For almost a decade after the death of James Blair, the placidity in College affairs that had marked the old president’s final years continued under his successor, William Dawson. That circumstance not only owed something to the conciliatory style of both Dawson and Governor William Gooch, but also to a continuing lack of divisive issues in either provincial or imperial affairs. The deaths of both men within a year of one another, their replacement by more controversial and less able successors, and, above all, the inauguration of a period of intense political conflict in the Virginia colony introduced a period of turmoil in the life of the College. Throughout the 1750s and 1760s, the faculty engaged in a series of bitter disputes with an increasingly vocal Board of Visitors, and sometimes with Virginia political leaders and royal governors as well, while a series of presidents looked on helplessly. Yet, if the consequences were sometimes damaging to its academic program and to its reputation, William and Mary continued to educate a growing number of Virginia leaders, including many of those who were to take a prominent part in the Revolution.

Before the Storm:  The Presidency of William Dawson, 1743–52

The ease of William Dawson’s accession to the presidency gave no hint of the troubled years that lay ahead. The letter that John Blair, the nephew of the deceased president, wrote to the bishop of London to report his uncle’s death made it clear that James Blair had hoped and expected that Dawson would succeed him in many of his preferments, although each appointment rested in the hands of different authorities.^[1] And although Dawson did not receive the rectorship of Bruton Parish, which went instead to his brother Thomas, his election as president was a foregone conclusion. Quickly approved by the Visitors, it was nevertheless fully acceptable to the faculty. Bishop Edmund Gibson lost no time after he received John Blair’s letter in naming Dawson commissary on July 18, 1743. Appointment to the governor’s council took a little longer, but it came in 1753.^[2] The new president gained further recognition when Oxford University conferred upon him in 1747 the honorary degree of doctor of divinity.^[3]

Dawson was a mild man, perceived as devout, and appreciated as a conciliator. Given the stormy history of the College both earlier and later, Dudley Digges, sometime Visitor and rector of the College, understandably looked back on Dawson’s administration as “the halcyon days of peace.”^[4] The goodwill that he enjoyed extended to the members of the burgesses, who were especially generous to the College in these years. In 1745 the General Assembly voted to renew the duty on tobacco exports to other colonies, the act being accompanied by statements in which the governor and the legislators sought to outdo one another in their praise for the College, with particular emphasis on its “present good Order, Decency & Discipline.^[5]  Three years later they also enacted a revised version of the export duty on skins and furs.^[6] The College continued, however, to face difficulty in getting the expected proceeds from these duties and also from the licensing of county surveyors (of whom George Washington was one, qualifying for his license in 1749).^[7] The essential harmony between College and provincial authorities even survived another spectacular Williamsburg fire, the burning of the first capitol in 1747, an event that once again required sharing the Main Building of the College with the offices of government for five years.^[8]

The new president could not match his predecessor’s reach into British ecclesiastical and political affairs, although even Blair’s influence had been slipping during his last years. Bishop Gibson, who had proved a firm supporter of Dawson, died in 1748. His successor as bishop of London, Thomas Sherlock, served as chancellor of the College from 1749 until his death in 1761 , notwithstanding the term limit of seven years in the statutes. He was, however, a rigid Anglican traditionalist, unsympathetic to the lax ways of the church in the colonies, and incapacitated at times by severe gout. While he perhaps fulfilled his essential responsibilities as chancellor, he lacked the political power of many previous bishops of London. Indeed, the political and intellectual climate in England had changed sufficiently that even a more active bishop might have lacked influence.^[9]

Dawson’s elevation to the presidency left vacant the chair of moral philosophy, to which William Preston was appointed in 1744. Preston’s initial reputation was that of perhaps the sternest puritan to serve on the colonial faculty, typified by his objections to a student performance of Addison’s Cato and his intrusion into a rehearsal where he ripped down the curtains around an improvised stage. Preston stayed on for more than a decade, until he found himself on the receiving end of charges of immorality and intemperance and resigned. A second candidate for a faculty appointment in 1748 presented a different problem. Alexander Spencer, a self-professed deist who “did not believe the Scripture,” sought the post in mathematics and natural philosophy. Despite his heterodoxy and the common knowledge that he “set up whole Nights at Dice,” Spencer asked to be sent back to England for ordination. The College, however, declined to pursue his appointment.^[10] The next year Dawson did succeed in making two appointments, Richard Graham, a well regarded graduate of Queens, Oxford, in the chair of natural philosophy and John Camm, who would stay for almost three decades in one of the divinity chairs, until forced out for his Loyalism.

Dawson tolerated a growing tendency of the faculty to violate the College statutes forbidding the faculty to be married. Both William Preston and Thomas Robinson took wives sometime before the spring of 1748, while Dawson himself remained single. An old friend and colleague, Edward Ford, hearing of the marriages of the two, chided the president for his “Perseverance in a State of Celibacy in the warm Latitude of 37 Deg. & amidst so many tempting Objects,” urging him to “come into the Fashion, & take some pretty Turtle to be yr. Mate.” Dawson took his friend’s advice by wedding Mary Stith, the sister of the former Grammar School master and niece of Sir John Randolph.^[11]

As the College entered the decade of the 1750s, it had thus remained relatively free of divisive controversies for some two decades, during which its faculty had been brought to full strength and its buildings completed. If William Dawson had not added significantly to what Blair had accomplished, neither had he lost any ground, apart from some weakening of the faculty of the School of Philosophy by the loss of Joshua Fry and the substitution of the less able William Preston for himself.

The College did seem to receive more favorable notice than had often been the case, although largely from those with a stake in its success. The great English evangelical preacher, George Whitefield, had visited Williamsburg in 1739 and proclaimed William and Mary as “near in the same Order and under the same Regulation and Discipline, as in our Universities at Home.” But Blair had received Whitefield hospitably, even inviting him to preach at Bruton Parish; and Whitefield had found two of his Oxford contemporaries on the faculty.^[12]

A more backhanded compliment appeared in the London Magazine of July 1746, in which an anonymous author reported that the students lived “in an academical Manner” and that “the Masters were Men of great Knowledge and Discretion.” He went on, however, to declare that William and Mary “can’t yet vie with those excellent Universities . . . of the Massachusetts,” explaining that students in Virginia were “pamper’ d much more in Softness and Ease.” Charles Stewart, a merchant involved in Virginia trade was, however, more complimentary when he wrote to an Antiguan correspondent:

Our Colledge has lain under reflections for some Time, but of late has somewhat retrieved its Character, altho’ it does not answer the Expectations that might be had from so great a foundation and noble an Endowment. There are at Present not above 70 Scholars in it, but that is in a great Measure owing to the Gentlemen of the Country who generally prefer private Schools, and from our Personal Acquaintance with all the Masters of the Colledge, we have reason to believe that the reflections that are thrown on them are unjust, and that they are Sufficiently capable to lay the foundations of a Youth’s Knowledge.^[13]

Governor Gooch had always been full of compliments for William and Mary, never more so than in his remarks at the time of the renewal of the tobacco duty in 1745 when he praised it as “that Seminary of Learning, and Ornament to Virginia.”^[14]  William Dawson added his own note of praise when he wrote in 1750 to Gooch, who had by then returned to England for reasons of health, that “the College thrives in Reputation, and Numbers of Scholars, being now almost 60.”^[15] Gooch died in little more than a year on December 17, 1751, and Dawson, seven months later in July 1752. For the College the “halcyon days of peace” were at an end. Even before William Dawson’s death, Gooch’s successor, Robert Dinwiddie, had stirred the first of the series of controversies in which faculty, presidents, and Visitors found themselves embroiled for the remainder of the colonial era.

The Battle Lines Are Drawn, 1752–55

Periods of turmoil in College affairs had always coincided with comparable times in provincial and imperial politics. The crisis that now opened at the middle of the eighteenth century was no exception, although underlying circumstances to some extent differed. For one thing, by the late 1740s, a new, tough-minded group of political leaders had come to power in Britain. They were men who were determined to regulate far more closely than before the commerce and political administration of an increasingly valuable empire, but who were far less concerned with furthering such cultural ends as religion or education in the colonies. Their objectives conflicted with those of an entrenched, experienced, and frequently unified Virginia elite determined to resist the new imperial policies. While these imperial issues were often sharply drawn, the colony was at the same time experiencing a less well formed series of strains in its internal social and political order, among which were a sense of economic decline among the great tobacco planters, the emergence of dissenting religious groups who directly challenged the Anglican establishment, and a need to accommodate the structure of provincial government to rapid population growth concentrated in newly settled western regions of Virginia.^[16]

In some respects College involvement in the contests produced by these tensions was predictable. In particular, the faculty, as had long been the case, were likely to be among the most vocal of the Anglican clergy of the colony and to take a leading part in defending the interests of the church and its ministers against provincial politicians and, now, religious dissenters. They remained a strong—sometimes the only—voice from within the colony in support of a forceful imperial policy. While at times motivated by concern for their own economic well-being as ministers paid out of public taxation, they clearly continued, too, to think of the College as a bastion of church and empire, the exemplar in Virginia of traditional English culture.

Yet, in other respects circumstances at William and Mary were much altered. First of all, there was no longer a James Blair. His successors, whatever the personal qualities of some, were rendered ineffective by circumstances sometimes beyond their control, but as often by their own limitations. None of the five who served over the three decades after Blair’s death achieved a vestige of the power that he exercised in provincial politics, even when they sometimes held the same combination of offices. Nor could they establish effective authority over, or command respect from, their faculty. Blair, of course, had never endeared himself to most of those who taught under him, but he usually confronted a single master, an Inglis or a Hugh Jones, in an unequal contest. Since the transfer of the charter, the faculty had become a larger, more coherent group, able to defy the president and outvote him in the meetings of the faculty and masters that had now become a more regular feature of institutional life.

The decline in presidential authority effectively destroyed the ability of Blair’s successors to bridge the tension between the Visitors and faculty, a tension built into the charter and statutes and exacerbated by the differing ambitions for the College of the two groups. The result was a clash between the powerful leaders of the colony who dominated the Visitors and an increasingly vocal faculty. While faculty more than ever inserted themselves in broader political issues and always against the provincial leaders, the struggle increasingly became one over the destiny of the College itself. Small and fragile as it was, William and Mary became for both sets of contestants a central instrument for fulfilling their differing conceptions of education and the cultural order. The resultant conflict was bitter, often petty, and unyielding on either side, but underneath it lay issues of substance regarding the character and purpose of William and Mary.

The round of controversies at the College began with a dispute in August 1752 over the election of a successor to William Dawson as president, in which a political dispute that had developed a few months earlier between provincial leaders and Governor Robert Dinwiddie played a significant part. Thus, from the beginning, the politics of the colony and the affairs of the College became enmeshed, although the alignments in this dispute differed from those in the subsequent battles. Dinwiddie had reached Virginia in November 1751 to take up his office. The new governor was no stranger to Virginia, having made it his base when he previously served as surveyor of customs for the mainland British colonies south of Pennsylvania, and having proved generally popular. He was, however, a zealous imperial bureaucrat with a particular interest in financial affairs. Almost the first move that Dinwiddie made was to institute a fee of one pistole (a Spanish coin in wide circulation in the British colonies) for affixing his seal to land patents. His action stirred a surprisingly sharp attack from a number of Virginia leaders, especially prominent members of the House of Burgesses. The controversy, commonly labeled the Pistole Fee Controversy, dragged on for several years, raising the issue of taxation by imperial authorities in terms that foreshadowed the later Stamp Act fight in 1765.^[17]

The Pistole Fee Controversy had just gotten under way shortly before the Board of Visitors turned in April 1752 to the election of the new College president. Dinwiddie became even angrier at the criticism of his policy when he learned that the person whom he regarded as primarily responsible for instigating the attack on the pistole fee, the Reverend William Stith, was a contender for the presidency. The people of Spirit entered into a High Priest, who was supported by the Family of the Randolphs.”^[18] Stith, as Dinwiddie correctly noted, was a Randolph kinsman, a cousin and political ally of Peyton Randolph and Richard Bland, two leading opponents of the pistole fee and powerful burgesses. Stith was, of course, an old College hand as well, an alumnus and former Grammar School master, who numbered some of his former students among the members of the Board of Visitors. Thus, he had the backing of powerful provincial leaders for the presidency.^[19]

Stith was also the brother-in-law of the late President That relationship proved of no advantage, however; one of his opponents for the presidency was William Dawson’s younger brother, Thomas, rector of Bruton Parish Church, the master of the Indian School, and the senior faculty member in length of service. A third candidate for the post, the Reverend William Robinson, was the great-nephew of John Robinson, a former bishop of London and chancellor of the College. All three were educated at Oxford, while Robinson and Stith were Virginians. Robinson proved to have insufficient support to be a serious candidate, but Thomas Dawson emerged as a formidable challenger. He drew the support of the governor, who was determined to block Stith; of John Blair, who was an ally of Dinwiddie, a member of the governor’s council, and deputy auditor general of crown revenues; and almost certainly of the faculty, who could be expected to distrust Stith’s Virginia political connections.

The infighting got under way immediately. Within five days of William Dawson’s death, John Blair began the campaign for Thomas Dawson, whom he described to the bishop of London as a “truly pious & diligent Pastor, and an able Divine.” In contrast, he attacked Stith as lacking “that sweet engaging Temper that Mr. Dawson has; being, I think, of a too overbearing, Satirical and Domineering Temper (too incident to school-masters); of which I have known many Instances in his Conduct”^[20] Dinwiddie joined the attack almost immediately. In his letter to Bishop Sherlock, the governor labeled Stith “a very improper Person,” who had opposed him by ”low Insinuations, contrary to Truth” and attempted “to make a Party of the lower Class of People” against him.^[21] The choice of a president came to a vote at a meeting of the Visitors on August 13, 1752, with both sides well represented. After a second count and with the tiebreaking vote of Rector Dudley Digges in favor of his old teacher, Stith gained the victory.^[22]

Blair and Dinwiddie had still another battle to fight, for they had a chance to keep Stith from receiving the appointment as commissary that by now seemed logically to go with the presidency. Stith lost no time in approaching Bishop Sherlock to claim the office as a customary right and to defend himself from the “Virulence and Fury” of those who sought to “starve” him in the single post of president. Dinwiddie and Blair had, of course, directed their earlier letters to the bishop, not because he had the authority as chancellor to influence the election of a president, but because he would have to choose his new commissary. Employing a combination of arguments, especially accusations of Stith’s religious heterodoxy and complaints that the pistole fee fight revealed him to be a “violent Incendiary,” the two men fired off a new round of letters to Sherlock. Thomas Dawson also made his own bid for the post, praising Dinwiddie as “a sincere Friend to our Church, Clergy, & Seat of Education” and promising to “exert my sincere and constant Endeavours faithfully and conscientiously to discharge that important Trust.” Dinwiddie also reminded Sherlock that since Dawson had inherited responsibility for his brother’s two children and for a sister and her four children whom William Dawson had brought over to Virginia, he would be “much Straitened in Supporting of them, unless he has Yr: Lordships Favor in appointing him Comissary.”

This time Dinwiddie and Blair were more successful, since the bishop chose Thomas Dawson. He also reprimanded Stith for his conduct in opposing the pistole fee and gave credence to the accusations of heterodoxy. Stith defended himself vigorously on both counts, although his statement could not mask his genuinely latitudinarian religious principles and his deep commitment to the constitutional liberties of “my Country,” as he referred to Virginia. The bad feeling continued between Blair and Stith, as did their mutual letters of recrimination to Bishop Sherlock.^[23]

William Stith’s victory was both bitter and partial, nor did his brief tenure as president before his death on September I0, 1755, go particularly well. He gained some of the financial security he sought—and escaped the near impossibility of serving a parish sixty miles distant from Williamsburg—by his election as rector of Yorkhampton Parish in nearby York County. His political ties also won him appointment as chaplain to the House of Burgesses, where, according to John Blair, he continued his ”black work” of inflaming opposition to Dinwiddie.^[24] Resident now in a more academic environment, he gave some thought to continuing the work on Virginia history he had begun while at Varina, but in the end confessed his reluctance to resume the hard work of searching old records and papers. Inside the College Stith’s narrow margin of victory and lack of faculty support took its toll. He may have been unduly optimistic when he wrote a year into his presidency that “the College is at present in a very peaceable & thriving Way, & has now more Scholars in it, than it has ever had from its first Foundation, with a fair prospect of its still farther increasing.”^[25] Some years later in 1767, his strong advocate Dudley Digges remembered Stith’s presidency as a difficult one when he observed: “Mr. Stith was not only a Man of Learning, but was known to have Spirit and Resolution enough to carry him through his Duty in every Station of life; but all Matters in the College being determinable by a Majority of Voices, and the President standing single, he could do nothing.”^[26] Nor did Stith have an opportunity to name any new members of the faculty, since those who were in place at the time of William Dawson’s death­—Thomas Dawson, William Preston, Thomas Robinson, John Camm, and Richard Graham—continued in their appointments.

Evidence of issues on which the faculty blocked Stith is scarce. The president seemed to get his way in putting into effect on his own authority a stricter disciplinary code for students and in ordering the faculty to enforce it. Among other things the regulations stipulated that no student should “saunter away his Time” on any of the College steps or play during school hours. Students were also to eat their dinner and supper in the hall unless ill and were forbidden to go into the kitchen. There were also warnings against the boys engaging in horse racing.^[27] At the same time, Stith set out to enlist the Visitors in a revision of the statutes of 1727 to reconcile the conflicting additions that had been made over a quarter century. The Visitors, where he enjoyed more support, agreed to form a committee for the purpose, but the president did not live long enough to bring the matter to completion. The Visitors continued their work, however, adopting the revised statutes on March 29, 1756, and ordering them to be printed with the charter and the transfer. The result was the 1758 edition, printed by William Hunter.^[28] For all the brevity and ineffectiveness of his presidency, Stith was a significant figure in the history of the colonial College. Given the publication of his history of Virginia, he was one of its most accomplished alumni. Even his unsuccessful presidency marked a certain milestone. His was the first closely fought election of a president, and the event was, in a way, the opening chapter in the seemingly ceaseless round of controversies that gripped the College after 1750. His own views and the circumstances of his election, with the exclusive support of Virginia laymen and the opposition of the faculty, made more explicit than ever the question of whether the College would be shaped by imperial or provincial culture. There was no question which side Stith favored. We do not know what Stith actually envisioned in enlisting the Visitors to overhaul the College statutes, but we do know that such a revision became a centerpiece of the Visitors’ effort over the next two decades to establish their dominance of the faculty.

The Battle Is Joined, 1755–58

On November 1, 1755, six weeks after Stith’s death, Thomas Dawson slipped quietly into the College presidency. Since he retained his appointment as commissary, although still without a commission, and by now also held membership on the council, he was able to combine the three offices that Blair and William Dawson had held. Thomas Dawson, however, proved too ineffective and was too overwhelmed by the problems that immediately beset him to achieve any of the power and influence that his offices potentially conveyed. Those problems would have severely tested a stronger president, but they destroyed Dawson, who died a hopeless alcoholic within five years.

Indeed, Dawson found his first crisis-in-the-making as he assumed the presidency. In October 1755 the General Assembly, responding to a severe failure in the tobacco crop and an astronomical rise in its value, passed “An act to enable the inhabitants to discharge their tobacco debts in money, for the present year.” In the standing laws of the colony, the salaries of public officials and other public obligations were fixed at a specified number of pounds of tobacco, based on the normal and relatively low price of the crop. With the massive crop failure and resultant high prices, those who, like the Anglican clergy, received their pay in tobacco or its equivalent value, stood to reap an enormous increase. The Two-Penny Act, as the recent legislation came to be called, sought relief for taxpayers by commuting the obligation to the more normal value of tobacco, two pence per pound, for the year of the short crop.^[29] One clergyman who did not oppose the emergency legislation calculated that payment of his stipend of seventeen thousand pounds of tobacco at the abnormally higher rate would have more than doubled what he would normally have received. Thus, the gain was substantial for the frequently hard-pressed clerics.^[30]

A number of Anglican clergymen determined to take advantage of the windfall and to insist on their legal right to the larger amount. After failing to persuade Governor Dinwiddie to veto the Two-Penny Act, they then asked Thomas Dawson as commissary to call a convocation of the clergy in order to press an appeal to the bishop of London. Failing in that effort as well, a group of eight clerics on November 29, 1755, addressed their own petition to Bishop Sherlock. Four of the signers, including the probable author, John Camm, were members of the College faculty, making it clear that the faculty stood at the center of the agitation that soon became known as the Parsons’ Cause. The language of the petition seemed almost certainly a reflection of Camm’s high view of the place of church and empire, for it moved beyond the single question of fairness to reiterate the dependence of the colonies on the mother country and to defend the power of the king and his councillors over any colonial legislature.^[31] A second communication from ten clergymen, only one a sign er of the earlier one, went out to the bishop on February 25, 1756. In addition to laying great stress on the vulnerability of the clergy, the petitioners, although none of them were faculty members, went on to assert that the act had “a threatening aspect upon all useful seminaries of Leaming particularly the College of William & Mary in this Colony, founded by Royal Charter, in which Seminary our youth are educated in several useful branches of learning & some trained up for the ministry.”^[32] By a letter of the same date, Dawson informed Sherlock that as “always a lover of peace & quieteness,” he preferred a “private report” on the act to any public protest, a clear indication of his discomfort at being caught in the middle of the dispute brewing between the clerics and the political leadership.^[33]

With an improvement of the tobacco crop in both 1756 and 1757, the political controversy surrounding the Two-Penny Act was muted for a time, but not the tempo of affairs at the College. There was a momentary lull in 1756, affording enough time in April for the College to confer an honorary degree of master of arts upon Benjamin Franklin, which he received in the presence of President Dawson and five members of the faculty. So far as we know, this was the first degree William and Mary had awarded to anyone, although Franklin himself had already received similar recognition from Yale and Harvard.^[34]

By the following spring, the faculty had involved themselves in another contest with the leaders of the provincial government. Their immediate cause was that of an embattled clergyman, the Reverend John Brunskill, Jr., rector of Hamilton Parish, Prince William County. For the clergy larger principles were also at stake in the suspicious atmosphere after the fight over the Two-Penny Act and a growing pattern of confrontation between ministers and their vestries.^[35] Brunskill stood charged by his vestry with “monstrous immoralities, profane swearing, drunkenness and very immodest actions.” Dinwiddie sided with his accusers, remarking himself that Brunskill had committed “every Sin except Murder and the last he had very nearly perpetrated on his own Wife by ty’g her up by the Legge to the Bed Post and cut’g her in a cruel Man’r with Knives.” The clergy came fully to Brunskill’s defense. Weak as the position of Thomas Dawson was, he had attempted on this occasion to champion his clergy and to try to keep the matter within his authority. Dinwiddie had insisted that jurisdiction belonged to the governor and council sitting as the General Court, which had tried the case and removed Brunskill, forbidding him to officiate in any church within the colony. Dawson declined to sit on the trial, and Brunskill refused to recognize the legality of the court’s decision. A number of clergymen, several faculty members among them, sided with him, especially the combative John Camm, who invited the embattled cleric to preach in his parish in defiance of the General Court and rallied his faculty colleagues in support of an effort to call a clerical convocation.

Since the issues involved in the Brunskill affair concerned the faculty in their capacity as ordained clerics who in several instances also served parishes, they did not directly affect the College. Yet the contest had completed a process that the Two Penny Act had begun , namely, to bring the faculty, and therefore the College, into a more direct confrontation with both the governor and the provincial leadership. The governor was particularly vehement in his counterattack, charging that in their abortive effort to summon a meeting of the clergy, the faculty members “had rid about the country and taken incredible pain by notorious falsehoods to inveigle as many as possible in their cabals.” He went on to accuse them of refusing to aid Thomas Dawson during a long illness or even to attend Bruton Parish while he was rector. The faculty, so the governor declared, had “quite ruined” the College and discouraged parents from sending their children “till there is a new set of professors.”^[36]

The deeper roots and the pervasive nature of the conflict between faculty and provincial authorities became more apparent in a conflict that developed simultaneously with that over Brunskill, one within the College and specifically over matters of education and discipline. It broke into the open in May 1756 when the faculty dismissed two students, Matthew Hubard and Cole Digges, “not only for their remarkable Idleness & bad Behaviour in general, but particularly for whipping the little Boys in the Grammar School—for Obstinacy & Disrespect to the Grammar Master & for refusing to answer before the President and Masters the Complaints made against them.” Matthew Hubard’s older brother James, an alumnus who was serving as usher of the Grammar School, stood outside the door as the faculty interrogated the offenders and, upon hearing the verdict, broke into the meeting “in a most scandalous, impudent, & unheard of Manner,” denounced the faculty, and took his brother away. Declaring that he had acted in “the Heat of Passion, excited by brotherly Affection,” James Hubard apologized the next day and was pardoned, but the verdict against the two students stuck.^[37]

Although faculty members must have known that they were punishing sons of two prominent families, they could hardly have expected that the Board of Visitors would react quite so punitively against what appeared to be serious breaches of discipline. The Visitors turned first against the master who brought the charges, Thomas Robinson, who had by now served for fifteen years as the Grammar School master and who had only recently recovered from an illness. Complaining of “his bodily Infirmities” and his neglect of his College duties in favor of his parochial responsibilities, the Visitors voted for his dismissal. The action assumed a power of dismissal not explicitly granted to the Visitors in the 1727 statutes, and a part of the indictment seemed untrue. Robinson was one of only two masters who did not hold a parish living, although he sometimes went on Sundays to preach for a friend. Despite their attack on his competence, the Visitors asked Robinson to stay on for six months, but, significantly, they also agreed to ask the bishop of London to find a layman as his replacement.^[38]  The Visitors had made a calculated move to establish their clear dominance over the faculty and to reduce clerical influence at William and Mary.

Thomas Dawson proved to be a cipher in the contest, as indecisive as ever. With the position of the faculty so vulnerable, William Preston, the professor of moral philosophy, grew afraid and offered to resign in order to return to England. The Visitors, however, wanted more blood, leaving it to Governor Dinwiddie, who was one of their number, to prepare an escalated group of charges against Robinson and to add Preston to the indictment. Both stood accused of “having scandalized the Visitors of the College and indeed the country in general” by immoral conduct, including excessive drinking and neglect of duty. Although the College authorities had consistently tolerated marriage by faculty in violation of the 1727 statutes, Dinwiddie now raised that issue as well.^[39]

Dinwiddie’s charges were dated September 12, 1757, and on the twenty-seventh the faculty returned to the case of the Hubard brothers and Cole Digges, dismissing James Hubard as usher on the grounds that he “continues to behave very ill in his Office, and is the occasion of the present Disorders in the College.”^[40] The Visitors countered by appointing a committee to investigate the usher’s dismissal, only to meet uncompromising resistance from the remaining faculty. John Camm as usual took the lead, according to a report of their meeting of November 4, in insisting that by the terms of the statutes “the sole Power of appointing or removing an Usher, is in the President and Masters . . . which Power he thought absolutely necessary for the good Government of the College, and Education of the Youth.” The other faculty followed his lead, stating that they ”were of the same Opinion.” The contest, which had now dragged on for six months, must have wrecked the long Trinity term. Now, after reviewing the statutes and reasserting their powers of dismissal, the Visitors determined to discharge the remaining masters, John Camm, Richard Graham, and Emmanuel Jones, the latter having come as Indian School master when Thomas Dawson succeeded to the presidency. William and Mary was, once again, as Hugh Jones had found it forty years earlier, a college without a faculty. Emmanuel Jones, a consistent trimmer in his long tenure at the College, began to think better of his decision and, after admitting his error, gained reinstatement.^[41]

Graham and Camm, joined by Thomas Robinson, who had never accepted his dismissal, stood their ground­­­­–quite literally, since they refused to vacate their College rooms. At their next meeting on February 7, 1758, the Visitors instructed President Dawson and Jones to order the housekeeper to deny the dissidents provisions and the servants not to obey any of their orders. The three were also to turn in their keys.^[42] Dawson and Jones in turn demanded a week later that they comply, calling in the housekeeper and the writing master as witnesses.^[43] When they continued to resist, Dawson and Jones lost their nerve and voted to seek legal advice. A month later Dawson also attempted to get Richard Graham, who served as bursar, to turn over the College accounts, to which he responded that he would do so “when the Weather was warmer” or when “there was a Society [i.e., a duly constituted faculty] to examine them.”^[44]

For the moment the dispute seemed to have come to an impasse. Dawson had proved entirely unable to deal with the yearlong struggle, and the faculty had demonstrated its contempt for him. Cole Digges gained reinstatement, but James Hubard did not return as usher. The Visitors found three new appointees for the two philosophy chairs and the Grammar School but chose to do without anyone in either divinity chair, a further demonstration of their growing hostility to the church to which they nominally adhered. Camm, Graham, and Robinson finally yielded their rooms, although they proceeded with an appeal of their case to the Privy Council. If the Visitors had seemed to carry the day, their victory was far from complete. In some respects Thomas Dawson was the real loser, condemned to suffer more than two additional years as president without either influence or respect from either side. Also, the College itself had paid a heavy price, and its troubles were only beginning.

The War between Visitors and Faculty Continues, 1758–64

If in 1758 the Visitors and the president were satisfied that they had rid themselves of a troublesome faculty and found abler replacements, they faced some unpleasant surprises. On paper, the three new faculty members were the intellectual superiors of many of their predecessors, but their tenure, brief in two cases, only brought a new round of controversies to the College.

William Small, who enjoys a particularly high reputation in the history of the colonial College as Thomas Jefferson’s respected mentor and the ablest scientist to serve on the faculty, became the new master of natural philosophy. He was one of the rare laymen on the faculty, the last, in fact, before the American Revolution, and held a master of arts degree from Aberdeen.^[45] Goronwy Owen, the new Grammar School master, perhaps deserves a rank equivalent to Small’s, although in literature rather than in science. He was an accomplished linguist and poet as well as a clergyman. Owen’s attendance at Jesus College, Oxford, was brief, but he had already received an excellent classical education at Friars School, Bangor, in his native Wales.^[46] Jacob Rowe, who completed the new appointments by filling the chair of moral philosophy, had gained admittance to Oxford by competitive examination and came recommended by the bishop of London as a man of learning.^[47]

Just as the new faculty members were settling in, the colony suffered a second year of failure of the tobacco crop, prompting another Two-Penny Act that again commuted payment of public obligations to two pence per pound of tobacco for one year.^[48] The act passed at the beginning of the term of a new governor, Francis Fauquier, who had replaced an ailing Dinwiddie the preceding June.^[49] Fauquier, educated as were many of the William and Mary faculty at Queen’s College, Oxford, was a person of markedly greater intellectual accomplishment than the typical colonial governor, a consequence of his education, musical interest, and scientific curiosity. Much about his interests might have suggested that he would take an active part in College affairs.^[50] Indeed, William Small and, for a time, Goronwy Owen were among the circle of companions often invited to the Governor’s Palace. Like Dinwiddie, however, Fauquier was sympathetic to the colonists regarding the Two-Penny Act and thoroughly angered by the resistance mounted by the “hot Headed Leaders” of the clergy, including those at the College.^[51]

With the passage of the Two-Penny Act, Fauquier gained his first experience with the political activism of the College faculty. Even while the General Assembly had the second two-penny legislation under discussion, the new professor of moral philosophy, Jacob Rowe, angrily declared that all who might support its provisions were “scoundrels” and that if any such member, “wanting to receive the Sacrament, was to apply to him, he would refuse to administer it.” A report of the incident led the House of Burgesses on September 21, 1758, to bring Rowe before it in the custody of the sergeant at arms. Rowe apologized and escaped a fine, his statement revealing that he had made his reckless threat in a private conversation at a friend’s house when “provoked by some rude Expressions used by some of the Company, against that sacred Order to which he belongs.”^[52]

John Camm, the principal clerical spokesman in the initial dispute over the 1755 act, was not so easily intimidated. Still a parish clergyman while his dismissal from the faculty was on appeal, he again took the lead in urging Thomas Dawson to call a convocation to organize clerical opposition. The president characteristically refused to roil the waters, and about half of the seventy-odd clergy in the colony, including all of the faculty except Dawson, gathered on their own. With a single dissenting vote, the group determined to send Camm to England to seek repeal of the two-penny legislation. Within a few weeks of Fauquier’ s approval of the second act, Camm departed, carrying a ”Representation of the Clergy of the Church of England” and also the materials necessary to his case and that of his two colleagues, Graham and Robinson, for reinstatement to the College faculty. Camm, whom Fauquier termed “a Man of Abilities but a Turbulent Man who delights to live in a Flame,” remained as intransigent as ever, denouncing the legislation as a defiance of royal authority. While both sides waited out the lengthy process of Privy Council review, the issue continued to fester and feed into the ongoing struggle between the faculty and Visitors.^[53]

The next chapter of that saga centered on Goronwy Owen, the Grammar School master, and Jacob Rowe, who had apparently abandoned the contrition that he had earlier exhibited before the burgesses. The issue, however, was not one of political principle or interest, but rather of personal conduct and character. The two had become notorious for appearing on the streets of Williamsburg and Yorktown inebriated, shouting profanity, and worse, until the Visitors complained of their “horrid oaths and execrations in their common conversations­­­­­­­­­­­—by which practices the youth are likely to be corrupted.” They stood accused as well of promoting conflict between the president and the masters.^[54]

In the most spectacular incident, for which Rowe received the blame, although Owen may have been an equal participant, the professor of moral philosophy led the students in a fight with the town apprentices. It was described by Rowe’s accusers as “a pitched battle with pistols and other weapons.” Rowe, moreover, held a pistol to the breast of two men who sought to intervene. One was Peyton Randolph, Visitor and recent rector, longtime College representative in the House of Burgesses, attorney general of the colony, and strident opponent of the Parsons’ Cause. On the day following, Rowe attacked President Dawson for conducting an inquiry among the students without calling together the full body of masters; he also insulted the rector when he ordered Rowe to keep the students in on the next night. Rowe had little chance of escaping punishment for these offenses and, indeed, made little effort to do so, choosing instead to heap abuse on Dawson. By the end of September 1760, he had been dismissed and ordered off the College grounds.^[55] Goronwy Owen fared no better. Arriving in Virginia as a widower with young children—his wife and one son had died on the voyage to America—he must have commanded some sympathy. Then he had married Dawson’s sister, who was the College housekeeper. But the problems with his drinking and “other flagrant improprieties” persisted until he had to leave, although he was permitted to resign. Fauquier found him a place as rector of St. Andrew’s Parish, Brunswick County, a remote area south of the James River, where he remained until his death in 1769.^[56]

Shortly before the fate of Rowe and Owen had been settled, the Parsons’ Cause had entered a new and more combative phase. On August 10, 1759, the Privy Council disallowed the two-penny legislation, and a few weeks later, the king issued a reprimand to Governor Fauquier for having approved the second act. John Camm was appointed to bring the official documents to the colony, but while he delayed his departure for several months, unofficial reports of the outcome reached Virginia and immediately began to stir opposition. As a further irritant, Camm had also instructed his attorney in Virginia to bring a suit for his back salary.

Thus, when Camm finally returned from England on June 20, 1760, the dispute was well advanced. He must have taken particular pleasure in delivering the official documents in person to Governor Fauquier, although he waited a week after his arrival to do so. Fauquier was enraged, believing that Camm had misrepresented him in London, and also offended that the much-delayed document was “open, dirty, and worn out at the Edges and Folds.” Calling in his servants and slaves, and pointing to Camm, the governor ordered that he never be admitted to the Palace again, although Fauquier later sent word that he would receive written communications.^[57]

By taking a leading part in the clerical suits against some of the parish vestries and by joining battle in the pamphlet war with Virginia spokesmen, Camm once again placed himself at the center of the Parsons’ Cause, which dragged on until Camm lost a last appeal of his suit to the Privy Council in 1767.^[58] Camm’s rush to engage himself further in the Parsons’ Cause only added to the woes of the hapless Thomas Dawson. The president was already in the midst of his difficulties with Jacob Rowe and Goronwy Owen, and Camm now pressed Dawson without success to call a convocation of the clergy so that he might report on his activities in England. By the fall of 1760, Rowe and Owen were gone, and then on November 29, Dawson died. Recognizing the great tragedy of Dawson’s ineffectiveness in the face of the bitter divisions that had gripped the College, Fauquier praised him in an obituary in the Maryland Gazette for “moderation, meekness, forgiveness, and long suffering” and lamented that he had become “a victim to . . . repeated marks of ingratitude and malice.”^[59]

Thus the Visitors, in the midst of other problems at the College, had to find a new president from an unpromising field. John Camm, although not yet reinstated to the faculty, apparently sought the backing of the chancellor for the appointment, but the Visitors were certain to resist that move.^[60] The only active faculty at the time were William Small, a layman and hence ineligible for the presidency, and Emmanuel Jones, whom the Visitors were unwilling to appoint. They turned instead to the Reverend William Yates, an alumnus, the son of former divinity professor Bartholomew Yates, and rector of Abingdon Parish, Gloucester County. Yates received a somewhat tepid endorsement from Visitor Dudley Digges, who termed him “a Gentleman of learning, great Moderation and Piety.” But John Camm’s self-interested charge that Yates had “no kinds of pretensions to an office of the kind” and John Page’s later complaint about his “arid teaching” demonstrated the general lack of enthusiasm for him. Bishop Sherlock had by the time of Yates’s appointment already moved to appoint as commissary a close associate of Camm, the Reverend William Robinson. The Visitors and the governor managed, however, to put Yates on the council rather than Robinson, who never had the confidence of the governor. Yates also succeeded Dawson as rector of Bruton Parish. The faculty dissidents largely ignored Yates, while relying on Commissary Robinson to represent their interests. He had, of course, a more direct link to the chancellor; and he could also be helpful as a dissident member of the Board of Visitors.^[61]

With the death on July 18, 1761, of Bishop Sherlock, after twelve continuous years as chancellor and slightly longer as bishop of London, the faculty lost a champion of its interests. William Robinson’s continuation as commissary also became uncertain. Fauquier had written just days after Sherlock’s death to the Reverend Samuel Nicolls objecting, as diplomatically as he could manage, to Sherlock’s appointment of William Robinson as commissary. Nicolls showed the letter to the new bishop of London, Thomas Hayter. In the fall of 1761, even before they knew that Hayter was to be the new bishop, both Camm and Robinson had written to advance the commissary’s reappointment. Hayter had complied but then died in the following year. So Robinson renewed the effort to keep his office by writing to the new bishop, Richard Osbaldeston, on June 8, 1762, that he had been appointed by Hayter. Bishop Osbaldeston clearly took the hint, for Robinson wrote him a very long letter, undated but received in early 1763, returning his “humble thanks” for his reappointment and then proceeding to lay out for the new bishop the full history of the grievances of Camm and himself against Fauquier. The governor’s letter to Osbaldeston a year later expressed his own bitterness toward Robinson, but conceded that the dispute between the two had calmed somewhat. By that time William Robinson had weathered the rapid turnover in bishops.^[62]

The influence that Robinson had achieved over successive clerical chancellors obviously caught the attention of the Visitors. When Bishop Sherlock died, the Visitors had moved quickly to follow precedent by appointing Thomas Hayter as chancellor, but on Bishop Osbaldeston ‘s succession, they balked at choosing another prelate to that post. So great was their determination to bring an end to ecclesiastical influence over the College, they turned in August 1763 for the next appointment to a notoriously incompetent layman, Charles Wyndham, earl of Egremont, a privy councillor, who took no active role in the College in the few months before his death. As the second lay chancellor the Visitors next appointed a more prestigious British official, Philip Yorke, earl of Hardwicke, the lord chancellor of England. Seventy-three years of age and in poor health, he, too, died within a few months, apparently before learning of his election. The effort to laicize the governance of the College had proved an utter failure.^[63] On October 24, 1764, the Visitors turned back to still another bishop of London, Richard Terrick-Richard Osbaldeston having died a short time after Hardwicke.^[64]

The Visitors’ lack of success in dealing with Commissary Robinson or in capitalizing on the rapid turnover in bishops of London and chancellors of the College between 1759 and 1764 did not deter their other efforts to reshape the College. They had found in the Virginia-born William Yates the compliant president they wanted. Now, once again, they had an opportunity to rebuild a faculty that was reduced to Emmanuel Jones and William Small, leaving divinity, moral philosophy, and the Grammar School unstaffed. In June 1761 they attempted to attract to the chair in moral philosophy a visiting clergyman, the Reverend Andrew Burnaby, who was making an extended trip through the colonies, from which he published Travels through the Middle Settlements in North-America. Burnaby had been in Virginia long enough to appreciate what he would be getting into and declined the offer. When the Travels appeared in 1775, he made all too clear his lack of regard for the colony and its College, observing that “the progress of arts and sciences in this colony has been very inconsiderable: the college of William and Mary is the only public place of education, and this has by no means answered the design of its institution.”^[65]

Lacking any other alternative, the Visitors turned to Richard Graham, one of the two whose dismissal was on appeal to the Privy Council. Since William Small now held his former post in natural philosophy, Graham agreed to fill the vacant professorship in moral philosophy. In 1762 the Visitors added another appointment, that of the Reverend James Horrocks as Grammar School master. Horrocks, one of the relatively few Cambridge men to teach at the College, appeared well qualified. He had finished sixth among mathematics scholars and had been immediately elected a fellow of Trinity College. Somewhat surprisingly, he chose instead to become usher at his old school, Wakefield, in Yorkshire, an academy to which Virginia students were sometimes sent.^[66]

By the following year of 1763, just as the Visitors seemed to have the faculty reconstituted apart from the divinity chairs, which perhaps in their anticlerical mood they purposely left vacant, the Privy Council ordered John Camm and Richard Graham reinstated.^[67] Thus, Camm regained his divinity post and a stronger base from which to continue his attack on the Two-Penny Acts and his defense of faculty powers against the Visitors. Graham and William Small now exchanged the two philosophy chairs, in order that Graham might reclaim his original appointment in natural philosophy. Small in his own way proved hardly less difficult for the Visitors than a faculty cleric like John Camm. A man of the Enlightenment, Small certainly had little interest in promoting the influence of the church on William and Mary . He seemed, however, to concern himself relatively little with faculty or student affairs, apart from his work with a few promising students like Jefferson. Soon after arriving he began to press for both salary increases and a lengthy leave with pay. His principal justification turned on a grant of £450 that the General Assembly voted in December 1762 for the purchase of scientific instruments for use in the instruction of students in natural philosophy.^[68] Small may well have played a part in securing the funds, and now he sought to return to England for eighteen months to oversee the purchase of the equipment. The Visitors, suspicious of his ever coming back, were reluctant to grant his request, although they finally consented to a leave of eight months duration.^[69]

Although this faculty was probably stronger as a group than any of a decade or more, its composition can scarcely have brought the Visitors satisfaction or offered much hope of a harmonious atmosphere at the College. Moreover, just as the full complement of faculty, except for one divinity professorship, had been restored, things again began to come apart. Late in 1764 President Yates died­—there had now been three presidents over a single decade—and for the Visitors the field of candidates was again unpromising. William Small delayed his return to England long enough to advance his candidacy. Appealing as the prospect of a layman as president might have been to some of the Visitors, none were willing to violate the terms of the charter, especially to favor a man who had already caused them difficulty. For differing reasons Camm and Emmanuel Jones were out of the question. Richard Graham as senior faculty member thought himself entitled to the appointment, but he, like Camm, was tarred with his opposition to the Visitors. Finally, the youngest faculty member, James Horrocks, was the choice, although he succeeded only by hiding his sympathy for many of the positions taken by Graham and Camm and promising the Visitors that he would support their agenda.^[70] Small now proceeded with his trip to England, from which, in fact, he never returned, while Graham resigned and also sailed for England. With the transfer of the new president from his old post as grammar master, the College was left with an Indian master and a divinity master, but with no one to teach the bulk of the students in the Grammar School or those in philosophy.

The five-year period that extended from the beginning of 1760 into 1764 lacked the flamboyant incidents of the 1750s, but it was nonetheless a turbulent interlude in College affairs, complicated by unprecedented frequency of turnovers in the presidency, faculty, and chancellorship. Only Commissary Robinson stayed in office throughout, despite an equally rapid turnover in the occupants of the see of London, to whom he owed his office. By keeping the bishops fully informed of the faculty perspective on the controversies that were unfolding, he was a major contributor to the continuing controversy. Moreover, the appointment of Richard Terrick as chancellor brought to the office a resolute supporter of the faculty and one who enjoyed a longer tenure. The Visitors, for their part, had only hardened their position, as their determination to maintain a puppet in the presidency initially suggested.

The Fight to Revise the Statutes, 1763–68

Nothing, therefore, in the circumstances that prevailed in 1764 made the Visitors any less determined to rein in the faculty and bring the College fully under the control of its external governors. Throughout the developing controversy, whether the immediate issue was student discipline, faculty conduct of College business, or the intrusion of the masters in the political affairs of the colony, the Board had increasingly concentrated on a full-scale revision of the College statutes as the vehicle for achieving the total subordination of the faculty.

The timing of the issuance of a new edition of the statutes in 1758 by the Williamsburg printer, William Hunter, suggests that its publication may have been an opening gambit, prompted by the Hubard dismissals. By the admittedly partisan testimony of William Robinson, the Visitors, once they learned that Camm and Graham were to be reinstated, moved in 1763 to enact a new statute that would establish their right to remove and replace faculty at their pleasure and require faculty to live in the College and not hold any other living or practice any other profession. Unexpectedly, they had been frustrated by William Yates, who had for perhaps the one time in his brief tenure stood against the Board, insisting that any such revision be reviewed by the chancellor before being implemented. But the statute obviously became for a time the centerpiece of the Visitors’ strategy, as, for example, when Horrocks had to swear his acceptance of it to gain the presidency.^[71]

In the letter that reached Bishop Osbaldeston at the beginning of 1763, Robinson had discussed at length another idea of the Visitors, that of curbing faculty responsibility for student discipline. He referred to “an order still subsisting in the book kept by the Visitors, which it seems is always to destroy the authority of the printed statutes.” The order, Robinson related, would allow the president and the masters to go no further in administering discipline than to give an offending student two warnings and then, upon a third offense, to turn the student over to the Visitors for trial. The commissary then went on to advance a bold proposal for supplanting the powers of the Visitors with an entirely new governing structure, which placed ultimate authority in the hands of English ecclesiastical leaders:

I think that if an authentic copy of the book kept by the visitors could be sent home by virtue of an order from England, there would want nothing else to shew the reasons why the College does not answer the end of the institution, & finally that if the College was really put under the care of the Bishop of London or the Arch-Bishop of Canterbury , who have been alternately Chancellors. … If, I say, either of these Prelates had the appointment of the President and masters & was enabled to protect them in their duty, it might be hoped that the College might become an instrument in such hands of diffusing Leaming, Morality, Religion & all due respect to those who have the authority over that part of his Majesty’s dominions as well as over the Mother Country.^[72]

Robinson clearly had in mind something far broader than simply faculty control of student discipline, for he had advanced his own counterproposal for a full-scale revision of the statutes, if not the charter itself. Thus, with Camm reinstated and presumably working closely with the commissary, and with Horrocks pledged to support the Visitors but working at times with his faculty colleagues, the issue of revising the statutes was now at the center of the controversy.

Amid problems of finance, staffing, and student misconduct, the ensuing struggle went on over the next five years or so, from late 1764 into 1768, both within the College and in the full glare of public attention. That it was in the end inconclusive did not make it any less bitter. In these same years, the imperial crisis entered a more critical phase as well, marked by the dispute over Parliamentary taxation through measures such as the Stamp and Townshend Acts. Many of the Visitors found themselves simultaneously engaged in opposing British policy and standing against a recalcitrant College faculty, who seemed no less identified with an aggressive British imperialism.

The Visitors unintentionally complicated their efforts to enact the 1763 statute when they chose Bishop Terrick as chancellor in 1764, for he became a resolute and influential advocate of the faculty. They encountered another obstacle when they called John Camm before them in 1765 to demand once again that he either give up his professorship or his parish; in typical fashion he stood his ground. Labeling the proceedings a court in which he stood accused, he demanded that a written “Defence,” which he had prepared, be read by the clerk. After some interchange with the Visitors, he read the statement, “which contained free and severe strictures on every part of the Statute, with some reflections on the President, who was present, for having sworn obedience to the Statute; and concluded with an Appeal to the King as supreme Visitor of a College founded by the Crown.” The Visitors hesitated, failing at that meeting and a subsequent one to vote for his dismissal. Camm clearly had the support of Commissary Robinson and the chancellor, who early in the next year, wrote President Horrocks to express strong opposition to the Visitors’ assertion of power over the faculty. Horrocks made it clear in the fall of 1766 that the conflict was unabated.^[73]

In the face of Camm’s intransigence and the chancellor’s disapproval, the Visitors in May 1766 offered a revision in the proposed statute. The new version asserted that no new powers were being conveyed to the Visitors, but that only an interpretation of the existing regulations was sought. Nevertheless, the new statement still claimed for the Visitors a general superintendency of matters of great moment and defined all powers of the faculty as delegated from the Visitors. As a gesture to John Camm, only new faculty would be required to swear under oath to obey the statutory prohibition on holding a clerical appointment in a parish.^[74]

The contest between faculty and Visitors also complicated the concurrent efforts to rebuild the depleted faculty. The first effort to fill Horrocks’s old post as Grammar School master proved abortive; Edward Hawtrey, or Hawtry, came from England in 1765, stayed only twelve weeks, and then returned home. Hawtrey’s brother had talked to William Small in England about the College and had written before Edward Hawtrey’ s departure about such matters as salary, the irregularity with which students paid their fees, and the nature of the quarters with which he would be provided. Small had evidently reported that the faculty were “well satisfied with the homeliness of their appearance, tho’ at first sight rather disgusting.” Edward Hawtrey had found on arrival that he had sixty-four pupils and the assistance of two ushers. After his rapid departure, Horrocks freely admitted to the chancellor that while Hawtrey had the offer of a better post in England, he had also found discouraging the “unhappy differences” between the faculty and Visitors and the feeling between the “usurper President and the surviving Faculty.”^[75]

Hawtrey was, moreover, not the only disgruntled faculty member in England. William Small remained there after the expiration of his leave, giving no signs of returning. To the Visitors he complained about salary still owed him and, somewhat belatedly caught up in the cause of the faculty, now refused to return unless the Visitors respected the charter and the statutes, as he read them, by abandoning any claim to the right of dismissing faculty. To those in England who would listen, he openly proclaimed his low opinion of the College as it was being managed.^[76]

Bishop Terrick made another offer to help with staffing the faculty in 1767 by recommending two new faculty members, Josiah Johnson for the Grammar School and William Halyburton for the chair in moral philosophy. Johnson arrived promptly and took up his post, but when Halyburton did not arrive, he sought to transfer to the moral philosophy appointment. In seeking the less remunerative but more prestigious chair, Johnson might have seemed filled with a laudable academic ambition, but it turned out that he had “the Misfortune to fall violently in love with a very pretty Object,” as one of the Visitors, William Nelson, noted. To afford his marriage, Johnson wanted to take a parish at some distance from Williamsburg while filling a chair that would require him to spend less time at the College. President Horrocks and the Visitors were agreed equally on their suspicion of Johnson’s motives and their unwillingness to grant his request. So Johnson stayed on as Grammar School master, eventually adding an appointment as rector of Bruton Parish from July 30, 1772, until his death the following April.

Halyburton, who had sailed to New York instead of Virginia, remained there for several months before writing Horrocks, confessing his lack of knowledge of the classics, or of anything “Academical.” When he finally arrived in Virginia, no one wanted to admit him to the faculty, as the rector of the Visitors informed Bishop Terrick in no uncertain terms.^[77] In such circumstances bringing the faculty back to full complement hardly seemed possible. The number of positions filled remained at three until 1770; John Camm single-handedly filled the two philosophy chairs, in addition to his regular, but hardly demanding, duties as professor of divinity.

In the meantime the small compromise that the Visitors offered in the revised statute of 1766 satisfied no one. Even their strong advocate, Governor Fauquier, was incensed, Commissary Robinson taking delight in reporting that the governor was “so far off his guard as peevishly to blame the Visitors for letting Mr. Camm lead them by the nose.” Relations between the faculty and the Visitors had only grown worse by the summer of 1767. Horrocks reported in June that some Visitors now advocated the filling of faculty vacancies through recommendations from the London merchants trading to Virginia, an indication of a determination to appoint laymen and lessen the influence of the church and the chancellor.^[78]

The continuing fights over the statute, the Halyburton affair, and the status of William Small seemed to have brought the rector, Dudley Digges, and a majority of the Board to a white heat. He wrote a scathing letter to William Small on June 25, bearing the news that the Visitors had no intention of meeting his demands or of bringing him back after his eight-month leave had extended beyond two years. Among other things Digges charged that Small’s attacks upon the Visitors in several letters “were as unjust as they are ungrateful,” and that his “Pretence of Regard for the good of the College, after what we know you have done is an Insult upon Common Sense & … a Continuance of your Hypocrisy.” Small had already made plans to remain in England; his career at William and Mary had ended, although he left behind a legacy of having trained a select few of William and Mary’s best students in the late colonial era.^[79]

On July 15 Digges wrote on behalf of the Board a second angry letter, this time to the chancellor. He dealt with the cases of both Halyburton and Small, but he then went on at great length to review the whole history of the controversy with the faculty, tracing it back as far as the contest between William Stith and Thomas Dawson for the presidency. William Robinson reported that the account was “hasty, unweighed, inaccurate, crude, false, and invidious” and was the work of a committee of the Board chaired by Robert Carter Nicholas, a powerful political figure, prominent player in the affairs of Bruton Parish Church, and treasurer of the colony.^[80] The Nicholas statement included what could be perceived as a rebuke of the chancellor because of the men he had sent to teach at William and Mary. It also charged that the faculty had behaved badly, even though they were received with “civility and Courtesy.” Indeed, the statement continued, “they have been caressed, they have been courted so long as their Behaviour has answered the Expectations conceived of them.”^[81]

Commissary Robinson saw to it that the faculty received a copy of the statement that Nicholas had prepared, and the faculty laid plans to reply in a memorial that Horrocks, cooperating at this juncture with his faculty, agreed to take to England. Bishop Terrick made an uncompromising response to the Visitors’ position, objecting to their personal attack on him and threatening to throw his weight behind a revision of the charter in favor of the authority of the faculty. The new rector, James Fontaine, wrote to Terrick on July 1, 1768, denying that Digges’s earlier letter had intended any criticism of the bishop. The counterattack on the Visitors had its effect, however, for Fontaine also reported that they had offered some concessions to the faculty, while remaining firm on other points.^[82]

Fontaine included with his letter copies of the minutes of the meetings of the Visitors between April 28 and July 1; together with faculty statements that were also sent to Bishop Terrick, they revealed a final, if inconclusive, effort to resolve the issues between faculty and Visitors. The faculty at a meeting on May 4 adopted a lengthy “Memorial for the better Government of the College,” undoubtedly written by Camm and filled with his customarily sharp language. Objecting to the idea that faculty powers were delegated from the Board, the statement proclaimed, “We presume to think that we are not the servants of the Visitors; we have a Charter to incorporate us into a regular Society.” Although recognizing the power of the Visitors to make statutes, the faculty stood their ground on their right to conduct the ordinary government of the College, administer discipline, award scholarships, and appoint College officers. They also claimed the right to counsel if called before the Visitors, and to hold other preferments. At meetings on June 16 and 17, the faculty agreed to some softening of language to which the Visitors had objected and on July 1, to a division of authority between the two bodies in the award of scholarships.^[83]

On July 22 the faculty met once again and voted to send its own letter to the chancellor, together with a new statement. After thanking the chancellor for his support, the faculty went on to assert that the rector had only partly reported their position and to recite at length the manner in which the Visitors had continued to respond unsatisfactorily to their proposals. Their conclusion seemed as defiant as ever:

It seems impossible for us, notwithstanding fair Words, to make any other Conclusion but that the Visitors mean to keep the grand Points of Power, on which the practical Utility of a College must turn, unsettled and in Confusion, and to leave us without the Authority which is necessary for obtaining that Discipline & Regularity which the Visitors are desirous should be enforced. … It is plain, we think, from this last Experiment, as well as many others, that the Remedy for the Disorders of which both the Visitors & we complain must come from some higher Power … whether that shall take its Rise from a Petition to the King for a new Charter, or from an Appeal to His Majesty as supreme Visitor of the College, which we suppose him to be.^[84]

There the matter rested, and nothing further seemed to occur by way of direct confrontation between the faculty and the Visitors, although a round of controversy in the Williamsburg newspapers continued for several months. Earlier, in the spring of 1768, John Camm had become embroiled in an exchange with Arthur Lee, who took time out from his more frequent attacks on British policy to accuse Camm of heading an improper coalition against the legitimate authority of the Visitors. The next year Camm also came under attack for drawing an extra salary while he filled his own divinity professorship and the two vacant philosophy appointments. There was a more biting attack on Horrocks during the same year, one that challenged his academic qualifications rather than his role in the controversies with the Visitors, although it was not without political overtones. John Page called on the president as a mathematician to provide a calculation of the transit of Venus, an event that had attracted the attention of Virginia’s gentlemen scientists, Page included. Page was clearly implying that Horrocks could not do so, and the attack touched off other newspaper pieces questioning his competence to translate Latin.^[85]

Except for these few newspaper articles, the protracted and bitter dispute had come to an almost inexplicable end, since neither side had yielded its essential position, the Visitors having made only a few concessions, which the faculty rejected. Such an inconclusive termination to a hard-fought and fundamental contest is not easy to explain. One possible consideration was the death at the beginning of 1768 of Commissary Robinson. Although never a member of the faculty, he had actively abetted Camm and the others in their strong stand and served as the principal agent in winning the support of the chancellor. The faculty had lost its most effective ally. Moreover, Horrocks had won out over Camm in the contest to be the new commissary, destroying the working alliance between the two men that had prevailed during the later stages of controversy.^[86] Yet, the Visitors made no move to take advantage of this situation. Even without the presence of Robinson as a dissident on the Board of Visitors, they still had to contend with the chancellor. In the end, what may have disarmed the conflict more than anything else was the deepening antagonism between Britain and the colonies, which affected both sides in the College controversy. Most of the Visitors were men who were increasingly absorbed in their leadership of the colony against imperial policy. While the heavy hand of the church and the clergy in opposing their effort to control the College could be seen as still another grievance against British authority, they had other pressing priorities. On the faculty side, Horrocks had to admit in early 1769 that the larger strategy of securing a revision of the charter that would favor faculty power had to be given up in the existing political climate.^[87]

The College also found it necessary to close briefly in 1768, due to an outbreak of smallpox that caused the death of two students. The situation may well have proved sufficiently distracting to the combatants to turn them away from the controversy.^[88] Even more compelling, however, was another death in 1768, one that obviously muted the debate. It was that of Governor Fauquier, who had remained a resolute supporter of the Visitors and a bitter foe of Camm and the late commissary. His death provided a last chapter in the dispute, when Camm was attacked for having refused a request to attend to the governor’s spiritual needs as his end approached. Camm denied that he had received the message, but was told that the accusation had cost him the appointment as commissary.^[89] More important, Fauquier’s demise brought the appointment as the new governor of Norborne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt, who, despite the charged political atmosphere, immediately established himself as a conciliator both in the governorship and as a member and rector of the Board of Visitors.

The end of the affair had, however, produced what has been correctly termed a precarious balance, rather than a genuine resolution. The Visitors kept control over some finances and conceded nothing of their claim to ultimate authority over the College, but the faculty perhaps gained a little more. They continued to hold their professorships concurrently with other appointments as parish clergy, and some of them moved out of their College apartments without further challenge. The Visitors made no further attempts at dismissals before 1776, despite the frequent involvement of faculty in other public controversies. And the issue of what the mission of the College should be and how it should be discharged continued to evoke a lively debate.^[90]

The Fate of the Students

By 1768 the turmoil in College affairs had dragged on without interruption for more than a decade. Student conduct had been an issue at two major junctures during the 1750s: the fight over the dismissal of the two Hubards and Cole Digges, and Jacob Rowe’s leadership of a town-gown riot. Then, in the 1760s, the contest had turned increasingly to the authority of the Visitors and faculty in all aspects of College governance. Yet, who would administer student discipline remained an important aspect of the struggle for power. At a meeting on March 30, 1762, the president and masters took note of disputes that had arisen over the question of whether every master had authority to punish scholars, that is, the students in the Grammar School, and reaffirmed their right to administer punishment, with only William Small dissenting. Later that year, Commissary Robinson raised the question to a level of central importance, suggesting that the effort of the Visitors to take control of discipline—a clear reference to the fight over the Hubards and Digges—was responsible for a collapse of order among the students. Robinson may have conveniently forgotten the poor example of conduct that the faculty had often set; but, whatever the reason, he was correct that throughout the decade of the 1760s, student conduct was a problem.^[91]

Two specific periods of marked student unrest, one throughout 1763 and another in 1766, appeared to preoccupy the masters. Early in 1763 they addressed a formal letter to Isabella Cocke, who had served as College housekeeper since August 1761, listing a series of complaints about her irregular performance of her duties—serving bad and inadequate food, failing to take proper care of the boys’ laundry, showing special favors to some students, being absent too frequently, among others—and demanding better conduct for the future.^[92] In this instance, the scholars appeared to have grounds for restiveness, and after Mrs. Cocke failed to improve her ways, she was dismissed. The removal of Mrs. Cocke did not, however, quiet the students. In May John Hyde Saunders was ordered to leave the College for impudent behavior, first toward the Grammar School master and then to the president and other faculty members. On October 6, three students, John Walker, Walter Jones, and James McClurg, the last of whom was to be appointed to the new chair in medicine in 1779, were sent home for a month on the charge of “injurious Behaviour … to a family in Town.” Later, the faculty added William Thompson to those who had participated in the incident and expelled him when he refused to submit to discipline.^[93]  The difficulties in 1766 obviously ran even deeper, prompting not only punishment of another group of students from prominent families, but a series of efforts to tighten supervision both of students and the young men who served as ushers of the Grammar School. On March 11 the faculty provided for a roll call of boarding students at nine o’clock each evening in the hall, and on May 3 they also stipulated that ushers were to be present at all meals unless the president or a master was also there. Ushers were also required to attend church and chapel services regularly and visit student rooms after nine three nights a week, reporting any absences or other irregularities to the president.^[94]

Misconduct only seemed to worsen. On July 22 the faculty found Mann Page, Sr., and Nathaniel Burwell guilty of indecent behavior toward the president. At the same time, they reprimanded Pages’s cousins, Mann, Jr., and John, for “going off their Bounds without Leave” and frequenting taverns in Williamsburg. The first two were sent home for a month, although both returned and made their peace before their suspensions ended. The incidents prompted the masters to look more closely at the old problem of students visiting the local taverns. As a result they gave the president discretionary authority to punish boys from the Grammar School for the offense and requested tavern keepers to refuse to serve students or face College efforts to have their licenses suspended.^[95] Before the year was out, another incident occurred in which Samuel Klug, the assistant usher, charged that the usher, John Patterson, had “kickd & beat him without the least Provocation.” The faculty investigated, found Patterson’s response unsatisfactory, and gave him a day to admit his guilt and promise to do better. When he persisted in defending his conduct, he was dismissed but eventually was given seven pounds, five shillings to pay the costs of his return trip to his home in Philadelphia.^[96]

Before the decade ended, there were other incidents. Two sons of William Byrd III, who was at the time a member of the Board of Visitors, were brought before the faculty for serious disciplinary offenses. Thomas Byrd led a riot by the boys of the Grammar School that resulted in “uncommon Waste & Havock” in the hall. Young Byrd was required to submit to a whipping or be expelled. He chose the latter, not “without many violent & threatening Expressions against the President.” The faculty stood its ground even when his father offered to administer the punishment if his son were readmitted. Later in the same year, William Byrd faced the necessity of dealing with the actions of another son, John, who had been recently admitted to the philosophy school and was now found guilty of threatening to whip a College servant and then the housekeeper when she intervened. Although the faculty had adopted a new regulation requiring expulsion for acts of violence, they allowed him to stay. Between the two incidents involving the Byrd brothers, another student, Robert Robinson, was expelled for theft of articles from a fellow student.^[97]

It is perhaps difficult to believe that a College caught up in so much turmoil among Visitors, faculty, and students could operate in anything like a normal manner. Yet, if, on the one hand, the list of the students charged with serious violations of discipline in the 1760s reads like a Virginia Who’s Who, this was also a decade in which many of the College’s ablest students were enrolled. Jefferson had, after all, begun his two years under the tutelage of William Small in 1760. To judge from Edward Hawtrey’s sixty grammar scholars, the number of students did not appear to decline. Classes were taught in all the branches of the College, although with a depleted faculty that required some doubling up by Horrocks and Camm. The faculty minutes regularly recorded the advancement of students from the Grammar School to that of philosophy. While the bishop of London recorded no ordinations of clergy trained at William and Mary in the early years of the decade, four divinity students were licensed between 1764 and 1768. John Blair, Jr., became bursar in 1760 and energetically attacked the College’s always-serious financial problems. As the discharge of the unsatisfactory Isabella Cocke and provision for hiring both a College nurse and a live-in “Stocking Mender” might suggest, there was some effort to meet the physical and material needs of the scholars. The serious, still unresolved division over control of the College had undoubtedly exacted a price, yet both sides in the controversies must have thought William and Mary valuable enough to be worth the fight that they had mounted for almost two decades.