Williamsburg in the spring of 1865 was a far cry from the “lovely sweet College town of charming villas & old mansions” that Union General Philip Kearney had described from his headquarters at “Wm. & Mary’s College” a few days after the battle of Williamsburg.^[1] The College lay in ruins, and the town, while looking better than at least one returning resident expected, carried the unmistakable marks of war and occupation. The main street presented “rather a more dilapidated appearance than usual,” she reported, “owing to the hotel having been pulled down” and several of the public buildings, including the courthouse, “being minus doors & windows.”^[2] The occupying forces had made some effort to repair Bruton Parish Church, but at the College the burnt-out shell of the Main Building, the missing fences and outbuildings, and the badly damaged Brafferton testified to the destructiveness of the just-concluded struggle. The President’s House still served as headquarters for a Union regiment.^[3] Both gown and town faced a formidable rebuilding task. Indeed, the difficulties of reviving William and Mary appeared so daunting that it seemed a legitimate question whether Williamsburg would ever again be a college town.

The Decision to Reopen

The men who would answer that question—the president, professors, and Visitors of the College—were yet scattered about the state. Most had survived the war, and most knew of the burning of the Main Building on September 9, 1862, but no one had an accurate accounting of the College’s losses and assets in the spring of 1865. President Benjamin S. Ewell had attempted to visit Williamsburg under a flag of truce in early October 1862 to inspect both the College and the Eastern Lunatic Asylum, but Union commander General John A. Dix refused to grant the necessary permission. A month later federal authorities allowed Ewell to visit his farm on the outskirts of town but barred him from the College.^[4] Word eventually filtered out that some of the ladies of Williamsburg had rescued “a considerable portion of the College Library” from the flames, and Bursar Tazewell Taylor had earlier deposited the school’s bonds and vouchers with Visitor Hugh Blair Grigsby in Charlotte County. In addition, Lewis E. Harvie, president of the Richmond and Danville Railroad, had protected the business records during the war. But both Grigsby and professor of Greek and German Edward S. Joynes feared for the survival of the College portraits.^[5]

Despite his uncertainty about conditions in Williamsburg and the increasingly gloomy outlook for the Confederacy, Ewell committed himself in the fall of 1864 to rebuilding the College. In a long letter to Grigsby, whose support he considered crucial to any such effort, Ewell declared he would think he “had lived to some purpose” if he could revive the College. “To aid in this I would be willing to teach a primary school for a mere support for years,” he added, little realizing that he would come uncomfortably close to doing just that.^[6] Flattered, perhaps, by Ewell’s confidence in him and recalling his own earlier labors as chairman of the Building Committee after the 1859 fire, Grigsby assured the president of his support.^[7] Although at this point both men overestimated the postwar resources of the College and Grigsby later had twinges of doubt about his role, the two remained remarkably steadfast in their commitment to “old William and Mary.”^[8]

When Ewell was finally able to survey the campus in June of 1865, he discovered that the portraits had indeed been preserved, along with much of the philosophical and scientific apparatus, some of the records, and parts of the library. Edwin Taliaferro, professor of Latin and Romance languages, assured him that many of the missing books were “Light Literature” and enough of the collection remained to support collegiate instruction.^[9] The College seal and charter and the securities Ewell had had in his possession for some months. Although the damage to the buildings was extensive and the portion of the endowment invested in Confederate bonds utterly worthless, Ewell insisted to Grigsby that “so far as the College is concerned there is no occasion for despondency.” He believed that the surviving buildings could accommodate all who might want to study at William and Mary for the next few years.^[10]

Ewell’s optimistic assessment was no doubt intended to influence Grigsby and other Visitors who would soon meet to consider the College’s future. In an autobiographical fragment written several years later, Ewell painted a much gloomier and more accurate picture: “The material condition was as bad as it well could be: the Main Building a ruin, the Brafferton gutted, the Steward’s Hall destroyed, The President’s House much pulled to pieces & all outhouses destroyed or carried off. …”^[11]

Yet Ewell was determined to do all in his power to persuade the Board of Visitors to rebuild the College in Williamsburg. To this end he prepared a detailed report for the first postwar Board meeting on July 5 and 6 in Richmond, and he strongly urged Grigsby to attend. Although Grigsby realized that Ewell regarded him “as the main column of support” for the College, he fretted that the president failed to appreciate his current difficulties—”delicate health,” “diminished means,” and the deafness that made it difficult for him to participate fully in the Board’s deliberations. Still, Grigsby again resolved to back Ewell. “I think I can keep alive the spirit of Virginia more intensely within the walls of that College than anywhere else,” he confided to his diary.^[12] Unfortunately, illness prevented him from journeying to Richmond on July 5.^[13] He was missed. As Ewell wrote him later, his presence “was much needed.”^[14]

The Board members who gathered to hear Ewell’s report and decide the fate of the College—ten men on July 5 and eleven on July 6, out of a total membership of fifteen—had contributed years of service to William and Mary. Several had been Visitors since the late 1840s and had seen the College through difficult times. But now they were divided between those who wanted to move the faculty into rented quarters in Richmond or some other urban area, at least temporarily, and those who favored rebuilding in Williamsburg. As proposals to relocate the College had long been a standard response to the school’s troubles, Ewell was prepared. After recounting the wartime history of the College and his actions as bursar pro tem, he estimated the damage to property at $70,000 (a figure he later decided was too low by $30,000) and endowment losses at about $31,000. He then declared that the walls of the Main Building “are apparently in as good condition as they were after the fire of 1859; indeed are less warped and cracked” and added that both the College Hotel and the President’s House, though damaged, were habitable. He also assured the Visitors that some of the College’s bonds and securities had held their value.^[15]

To Ewell the arguments for reopening the College in Williamsburg in October were clear, even if he and other faculty members would be operating little more than a grammar school for several years. In the first place, the College’s identity was inextricably linked to Tidewater Virginia; Ewell thought it would be difficult to raise money, especially in the North, if the Visitors severed William and Mary’s historic roots. Moreover, he expected the Tidewater area to recover economically within a few years. Second, Ewell noted that the College’s claim to the Mattey Fund, an eighteenth century legacy for the education of needy children of Bruton Parish, depended upon the school’s Williamsburg location. In addition, Ewell knew that he had the support of at least one other faculty member, for Edwin Taliaferro had written to him in mid-June to urge the opening of a primary department as a stopgap measure while the College was being restored.^[16] Ewell proposed that the Board employ two or three faculty members for the fall and allow the others to continue on leave without pay as they had during the war. Such action would at least preserve the corporate identity of the College.^[17]

The impact of Ewell’s report is difficult to judge. On July 6 the assembled Visitors elected the Right Reverend John Johns, Episcopal bishop of Virginia and a former president of the College, rector for the coming year. Then James Lyons of Richmond offered a resolution, with a preamble by the College bursar, Tazewell Taylor, requesting the president and the faculty to rent a building or buildings for not more than $1,000 a year “in or near the city of Richmond ‘or elsewhere in the State as convenience and economy may dictate'” for fall classes. The former governor, Henry A. Wise, promptly countered with a motion that classes be resumed in repaired or rented buildings in Williamsburg. Unfortunately, there is no record of the debate on these motions, but ultimately the Visitors postponed their decision by adopting a resolution proposed by William Boulware of King and Queen County that the rector appoint a special committee of five to consider both previous motions and report back to an adjourned meeting of the Visitors on August 2. The committee consisted of Boulware and four men from Richmond—Lyons, Judge William W. Crump, William H. Macfarland, and the Reverend George Woodbridge.^[18] Apparently, the group was more balanced than it appeared, for Ewell later recorded that Macfarland and Crump strongly supported rebuilding in Williamsburg.^[19] In any event, Ewell now had another month to strengthen his case and lobby for his point of view. Boulware’s motion directed the president to safeguard the College property and report to the August meeting “what he may deem pertinent to the interest of the College.”^[20]

Although federal troops still occupied the campus, Ewell returned to Williamsburg to confirm his assessment of the College’s condition and remaining assets. He also attempted to answer the chronic complaints about the school’s location. He frankly admitted that if the question were the opening of a new college, Williamsburg would scarcely be considered. Even if its miasmic atmosphere had been exaggerated, there was no denying that the town was small, poor, and remote. But as William and Mary had long been established there, he reiterated the financial, political, and emotional reasons for staying. He repeated his contention that the Peninsula would eventually become the garden spot of Virginia, and he added an argument that he would use time and again over the next two decades. Liberal arts colleges belong in rural areas. “Institutions of Leaming of a high grade” do not flourish in cities; even urban parents want to send their children to school in the country. Ewell noted, too, that the College had survived many crises since its founding, and he believed it could do so again “without resorting to the extreme measure of removal.”^[21]

When the Board gathered at Richmond’s Ballard House in August, Lyons was absent because of sickness, and the other committee members offered no report. Thus, even though Ewell admitted that the attempt to restore the College would be a long and difficult “experiment,” he persuaded the nine Visitors to let him make a start. Wise and Macfarland offered the necessary resolutions to appropriate $1,000 for repairs and $600 for Ewell’s services in protecting College property during the war and to authorize salaries at prewar levels for those professors to be employed during the coming session.^[22] Whether the College actually had enough money to pay those salaries was not clear. But Ewell was eager to reopen, even on a limited and tenuous basis, and for the time being, he carried the day.

Faculty and Students in the Immediate Postwar Years

Four of the six surviving members of the 1860–61 faculty—Robert J. Morrison, professor of moral philosophy, had died in 1861—also met in Richmond on August 2 at the same time as the Board of Visitors. Professors Charles Morris (law) and Edward S. Joynes (Greek and German) extended their leaves of absence. The adjunct professor of mathematics, Thomas T. L. Snead, cast his lot with Ewell.^[23] As for the others, Professor Edwin Taliaferro (Latin and Romance languages) had already announced his commitment to reviving the College, but Assistant Professor Thomas P. McCandlish (languages and mathematics) did not return to teaching until the fall of 1866.^[24] The catalog for 1865–66 listed all six men as members of the faculty, along with William R. Garrett of Williamsburg as master of the Grammar School. It also claimed for the College departments of Latin, Greek, modern languages, belles lettres, mathematics, and chemistry and natural philosophy.^[25] The faculty minutes spoke more realistically of “Faculty in Attendance”: Ewell, president and professor of physical science; Taliaferro, professor of languages; Snead, adjunct professor of mathematics; and Garrett. Taliaferro also served as librarian, though he had few enough books to preside over.^[26]

Ewell had told the Board that he was certain thirty young men could be attracted to William and Mary in the fall of 1865. He had written Grigsby that College policy ought to be “to reduce Fees & Board to the minimum,” for despite his public optimism, he knew well the depressed state of postwar finances in the South.^[27] It is not surprising that the flyer Ewell distributed announcing the 1865–66 session stressed economy. The terms for college students were:

Fees

$66.00

Each modern language

$15.00

Board at College Hotel

$160.00

Fuel, lights, & washing

$25.00-$50.00

Grammar School pupils would pay $33 in fees and $10 for each ancient and modem language; other charges would be the same as for the older students. If the College Hotel seemed too costly, students could board with private families, and the most impoverished could bring their own furniture and provisions from home and “mess” in their rooms. That strategy would reduce their expenses by about two-thirds, according to the flyer.^[28] What the flyer did not say, but what occurred with some regularity in the immediate postwar years, was that Ewell waived the fees for hard-pressed students. “We have more pupils than we had counted on,” Edwin Taliaferro told his brother in early 1866, ”but many are gratuitously received into our classes so that in many cases we have to be satisfied with the consciousness of usefulness—rather than the receipt of fees.” Ewell later reported that more than half the students who attended the College between 1865 and 1868 were “received without charge.”^[29]

As Taliaferro’ s letter attests, Ewell actually underestimated the demand for places at William and Mary. News of the College’s reopening, which occurred a week later than planned because of delays in the departure of the federal troops, attracted registrants throughout the fall and into the new year. All but a few were from Williamsburg and the adjacent counties.^[30] By the end of the 1865–66 session, the matriculation book recorded sixty-two students—twenty-three collegiate and thirty-nine preparatory—who ranged in age from eleven to twenty-two.^[31] Although the catalog prescribed minimum ages of twelve for the Grammar School and fifteen for the collegiate course, the College ignored its own rules for many years. There were ten-year-old students in the Grammar School in 1866–67, 1870–71, and 1871–72 and fourteen-year-old collegians as late as 1875–76.^[32] At the same time, some of the boys in the Grammar School were “full grown.”^[33]

Except for their ages, the students were a homogeneous lot. Not only were their origins intensely local, but they often came from families with some prior connection to the College. And virtually all were Episcopalians, Baptists, or Methodists. The one Catholic and two Disciples of Christ who enrolled in the 1865–66 session were the only exceptions before 1869.^[34]

They did differ in their academic preparation, though all had undoubtedly suffered some disruption between 1861 and 1865. None of the twenty-three college students in the first postwar group placed above the junior (or first year) level. For this reason there were no recipients of either of the College’s three-year undergraduate degrees, the bachelor of philosophy or the bachelor of arts, in the spring of 1866 and no occasion for commencement exercises.^[35] A few students, including veterans whose work had been interrupted by the war, earned degrees in 1867 and 1868, but their small numbers, the dilapidated state of the campus, and a chronic shortage of funds precluded any graduation ceremonies. Then the faculty suspended collegiate classes for the 1868–69 session so that Ewell could concentrate on completing the repairs to the Main Building. The first commencement since the Civil War finally occurred in July 1870, but ironically, because of the previous year’s hiatus, there were no undergraduate degrees bestowed.^[36]

The faculty did award numerous honorary degrees during this period, however-to a mixed group of graduates, friends, and potential supporters of the College. The results were hardly spectacular. Gracious thank-you notes and a few volumes for the library were the most common responses. The many doctor of divinity degrees conferred upon Episcopalian clergymen may have created a link between the College and the church in the minds of some, but if so, that impression later proved a doubtful blessing.^[37]

The educational accomplishments of the first three postwar sessions at the College are difficult to ascertain with any precision. Obviously, much of the instruction occurred at the primary and preparatory levels. Grammar School students continued to outnumber the collegians as they had in 1865–66: thirty-nine to twenty-two in 1866–67 and thirty-three to twenty in 1867–68.^[38] Still, Ewell reported collegiate classes in virtually all subjects the College offered, from Greek and Latin to rhetoric.^[39] These classes were very small, but that, Ewell argued, was a strength rather than a weakness.

Fred is doing far better, & learning more, than if we had more students [Ewell assured Fred’s father, Bursar Tazewell Taylor, in October 1866]. Of this I have no doubt, … He has four times the instruction in a class of six he could have in one of 30—This is plain.^[40]

The faculty members who attempted to educate the young men and boys of William and Mary in the immediate postwar period are not so well known as their successors in the late nineteenth century, the Seven Wise Men of the Tyler era, but they made some impression on their students and their colleagues. William Robertson Garrett, who had studied law at the University of Virginia after earning a master’s degree from William and Mary, served only one year as master of the Grammar School; he was followed by a series of acting and temporary appointees.^[41]

Among the College faculty there was greater stability, though Edwin Taliaferro succumbed to tuberculosis in September 1867 when he was only thirty-two. Taliaferro, whose family was intimately involved with the College during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had earned a master’s degree at the University of Virginia and studied at Bonn, Berlin, Rome, and the Sorbonne before taking up the chair of Latin and Romance languages at William and Mary in 1858. Like Garrett, Snead, McCandlish, and Ewell, he fought for the Confederacy during the war.^[42] If his former colleague Edward Joynes is to be believed, Taliaferro was gentle, refined, and cultured, yet cut a dashing figure on “his famous blooded horse, Comet.”^[43] Because Joynes did not return to the College after the war, Taliaferro was the sole language teacher when Ewell reopened the school.^[44]

Although he hoped to see the College prosper and journeyed to Richmond to help lobby for funds, Taliaferro described himself as “employed in a dull quiet & monotonous round of teaching” and remarked wistfully that making money from brain power would be a slow process in the devastated South.^[45] Eager for greater financial and professional rewards, he applied for the professorship of Latin at the University of Virginia in the summer of 1866, but he failed to win appointment and returned to William and Mary in the fall.^[46] By early 1867 his health was so poor that he had to retreat to Richmond. “I cannot stand the climate of Williamsburg or the duties of my office there,” he told Tazewell Taylor. “However well I may feel[,] a month there breaks me down, and my extra-work of last year fairly undermined my constitution.”^[47] Apparently, the College continued to pay his salary, such as it was, but he in turn paid his substitute, Thomas P. McCandlish.^[48]

Taliaferro’s near contemporary, Thomas T. L. Snead, also died prematurely, but he instructed William and Mary students until the early 1870s. A native of Accomac, Snead became adjunct professor of mathematics in 1856, soon after he earned his master’s degree from the College. During the war he was a captain in the Confederate Engineer Department, and when he returned to Williamsburg, he became a director of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum at the same time he resumed his professorship.^[49] Edward Joynes remembered Snead as a kind of rough diamond who was physically and mentally strong. To one former student he was “a mathematical genius who was no teacher for the non-mathematically inclined”; another agreed that he was impatient with the elementary classes and the slackers but thought he tried to help the hard workers.^[50]

Snead literally helped restore the College by planting trees on the campus in 1867, and he took over Ewell’s classes in natural philosophy and chemistry that spring when the president’s attempts at fund-raising kept him away from campus for long periods.^[51] Yet in June 1872, when the entire faculty resigned to allow the Board of Visitors to reorganize the institution, Snead’s was the only resignation the Visitors accepted. They expressed regret but pointed to “the embarrassed state” of College finances. Because Ewell also taught mathematics, the Visitors undoubtedly saw Snead as expendable. They did promise to pay his salary until October 1, 1872.^[52] Snead promptly reminded them that he had taught Ewell’s classes as well as his own for nearly one-third of the 1871–72 session. He asked for proper compensation.^[53] Whether through ingratitude or poverty, the Board granted him only the remaining $400 of his salary. Sadly, he never saw even that small sum because he died of a severe attack of diarrhea on July 3, 1872, a few days before Ewell received the salary checks from Bursar Taylor. ”While the course of the Board was right & necessary,” Ewell observed to Taylor, “the circumstances have made it more to be regretted.”^[54] As perhaps some final acknowledgment of Snead’s contributions to his alma mater, he was buried in the College cemetery.^[55]

Thomas McCandlish was another alumnus whose teaching career at the College ended unhappily, though not tragically. After having served as a quartermaster in the Confederate army, he returned to William and Mary in the fall of 1866 as acting master of the Grammar School and assistant professor of ancient languages and mathematics. When Taliaferro’s health failed at midyear, McCandlish relinquished the Grammar School to the Reverend S. W. Blair and devoted full time to language instruction. Ewell recommended that he be kept on in that capacity, and so he served for several years as professor of Latin, Greek, and French.^[56] The seriousness with which he approached his task is evident in a long letter he addressed to Hugh Blair Grigsby in early 1868 upon learning from Ewell that Grigsby had expressed interest in his department. The letter offers a rare glimpse of a faculty member’s intellectual and pedagogical concerns during the immediate postwar era.

McCandlish explained that he spent four and a half hours a day teaching three classes of Latin and three of Greek, from the preparatory to the junior level. In the advanced Latin classes the students read Horace and Virgil, in upper-level Greek, Sophocles, Homer, and Xenophon’s Anabasis; they also wrote compositions and reviewed grammar, forms, and syntax. His pedagogy, he added, was frankly conservative:

After some experience in teaching the languages, I have arrived at the conclusion that the old English method is the best. At our American colleges, professors and teachers, imbued with what has been falsely termed the “spirit of progress”—have tried to dispense with drudgery and drilling in the forms and syntax, that their pupils may enjoy the beauties of the classical literature, which of course they cannot comprehend or appreciate without understanding the language in which it is written—and the result is, our American scholars are generally not thorough—or at least, they do not compare favorably with English and German scholars.^[57]

Ironically, one of McCandlish’s former students remembered him as “a poor drillmaster, but an interesting teacher,” one who taught more about literature than about syntax.^[58]

At the end of the 1867–68 session, Ewell noted that both Professors McCandlish and Snead had donated about 10 percent of their salaries to the College’s building fund and that McCandlish had given “more than the stipulated time to his classes.”^[59] As the College’s enrollment and resources shrank in the late 1860s and early 1870s, however, the hardworking McCandlish became discouraged. A requirement that the faculty offer more preparatory classes coupled with the increasingly erratic salary checks and his own uncertain health pushed him toward resignation. He left the College at the end of the 1871–72 session but continued to argue, unsuccessfully, with the Board for back pay until the summer of 1874.^[60]

The dominant figure for the students was undoubtedly Ewell himself. Even the Grammar School boys had some contact with him, for it was his custom to observe their recitations on alternate Fridays, his “fierce bull-terrier named John Brown” in tow. Many of the youngsters were dumbstruck in his presence—to the obvious detriment of their lessons—but the college students had great affection for the man they called “Old Buck.” They knew him as an excellent teacher and lenient disciplinarian who was deeply concerned for their well-being.^[61] Most of the postwar student recollections of Ewell date from the 1870s and 1880s, however. Between 1865 and 1869, the struggle to rebuild the College absorbed nearly all his time and energy.

The Frustrating Search for Funds

When Ewell pledged in 1864 to rebuild William and Mary, he could scarcely have foreseen that he was making a lifelong commitment Yet if he was dismayed by the extent of the damage to the College, the poverty and demoralization of southeastern Virginia, and his own lack of resources (“I am in the condition somewhat as to means of living that a plucked chicken is as to feathers,” he wrote in the summer of 1865), Ewell was not deterred.^[62] True, he twice offered to resign the presidency in favor of his wartime commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, but his primary motive was greater visibility for the College rather than relief from the burden of leadership.^[63] He was acutely aware of the public attention that focused on Washington College after Robert E. Lee accepted its presidency in August 1865. By 1868, when William and Mary temporarily suspended college classes, Washington College boasted an enrollment of 411.^[64]

Even after Ewell began to understand the magnitude of the task he had taken on, he rarely wavered. In the spring of 1866, he declined the chair of mathematics at Hampden-Sydney College which the trustees offered him at an initial salary of $1,000 (soon to rise, they hoped, to $1,500) and $500 in moving expenses.^[65] He was already caught up in the campaign to revitalize William and Mary. In fact, he had begun his search for funds and support before the first student matriculated in the fall of 1865.^[66] Although he hoped for some income from the College’s bonds and loans, other sources such as the state legislature, the federal government, philanthropic foundations, and wealthy individuals in England and in the North seemed more immediately promising. In retrospect, his attempts to raise large sums from both friends and recent foes amidst the political and economic uncertainties of Reconstruction seem naive, yet his fellow faculty members and at least some Visitors shared his faith in the symbolic power of William and Mary’s past “A College is not a commercial scheme, but rests its strength on the wealth of associations, that age, time, and place, and circumstances, can alone give,” Hugh Blair Grigsby declared.^[67]

Early in the 1865–66 session, the faculty authorized alumnus Robert Lamb of Norfolk to approach English gentlemen on behalf of the College and requested Mrs. Angelica Wilson Earley [Emlen?] of Philadelphia, “so well known as the Florence Nightingale of suffering Confederate prisoners,” to solicit funds from Pennsylvanians.^[68] There is no record of the accomplishments, if any, of these first two appointees, but a later agent, John R. Thompson, made a vigorous though ultimately disappointing canvass in Great Britain.^[69] Grigsby, who warmly supported Ewell’s efforts to tell the William and Mary story, had high hopes for aid from the North, especially New York City; he also knew of men in Boston, Philadelphia, and England who might be sympathetic.^[70] To sway potential donors, Ewell quickly prepared and distributed a brief Historical Sketch of the College that sounded a theme to which he would return again and again: the College was almost the only remaining link between “what Virginia was, is, and is to be.” Surely, he implied, the $80,000 he now estimated as the cost of rebuilding was a small price to pay for the restoration of the vital connection between Virginia’s past, present, and future.^[71]

At the same time Ewell was pleading the College’s case in letters to old friends and colleagues in the North, as well as to such prominent individuals as Henry Ward Beecher and Senator Charles Sumner, he pursued every possibility for income closer to home.^[72] He made several trips to Richmond to urge the General Assembly to resume interest payments on the state stock the College held and to argue that William and Mary deserved a share of the income from the Morrill Land Grant Act that Congress had just extended to the former Confederate states. Though he had dreams of nearly $6,000 in back interest and much more in Morrill money, Ewell gained nothing from the legislators, who were as yet little concerned with education.^[73] A petition from the faculty in early 1867 restating the College’s willingness to offer instruction in “agriculture and other practical sciences” in return for a portion of the Morrill money also fell on deaf ears.^[74] On one of his visits to the capital, however, Ewell set in motion a more profitable endeavor when he arranged with Board member William H. Macfarland to press the College’s claim to the Mattey Fund through an English lawyer in London.^[75] In addition, both Ewell and Tazewell Taylor corresponded with some of those who owed money to the College, as well as with lawyers who offered to pursue old claims for the school. Hampered by a June 1865 stay law that gave Virginia debtors up to four years to settle their obligations, most of these efforts produced little more than the familiar tale of poverty and loss.^[76] Although Thomas J. Randolph did pay $1,000 on the Shadwell debt in the spring of 1867, and lawyer Thomas Giles recovered some $1,500 from a suit against two estates in Amelia County, in the short run, only the Mattey Fund proved really lucrative.^[77]

“We must not be discouraged with small beginnings,” Grigsby instructed Ewell. “The poverty of the people is great. Even wealthy persons have no money, and hardly know when and where they will be able to get any.”^[78] In public Ewell agreed, but privately he expressed frustration at area residents’ lack of initiative. To his mind, the economic recovery of the South required the adoption of the Yankee values of industry and enterprise.^[79] Perhaps because he had opposed secession up until Virginia left the Union and refused to romanticize the war, Ewell saw no reason to prolong the hostilities between North and South. “I believe the whole difficulties [sic] might have been settled 3 months after the close of the war, had a greater spirit of moderation prevailed,” he wrote wistfully in early 1867.^[80] He also believed that the former slaves would play an important role in the postwar South and favored both education and suffrage for them. Unlike most white residents of Williamsburg, he supported the efforts of the two Quaker teachers sent by the Friends Association of Philadelphia and urged them to continue their work with the local freedmen. In addition, he advocated ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as a way of moving toward “harmony & real peace.”^[81]

Ewell’s counsels of moderation had little impact “beyond that of making people call me ugly names such as Abolitionist,” he told his brother.^[82] The legislature of Governor Francis Pierpont’s “Restored” Unionist government overwhelmingly rejected the federal amendment, confident that a majority of white Virginians opposed even limited enfranchisement for the freedmen. That intransigence brought both military reconstruction and black male suffrage to the state in early 1867 and guaranteed a continuation of the political and economic turmoil that so dismayed Ewell.^[83] He daily confronted men like local resident, alumnus, and future Board of Visitors member P. Montagu Thompson, who blamed the freedmen for the sorry state of agriculture on the Peninsula. Thompson admitted that many whites seemed to have lost all initiative, energy, and hope and that a significant portion had become “whiskey drinking loafers,” but “the great obstacle in our way is the large number of thievish idle negroes,” he declared. When unusually wet weather ruined the wheat crop in the summer of 1867, Thompson described conditions as “deplorable in the extreme in every aspect”; the whites were bankrupt while the blacks were “daily growing more worthless and depraved.” The fact that these African-Americans were now voters drove Thompson nearly to distraction.^[84]

What Thompson failed to acknowledge, of course, was the important role of black workers at the College. Both students and faculty depended on the servants, cooks, and washerwomen who daily performed their mundane yet essential tasks. And what Thompson could not anticipate was that an African-American state legislator would play a crucial role in the General Assembly’s decision to aid the College in 1888.^[85]

Ewell agreed with Thompson as to the desperate state of the local economy—”The people here are on the verge of utter destitution … ,” he told his sister Elizabeth in March 1868—but he refused to blame the blacks or to give in to despair.^[86] The solution, he believed, lay in vigorous action and political moderation. “If we stop and fold our hands we are gone,” he warned Tazewell Taylor. “We must make exertions to subsist, & to keep up the country.” As for politics, “if there was moderation on both sides—There is on neither—it would be well,” he told another correspondent.^[87]

For Ewell the path to peace and prosperity led to support for Ulysses S. Grant in the presidential campaigns of 1868 and 1872. After his election, “all will be well,” Ewell enthusiastically assured Colonel Albert Ordway in early 1868.^[88]  Ewell’s political and personal admiration for Grant was neither sudden nor inexplicable. He admired the general’s conduct at Appomattox, and he was deeply grateful for Grant’s efforts in June 1865 to free his brother, General Richard S. Ewell, from the military prison at Fort Warren, Rhode Island, where he had been confined since April.^[89]  In early 1866 Ewell had elicited the general’s support for the rebuilding of William and Mary, and he used Grant’s favorable response along with the endorsements of several other prominent Union generals to buttress the College’s claims for indemnification.^[90]

Ewell’s reliance on his old friends from West Point, coupled with his public opposition to sectionalism, aroused some hostility from fellow Southerners, but he could see no other way to repair the damage from the war and move forward.^[91] Fortunately, amidst the poverty and apathy that he found so frustrating, Ewell did have some energetic allies. His sister Rebecca Ewell managed to obtain a donation of $1,000 for William and Mary from wealthy Washington banker W. W. Corcoran in early 1867, and she solicited funds abroad as well.^[92] One of the most prominent women in Williamsburg, Cynthia Beverley Tucker Washington Coleman, also issued an appeal on behalf of the College. Both because her family had long-standing ties to the College and because she hoped to see her sons educated there, she was anxious that the school be revived.^[93] Hugh Blair Grigsby helped, too, by approaching such philanthropists as Robert C. Winthrop of Boston and by joining Ewell in the defense of the College’s historic location.^[94]

Scarcely had Ewell dampened one faction’s enthusiasm for Richmond when a group of citizens in Norfolk began to agitate for removal there. In January 1866 a city official wrote to Rector Johns that the trustees of the Norfolk Academy would give the College their building and hinted that the city might offer additional inducements.^[95] When only seventeen collegiate students enrolled at the College at the beginning of the 1866–67 session, the campaign was renewed.^[96] This time Governor Pierpont added to the pressure by suggesting to the General Assembly that William and Mary be removed to a more populous area.

Ewell moved quickly to counter the governor’s proposal. In an article for the Norfolk Journal and in an open letter to Williamsburg’s delegate, Sydney Smith, published in one of the Richmond papers, he repeated the familiar arguments for remaining in Williamsburg; to Smith he also asserted that the legislature had no right to move the College. According to the charter, he declared, only the Visitors and the faculty could do that, and he estimated that the College would lose as much as $40,000 of its endowment, as well as the about-to-be-realized Mattey Fund, if it left Williamsburg. He hoped that this statement of the difficulties of moving William and Mary would settle the question once and for all.^[97] But until the school showed signs of recovery, that was a vain hope, as he doubtless knew. Ewell redoubled his efforts to raise funds to rebuild the College where it stood.

Unfortunately, the elaborate campaign of John R. Thompson to raise donations of money and books in Great Britain collapsed at about this same time. Thompson, a Richmond-born writer and former editor of the Southern Literary Messenger who had lived in London since 1863, agreed to serve as an agent for the College in early 1866.^[98] Although his British friends persuaded him that the lecture tour he originally contemplated was not feasible, he diligently pursued other approaches, contacting the archbishop of Canterbury and writing leading newspapers, publishers, and the presses at Oxford and Cambridge. But by June 1866, he had collected only about seventy-five volumes and £21.10, barely enough to pay the printing and shipping bills. In explaining this meager response to Ewell, Thompson stressed the waning of English interest in the former Confederate states and a recent stock market crash in London that ruined thousands of investors. He also noted that the university presses could not donate books outside the United Kingdom.^[99] If Ewell thought that Thompson had encountered difficulties unique to Britain in 1866, he would soon discover similar problems in the United States.

Armed with letters of introduction and endorsements from such luminaries as Henry Ward Beecher and U. S. Grant, Ewell went north in the spring of 1867. He bombarded the New York Times with letters preaching sectional reconciliation and pleading the College’s case. He also published a wildly optimistic piece urging the paper’s readers to purchase land in Tidewater Virginia. “In ten years these lands will be sought and purchased at five times their present price,” he predicted.^[100] The editors were sympathetic enough to Ewell’s mission to give the College and its president a brief editorial notice on April 3. But despite this valuable publicity, Ewell admitted to his brother that he only made “a small beginning” on this first trip.^[101] The results were no better when he returned to the city in May. Henry Ward Beecher tried to assuage Ewell’s disappointment by pointing to the unsettled political climate. Although he had hoped that Ewell could “fish in such troubled waters,” he was not really surprised that the Virginian had caught “few fish & no money.” Beecher believed that the North would eventually agree to help Southern institutions, but “I do not think you can do much till after the election of the next President,” he advised.^[102]

Philadelphia and other cities proved equally unreceptive to Ewell’s message. Even more disappointing was his failure with the Peabody Fund. Established in 1866 by philanthropist George Foster Peabody, this foundation directed the income from its two-million-dollar endowment to the improvement of education in the South. Unfortunately for William and Mary, the Peabody trustees decided to concentrate their efforts on public education and state normal schools.^[103]

While Ewell was working to arouse interest among private donors, the College filed its first of many damage claims with the Congress. The faculty prepared a memorial outlining the history of William and Mary and describing the destruction in 1862 by federal troops. Estimating the losses at $80,000, the memorial asked for a donation of money or land in reimbursement. Appended to the memorial were affidavits from several white townspeople and at least one freedman attesting to its accuracy. Ewell filed these documents with the House Committee on Southern Claims in March 1867, but as the College had clearly not been a loyal institution (Ewell’s personal views notwithstanding), the committee rejected the request out of hand.^[104] Friends of William and Mary were convinced that it had a good case, but future petitions would obviously have to reshape the College’s argument and focus on the Congress as a whole.

The Mattey Fund and the Struggle to Rebuild

Amidst the disappointments of early 1867, the College enjoyed one unqualified triumph. Thanks to the efforts of English lawyer C. M. Fisher, Colonel R. Milton Carey, John R. Thompson, and Board of Visitors member William Macfarland, the income from Mary Whaley’s eighteenth century bequest, the so-called Mattey Fund, finally reached Williamsburg. Ewell reported to the faculty on April 27 that he had received $8,749.38 from Visitor Macfarland; after the deduction of some incidental expenses, about $8,100 remained.^[105]

This money had a tangled history. Former colonist Mary Whaley, who had returned to England some years after the death of her young son Matthew (Mattey) in Williamsburg, intended to memorialize him in her 1741 will by leaving to the minister and church wardens of Bruton Parish a parcel of land in York County and a small endowment to support a school to teach “reading, writing, and arithmetick” to the neediest children of the parish.^[106] But the executor failed to carry out the terms of the will; after two suits, an English court managed to extract £500 from the estate. It invested the money in English securities and then apparently forgot about it for more than a century. The English attorney Fisher discovered the bequest in 1859 and wrote to the rector of Bruton Parish Church. Because the church was not in a position to conduct a school, the rector passed Fisher’s letter along to the College faculty. The faculty replied to Fisher, but they heard nothing from him until May 1865, when he informed them that he believed the College might claim the Whaley legacy if it were prepared to comply with the terms of the will. Fisher offered to undertake the necessary legal work for one-third of the recovered amount. After Visitor Macfarland met with Fisher several times in London in the fall of 1865, the Board of Visitors accepted his terms. Fisher seems to have earned his commission, for the destruction of College records over the years and the absence of any institution called the Mattey or the Whaley School complicated William and Mary’s claim. The fact that the College was already operating the Grammar School, coupled with its promise to accept fifteen of the poorest boys in Bruton Parish tuition-free and to incorporate Matthew Whaley’s name into the name of its school eventually won over the British court.^[107]

The Mattey Fund could scarcely have come at a better time, for Ewell had concluded by the end of the 1866–67 session that he would have to push the Board to begin rebuilding as soon as possible. Although the enrollment for the second postwar session had eventually risen to sixty-one, Ewell realized that the College could not hope to attract many students when all recitations, grammar and collegiate, took place in the patched-up Brafferton. As he noted in his 1867 report to the Board of Visitors, despite an extensive advertising campaign, “an impression prevails to a great extent that the College is closed. This will continue to be the case so long as the Main Building is in ruins.” Knowing the Board’s reluctance to endanger the endowment by selling any of the school’s bonds prematurely, Ewell suggested that the money for rebuilding might come from the Mattey Fund. “What better or safer investment … ? ” he asked.^[108]

To persuade the Board to endorse his proposal, Ewell outlined an economical plan for the restoration. Rather than hiring a general contractor, the College should avail itself of free architectural advice, then buy the necessary materials and hire day laborers and contract workers to make the repairs. Ewell himself would supervise the work. In this manner, he told the Visitors, the Main Building could be completely restored for less than $20,000. The Mattey Fund would supply a part of that sum; Ewell recommended borrowing the rest.^[109]

Even before Ewell offered this very low estimate, he used another tactic to put pressure on the Board. On June 10 a meeting of Williamsburg and James City County citizens, chaired by the city’s mayor, passed a series of resolutions urging the Board of Visitors at its forthcoming meeting to vote to begin rebuilding the College at once. The group sent copies of the resolutions to both the Norfolk Day Book and the Richmond Whig and urged all other newspapers concerned about the fate of the College to print them as well.^[110]

With the help of Hugh Grigsby, Ewell got much of what he wanted when the Visitors met at the President’s House on July 3. The Board appropriated $10,000 for the rebuilding project and named a committee of three—Hugh Grigsby, new Visitor and Williamsburg resident William S. Peachy, and local alumnus P. Montagu Thompson—to work with the faculty. In hopes of raising additional funds, the Board ordered the bursar to try to collect all private debts due the College and reaffirmed Ewell’s authority “to travel wherever and whenever he may deem best in this country and in England to solicit and collect funds for the College” and to appoint agents to assist him, so long as their expenses were paid out of the money they raised.^[111]

In one other action that would have positive long-range consequences for the College, the Board unanimously endorsed Grigsby’s nomination of Colonel William Lamb of Norfolk to fill a vacancy in their ranks.^[112] Lamb, thirty-two years old, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the College, and the Confederate “hero of Fort Fisher,” proved a devoted Visitor for nearly forty years.^[113]

Influenced perhaps by Ewell’s confident presentation, the Board concluded its meeting with the hope that the College would be rebuilt and a full complement of professors employed by the end of the next academic year. Certainly the Building Committee wasted no time. On July 4 Ewell, Grigsby, Peachy, and Thompson, along with Henry A Wise and Professor Snead, inspected the remains of the College building and began to formulate plans for its restoration.^[114] The committee promptly engaged Alfred L. Rives, son of William Cabell Rives and former acting chief of the Engineering Bureau of the Confederacy, as architect.^[115] Ewell urged him to work as quickly as possible and with an eye on the budget. Rives visited Williamsburg in mid July, and Ewell began looking for suppliers of slate and other material.^[116] At the same time, Ewell continued his efforts to keep the College’s name before the public.^[117]

Despite this energetic beginning, the restoration project soon bogged down; it proved much more complex and costly than Ewell had anticipated. Both natural and human elements seemed to conspire against it. An unusually rainy summer and fall slowed the preliminary work of demolishing unsound walls and cleaning the salvaged bricks for reuse; a late spring in 1868 delayed the new construction. Suppliers and workmen were often either unavailable or unreliable Ewell learned, as he struggled with his role as general contractor.^[118] For example, he spent months trying to arrange for the shipment of roofing slate from Richmond to the College. He quickly discovered that most of the James River steamboat captains were unwilling to stop at one of the landings near Williamsburg to unload such a cargo. “I have been waiting for these slate since I saw you in Sept. last,” Ewell complained to Colonel Albert Ordway of the slate company in late December 1867. He finally found a cooperative vessel in January 1868—only to have College Creek freeze over. Ewell eventually got the slate to campus in the summer of 1868, but other delays, the difficulties of coordinating bricklayers and slaters, and shoddy workmanship produced a roof that leaked for years to come.^[119]

Paying for the reconstruction was no easier than superintending it, for Ewell had constantly to prod a reluctant Tazewell Taylor for the necessary funds. Ewell knew that the bursar doubted the wisdom of his course, so he peppered his letters to Taylor with reminders of the importance of acting vigorously and expeditiously. “It would have shocked public sentiment greatly to have moved the College—or to have attempted it & would have endangered its existence anywhere,” Ewell noted in January 1868. The only hope, he reiterated, was to rebuild as rapidly as possible.^[120] Hugh Grigsby, as always, tried to help. After spending an evening with Taylor in Norfolk, he wrote to assure Ewell that the bursar appreciated Ewell’s heroic efforts on behalf of the College.^[121]

As cost mounted, Ewell also counted on Grigsby to persuade his fellow Visitors that the College should indeed borrow money, if necessary, to complete the restoration.^[122] By the summer of 1868, Ewell had to report to the Board that although he had spent the entire $10,000 appropriation, the Main Building—which according to Rives’s plan was to contain eight lecture rooms, a chemical laboratory, rooms for the two literary societies, a library room, an office, and a chapel—was only half finished. Ewell estimated that another $5,000 would be required to complete and furnish it. To repair the Brafferton and its outhouses and to rebuild the fences would take “$6,000 perhaps additional.” The total cost would therefore be more than his original estimate, but he urged the Board to push ahead. Specifically, he recommended that the Building Committee be continued, the Board appropriate at least $2,500, and the committee be authorized to borrow the rest.^[123] Whether the faculty should continue to offer collegiate instruction in makeshift quarters as they had done since 1865, Ewell left up to the Visitors to decide, but he reminded them that the Grammar School had to be kept open to meet the terms of the Mattey Fund. Personally, he seems to have hoped that William and Mary could maintain some semblance of collegiate education in 1868–69, for he assured the Visitors in his July 3 report that “competent men of character can be found willing to try the experiment of restoring the College, for $666 salary & such fees as they might make.”^[124] But when the Board accepted Ewell’s recommendations and turned the question of collegiate classes back to the faculty, he discovered that neither McCandlish nor Snead would agree to work for the small sum he suggested.^[125]

On July 10 the faculty voted “to suspend the exercises of the Collegiate Department for the present session” and to continue the Grammar and Mattey School under a new master, Thomas Jefferson Stubbs of Gloucester, who was to receive a salary of $300 plus fees.^[126] The twenty-seven-year-old Stubbs, to whom the faculty had just awarded an honorary master of arts degree, had attended the College from 1858 to 1861, when he joined first the Gloucester Artillery and then Company A of the Thirty-fourth Virginia Regiment (Wise’s Brigade). Captured at Petersburg, he was not released until after the surrender at Appomattox. Between the end of the war and his return to Williamsburg, he studied for one or two years at the University of Virginia. Although Stubbs’s tenure as Grammar School master was brief—he served for only one session before striking out for Arkansas—he later returned to the College’s faculty as one of the most colorful of the fabled Seven Wise Men.^[127] In addition, both his brother, James N. Stubbs, and his son, T. J. Stubbs, Jr., contributed significantly to William and Mary. Not as numerous as the Taliaferro clan, the Stubbses must nevertheless be counted among the prominent Gloucester County families that stood by the College during the difficult years between the Civil War and World War I.^[128]

Suspension and Renewal

Although Ewell regretted the suspension of collegiate classes, Snead and McCandlish’s refusal to work for a pittance freed the president to devote all of his time and energy to the rebuilding project. Given the continuing construction problems and the amount of money Ewell had to raise, it is difficult to see how he could have also taught in 1868–69. Still, he worried that even one session without students would strengthen the impression that William and Mary was in its death throes. To counter any such damaging thoughts and to rally friends and supporters, he sent a long letter to the Richmond Whig in mid-September 1868 in which he stressed both the severity of the wartime damage and the progress the College had made toward recovery. Indeed, he exaggerated that progress, claiming the Main Building was three-quarters finished and the library had received so many donations it was now “larger than that of any College in the State.” He also attempted to make a virtue of the Board of Visitors’ cautious, piecemeal approach by noting that none of the school’s endowment had been spent on the restoration. He ended the letter, as was his wont, on an upbeat note. The prospects for the College were brighter than they had been at any time since 1862, he declared.^[129]

In reality, the prospects of the College depended on Ewell’s success in completing the reconstruction as expeditiously and economically as possible. The true scope of his task is evident in his correspondence with Tazewell Taylor and Colonel Albert Ordway in the fall of 1868 and in his renewed attempt to raise funds in the North in early 1869. The work in Williamsburg progressed slowly and unevenly, yet rapidly enough to strain both the College’s and Ewell’s limited resources. In letter after letter, Ewell pleaded with Taylor for money to pay overdue bills and his own and Stubbs’s salaries. “There has been no extravagance I assure you though the outlay may appear large,” he wrote on December 2. “It is not as great by 25 percent as that in 1859 & the work is three times better. Then it was contract shoddy. Now it is properly done in the main.”^[130] Unfortunately, in his attempts to reassure Taylor, Ewell exaggerated the quality of the new construction. On November 12 he had told Ordway that there was a leak between the north wing and the central section of the Main Building; months later he was still complaining about the defective roof, which was never satisfactorily repaired.^[131]

No matter how persuasive Ewell’s letters, Taylor could supply only a portion of the necessary funds. Ewell’s life thus remained an endless round of begging and borrowing. The obvious impossibility of raising the required amount in impoverished Tidewater persuaded him to make another foray into the North, even though he knew that three and a half years of Southern intransigence had alienated many erstwhile moderates.

Again, he prepared well by collecting warm letters of introduction and recommendation from President-elect Grant; General J. M. Schofield, the former commanding general of Virginia’s military reconstruction and current secretary of war; General O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau; a Radical judge, Hugh L. Bond of Maryland; and General Ambrose Burnside, the sitting governor of Rhode Island.^[132]

Ewell quickly collected more goodwill as he traveled to New York, but as always, the difficulty lay in converting sentiment into cash. “My conviction that it is hard to blarney [?] people out of their money is gaining strength,” he wrote his daughter from New York. In addition, he discovered that people often had short memories. Henry Ward Beecher “who made so many promises seems to have lost sight of them all; indeed he was almost oblivious of having seen me before,” Ewell complained.^[133] While he continued to call on individuals who might help, Ewell turned to the press, as he had in 1867, but neither approach opened any wallets.^[134] By January 16 Ewell’s frustration was palpable. “People are fast to say they feel great interest in the College’s restoration but slow to say they can[‘]t help. Yet I must wait & get answers whatever they may be,” he noted ruefully.^[135] Having already decided to postpone his trip to Boston until later in the spring, Ewell soon retreated from New York. Except for donations of books from several publishers and individuals and a $500 scholarship from James T. Soutter, he had little to show for his weeks in the cold, wet, dauntingly indifferent city. “There as here money is scarce,” he told Colonel Ordway.^[136]

A month or so after Ewell’s return, the faculty authorized Thomas McCandlish and Colonel Ed gar B. Montague to collect funds for the College while they attended the Theta Delta Chi fraternity convention in New York, but there is no evidence that they were any more successful than the president. Ewell’s journey to Boston was equally unproductive.^[137]

Despite these disappointments, work on the Main Building went forward. The College obtained thousands of dollars worth of supplies on credit from Williamsburg merchant W. W. Vest, and Ewell eventually loaned nearly $2,000 of his own money to help meet pressing obligations. (These funds seem to have come from his share of his sister Rebecca’s estate; that good friend of the College had died in August 1867.) ^[138] By June 1869 Ewell was confident that the College could reopen in the fall. The report of the Building Committee, dated June 28, declared the Main Building “essentially finished” and estimated that it would be ready to receive students in another month. The rebuilding had been accomplished at a cost of $20,000, according to the committee. However, the library needed additional work, as did the President’s House, the College Hotel, and the Brafferton. Moreover, the report said nothing about the problems with the roof.^[139] At that point, Ewell may still have been confident that the slaters and carpenters could make the necessary repairs.

In preparation for the reopening of the College, Ewell submitted his resignation to the Board of Visitors in order to give them the opportunity to restructure the institution. Whether he really hoped to retire is difficult to know. On the one hand, in early June he told his brother that he thought a new president would be appointed, “& if so I expect to retain a Professorship and live at the farm.” And indeed, there was talk around Williamsburg that the Reverend George T. Wilmer, rector of Bruton Parish Church and son of the Reverend William H. Wilmer, eleventh president of William and Mary, would be elected as Ewell’s successor.^[140] On the other hand, by the middle of the month, Ewell was discussing the candidates for faculty positions and advising Dr. Richard Wise’s father and brother on that young man’s chances for a place at the College. By the third week in June, he was clearly operating on the assumption that he would be retained as president, though he went through the motions of submitting his resignation to the Board and seeing it promptly refused.^[141] Whatever his personal desires, Ewell was so closely identified with the effort to revive the College that it is difficult to imagine many Visitors wanting to replace him at this juncture.

Ewell and the Board did differ, however, on the rehiring of collegiate faculty. Although Ewell estimated that the College’s depleted assets would produce, at most, $4,500 annually for the salaries of the president, the professors, and the Grammar School master, he hoped to hire at least four professors in addition to himself.^[142] The Board, opting for fewer appointments at higher pay, authorized him to advertise only three positions: intellectual and moral science, languages, and mathematics. He was to retain the chair of chemistry and natural philosophy as well as the presidency. He followed the Board’s instructions, but he also told Henry Wise that he thought his son, Dr. Richard A. Wise, should come to the College to assist in the natural science department. “Natural science has not been taught here for a long time as it should have been. I’d willingly give up 200 Dolls of my own salary that Richard might be appointed to the chair of Chemistry, geology, mineralogy, etc.”^[143] Ewell urged Henry Wise and Richard’s brother, John, to lobby James Lyons and the other Richmond Visitors—surely superfluous advice to the supremely political Wises!^[144] Ewell was also impressed with the recommendations and testimonials that were coming in in support of Frank Preston, an assistant professor of Greek at Washington College. Son of a longtime faculty member at Virginia Military Institute, Preston was a war hero who had lost an arm at Winchester.^[145]

When the Visitors met at the Ballard House on July 2, they reelected Ewell, McCandlish, and Snead and chose the Reverend Mr. Wilmer to complete the faculty. But the decision was not unanimous. Both Hugh Grigsby and Colonel William Lamb, who was attending his first Board meeting, argued for more professors at smaller salaries. Lamb “advocated a Faculty of 6,” and Grigsby hoped to elect young Preston as well as McCandlish.^[146] This division doubtless encouraged Ewell to urge the Board to reconsider its action the next day.

Since they had refused his resignation, he wanted to offer his own plan for the reorganization of the College, Ewell told the Visitors. In a letter to the new rector, William H. Macfarland (Bishop Johns had resigned at the end of the previous evening’s meeting), Ewell outlined his proposal: both he and Wilmer would receive $1,000 annually; his chair would encompass natural philosophy and mixed mathematics, and Wilmer’s would include belles lettres, political economy, rhetoric, and biblical writing, as well as intellectual and moral science. The salaries for Snead (mathematics), McCandlish (Latin, French, and Roman and French history), and Preston (Greek, German, and Grecian and German history) would be $700, and Dr. Wise would earn $500 as professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology. Stubbs’s replacement as master of the Grammar School, yet to be hired, would be offered between $100 and $300. If the Visitors thought these salaries too low, Ewell replied that the faculty had to make sacrifices to restore the College. “The experiment can do no harm if it does no good & I think that under the circumstances it ought to be made.”^[147] As Ewell frankly acknowledged, “A Professorship here will be no bed of roses for some time to come.”^[148] Whether or not the Visitors accepted Ewell’s vision of a self-sacrificing faculty, they obviously saw the importance of supporting the president they had just reappointed. They reconsidered their earlier decision and adopted Ewell’s plan instead.^[149]

In addition to the crucial personnel decisions, the Visitors took two other important steps during their July meeting. They appropriated $5,000 to complete the restoration, and they added P. Montagu Thompson to their number. The Board adjourned about noon on July 3 “in fine temper,” feeling it had done all that it could for the College, according to Grigsby. All of those offered teaching appointments accepted, so the College would reopen in October with as large a faculty as its resources would permit.^[150]

Ewell had little time to savor his success, for he knew that classrooms and faculty were useless without students. He had been distributing circulars announcing the reopening of the College since early June, and he had even enlisted the young ladies of Williamsburg in his recruitment effort. Anyone who wanted a beau from among the students, he told them, would have to help spread the word that William and Mary was offering collegiate classes again.^[151]

Ewell also pressed to put the final touches on the Main Building and to hire a Grammar School master. Neither task was as easy as he might have hoped. His numerous letters to Colonel Ordway about the leaking roof brought no response, and classes began with the problem unresolved.^[152] As for the Grammar School appointment, the job eventually went to a Washington College alumnus, J. Wilmer Turner of Goochland County, who earned a master’s degree from William and Mary in 1872.^[153]

Ewell wavered between realism and optimism as he contemplated the approaching session. In early August he admitted to Tazewell Taylor that “the prospects are misty.” Yet he was enthusiastic about the faculty, especially Frank Preston, who “is a man of great energy, zeal, & capacity.”^[154]  The president also hoped for a substantial enrollment—perhaps forty collegiate students and enough younger boys to justify an assistant for Turner.^[155] Despite the leaky roof, the minimal furnishings, and the ongoing repairs at the College Hotel, William and Mary was in better shape than it had been since the war.