color line. Those white Republicans recognized a complementarity of interest with newly freed blacks. They had long resented the slaveholding elite‟s hold on power, and by the war‟s end, many had concluded that the battle was not theirs so much as it was a “rich man‟s fight.” Their alliance with former slaves did not erase racial animosity, which had been deeply engrained by two hundred years of experience with racial slavery. But it did hold out for both groups the promise of an enlarged political voice and greater economic opportunity—those things that gave „freedom‟ substance and meaning in day-to-day life. When voters went to the polls in late 1867, the results were astounding. Republicans won 107 of 120 seats in the constitutional convention. Fifteen of those delegates were black. In January 1868, the convention met in Raleigh and drafted a document that reflected the aspirations of former slaves and their white allies. The new constitution gave all adult men the right to vote, regardless of skin color or previous condition of servitude. It also established a school system that, while it remained racially segregated, promised for the first time in the state‟s history to educate all children, black and white alike. (How many of you in the audience attended public school in North Carolina? In a very direct sense, you owe your education to the constitutional convention of 1868 and to the desire for learning that fired the hearts of former slaves after the Civil War.) And last, but certainly not least, the new constitution revolutionized state and county government. It removed the property qualifications for state office-holding. And at the local level, it abolished the offices of the justices-of-the-peace and replaced them with elected, five-member boards of county commissioners who were responsible to voters rather than to political cronies in the legislature and the governor's mansion. With a few deft strokes, political power in North Carolina had been radically restructured. Additional proof came in the election of April 1868. Republican candidates took more than two-thirds of the legislative seats in Raleigh. Twenty of those legislators were black, and at the local level, scores of black men became county commissioners, judges, and school committeemen. Republican William Woods Holden also won the governor‟s office. Prior to the Civil War, Holden had been an outspoken advocate of secession, but as the fighting ground on and took a heavier and heavier toll on white yeoman families of the Piedmont and the western mountains, he switched sides. He had run for election as a peace candidate in 1864, and for a brief period during Presidential Reconstruction, he had served by presidential appointment as the state‟s provisional governor. The Constitution of 1868 brought change to the University as well. It stripped legislators of their authority to appoint the University‟s trustees and gave that responsibility to the state Board of Education, which was controlled by the governor. This move was designed to wrest control of the campus from its ex-Confederate alumni and, in the words of Governor Holden, to broaden and democratize the University—to remake it, he declared, as a “people‟s university,” open to all and no longer reserved “for the few.” The executive committee of the University‟s new Board of Trustees declared their support for the coeducation of men and women and endorsed plans for establishing in Raleigh a college for the freedmen, which was to be operated as a branch of the University.

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