“Make Their College Useful”

Williamsburg was a place that time forgot, or so it must have seemed to those of its people who ventured into the larger world. When Richmond became the seat of government, the town ceased to be the center of the state’s political and social life. Since then the decades had rolled serenely on. Only occasionally did something such as the threat of a cholera epidemic, Nat Turner’s bloody massacre, and, more remotely, the Nullification crisis disturb the even tenor of its ways. Otherwise, the inhabitants were left to follow their accustomed rounds of visiting, gossiping, marrying, birthing, and dying, comfortably entangled in a generations-old web of social and family relationships, content in the belief that the future would be much like the past.

In contrast to this quiet backwater, the nation at large was undergoing a rapid transformation. The 1820s saw the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The application of steam to transportation, the growing importance of manufacturing, the accessibility of new markets, and the westward push of the frontier all seemed to promise unlimited opportunity for everyone in a democratized society. A rising class of new men challenged what they saw as an eastern elite’s monopoly of privilege. They aimed to displace the mercantile and planting aristocracy whose hegemony was rooted in the colonial period. It was a time of evangelical egalitarianism, and Andrew Jackson’s victory in the election of 1828 left conservatives as thunderstruck as Jefferson’s victory had left their Federalist fathers a generation before.

Higher education, or what passed for it, was part of this social ferment and often found itself pulled in different directions. The passion for leveling symbolized by the Jacksonian slogan “any man is good enough to hold any office” carried over into all forms of human endeavor. If any man was good enough for any office, he was also good enough to be a lawyer, physician, minister, or professor. Yet Americans, then as now, wanted some kind of formal cachet, a diploma or certificate authenticating their democratic entitlement to universal privilege. Moreover, in the frenzy of reformism and religious enthusiasm that constituted the Second Great Awakening, multiplying sects and communities started what they called colleges as instruments of regeneration and progress. Many were no more than rustic academies ladling out an anemic version of the liberal arts, while the professions filled up with lawyers ignorant of the law, doctors with diplomas from storefront quack factories, and ministers innocent of theology.^[1]

The same religious upwelling that created so many sectarian colleges also affected existing institutions and sometimes brought into collision the Enlightenment ideals of the old gentry, supposedly exemplified by Jefferson’s university, and the fundamentalist beliefs of evangelical Protestantism. One historian has named the result “the great retrogression.”^[2] Jefferson himself could not withstand the wrath of the Virginia Presbyterians and found it necessary to give up the appointment of Thomas Cooper to the university primarily because of their objections to that eminent scientist’s unitarianism.^[3] This was merely an intensification of the hostility once directed at the alleged deism of Bishop Madison and John Augustine Smith.

Besides being attacked as propagators of heresy, colleges came under fire for clinging to an outdated curriculum irrelevant to the entrepreneurial millennium just dawning. Homer had little to teach, after all, about building canals and railroads; iron horses not wooden horses were in demand. The practical application of education had always been important to the Enlightenment, an expected dividend of the search for nature’s laws.^[4] On the other hand, neither Jefferson nor many of his forward-looking contemporaries were willing to jettison the classics, which they saw as an essential acquirement of the properly educated mind. Nor had they abandoned the idea of a natural aristocracy, an elite of innate talents to which the educational system should be tailored if the nation was to have principled guardians of the republican flame. Besides, to update the curriculum meant adding professorships and buying expensive equipment. Even though the nation’s investment in education grew during the antebellum period, the proliferation of colleges would have made a widespread reformation more costly than the American people were willing to consider.^[5] Eventually, adjustments would come. At William and Mary the decades before the war of 1861 would see the revival of modem languages and efforts to provide professional training in engineering and medicine. But there, as at colleges generally, social and economic restraints would leave the traditional course of study fundamentally intact. Believers in the old curriculum received powerful encouragement from the so-called Yale Report of 1828. Coming from an institution whose graduates were very influential in educational development in the South and West, this stirring reaffirmation of time-tested values heartened those who still believed that in the larger scheme of things the ability to read Homer might after all be as important as knowing how to build a railroad.^[6]

Meanwhile, back at the College the future must have seemed bleak indeed in the aftermath of the removal fiasco. At least two members of the faculty doubted if William and Mary had a future wherever it was located. Professor Ferdinand Campbell tried to abandon ship in the summer of 1824. He visited Philadelphia looking for an appointment to the University of Pennsylvania, a quest that failed despite the support of his friend Robert Hare, then professor of chemistry at the medical college.^[7] Late in October he wrote his uncle, “Our College, as you anticipated is I think completely gone, there being at present about 5 students only attending the lectures, and two who had entered have already left town to seek some other more flourishing seminary.”^[8] His colleague, Patrick Rogers, was equally pessimistic. He told Jefferson, who was not likely to disagree, that there was “something in the organization of William and Mary which, independently of its location or other permanent disadvantages, must forever prevent it from being successful or prosperous.” When the university opened, he continued, the College would probably close. He proposed to visit Monticello soon and was clearly angling for an invitation to join the university’s faculty.^[9]

As for John Augustine Smith, he had made it known that he intended to leave the College if it did not relocate in Richmond. He continued to be hardheaded and tenacious, refusing to take the House of Delegates’ rebuff as the end of the battle. He told the Visitors at their July convocation that he still believed the move to be indispensable,^[10] and there are indications of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Smith to get the Visitors to try again. But his day was drawing to a close. The first order of business was to be reform, not removal. The dreaded rival in Charlottesville had begun operations in March. What could the College do to survive?

A year before, Jefferson had predicted that when the Richmond project failed “they will recall their grammar school, and make their college useful as a sectional school of preparation for the University.”^[11] There were Board members who had devised a contingency plan somewhat similar to Jefferson’s prophecy: revive the Grammar School, provide room and board in the College to reduce costs to students, and if the College was still unable to recover, surrender the ancient charter to the state.^[12] Judge Semple and Visitor John Seawell had said much the same in their testimony before the Committee of Schools and Colleges,^[13] although without suggesting giving up the charter.

A consensus already existed, then, when the Board asked the faculty for advice at its meeting of July 1825. The Society recommended reestablishing the Grammar School, where classical languages and literature would be taught. Many agreed with Professor Rogers that classical learning was essential in any seminary, and that the Grammar School would be useful to the people of Williamsburg and the vicinity.^[14] It was important to cultivate the good will of the community, which often exercised a commanding influence in the affairs of the College. The Society also made recommendations about internal governance: repeal the statute of 1817 that made it the duty of the president alone to report on the conduct of the professors and restore the policy prevailing under Bishop Madison of having the Society as a whole annually inform the Visitors of the state of the College. Dr. Rogers was especially vehement on this point, as might have been expected, protesting against a system that presumed to enforce the execution of duties by “the excitement of perpetual fear or apprehension” and by “menaces from a colleague,” a reference to President Smith.^[15] The professors also requested that all of them, not just the president, be permitted to meet with the Board, a request the Visitors ignored.

Otherwise, the faculty recommendations were accepted, except for a vague suggestion about reforming the disciplinary code.^[16] Students would now board in the College unless exempted for sufficient reason, as many would be. The Society was to appoint a steward who would provide bed and meals for $100 per session, with washing and candles $20 more, thus keeping living expenses within the reach of families of modest resources. The Grammar School and the professorship of humanity were reinstituted. If income should be insufficient to pay for this new professorship, the deficiency would be made up by assessing the salaries of the other faculty members.^[17]

John Augustine Smith was left glowering amid the ruins of all his plans. The Society had resumed the weekly meetings that Smith had scotched in 1814; now, with the repeal of the 1817 statute, he found himself broken to the ranks. In the words of one observer, he was “little more than the mere nominal head … stripped of all his power,” the only shred of presidential status left to him being his right to preside at faculty meetings.^[18] The Visitors delivered a gentle hint by raising the possibility of cutting his salary,^[19] and in July 1826 Smith wisely seized the chance to return to the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons whence he had come twelve years before. As mentioned, he rose to the presidency and continued to pursue the pungent style of leadership he had brought to perfection at William and Mary.^[20]

The reorganization of 1825 was intended to re-create the College as it had been at the time of Madison’s death. Therefore, it was to be expected that when Smith resigned the Visitors would resume the practice of electing as president a man in holy orders, someone who would free the College from the taint of deism. Furthermore, such an appointment would be consistent with the prevailing practice of American colleges, the rising religiosity of the times, and the implicit requirements of the charter with respect to the College’s missionary responsibilities. “It had been strongly urged from almost every quarter,” asserted “A Citizen of Williamsburg,” “that a Clergyman ought to be placed at the head of the College.” On the other hand, the president traditionally taught moral philosophy, which had come to embrace politics, political economy, and “national law.” Many believed that these subjects should be taught by a layman.^[21] Religion and politics were best taught separately.

The obvious solution was to establish a new professorship to take care of these secular disciplines. But could the College afford an addition to the faculty? The accounts continued to show annual deficits with depressing punctuality, and there was no reason to expect that income would grow; shrinkage was more likely. If the new chair was to be funded, the only recourse was the salary pool. This had amounted to a total of $2,900 under Bracken, but the new salary scale had raised it to $5,050 by 1815, the end of Smith’s first year.^[22] That sudden surge had stuck in some people’s craw from the first,^[23] and now with the addition of the humanity professorship, what today would be called the instructional budget had climbed to $5,720. So the Visitors cut salaries sufficiently to pay all but $250 of the cost of a new professor of political law, thus leaving to a clergyman-president the more religiously sensitive elements of moral philosophy and silencing critics who feared that, as in the past, a layman teaching those subjects might nurture infidelity.^[24] Such was the combination of pressures that led to the creation of the professorship whose first occupant would be Thomas Roderick Dew, ironically a former student and warm admirer of John Augustine Smith. The subjects attached to the chair were listed by the Board as “National and Natural Law, Political Economy, Political History, and the Philosophy of the human mind.”^[25]

The new president and professor of moral philosophy was the Reverend William H. Wilmer, D.D., heretofore rector of St. Paul’s in Alexandria. His connection with the College reached back to the early days of Smith’s tenure. Then he had supported the latter’s efforts to revive the chair of theology which they hoped would be the nucleus of an Episcopal theological seminary, the only result being the short-lived and unsuccessful professorship of Reuel Keith. Wilmer’ s interest in religious education continued unabated, and when the seminary was actually founded in Alexandria in 1823, Wilmer, Keith, and Oliver Norris undertook the instruction of ministerial students. Wilmer’s other link to William and Mary was through Richard Channing Moore, bishop of Virginia. Together with fellow evangelicals William Meade and Norris, he had persuaded Moore to be a candidate for the episcopate at the 1814 convention, convinced that only an evangelical bishop with Moore’s demonstrated abilities could save the church.

Moore was elected, became rector of the new Monumental Church in Richmond, and three years later joined the College’s Board of Visitors. Meanwhile, Wilmer’ s standing in the church grew rapidly as the church itself gained new strength, and many looked to him as Bishop Moore’s probable successor.^[26] The bishop himself was anxious to see an able priest in the presidential office, and he threw the full weight of his considerable prestige into a campaign to choose Wilmer. As soon as he heard of Smith’s resignation, he wrote Wilmer urging him to accept the position if it were offered and expatiating on its advantages. Not only would he have his salary and fees, but the rectorship of Bruton Parish and an additional $500 per year therefrom. You could do much good at William and Mary, he told Wilmer, and you would also promote the interests of the Episcopal church. The bishop corresponded or met with many Visitors, including John Tyler, now governor of Vrrginia, and succeeded in rounding up a large majority of the Board. On October 16 the Visitors warmly invited Wilmer to accept their election of him as president.^[27] Wilmer heard the Visitors’ urgent plea as “a call from heaven to the Presidency of William and Mary.”^[28] He may have been the only person ever connected with the College who saw the Visitors as receiving their instructions from on high; many have at times wondered if their lines of communication did not run in quite a different direction.^[29]

A more radical change in styles could scarcely have been imagined. A skeptic president who went galloping off to the chase with horn tooting and hounds baying had given way to one who held semiweekly prayer meetings in private homes and scoured the countryside for lost sheep in a zealous baptismal crusade.^[30] The people of Williamsburg, it was said, gave up their balls, routs, and squeezes for psalm singing, although Wilmer was not above serving wine along with the psalms at his own parties.^[31] The new Episcopalianism might discountenance “gaming, attending on theatres, public balls, and horse racing” as occasions of sin, but no one in his right mind would have expected the faithful of Williamsburg to give up a genteel glass of wine.^[32]

Wilmer quickly became much beloved by all.^[33] At the College, Patrick Rogers doubtless agreed fully with his son, who observed that Wilmer’ s amiable disposition “must be particularly pleasing from the contrast it forms with the very opposite character of his predecessor. It is like a mild, vernal sunshine succeeding to cold, changeful, blustering weather.”^[34]

Drifting in the Doldrums

Delusive dreams of grandeur at Richmond dispelled, the Grammar School restored, a common table reestablished, Smith gone, and a popular clergyman of stature and undoubted piety at the helm: surely the future must have seemed brighter. Unfortunately, these events only introduced another period of uncertainty and instability. The most shocking blow was Wilmer’ s sudden death soon after the end of the 1826–27 session from the effects of that scourge of the lowlands, “bilious fever.”^[35] Doubtless at Bishop Moore’s instance, the Visitors cast about hurriedly for a replacement and sounded out William Meade, upon whom the College had just conferred an honorary degree of doctor of divinity. Meade declined,^[36] possibly because he saw improved prospects of becoming bishop now that Wilmer was gone. Moore then recruited the Reverend Adam Empie, rector of St. James in Wilmington, North Carolina, whom the bishop recommended in terms that left his colleagues “no alternatives.” “We know nothing certainly of him,” said another member of the Board, “but have reason to hope he will give entire satisfaction. …”^[37]  Empie’s election was unanimous.

The Visitors must have possessed at least a curriculum vitae of the new president, even if most of them lacked personal knowledge of him. Empie was a forty-two-year-old New Yorker, an Episcopal priest whose parents were native Hollanders, and an alumnus of Union College. He was said to be “a churchman & no presbyterian, & zealous & consistent.” Among his earlier positions had been a professorship of history, geography, and ethics at the United States Military Academy (1813–17), where he was also chaplain. From West Point he moved to St. James in Wilmington and made his mark on the Episcopal church of North Carolina. According to one experienced observer, Empie “commenced his course with favorable impressions. … He seems desirous to please, and, perhaps, to shine;­—his talents are most respectable—pleasing exterior, graceful manners—classical in style and taste, and of ready elocution … but, still, he is not, to my discernment, Dr. Wilmer:—This entre nous.”^[38] Empie would be president of the College for nine years, many of them difficult.

Another newcomer in 1827 was a teacher of modern languages. For some time there had been sentiment for bringing back this Jeffersonian innovation. Now that Spain’s empire in America had dissolved into independent republics open to the trade of the world, a knowledge of Spanish took on, at least in theory, a political and commercial importance.^[39] As for French, it had always been the modern language of choice. Early in 1827 the Grammar School usher, Mr. Henry James, had undertaken to teach that language, but then had a falling out with Professor Dabney Browne, master of the school.^[40] In the autumn Colonel C. de la Pena took his place in the Grammar School as teacher of French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. He proposed also to open a music school, wherein young ladies would be taught to play the piano and the Spanish guitar. ^[41] Other than his being a native Spaniard and a refugee from the revolutionary troubles afllicting his country, little is known of Pena. He remains another of those shadowy figures who flit through the history of the College.^[42]

Senor Pena’s first impression of Williamsburg, presented with a rueful melancholy, is perhaps worth reproducing in part:

According to my promise I write to you from this sad place of solitude and exile. … As time destroys every thing, nothing remains here that would ascertain its past glories, but an old statue of an old english general^[43] who was the first governor of this state, and many half ruined wooden houses which afford a tranquil and peaceful asylum to insects of every description. The streets give an idea of the wonderful fertility of this soil, by their being covered with grass, and several cows, pigs, horses, mules and goats are to be seen pasturing undisturbed along them. I thought I was transported to Noah’s Ark, when I first came into this town, so prodigious was the quantity of animals I met with, without seeing a single person till I reached the post office . …^[44]

The following July the Board revived the professorship of modern languages, to which Pena was appointed—without salary. He was, however, allowed to charge his students the usual twenty-dollar fee. Possibly the Visitors thought he could make ends meet by teaching fandangos to the young ladies. He lasted two years. The first anyone knew of his resignation was when the Society sent Pena, then in Richmond, the usual notice to be given to the newspapers announcing the beginning of the fall term. When the notice appeared, the members saw with astonishment that Pena had expunged all reference to the professorship of modern languages. Exit Senor Pena.^[45] With him modern languages vanished from the curriculum for nearly thirty years.

There were still other changes and vacancies that must have made some prospective students think twice about matriculating; one never knew, it seemed, what would be taught or by whom. In 1827 Empie was weeks late in arriving, and so Rogers had to teach his course in moral philosophy. Then in the summer of 1828, Rogers himself died of what was called a malarial fever.^[46] With all due respect, in this case the College was the gainer. To fill his chair the Visitors elected his son, William Barton Rogers, an alumnus then lecturing at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore and a man who had a most distinguished career before him.

A vacancy in the mathematics professorship had no such fortunate outcome; far from it. In 1827 the holder of that position, Ferdinand Stewart Campbell, fell heir to the barony of Ascog on the Isle of Bute. He took leave of absence during 1828–29 to begin the long and complicated process of claiming his inheritance, which involved, among other things, becoming a British citizen. To teach his classes he made an arrangement with John Page, a Williamsburg lawyer, member of the Board, and son of the late governor of the same name who had been a lifelong intimate friend of Thomas Jefferson.^[47] Ferdinand Stewart Campbell-Stewart—his new patronymic was a condition of inheriting—returned to teach during the 1829–30 session and then resigned. His days of scrabbling for $20 fees were over, for he was soon to sell Ascog for £80,000.^[48]

Campbell-Stewart’s departure precipitated an unpleasantness that provides a glimpse of the College’s inner history, revealing the ingrown, parochial, often neper tistic sociopolitical environment which was so much a part of the life of the institution. John Page, now in 1830 rector of the Board of Visitors, for years had coveted the mathematics chair. When Campbell, whose student Page had been, tried to escape to the University of Pennsylvania in 1824, John Augustine Smith assured Page he would be Campbell’s successor if the latter did not return. Now that Campbell-Stewart had finally resigned, Page expected his endorsement and was “mortified” when he heard nothing, doubly so when it was rumored that Campbell-Stewart had recommended Henry Rogers, brother of William B. Rogers.^[49]

As rector, it was Page’s responsibility to call a meeting of the Board to fill the vacancy. Page’s brother-in-law, Robert Saunders,Jr., whose father was on the Board, tried to help. He wrote Visitor Joseph Prentis urging him to attend. He referred to the “strange” yet “certain influence that Judge Semple is known to possess over many members of the visitation.” Page could not be elected unless Visitors free from that influence “attend in sufficient number to throw that party … into a minority.” The basis of this factionalism may have been at least partly political. Semple was connected by marriage to John Tyler, recently governor of Virginia and a member of the Board. Saunders (and presumably his father, a Visitor) was extremely conseivative and was on his way to becoming an ultra-Whig. It may have been that the Tylerites, who were at heart proto-Democrats, were expected to oppose a candidate connected with the Saunders family.

As it turned out, there was no vote on Page because his call did not produce a quorum.^[50] With the session of 1830 about to begin, the Society had to take steps to see that mathematics was taught Courses in that subject could not be suspended without serious consequences. Students intending to take a degree or those who needed mathematics for other reasons would be likely to go elsewhere, nor would new students wish to enter an institution with so radical a gap in its curriculum. On October 23, not long after the Board failed to achieve a quorum, the Society appointed William Barton Rogers to teach mathematics as well as his other courses, his only additional compensation being student fees.

Page was beside himself, as were others who championed his cause. Among these was the elder Robert Saunders. Page’s mind, said Rogers, “is wound up to a pitch of phrensy by the action of the faculty. … He and Saunders and others of the same interest are raging with passion and hatred against me.” Rogers had made no bones about his opinion that Page was not competent to teach mathematics, and upon being interrogated by Page, told him to his face that if asked he would say so to the Board. Thereupon, Page “talked of fighting with muskets and so forth.” Undismayed by these threats, Rogers went to work enthusiastically to “place the mathematics department on a more elevated and scientific footing than it has hitherto occupied.”^[51]

Page’s qualifications, whatever they may have been, were not the only reason for giving the job to Rogers. Expenses continued to outrun income. The professors’ salaries were chronically in arrears. Saving the salary of the mathematics chair by assigning its duties to one or more incumbent professors was apparently the only way of balancing the budget and recovering the delinquent salaries. Judge Semple, professor of law, seems to have been the principal advocate for this policy,^[52] and the Society advised doing so in its report to the Board in July 1831. Rogers had discharged the duties of the position “greatly to the benefit and satisfaction of both Mathematical classes,” said the report, and should someone be brought in to replace Campbell Stewart, income would be wholly inadequate to pay salaries, which had accumulated arrears of $5,544. Moreover, a recent drop in enrollment from sixty-four to fifty-seven had been caused by the uncertainty of the public as to whether mathematics would be taught and—pointedly—”by whom.” The matter needed to be settled.^[53]

The Visitors, in their wisdom, did not accept the cogency of these arguments. Although they had exhorted the faculty to reduce expenses and had prohibited the spending of capital, they nevertheless demonstrated their adherence to deficit financing by trying to fill the mathematics chair, though with Rogers, not Page. The professorship of chemistry and natural philosophy was offered to the president of Hampden-Sydney College, Jonathan Cushing. When Cushing declined, Rogers continued to do double duty, and as a result the budget briefly threatened to show a small surplus. At last, in 1833, the Board elected the younger Robert Saunders to the mathematics chair. It was a close contest between Saunders and James Cabell, nephew of Joseph C. Cabell, who had been so long and intimately connected with the College and Williamsburg. Uncle Joseph made a serious effort on James’s behalf, but failed by a narrow margin. The vote was six to five. Five of the six were Visitors who, like Saunders, were residents of Williamsburg . Among them was John Page, the winner’s brother-in-law, although the senior Saunders, the candidate’s father, very properly abstained. No doubt he had counted noses. Still, young Mr. Cabell had his reward. In 1837 he became professor of anatomy and surgery at the University of Virginia, where Uncle Joseph sat on the Board of Visitors.^[54] Meanwhile, the law professorship had been vacated by Judge Semple in 1832 and would remain empty for two years before being filled by a man who would become one of the College’s brightest ornaments, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker.^[55]

Although the problems posed by all these changes and vacancies were often difficult to contend with, at least the College had turned the comer on the vexing matter of student behavior. There was, however, much unhappiness before the comer was reached.

After the departure of John Augustine Smith, the Society tried to adopt a milder, more paternal policy in dealing with their young men. This seemed to work well during Wilmer’s brief tenure, even if the reverend himself had to pursue and collar a nocturnal bell ringer.^[56] Empie’s first year was fairly quiet, except for some incidents of drunken vandalism. One led to the presentation of Mr. John J. Clarke to the grand jury for “knowingly and willfully” shooting two oxen belonging to Dickie Galt.^[57] At the end of the academic year 1827–28, the faculty awarded faint praise: the session had manifested “less of what is riotous and disorderly than had usually been the case at this seminary.”^[58]

The next session saw an increase in “irregularities.” Meetings of the Society in the Blue Room of the Main Building were interrupted by bricks coming through the windows. Doors and furniture were broken, and the professors were doused with water as they came down the front steps. Professor Pena was accosted in a disrespectful way by Mr. William Whiting, the latter at the time being held upright by two friends.^[59] This ongoing guerrilla warfare disrupted the educational process, poisoned the atmosphere of the campus, and hurt the College in the estimation of the public. It also absorbed a remarkable amount of the faculty’s time and attention, as the most cursory reading of the faculty minutes will show. Perhaps the reductio ad absurdum was reached when Judge Semple found himself embroiled in an argument with a local landlord over the cost of washing to students, an issue arising out of misbehavior by the students who lived there.^[60]

The main cause of friction between faculty and students here as in other American colleges was the prevailing practice of requiring the former to act as policemen. By contrast, happy was the lot of the dons at Oxford and Cambridge, where policing was the responsibility of deans, proctors, and beadles, not of those who taught.^[61] Eventually, American colleges would become large enough to afford a separate bureaucracy and relieve the faculty of this unwelcome duty. Until then, they  had to muddle through as best they could.

In 1829 the Society sent the Board a long analysis of the problem and a rather piteous admission of helplessness. Liquor, said the professors, caused much of the trouble, as was true “in society at large.” They knew whereof they spoke, because the consumption of alcohol was at an all-time national high during the 1820s.^[62] The liquor was bought with pocket money supplied by parents, and it was the pocket money that was “the root of all evil,” leading to “idleness[, gambling,] dissipation[, and] intemperance.” The precipitating cause of the worst disorders was the combination of the February examinations and the Washington’s Birthday Ball. After acquitting themselves respectably in the former, many students thought themselves “at liberty to become comparative idlers for the remainder of the course.” They were so numerous as to be “beyond the reach of ordinary punishment. The high excitement and intense application existing previous to the exam. naturally gives place to the opposite extreme. … The evil is enhanced by the ball of the 22d. which is the subject of hopes and excitement and preparations for weeks before and manifests its effects still more for weeks afterwards.” The result was more drinking and more rampages, and so the downward spiral continued.

By the time this stage was reached, said the report, the faculty was powerless. “Strike any one of them directly or indirectly or threaten the whole mass and in either case they act in concert … persuaded that the largeness of their numbers will insure impunity. … ” True, there was a statute on the books allowing the Society to treat everyone as guilty who could not prove his innocence, but it could be used only in “the greatest emergencies.” If the rule were invoked to detect the guilty, admittedly a very difficult thing to do, the College would be in a continuous uproar. Experience had shown that to invoke this rule so unified and aroused the students that the outcome would be to suspend all of them and so deal a death blow to the institution.

The faculty asked the Board to break the mainspring of the cycle of disorder by abolishing both the midyear examinations and the February 22 ball. ^[63] As to the latter, they could have done so themselves. Although they had the authority to refuse permission for the students to hold the ball, they nevertheless routinely granted it, probably because they feared the consequences of not doing so.^[64] The Board took no action at this time; in fact, it is not known if there was a convocation in 1829. The next session saw a continuation of misconduct. Incidents were fewer in number, but they included an ugly riot early in March. Led by students in disguise, the rioters stoned the President’s House, threatened faculty members with pistols and sticks, broke into the Blue Room, where they smashed furniture and windows, tore up and “defiled with human ordure” the Society’s records, and vandalized things generally.^[65]

At their convocation in July 1830, the Visitors, in an unaccustomed paroxysm of legislative zeal, took cognizance of disciplinary problems by passing a “Statute for the Good Government of the College.”^[66] Partly a codification or digest of earlier laws, it also contained new rules the clear intent of which was to avoid needless provocation of student resentment and to prevent every incident, many of which were certainly trivial, from becoming a full-scale confrontation between the Society and the offender. For example, the professors were “enjoined from making any remarks by way of reproof or otherwise, injurious to the feelings of students during Lecture, or on any other occasion.”^[67] When a case of misbehavior was reported, instead of immediately hauling the suspect before the whole Society, one or more professors would be appointed as a committee “to confer with and advise in private and in a friendly manner with such Student” Should he deny “on his honor as a gentleman the offence of which it has been believed he was guilty, such denial shall be taken as conclusive evidence of his innocence.”^[68] On the other hand, failure to deny, or if guilt was admitted, to pledge future good behavior subjected the srudent to such punishment as the Society deemed appropriate.^[69] The Board accepted the faculty’s advice concerning the midyear public examinations, which were abolished. But instead of doing the same for the February 22 ball, the Board explicitly allowed it.^[70]

The graph line of student disorders showed a marked decline from this time on, with occasional minor protuberances here and there. The Washington’s Birthday Ball of 1832 had its usual effect, but this celebration appears to have been held less frequently afterwards. Concerted action, such as the riot of 1830, gave way to scattered incidents involving individual sinners. Although some were serious—duels, acrual or attempted, and “affrays” with weapons—most were cases of frequenting taverns and intoxication.^[71] To what extent the new rules were responsible for this improvement it is impossible to say. They may have helped by encouraging the faculty to distinguish between mountains and molehills and to proceed with more tact in their investigations. The Board deserves credit for this sensible approach. The Society continued to urge parents to withhold that “root of all evil,” excessive spending money, and asked local merchants not to extend credit to students, a practice ultimately outlawed by the legislature.^[72] Finally, faculty and Visitors would have been more than human if they had not derived some satisfaction from comparing the conduct of their young men with that of students enrolled in Mr. Jefferson’s university. There, the turmoil be gan almost immediately after it opened and continued with a persistent level of violence, including the murder of a professor, which the old College could not pretend to rival.^[73]

The convocation of 1830 also acted on matters other than student discipline. When the faculty said rather plaintively that everything possible had been done, without success, to bring expenses down to the level of income, a compassionate Board lent a helping hand by cutting salaries by $100^[74] and stipulating that salaries, or portions thereof, would be paid only after all other annual expenses had been met. If further arrears ensued, the faculty would have first claim on anything that might be collected from the unpaid debts owed the College.^[75] In what might be called the Admiral Byng approach, the Board thereby encouraged the professors to persevere in their economies and to put the screws on debtors.

“Each Professor may have two classes; but no Professor shall receive from the same Student more than twenty dollars in the same collegiate year.” Behind this innocent-sounding injunction, which was part of a long statute describing and prescribing course content and required books, lay an unpleasant controversy. It involved young Thomas Dew, who had recently come to public notice with the appearance of his Lectures on the Restrictive System,^[76] and who was perhaps feeling his oats. Although the affair proved to be transitory, the issues involved illustrate some important educational and fiscal facts about the College. Only the essential details need to be given.

The normal assignment for a professor was two full-year courses, but when the chair of political law was created in 1826 and Dew elected to it, some members of the Society and of the Board had evidently expected that he would teach only one course: the part of the moral philosophy course subtracted from the presidential professorship at the time of Wilmer’s election. Dew believed that these subjects plus history were too much to compress into one course. The Society approved his request to be allowed to offer a separate half-time course in history, Wilmer and Rogers dissenting, on condition that it not be required for a degree or interfere with those courses that were.^[77] This and a half-year course in metaphysics gave Dew the equivalent of two full courses, which seemed to him only fair. Two courses meant more student fees than one course.

Early in the 1829–30 session, the Society rescinded the resolution permitting Dew to teach a separate history course, although permitting him to do so without fees until the Board could decide the question. These two facts are connected. As pointed out earlier, fees could make up a large portion of a professor’s income, sometimes substantially more than his salary. Unpopular or demanding teachers or those with unpopular courses were at a disadvantage in competing with popular teachers and popular courses. Such would not have been the case had all students been made to take the same program of study. There was a “regular” course that all students were supposed to take; however, the sheer necessity of maintaining enrollments meant that numerous exceptions were made, the beneficiaries being called “irregular” students. During the 1829–30 session, fully half were “irregulars.”^[78] Dew’s troubles began when considerable numbers of students began to ask for exemption from the “regular” course to make room for Dew’s history class. These applications, said Dew, “produced discussions of the most unpleasant character … calculated to engender warmth of feeling, and elicit remarks disparaging to the dignity, usefulness, & importance of the political chair or some of the studies belonging to it.”^[79]

Dew obviously believed that competition for fees was the real issue.^[80] Therefore, he asked the Board to consider seriously putting all fees into “a common purse,” which was the practice, he said, in almost every college in the country where course fees were collected. He had reason to believe that most of the other professors supported such a system. The pooling and division of fees, incidentally, had been recommended to the Committee of Schools and Colleges by Judge Semple more than five years before.^[81] On the other hand, there were those (not professors) who believed in more, not less, competition, and who were willing to make the faculty more dependent on fees by reducing salaries. Then they would be spurred to greater efforts in order to make a living.^[82] This was the reasoning of no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson, and the fee system prevailed at the University of Virginia for many years with the same consequences as at William and Mary.^[83]

Not until after Dew’s death did the Board take his advice.^[84] Meanwhile, it clung to this destructive piecework, sweatshop philosophy of academic management that has its modem parallel in the infatuation of the late-twentieth century administrator with merit evaluations and the rule of publish-or-perish, the idea being to stimulate publicity-generating “productivity” by fomenting the same kind of Hobbesian war of all against all that caused Dew’s troubles. The wheel turns and the same old spoke comes up again.

After their unusual burst of activity in 1830, the Visitors lapsed into their accustomed torpor. Soon the College began to show signs of dwindling away. With modem languages defunct since 1830, no regular mathematics professor for several years, and no one teaching law from 1832 until 1834, a decline in enrollments was to be expected.^[85] Instead of a gradual decline, enrollments collapsed from fifty-three in the fall of 1831 to twenty-three in 1832.^[86] Lack of a law course, which had enrolled fourteen in 1831–32, accounted for some of the drop, but the faculty believed the main cause to be “that appalling scourge of Asiatic cholera,” which had been “raging all around us” weeks before the beginning of the 1832 term. Indeed, “at the very moment that College was opening a report … was suddenly spread abroad that the cholera was raging at Wmsburg. & several on their way to the Institution returned home & went to seminaries at that time more favored.”^[87] Combined with Williamsburg’s reputation for unhealthiness, this rumor was bound to devastate enrollments. The fearsome cholera pandemic that had swept across Europe in 1831 and 1832 reached the United States via New York in the latter year. By July it was in Norfolk. Then it appeared in the lower Chesapeake Bay region generally and by September was in Richmond, eventually reaching into the Piedmont, northern Virginia, and the Shenandoah Valley. The mortality rate was sometimes as high as 30 to 50 percent, with death coming as soon as three hours after the illness manifested itself. Four hundred died in Norfolk, and in Richmond, 498 of a population of 10,000.^[88] Yet Williamsburg, that supposed pesthouse, experienced no such ravages. The faculty publicly but vainly denied that cholera was in their midst They insisted there had been only one case of violent disease since late October that might possibly have been cholera; otherwise the town and the College had never been more healthy. One possible case was enough; give a dog a bad name. … ^[89]

On the Upward Roll

The cholera passed on, yet the College continued to shrink, in part, no doubt, because of fears that the disease might be lingering where it never actually was. Eighteen students matriculated in the fall of 1833. By the end of the session, these had dwindled to a dozen or so.^[90] To add insult to injury, a vicious tornado swept through the town on June 21 and inflicted costly damage on the College buildings.^[91] The commencement exercises, if any, must have been a melancholy affair; Mr. Humphrey Wynne stood in solitary splendor as the only degree recipient.^[92]

There was, however, a convocation. With difficulty, a bare quorum of the Visitors was achieved, probably because five vacancies had been filled the previous year. According to a new member, they found the institution “nearly prostrate” and undertook “a system of reform and improvement.”^[93] As noted before, the chair of law was filled by the election of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, son of St George Tucker, who would bring much attention and an enhanced reputation to the College. Besides taking this essential step, the Board instituted a program of awarding testimonials or certificates to students who had worked hard, behaved themselves, and had performed well in one or more subjects. The testimonials were to be published along with the names of students who received degrees. Bearing the College seal, these documents were a kind of consolation prize for those who did not go on to earn degrees. The great majority had never done so—in fact, less than half stayed for more than a year—and the William and Mary degree historically had not been easy to achieve. In contrast to the large number of institutions where a degree could, simply put, be bought, the College’s degree had to be earned.^[94] The testimonials also opened a new route to a degree, one that the Visitors no doubt hoped would encourage more students to try for one, stay longer, and so bolster enrollments. Testimonials in those courses required for a degree would be sufficient to secure one, a change that eliminated the necessity of enduring the public examinations heretofore required.^[95]

Another reform was to begin the transformation of the ancient languages department into a full-fledged classics department similar to those found in better colleges. Eventually, the Grammar School would disappear and its upper grades would be absorbed into the first year of a three-year course of study.^[96] The Board also hoped to revive modern language instruction, something that would not be accomplished until the 1850s.^[97]

Enrollments grew during the late thirties despite the hard times brought on by the Panic of 1837 and the competition from new colleges in Virginia and in adjoining states.^[98] By the end of the decade, the number of students had risen to an all-time high of 140, a figure not exceeded until 1889.^[99] During these years enrollments at the University of Virginia, which had a four-year course and enjoyed an annual $15,000 subsidy from the state, were only averaging about 191,^[100] and so the Visitors could take pride in what seemed to be the result of their work.^[101]

In the interim William and Mary was embarrassed to see its recreant alumnus, Joseph C. Cabell, lure William Barton Rogers to Charlottesville in 1835, a loss that would have been much greater had not John Millington accepted election as the new professor of chemistry and natural philosophy.^[102] No one, however, could really replace Rogers. Only twenty-three years of age when he succeeded his father, he was from the first an enthusiastic and successful teacher. His younger brother, Robert, one of his students, left this description ofWilliam’s pedagogy:

His class are advancing very well indeed, and they are all very much pleased. William has divided his classes into four divisions, which are called clubs; he meets one of them every night of the week except Saturday and Tuesday, and the students attend with the greatest alacrity possible; there is not the least disorder among them, either at college or at the table; they are sociable, but polite, towards William.^[103]

A professor whose students attended extra night sessions with “the greatest alacrity” was no ordinary teacher; he was, indeed, well on his way to becoming a lecturer of mesmeric eloquence. Rogers even made them like mathematics, that black beast of undergraduates, and must have gained some celebrity among them when as part of a chemistry experiment he allowed them to inhale nitrous oxide (laughing gas) , which in some cases produced “the most powerful effects.” Rogers tried it himself in private and found the emotions it produced to be “pleasurable,” with sensations of “vastness, grandeur, sublimity and solitude,” enabling him to look around himself “with the haughty disdain and towering importance of the Great Mogul.”^[104] The lofty elevation induced by nitrous oxide did not prevent Rogers from emphasizing the mundane applications of his courses, a policy carried further by Millington and one consistent with the general trend in American education. In chemistry Rogers explained such practical processes as bleaching, dyeing, tanning, the manufacture of glass and porcelain, and so forth. In natural philosophy he explained the construction of bridges, roads, and steam engines, the strength of materials, and the principles of architecture.^[105]

Rogers’s interest came to focus on geology, and by the early thirties he had earned a reputation that extended far beyond Vrrginia.^[106] He gave an address before members of the General Assembly on the importance of geology that was followed by the funding of a state geological survey under Rogers’ s direction. Almost simultaneously he left William and Mary for the University of Virginia, where he would remain until 1853. Then he moved to Boston and became the founder and first president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[107] His is still another name on the list of distinguished men who passed through the College on their way to illustrious careers on a larger stage. Even so, he long retained a fondness for William and Mary and the old town.

No one could have missed Rogers more than President Empie and his wife, his intimate friends with whom he had lived for a time.^[108] The Empies were not long in following his example. Such evidence as survives suggests that they had never been happy in Williamsburg. With a large family to support, the president apparently had a hard time making ends meet; he borrowed small sums from friends and colleagues and at one time owed the College $800.^[109] Once, probably after he had been at the College for three or four years, Empie added up in parallel columns his professional income (there was likely no other) from the United States Military Academy, his church in Wilmington, and the presidency of William and Mary. The last was the least.^[110] The family was plagued by illness, which some attributed to the large stagnant pool in the road behind the President’s House.^[111] “There seems to be no prospect of our ever enjoying health in this wretched place,” he wrote in the spring of 1836, “though we were to spend our lives here.” He resigned that summer to take the rectorship of a Richmond church.^[112]

Empie left an institution that remained as he had found it financially and materially: expenses exceeding income, salaries in arrears, landholdings dwindling, buildings in need of repair, and an inadequate “philosophical apparatus.”^[113] However, in terms of enrollments and the quality of the faculty, Empie left on the upward roll. Millington was a worthy replacement for Rogers, the chair of law was filled by Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and Empie was followed in the presidency by one whose reputation had already spread beyond the boundaries of the Old Dominion: Professor Thomas Roderick Dew.