Defender of the Faith: Thomas Roderick Dew

The session of 1836–37 opened on Monday, October 10, with an address by William and Mary’s new president.^[1] Much of it was conventional, sketching the course of studies in the different “schools,” exhorting the students to work hard, go to church, and avoid the evils of gambling, extravagance, and drink.^[2] President Dew took great care to proclaim the supreme importance of studying politics and morals.^[3] Such training was especially necessary at this juncture in history, he said, when the South and slavery were coming under ever more alarming attacks. A knowledge of these subjects would teach them how to be good masters and to be secure in the conviction that their cause was just should the “demon of fanaticism” at last “array its thousands of deluded victims against us.” So prepared, they would “stand firm and resolute as the Spartan band at Thermopylae.”^[4]

As Dew was aware, the Spartans were wiped out at Thermopylae. His use of this discouraging illustration may have been an unconscious reflection of his apocalyptic vision of the future, for abolition fanaticism was only one symptom of the “fearful changes” that threatened “the destiny of the world. … Monarchists and democrats, conservatives and radicals, whigs and tories, agrarians and aristocrats, slaveholders and non-slaveholders, are all now in the great field of contention. What will be the result of this awful conflict, none can say.”^[5] Although he did not say so on this occasion, he saw looming on the horizon a vast industrialized, urbanized society that would create a huge propertyless proletariat. Class war and a new Reign of Terror lay at the end of that road.^[6]

The president concluded by urging the students to draw inspiration from their surroundings, such as the capitol, where the great men of the Revolution had once gathered (a capitol which, suggestively, had been a blackened ruin for several years), just as Edward Gibbon had been inspired to chronicle the decline and fall of Rome by contemplating the shattered remains of the Forum.^[7] Allusions to Thermopylae and the fall of Rome may have been more chilling than invigorating to the young gentlemen, but they were surely prophetic. Not too many years later, it would be possible for those students who had survived to return to Williamsburg and, like Gibbon’s learned Poggius on the Capitoline, sit amid the crumbling remains of the College and ponder the fall of the society that Dew had hoped William and Mary would teach them to honor and defend.

Thomas Roderick Dew’s ten-year presidency is traditionally regarded as a sort of golden age for William and Mary. The College community was relatively harmonious, matriculations rose to new levels, and finances were at least reasonably stable. Above all, these years are remembered as a time when the fame of the old school was illuminated by the abilities of Dew and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, who made it an intellectual bastion of the South’s world view and way of life. Dew and Tucker manned the battlements and defied the growing menace from the North. Nat Turner’s massacre, the Nullification crisis, an accelerating conflict of sectional economic interests, and the emergence of militant evangelical abolitionism made an increasing number of Southerners acutely conscious of their dwindling political influence and the growing power of their adversaries. Mainly through fear of what the future might bring, they chose the fork in the road leading to the affirmation of Southern perfection^[8] and an uncompromising defense of a doomed social system. Dew and Tucker were prominent figures in this pilgrimage to oblivion.

Dew had joined the struggle well before his election as president. As mentioned earlier, in 1829 he had published his lectures on free trade. Some of his central ideas coincided with and probably owed much to those of John C. Calhoun’s famous Exposition of 1828, a denunciation of the Tariff of Abominations as ultimately fatal to the planting economy as well as an unconstitutional oppression of the Southern minority. Dew cited the Exposition and echoed its advocacy of free trade and minority rights.^[9]

Almost simultaneously the youthful scholar was becoming a well-known and energetic proponent of state-financed roads, canals, and railroads: internal improvements as they were then called.^[10] In Virginia the subject was deeply divisive, pitting east against west, the former, with its deep tidal rivers, not wishing to be taxed for the benefit of the latter, which strongly favored improving the means of transportation. Tied to the issue was the question of the east’s overrepresentation in the legislature, which in turn involved slavery, since slaves were counted in determining representation. Voter qualifications, that is, white manhood suffrage versus a property basis, were still another point of dispute. All of these came up in the constitutional convention of 1829–30, which heard western threats of breaking away and forming a separate state.^[11]

Dew came from a Tidewater slave-owning family,^[12] and so his championing of internal improvements was idiosyncratic. He had little success in winning over his section to the cause. Nevertheless, he made himself known as a man with formidable intellectual powers, thus guaranteeing a respectful hearing for his views at a critical moment in Virginia’s history.

That moment came in the wake of the celebrated debates in the House of Delegates during the 1831–32 session concerning the possible abolition of slavery in Virginia. The precipitating event was the Nat Turner revolt in Southampton County in August 1831, during which a rampaging band of blacks killed scores of whites, mostly women and children.^[13] Although quickly repressed, the bloody outbreak provoked a contest that divided the state along much the same geographical lines as had emerged in the recent convention. Many of the same arguments were common to both gatherings, but this time the pivot was slavery. Nothing quite like this had ever occurred before: a full and free debate in the legislature of the largest slaveholding state as to whether or not to adopt a plan of emancipation.^[14]

No discussion of the proceedings is possible here, of course. The final outcome was what one historian has called “the triumph of caution” in the form of a resolution conceding “the great evils arising from the condition of the colored population of this commonwealth,” but concluding that “further action for the removal of the slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion.”^[15]

In the meantime Dew had been considering writing about the issues ventilated in the debates. He was encouraged to do so by Governor John Floyd, an ardent proponent of internal improvements who had won the young professor’s admiration and gratitude. The governor feared “a sensation” had been produced that would “require great delicacy and caution in touching, and I am sure none can do so with more skill than yourself.”^[16] At nearly the same time, Joseph C. Cabell, president of the James River Canal Company and a member of the legislature, was urging Dew and William Barton Rogers to use their talents to advance the cause of internal improvements. Dew complained that he did not have the time, but Cabell predicted that he would be “persuaded to overcome” that objection.^[17] The result of these various considerations was the Review of the Debates of the Virginia Legislature of 1831–1832,^[18] a work with a dual purpose.

Over the years many have regarded the criticism of slavery during these debates both as a reflection of the fading afterglow of Revolutionary idealism and, because of the legislature’s failure to act, as a symptom of the South’s growing commitment to a society in which slavery was a permanent, organic element. Certainly the attacks on slavery the debates contained helped to inspire a systematic justification of slavery, a school of proslavery sociology of which Dew was one of the founders, at least inadvertently.^[19]

The route by which he arrived at this point in his career is interesting, if to some degree conjectural. During his tour of Europe in the mid-1820s, Dew had met the lady known as “the black princess,” the widow of Christophe, king of Haiti. When slavery came up in their conversations, Dew referred to it as a “great opprobrium of our country.” In his diary he said it was “a subject most sore and galling to the Americans,” though it was perhaps their duty “to offer … those apologies which his country can certainly lay claim to, for after all she is not without her defense.”^[20] Even more remarkable was what Dew wrote in one of a series of unsigned articles on internal improvements published early in 1832 at the height of the attacks on slavery in the legislature. Slavery, said he, was “that most dreadful curse of the fairest portion of our most happy land.” As for the innate capacity of the black race for civilization, “Judging from primeval ages we should come to the conclusion, that they formed the most intelligent of the different species of man.” Egypt, “this boasted land of primeval ages[,] was inhabited by a black race with wooly heads.”^[21]

Yet only a few months after the ink had dried on these pages, Dew had begun writing the Review that would, according to Eugene Genovese, sweep the South and prepare the way “for a broad consensus.” More than anyone else, perhaps excepting John C. Calhoun, he “built an intellectual bridge over which southern intellectuals could cross from the world of Thomas Jefferson to that of the proslavery extremists of the 1850s.”^[22]

The Review is clearly written, closely reasoned, occasionally vehement, and sometimes ambivalent. Here no more can be done than to set forth some of its salient features. Its arguments fall roughly into three categories: philosophical, historical, and practical.

In common with much of nineteenth century Western thought, Dew broke from the Enlightenment’s assertion that all men were entitled to the same rights, those rights of life, liberty, and property that Locke’s right reason deduced God must have given men in a state of nature. On the contrary, Dew, “in erring reason’s spite,” agreed with Alexander Pope’s “whatever is, is right,” that all “partial evil” is really “universal good.”^[23] “All of the laws of matter, every principle, and even passion of man, when rightly understood, demonstrate the general benevolence of the Deity, even in this world.” If there is evil, it is incidental to the happiness that is “always the main design.” This was true of the great subject of debate, slavery, which had been perhaps the “principal means of impelling forward the civilization of mankind.”^[24]

The author expounded at length upon the civilizing and ameliorative effects of slavery. Even now there are miserable multitudes legally free, he said, who would happily exchange their lot with that of the Southern slave. He did not, as George Fitzhugh would do thirty years later, hold up domestic slavery as the ideal social system. He seemed to leave ajar, or at least unlocked, the door to eventual emancipation. With respect to the South, the “evil” that was “the growth of ages, may require ages to remove.”^[25] Examples of premature emancipation came not only from societies using black slaves, but from eastern Europe. “Liberty has been the heaviest curse to the slave, when given too soon. …”^[26]

These hints at eventual emancipation had a ring of abstraction where Virginia slaves were concerned: “The time for emancipation has not yet arrived, and perhaps it never will.”^[27] Was it because these particular slaves were black? Like Jefferson, Dew does not make a definitive case for innate racial inferiority. Although he believed blacks to be inferior, his statements on this point can be read as blaming the inferiority on a lower degree of civilization. Given his belief, stated only a few months before, about the black, woolly-headed masters of ancient Egypt, one could infer that Dew had not yet decided that racial differences precluded blacks from attaining a high degree of civilization. Even when he said that whites were “acknowledged to be the superior race both by law and custom,” he said no more than Abraham Lincoln would say in his debates with Stephen A. Douglas.^[28] After attempting conscientiously to synthesize dozens of references to this subject in the Review, this writer can only conclude that Dew either had not made up his mind or that he deliberately sidestepped the question.

As for the morality of slavery, Dew repeatedly called it an evil. Britain, not America, had to bear the “original sin” of forcing upon the colonies an “evil” that had become “interwoven with [the South’s] social system.”^[29] “We have to deal with an evil which is the growth of centuries … ; which has existed under different modifications since man was man.”^[30] While denying that there was anything in either the Old or New Testament “which would go to show that slavery, when once introduced, ought at all events to be abrogated, or that the master commits any offence in holding slaves,” he admitted that slavery was “against the spirit of Christianity.”^[31] He especially condemned the trans-Atlantic slave trade as “a violation of the principles of humanity” and agreed that “slavery in our hemisphere was based upon injustice in the first instance.”^[32]

There was virtual unanimity among the emancipationists in the legislature that freedom and removal must go hand in hand.^[33] From Jefferson and Madison to Clay and Lincoln, colonization of blacks outside the United States was seen as a necessity because of ingrained and ineradicable race prejudice. Therefore, Dew could take that stipulation as axiomatic in Virginia. He needed to do no more than to prove that plans already advanced for compensated emancipation and colonization were utterly impracticable. This he did prove.^[34] There were some delegates who suggested that the cost could be held down by not compensating slaveholders, at least in full. Dew became very exercised in his denunciation of this “most dangerous of all the wild doctrines advanced by the abolitionists in the Virginia … , that property is the creature of civil society, and is subject to action, even destruction.”^[35] To the contrary, the “great object of government is the protection of property,” for the “strong and unjust man in a state of nature robs the weaker, and you establish government to prevent this oppression.”^[36] That property rights were anterior and thus superior to government was, of course, an idea with a long pedigree, although Dew did not invoke Locke or John Taylor of Caroline or even his old teacher, John Augustine Smith. And obviously Dew radically departed from Locke when he assumed that the natural right to property included the right to own slaves. He had already identified the institution of private property as “a very fruitful source of slavery,” and one might easily conclude that for him slavery was a necessary element in civil society—at least for Virginia and the South.^[37]

The syllogism was clear. Everyone conceded that abolition without removal was impossible; uncompensated emancipation was unthinkable; the cost of compensated emancipation and colonization was unbearable. Therefore, emancipation and the reduction of the black population could not be achieved by the visionary schemes presented to the legislature. But there was an answer. Internal improvements were the “great panacea by which most of the ills which now weigh down upon the State may be removed.”^[38] Without the historical or philosophical freight which attracted most of the attention then and since, Dew’s essay would have been recognized for what it was, a tract promoting internal improvements.

In what might be called the Review‘s peroration, Dew tried to use the excitement generated by the slavery debates in conjunction with long-standing state divisions over apportionment, voting qualifications, and expenditures for internal improvements by offering the last as a comprehensive solution. He told the antislavery westerners to give up their costly plans of abolition and instead devote public revenues to building the canals and railroads that would so greatly benefit their part of the state. In turn, Tidewater citizens, so fearful of attacks on slavery, would give up their opposition to internal improvements. Then, as the social and economic configuration of the state changed, white emigration would be succeeded by immigration. At the same time, the black population would decline with the growth of towns, changes in the system of agriculture, and better opportunities for investment than slaveholding offered. Virginia would follow the example of Maryland, which was rapidly becoming a nonslaveholding state.^[39] “Time and internal improvement,” he assured his fellow Virginians, “will cure all our ills, and speed on the Old Dominion more rapidly in wealth and prosperity.”^[40]

So the essay that has been regarded as a premier proslavery dissertation was something rather different. It was instead an argument for Virginia to protect the rights of slaveholders and eventually get rid of the blacks by becoming more like the North.^[41]

The Review attracted the attention of a wide range of readers, among them two former presidents, John Quincy Adams and James Madison. The latter, long a member of the American Colonization Society, told Dew that he had overestimated the damaging effects of the tariff on Virginia’s economy and underestimated those of slavery. He appreciated the professor’s powerful statement of the difficulties facing colonization and agreed that emancipation must be accompanied by removal, but something might still be accomplished, and even failure would be sanctified by its proof of “laudable intentions.” As for Adams, he wrote that the Review deserved “grave meditation,” and saw in Dew’s pages a portent of coming disunion, war, and abolition.^[42] Adverse reactions to the Review in Virginia came largely from colonizationists.^[43] The effects of Dew’s case for internal improvements are difficult to estimate. In 1833 the legislature reorganized the James River Canal Company, now the James River and Kanawha Company, into a joint-stock company and surrendered the state’s interest in the former to the latter, with the prospect of future public appropriations based on matching private investments.^[44] It is not known how much Dew’s arguments may have facilitated this or subsequent legislation on internal improvements.

With respect to the Review‘s long-term significance, the work came to be regarded as “a standard, unquestioned source of pro-slavery arguments” and Dew’s chief claim to fame.^[45] This was rather ironic, for the author was primarily interested in economics; his later writings dealt mainly with banking, regulation of interest, state debts, price theory, and so forth.^[46] True, these topics usually had a constitutional or social significance and often bore on the sanctity of property and fear of consolidated political power, two matters of central importance to him. These concerns in tum sprang from a fundamental desire to protect the Southern minority against the Northern majority, all of which necessarily required the defense of slavery. Had Dew focused on the peculiar institution, and especially if he had lived into the 1850s, he probably would have ended up with both feet in the “positive good” camp. He did, in fact, move from his position on race, which was still uncertain in 1832, to subscribe explicitly to the theory of innate racial differences. Those woolly-headed blacks who he once believed had built ancient Egypt now turned out to be people who were instead “dark brown with curly hair.” In Egypt “negroes were always subjects and slaves.” Europeans had come to dominate the world in the nineteenth century because of their intellectual superiority. “The Caucasian or the white race … seems to be a superior race. It is proved so by [the] uniform testimony of history, and other races seem intellectual in proportion to [their] likeness to [the] European, e. g., [the] races of Asia and Africa.”^[47]

Dew’s reputation advanced sufficiently in the wake of the Review to elicit an invitation from South Carolina College to accept a newly created chair of political economy and history, subjects formerly taught by Thomas Cooper, to whose earlier writings Dew may well have been indebted for many of the ideas found in the Review. Dew’s nomination was probably the work of his old friend and fellow defender of slavery, William Harper, then a member of the Board of Trustees. Dew declined the offer, however, as he would one from the University of Virginia eleven years later. Although he seems to have been tempted by the latter, the ties of friendship, family, and a genuine affection for William and Mary decided the question for him.^[48]

Defender of the Faith: Nathaniel Beverly Tucker

Standing shoulder to shoulder with Dew in his defiance of the Yankee foe was Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. Since 1834 he had held the chair of law, which after the resignation of his father a generation before, had been filled by several lackluster successors. Tucker’s own studies of the law under his father’s tutelage had produced less than brilliant results. Nor did he find rewarding his years of practice in Charlotte County, where he settled in order to be near his half brother, John Randolph of Roanoke. His relationship with this talented eccentric was close, though sometimes troubled, and helps to explain how he came to abandon the Jeffersonian principles of St. George Tucker for the Burkeianism of Randolph.^[49]

Tucker was discouraged by the dim prospects offered by a country law practice. He associated his own lack of success with the steady decline of Virginia’s prosperity and the loss of its once preeminent political position in the nation. The glory days of the Revolution were gone, and he was in distinguished company when he yearned for that glittering but fast-fading heroic age. Such were the considerations that led him to emigrate to Missouri. There he not only would try to achieve the personal recognition he believed he deserved, but he would attempt to found a settlement of Virginia planters and re-create a model of Virginia as she had been in her grander days—a city on a hill to preserve in a new Virginia the society he saw so rapidly vanishing in the old.^[50]

Missouri did not become Virginia, of course, and Tucker never seemed fully at home on the frontier. The loss of two wives and two children was assuaged by a third marriage, this time to Lucy Smith, twenty-eight years his junior, the daughter of another Virginia expatriate.^[51] Even this happy outcome and a modicum of professional success could not cut the ties that, almost in spite of himself, bound him to his home and his country. All the while he watched gloomily the rise of the demagoguery which he attributed to the demise of a property-based franchise and the mounting assault on all things Southern. He brooded on what might be done to stem the tide.

Then in 1832 came the Nullification controversy. To Tucker it seemed to promise a regenerative crisis, perhaps a Southern nation, and when an ill and aging John Randolph wrote “Come to me,”^[52] Tucker returned to offer his sword, so to speak, in the spirit of those chivalric Cavaliers of yore he so much admired. The outcome was anticlimactic. The crisis passed, then Randolph died. Meanwhile, Tucker had moved his family to Virginia, planning to live once again near Randolph and practice law.^[53] Then, while Tucker was visiting Richmond, Professor Dew arrived and delivered him a notice from the Board of Visitors dated July 7, 1834, notifying him of his election to the chair of law. He received the news with little enthusiasm. Although he promptly accepted, he probably intended to move back to Missouri in a year or two. But he did not. In his father’s chair and his father’s house he would stay until his death seventeen years later.^[54]

Tucker was a complex man, emotionally and intellectually. Fifty years old in 1834, he had been a lawyer, a judge, a dabbler in practical politics, and a planter. He would go on to be a novelist, essayist, and one of the stars in the proslavery firmament, all the while teaching law at the College. Tucker was not a systematic thinker. His political, social, and legal ideas contained inconsistencies that were never fully resolved. He urged South Carolina to secede and wrote a novel, The Partisan Leader,^[55] prophesying a Southern nation, and yet a few years later spoke of “our cherished union,” and in the end he yearned to be remembered as the founder of a “glorious Southern Confederacy.” He accepted, at times, the concept of a state of nature and the compact theory of government, and yet maintained that society antedated government.^[56]

Slavery, Tucker believed, was the basis for all Southern institutions. It arose from innate racial differences, which were God’s will. The differences were complementary and had been of immeasurable benefit to both races. Although he refused to justify the origins of American slavery, he would discuss it in esse, as part of something that had always existed everywhere and was rooted in original sin. At the same time he hinted that it was an evil which, if it had not existed, should not have been instituted.^[57]  “It is not for us to do evil that good may come. … But when it is accomplished, shall we reject it? When the price has been paid and cannot be recalled; when God has been pleased to overrule the evil to his own good purposes, shall we cast away the benefit?”^[58] So Tucker, like Dew, passed the buck to God.

History taught Tucker that societies that once tasted of liberty moved in cycles. After liberty came leveling democracy, with its demagogues and corruption, followed by anarchy, then military dictatorship. From this some enlightened ruler might create an aristocracy of virtue, but that would only degenerate into a struggle for power and wealth, with the monarch siding with the people to crush the nobility. Then only the monarch would remain, and the abuses intrinsic in despotism would lead to revolution and the completion of the cycle with the rebirth of liberty.^[59] But cycles did not fit well with linear progress toward ultimate good. God needed some help.

Our task, wrote Tucker, is to discover what form of government is best for man’s happiness and then to “devise some means to counter-act that tendency to change.” We must find a way of “checking the car of destiny in its fatal career, and postponing the evil day when the history of liberty and happiness in Virginia shall but furnish school-boy’s theories in distant lands.”^[60] Tucker would put a spoke in the Almighty’s wheel, or at least apply the brake, to save what remained of the perfect society that had once blessed the Old Dominion. One must repel attacks from without by those already in the grip of the second phase of history’s cycle and put down impulses from within, such as universal manhood suffrage, that were threatening to revolve the wheel of fate in Virginia.

What was to be saved and revivified was a society of communities guided by a gentry of talent and breeding, acting on the principle of noblesse oblige, as their Cavalier forebears had done. The component parts of these communities would be the patriarchal family and household, including masters and slaves bound together by mutual affection, by benevolent care and protection on one side and devoted obedience on the other.^[61]

This was how Tucker saw the life he lived, there in his father’s house in Williamsburg, this little village in the mellow afternoon of life, where shopkeepers extended slaves credit with trust as the only collateral, where slaves were bound together in holy wedlock by the Episcopal priest in Bruton Parish Church, with their white families and friends in attendance, and parties to follow in an evening of “festive hilarity.”^[62] David Strother, a young artist from western Virginia, visited Williamsburg in 1849 and left a memorable record of Tucker’s world. He and Richard Randolph, a relative and friend of Tucker, resisted the judge’s pressing invitation to move from a local tavern and stay in his home, but they did accept his invitation to take tea with him in the evening. There amidst the ancient oaken furniture, with ancestral portraits gazing down upon them, they met Mrs. Tucker and her children, the eldest being the pretty seventeen-year-old Cynthia, “easy and confiding in manners and sweetly accomplished in music … petted and idolized by her father without being spoiled.” After supper they adjourned to the “cozy sitting room,” which is still cozy, by the way. There several College students joined them, and the evening began:

The Professor was genial and courtly in his manners to all, and conversed as few men could talk even in Old Virginia. Anon an elegant old negro servant entered with hot whisky punch in silver service. We sipped and talked and talked and sipped and the glow of social sentiment grew warmer as the evening progressed. I observed meanwhile that while our genial host grew more and more eloquent, the supply of punch in our silver goblets never diminished and never cooled off. The grey-headed Ganymede seemed to possess a sleight of filling unseen as our cups were drained.

The antique mantle clock tingled its silver bells unheeded by us. The law students one after another arose and with bows and compliments departed. Cynthia then rose, kissed her father, and gracefully bid goodnight to his guests. We were discussing Virginia—her tradition and great men—a mellow and engaging theme. Tucker had shaken hands with Washington and dined with John Hancock. So we lingered until Randolph nodded and signed drowsily to me it was time to go. We rose with apologies for the late hour. Our knees were weak and shaky—our tongues were thick in murmuring the intended compliments. The Professor gracefully waved his hand to the “Major Domo.” This ancient had already taken up two silver candlesticks with lights. We followed dreamily into the hall, where were our coats and hats. The front door was already locked. “Here they are, Gentlemen. This way.” We meek and unquestioning followed the lights to the end of the hall and at the foot of the stairway. Still no coats and hats. “Up this way, Gentlemen.” We followed him up dreamily. ”Yours are here, Sir,” said the conductor handing me the light as I passed into the door of a richly furnished chamber. “A good night Sir. This way Mr. Randolph.” I stood bewildered and alone. There was my coat and hat hanging near a luxuriously covered bed. There also was my trunk and valise, and there on the hearth and mantle were all my shells and botanical specimens, neatly arranged as in a museum. “Leave your boots at the door, if you please, Sir,” said Ganymede, blandly peeping once more into the door. “A pleasant rest. … ” After a night of dreamless and refreshing sleep we rose and met at breakfast without an allusion on either side to the transfer, and feeling as much at home as if we had been born inmate[s] of the family. … We remained at Tucker’s several days and left steeped in dreamy traditions and lubricated with the most graceful and engaging hospitality the world can afford.^[63]

David Strother’ s impressions accord perfectly with the recollections of one of Tucker’s colleagues who came to know him well during the last years of his life and agreed with him on scarcely any subject.^[64] Silas Totten, born and educated in upstate New York, believed that slavery originated “in ignorance or disregard of human rights,” was perpetuated by necessity, and that about all one could do after so many years was to make it as beneficial to both races as was possible.^[65] In 1862, when a resident of Iowa, he looked back on his Williamsburg years and concluded that even the most radical of abolitionists would have excused Tucker’s defense of slavery if they could have seen the institution as it was in the judge’s household:

He had some 20 slaves—men, women, and children—about his house and garden who were made as happy as dependents could possibly be. Every want was attended to. He was as courteous and polite to his servants as to his equals and took great care never to wound their feelings, thinking it especially mean to insult or abuse those who could not resent it. It was a beautiful sight to contemplate when he came from his room usually about ten o’clock in the morning and walked around his premises to see his servants at their several occupations. His long flowing gray hair, his handsome and venerable countenance beaming with benevolence, his cordial good morning to all reminded one of the patriarchs of Old. Slavery under such a master seemed no bondage and was not felt to be such. They never spoke of him but with veneration nor seemed for a moment to distrust either his wisdom or his goodness.^[66]

However romantically unreal they may sound to the late twentieth century, these few lines by David Strother and Silas Totten vividly reveal the essential meaning of all that Tucker wrote, said, and taught. They depict the old Virginia as Tucker saw it, the way of life he cherished, the society he defended with all his heart. He would have liked the inscription on the gravestone erected after the war in the churchyard of Bruton Parish. It began, “Descended from Virginia’s best blood, Judge Tucker was by birth, and training, a gentleman of the old school.”^[67]

Professors of the Golden Age

While Dew and Tucker were making themselves known as defenders of the faith, they and their colleagues had students to teach and a college to run. Tucker had to revive a law course that had been virtually nonexistent after Judge Semple’s departure. William and Mary’s priority in this discipline had become a thing of the distant past. Harvard, Columbia, Yale, the University of Virginia, and the University of Maryland, among others, had law schools, often headed by judges and scholars of great repute. The general trend in such programs was to make the study of law more professional. Harvard and Yale, it has been said, “were in the highly competitive business of teaching occupational skills.”^[68] There were, moreover, tendencies to see the law from a nationalist point of view.

Tucker was not part of this developing mainstream. He did not look for similarities in the laws of the various states; he concentrated on Virginia laws and cases and on the common law, which was unique to each state and thus a bulwark of liberty and states’ rights. And he told his students in his introductory lecture that he was not there to train mere practitioners, but to make statesmen.^[69] He did not, of course, neglect the practical. Like his predecessors, he held a moot court. It was a serious exercise in research and pleading. The court was not intended as an arena for youthful courtroom histrionics, he warned prospective students. “It presents nothing to vanity or ambition, and is a dry, severe and practical task.”^[70]

His lectures on the Constitution were the high point of the course.^[71]  They hinged on such sacred texts as Madison’s Report of 1800, that classic defense against the usurpation of undelegated powers by the federal government. “The Virginia School of Political Science and Constitutional Law is the School of William and Mary.”^[72] Thus spake the judge. Both the course and Tucker himself were popular with students.^[73] He might not have been very systematic, said one who had studied with him, but his reasoning was cogent and was “happily illustrated by bold and striking figures, which adorn his conversation as well as his lectures.” The secret of his success was his close association with his students and “his conversational mode of lecturing,” which inspired “a taste for study and an ambition for distinction.” Many successful young men were greatly in their old professor’s debt.^[74]

When Dew became president, he turned over to Tucker his “Junior Political Class,” a study of the law of nations with Vattel as the text. This left Dew with moral philosophy and the senior political course. The former included Dew’s history lectures; the latter, despite its title, was mainly concerned with economics and used as readings Dew’s essays on free trade, slavery, and so forth.^[75] Without being charismatic, he was a popular and able teacher. One former student remembered “how interesting Prof. Dew was in general conversation and in the classroom. A question would be asked pertinent to the day’s lesson, and Prof. Dew would unwind his long legs, with his hand plaster down his curly red hair, and rising, exclaim, ‘An intelligent question, young gentleman. I am glad you are thinking.’ Then the delightful answer was forthcoming. Prof. Dew’s chief attraction as teacher and lecturer was his bracing, invigorating manner of thought and speech. The boys would forget to take notes lest they miss his elusive facial expressions or the fascinating flow of words.”^[76]

In his inaugural address, Dew warmly recommended to the students the “school of engineering, lately established by the visitors.”^[77]  The school existed in the person of John Millington, a worthy successor to William Barton Rogers, who had entered upon his duties in February of 1836. Born in London in 1779, this gentleman was remarkable for his capacity for hard work, versatility, and wide experience. He had attended Oxford, taken a law degree in the Temple, studied medicine under the famous Sir Astley Cooper, lectured at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Guy’s Hospital, and the University of London, and had helped to found the London Mechanics Institute. For twenty-five years he also worked as a civil engineer. In 1829 Millington left England to become chief engineer at a British-owned silver mine in Mexico. This was a mistake, and after about a year and a half he departed for the United States intending to return to England. As it happened, he settled in Philadelphia and tried to make a living as a vendor of scientific equipment and as an engineer for a company attempting to mine gold in northern Virginia. While in Philadelphia he heard of Rogers’s departure from William and Mary. Armed with a recommendation from Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, he was elected professor of chemistry, natural philosophy, and civil engineering.^[78] The last subject was one whose time was coming in an undeveloped economy with few trained engineers and an urgent need for better transportation—roads, canals, bridges, railroads—and Millington intended to train his students for such projects. For some reason, the course never caught on, perhaps because the great majority of William and Mary students came from farms in areas where internal improvements were not a pressing necessity, or perhaps because engineering required a certain minimum competency in mathematics. The course at best had few students; after three years it had none and disappeared from the schedule, although it remained in the catalogue for some time afterward.^[79]

The energetic Millington also offered a course in medicine that attracted a few students in the mid-1840s.^[80] Without access to an urban hospital in which to study diseases and surgery, or a steady supply of cadavers for the study of anatomy, the scope of the course was necessarily limited. The professor did some doctoring himself. The scanty record of his years in Williamsburg shows him concocting sarsaparilla syrup for Mr. Bassett, tending young Mr. Barziza’s broken arm, and helping Mr. Beale through a serious respiratory attack.^[81] He seems to have had an interest in an apothecary shop that his son Thomas and young Dr. James Griffin opened on Duke of Gloucester Street in 1840. As if that were not enough, the Millingtons also took in boarders at the George Wythe house, which the professor had purchased.

Most of Millington’s time, however, was spent in teaching chemistry and natural philosophy. The experimental apparatus was inadequate, so he built and bought much of what was needed, spending thousands of dollars of his own money.^[82] His students (who called him “Old Yoss” because of his English pronunciation of “yes”) appreciated his efforts on their behalf. When a Richmond paper reported on the number of lectures, speeches, and experiments by Yale’s Professor Benjamin Silliman over a period of six years, they replied in a published letter showing that Professor Millington had done about ten times as much in three years as Silliman had done in six: ‘”Virginia is not therefore outdone.”^[83]

Although sometimes feeling overworked and regretting his isolation from the world of science, Millington settled very comfortably into Williamsburg society.^[84] He was simple, honest, and straightforward. His fondness for children was well known, and despite his age he liked to “get down on all fours in his parlor, to play bear for them, or to let them ride on his back.” He was thoroughly loveable and was beloved by all ages.^[85]

The decision by the Board in the mid-1830s to emphasize advanced classical studies was accompanied by the phasing out of the Grammar School. Enrollments in the former did not keep pace with the shrinkage of the latter, inducing the professor of humanity, Dabney Browne, to seek greener pastures as headmaster of an academy in Brunswick County.^[86] Browne’s departure may have been one of the hoped-for results of the reform. Dew wished to fill the position, as he told William Barton Rogers, “with a much more efficient scholar than our old friend Mr. Browne, who is pretty much like the old steamboat Columbia on the North River, going at the rate of 4 miles an hour. And the best of the joke was, you know, that Browne swore to the last, that all other systems of teaching besides his own, was [sic] d——humbug.”^[87]

The classics chair was vacant during the session of 1841–42. According to one account, the Visitors preferred to fill it with a Southerner, and if one could not be found, a Northerner or an Englishman, but they decidedly did not want an Irishman or a German.^[88] A German got the job nonetheless, one whose credentials were so overpowering that he was chosen from thirty or more applicants. Charles Frederick Ernest Minnegerode, son of the president of the Hesse-Darmstadt Superior Court, had found himself caught up in seditious activities while a student at the University of Giessen. After some eighteen months in a cell and more time under close house arrest, young Minnegerode emigrated to the United States. Landing in Philadelphia in 1839, knowing no one, the refugee managed to find employment teaching ancient and modem languages.^[89]

This new colleague impressed Dew as the most thorough classical scholar he had ever met. His letters were overwhelming, and he seemed to be “a very amiable little gentleman.”^[90] Although bred to the Lutheran church, Minnegerode joined the crowd, became an Episcopalian, and then an ordained priest. He would later be rector of St. Paul’s, the denomination’s premier church in Richmond, where he remained for thirty-three years. The Reverend Minnegerode never shook off his heavy accent, summoning the faithful sonorously, “Let us bray!” His conversion has been attributed to Mary Carter, the pious young lady he married in 1843. It was clearly a love match. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker complained of the infatuated couple shortly before the nuptials, “But really if they cannot break themselves of thinking there is nobody in the world but Mary and Cha-a-a rles (as she calls him) I could not bear to live in the same house with them.”^[91] The Tuckers had taken Minnegerode under their wing and looked upon him as a member of the family, nicknaming him “Minck.” It was for the benefit of the Tucker children that he introduced the Christmas tree into Williamsburg during his first year at the College.^[92]

The little Hessian was rather taken aback when he discovered how much time he would have to spend teaching beginning Latin and Greek, courses that had been the business of the Grammar School, but he soon developed a liking for this level of instruction. In addition, during his tenure the study of the higher classics rose to a very respectable standard for the times, fully equal, it was claimed, to that prevailing at the University of Virginia.^[93]

The fifth member of the faculty during Dew’s presidency, and destined to succeed Dew briefly, was Robert Saunders, professor of mathematics. His appointment in 1833, when with the backing of the Williamsburg members of the Board he beat out young Cabell, has been described. He and his family were very much of the old guard in town and College affairs, and during his career Saunders himself at one time or another was city councilman, state senator, mayor, president of the College, and president of the board of directors of Eastern Lunatic Asylum. In politics he was, to put it mildly, conservative. Some spoke of him as a possible candidate for Congress in 1844, but Dew predicted he would not be picked because he had spoken so indiscreetly of his aversion to democracy and preference for monarchy. Tucker was said to have had great respect for his intelligence, and he seems to have been well-thought-of by students.^[94] According to Cynthia Tucker, Saunders was “an accomplished gentleman. Of him it is told that when finger bowls were first introduced that a gentleman at his table seized upon the one at his plate and quaffed off the water. In a moment, before the ghost of a smile could flicker around the table Mr. Saunders was holding his own bowl to his lips and when he replaced it on the table his guests were in their normal condition.”

These, then, were the men of the College’s golden age. Comparisons can be odious, but surely the faculty’s level of intelligence, scholarship, and ability never stood higher, if as high, than during the decade of Dew’s presidency. And whatever else these men accomplished, their teaching came first and their students knew it. From the standpoint of the academic world of the late twentieth century, this alone is enough to give these years their golden hue.

The Quest for Public Funding

Unfortunately, scholarly and pedagogical achievements did not translate into money, either private gifts or public funds. In December 1836 the Board of Visitors submitted a petition to the legislature asking for help. It began with a rather pathetic recounting of the College’s steady loss of tax revenue since the Revolution, until finally the legislature had taken from it the last pittance of public support, a share of surveyors’ fees. The College had done its best, said the Visitors, and had indeed done well in the face of adversity, yet its annual income was regularly exhausted by the barest necessities. Nothing remained for repairs or additions to the buildings or for additional professorships, especially a much-needed one in modem languages. William and Mary’s “only aspiration” was to do “the greatest good to the greatest number,” and so it now asked for financial help, and for permission to establish a medical school in Richmond, something that the physicians of the city had urged upon the Board.^[95] The College also petitioned the legislature to pay a long-overdue debt of £2,013.8.3 that stemmed from a default by the colony’s treasurer shortly before the Revolution.^[96]

The House of Delegates passed a bill for the medical school, but the Senate returned it with an amendment that would have made such a school independent of William and Mary. Thereupon, Robert McCandlish, member of the Board and a delegate from Williamsburg, James City, and York County, objected to the amendment on constitutional grounds. Mr. Joseph Watkins, who thought the school should be in Norfolk, said there was no time to debate constitutional issues and moved to postpone indefinitely, which was done.^[97] There were doubtless those who welcomed the loss of the bill because they believed that a medical school in the capital should be part of the University of Virginia, not the College.^[98] In 1838, incidentally, Hampden-Sydney College opened a medical school in Richmond and within a few years, obtained support from both the city and the state. In 1854 the legislature severed the school’s connection with Hampden-Sydney, and it was on its way to becoming the Medical College of Virginia.^[99]

The proposal to make a “donation” to compensate the College for the pre-Revolutionary debt was likewise indefinitely postponed.^[100] McCandlish brought it up again the next year. The petition was sent to the state auditor, who was to report to the House of Delegates in 1839. He did, and the College got nothing. Unhappily, it had been so sure of receiving this money that it had begun spending it prospectively on repairs to the buildings. When the donation was “knocked on the head,” as Millington put it, the professors had to pay for the repairs out of their salaries, for the Board prohibited using the endowment.^[101] That same year the state’s private colleges asked for an annual subsidy from the distribution of the federal surplus to the states. Nothing came of this either, one reason being that the surplus vanished in the wake of the Panic of 1837. In 1840 a personal appeal on behalf of the College by Judge Abel P. Upshur to Governor Thomas Walker Gilmer, soon to be Upshur’s colleague in President John Tyler’s cabinet, was unavailing.^[102] Four years later William and Mary elected delegates to a convention of private colleges that asked for money from the Literary Fund, with the usual lack of results.^[103]

Considering the reputation the College had gained in the 1830s and 1840s and the support of such men as Upshur, John Tyler—legislator, governor, United States senator, and then president—and other prominent figures, the failure to secure public funding may seem peculiar. There were reasons, however. Virginia was not helping other private colleges either. There were those who even wished to take the University of Virginia off the public payroll. Furthermore, the myth that the endowment of the College was more than ample died hard, and allegations that it mismanaged its funds did not help matters.^[104]

Finally, the public notice that Dew and Tucker brought the College made enemies as well as friends. Virginia politics fell into three divisions. There were Jacksonian Democrats, thoroughgoing Whigs, and those who have been called Whigocrats: Jacksonians in the Jeffersonian tradition who broke with Old Hickory over his Nullification Proclamation and the Force Bill. Tyler, Dew, and Tucker were among these. The loyal Jacksonians denounced them for their abandonment of their hero and his successor, Martin Van Buren, who was the villain of Tucker’s novel, The Partisan Leader. The College felt the wrath of the real Whigs, who accused it of fostering disunionism and Locofoco free trade policies. Nor did everyone regard Dew as an oracle. In the summer of 1837, Governor David Campbell, then struggling to cope with the financial panic that was sweeping the country, bemoaned the comparative ignorance of commercial affairs displayed by otherwise well-informed gentlemen. “A Kentucky horse or hog drover would in a few minutes conversation show you that he knew more about the matter than professor Dew of Wm. & Mary.” The College came into an even sharper political focus when John Tyler succeeded to the presidency upon the death of William Henry Harrison. An alumnus, long a member of the Board, a resident of Williamsburg since 1837, friend of Tucker and Dew, Tyler’s political principles appeared to be those of William and Mary. His administration was so troubled that he became a man without a party, disowned by the Whigs and not adopted by the Democrats. Perhaps his predicament in the nation at large helps explain the plight of the College in Virginia. One who did not like Tyler was not apt to like William and Mary.^[105]

Whether or not political controversy seriously hurt the College’s chances for public support, President Dew believed it could affect enrollments, at least temporarily.^[106] In this he was probably mistaken. Matriculations at both the College and the University of Virginia bulged upward during the latter 1830s, then fell off during the early 1840s.^[107] During the years 1836–46, the closest correlation to any external influence as yet discovered is to tobacco prices. Rising enrollments, which reached a peak of 140 in 1839, may also have been due in part to rising sectional tensions combined with the presence of such Southern stalwarts as Dew and Tucker. In this connection, the slight but distinct increase in the number of students from other Southern states is suggestive. Yet such tensions certainly did not decline after 1839, and Dew and Tucker were still at the College, and yet enrollments fell to 68 in 184 5.^[108] Possibly the image of William and Mary as a stronghold of Southern principles at most helped to mitigate the effects of competition from a growing number of colleges in and out of Virginia. The subject is one that does not lend itself to precise answers.

As the end of the 1845–46 session approached, Thomas Dew had other things than enrollments and funding on his mind. He was getting married—at last. A bachelor at forty-three, Dew had never been wildly popular with the ladies, for all his sterling qualities. He was certainly a homely man, quite as homely as Abraham Lincoln. His health was never robust, probably because of tuberculosis. He did have financial security in his favor,^[109] and he seems to have been persistent in his pursuit of romance. Of one such endeavor, Tucker reported facetiously (one hopes) that Mrs. Tucker was “completely horrified to hear that A. E. is to marry Mr. D, and begs to know if such a monstrous profanation is to take place. It ill becomes her, you may think[,] to criticize other people’s tastes.” But if a woman got to know Dew and could find it in her heart to love him, “she should marry him, for there is no better man, & none more amiable.”^[110]

Nothing came of Dew and “A. E.,” and a few years later he was in pursuit of Miss Natilia Hay, a well-connected lady. This affair had its ups and downs. Mrs. Robert Garrett remarked that “Miss Hay left for home today, it is said she had had her own amusement with the President of the College and has finally left him in dreadful spirits. He ought to have sense enough to admire those girls only who think ‘an ugly or unhandsome person is no objection if the man is clever & agreeable.’”^[111]

Dew did not give up and must have made sufficient use of his amiability to overcome those handicaps that were so obvious to his friends, for he and Miss Hay were married on June 17, 1846. They set sail for Europe, the groom carrying letters of introduction from Daniel Webster and Edward Everett, among others.^[112] He was sublimely happy, but after a rough passage his health broke down and he became seriously ill in Paris. A physician saw him on the fifth of August and diagnosed bronchitis. That night he seemed to fall into a deep sleep. The next morning Natilia arose to open a window; she returned to the bed to see if her husband was awake, laid her hand on his brow, and was shocked to find it stone cold. He had died in his sleep, probably from pneumonia. After Dew’s burial in Montmartre Cemetery, the young widow returned to America on the same ship that a short time before had carried her to Europe as a bride.^[113] Hers was obviously a dreadful personal tragedy, but Dew’s premature death would have repercussions well beyond his family, as the College would soon discover.