Archie Peachy: Apple of Discord

Scarcely more than two years after the melancholy death of President Dew, William and Mary had virtually ceased to exist. Only one professor from the Dew era remained, there were no regular classes except for law, and the president was ad interim only. The College had been brought to the brink of dissolution by prolonged internal quarrels of professor against professor, Visitors against Visitors, Visitors against faculty, and townspeople, themselves divided, for or against this or that faction. The reasons for this unfortunate episode are complicated and difficult to untangle completely. Personal antagonisms, points of honor, religion, politics, and family connections appear in kaleidoscopic fashion to bewilder the researcher. Despite some holes in the evidence, however, it is possible to ferret out the kinds of influences that too often governed the fate of what some were now calling “the poor old college.”

When Dew left on his honeymoon trip in June 1846, he asked Robert Saunders, professor of mathematics and senior member of the faculty after Dew himself, to act in his place for the brief remainder of the session. In August, when news of the tragedy in Paris reached Williamsburg, the Board asked Saunders to serve as president pro tem. No one considered appointing Millington or Minnegerode, and Tucker had made it plain he was unavailable for the position. The question naturally arises as to why Saunders, that pillar of the community, was not offered a permanent appointment. The answer, according to Tucker, was an “impression” throughout Tidewater Virginia that Saunders “was a man addicted to pleasure, and prone to indulgences of pernicious example to young men,” meaning that he sometimes drank to excess. There was reason to believe, the judge continued, that “this example was dreaded by parents,” who feared that the toleration of such conduct in a professor would undermine the enforcement of academic discipline. Consequently, the Board decided to advertise two vacancies, Dew’s chair and the presidency, thereby creating an additional faculty position. The creation of a sixth chair by the division of Dew’s courses was intended to enable the Right Reverend John Johns, assistant bishop of Virginia, to accept the presidency without giving up his churchly responsibilities. The truncated professorship would allow him to pursue his itinerant pastoral duties, teaching only during the winter term when the weather made travel impracticable.^[1]

The object of the Board’s desire was a native of Delaware and a graduate of Princeton, where he had studied at its theological seminary. A strong evangelical, Johns presided over churches in Maryland until his election by the Virginia Episcopalians in 1842. In October 1846 the Board asked Johns if he would accept the presidency should he be invited.^[2] There were those, including a dominant element on the Board, who wished to resume William and Mary’s association with the church. Disputes about the wisdom of this policy led to arguments in the press and became entangled with the internal problems of the College. On one side it was contended that the royal charter had established an Anglican seminary, but that the Visitors had cut those ties, flouting the intentions of the founders. Thus duty required a return to the original purposes of the institution. Furthermore, without the patronage of a church much strengthened since the days of Bishop Madison, the College could not hope to flourish. In opposition, there were the antiepiscopate people, who pointed out how the College had prospered under Dew, a layman, and who claimed that it could never do so “in the hands of the priesthood.” They warned that non-Episcopalian students would shun William and Mary, and cited the numerous adherents of other denominations in the College’s prime recruiting ground, Tidewater Virginia. There were even those who feared that the endowment might be turned over to the church.^[3] Of course, those who wanted Saunders to keep the presidency might well have joined the protest against a church connection for that reason.

In spite of objections, the Board elected Johns as president. At the same time, it picked George Frederick Holmes to teach the subjects so closely associated with the lamented Dew: political economy, history, and national law. Then twenty-seven years old and a professor at Richmond College, Holmes was a British citizen who had won considerable reputation among Southern conservatives for his contributions to the Southern Literary Messenger. Holmes’s wife was the daughter of the late John Floyd, governor of Virginia and good friend of John Tyler, to whom Holmes attributed his success. Indeed, Tyler believed that Holmes’s presence would be “almost a guarantee” of the College’s “ultimate prosperity.”^[4] Holmes accepted, but Bishop Johns replied that he would have to ask the advice and consent of the church convention before returning an answer.

The convention met in May. Although a committee reported against acceptance, in the debate that followed most of the delegates, including William Hodges, rector of Bruton Parish, Adam Empie, and Charles Minnegerode, seemed at first to favor the idea. However, the presiding bishop, William Meade, gave a powerful speech in opposition. He feared that such an appointment might be contrary to the best interests of both the College and the church. Moreover, it would “array William and Mary against the University of Virginia,” for Johns would in effect be pledging himself and the church’s ministry to send students to the former instead of the latter.^[5] Of course, as far as the College was concerned this was precisely the point.

When Johns declined, the Board elected Francis L. Hawks, rector of Christ Church, New Orleans, a well-known orator, writer, and theologian.^[6] Hawks had written the Reverend Hodges expressing interest. Then he got a better offer from the University of Louisiana and excused himself by saying that he did not consider his letter to Hodges as an actual “offer” to take the presidency. “And so,” said a well-informed Williamsburg lady, “he creeps out of the difficulty.”^[7]

By now it was late August and something had to be done about a president. By what an anti-Saunders Visitor called “a light vote” of four to three, Saunders was elected president without the designation of pro tem. It had not been an easy decision. One Visitor, having heard that Saunders disliked him, abstained from voting; otherwise Saunders would have lacked a majority. According to Visitor Corbin Braxton, his advocates admitted that he was a hard drinker, but “believed he had partially reformed (that is, had not been seen drunk in a tavern of late) and make him President, and it would wholly reform him—a goodly project I trow.”^[8]

At this same meeting, the Board voted to offer the chair of moral philosophy to Landon C. Garland, the highly respected former president of Randolph-Macon College. Should Garland decline, the next offer was to go to Archibald C. Peachy, of whom more later. Minnegerode set off at once for Garland’s Nelson County home with news of the election. Garland responded by saying that there was no place he would rather be than William and Mary; unfortunately, he had a few days before accepted a professorship at the University of Alabama.^[9] Now the faculty was supposed to make the next offer to Peachy. This was not done; Peachy learned of Garland’s nonacceptance by reading the newspapers. The faculty’s reluctance to regard Garland’s answer as final and its unwillingness to approach Peachy in accordance with the Board resolution sprang from the fact that four of the five (Tucker being the odd man out) very much wanted Garland and very much did not want Peachy.

By now the session had begun, and the chair of moral philosophy remained empty. Therefore,^[10] the Board convened and on November 8 elected Peachy. On November 9 Saunders resigned the presidency and the professorship of mathematics, effective the following July; some believed that Minnegerode and Millington might follow his example.^[11] The College had begun its descent into an internecine conflict as bad as anything seen during the regime of John Augustine Smith.

Because the Visitors knew that Peachy and Saunders were “at variance personally,” the latter doubtless took their action as a direct slap. Yet until fairly recently, Saunders had been close to the Peachy family, one of Williamsburg’s oldest. He had extended friendly assistance to Archibald’s financially strapped parents, had remitted tuition fees for him and his brothers, and early in 1846 had written a testimonial for Archibald, who acknowledged it as being only one of many kindnesses he had received at Saunders’s hands.^[12] And a year later, when the storm was dying away, Saunders, at least when in his cups, professed the utmost love for all things Peachy.^[13] According to Tucker, the opposition to Peachy among the faculty began in mid-February 1847. This was about the time Holmes was elected to Dew’s chair, for which Peachy was then an applicant.^[14] The two were about the same age, but, as mentioned, Holmes had earned a substantial reputation as a staunch upholder of states’ rights, whereas Peachy had no public reputation at all. It may be that Saunders had favored Holmes over Peachy, and that the personal “variance” grew out of Peachy’s discovery of his abandonment by his erstwhile patron.

Although Peachy did not apply for the chair of moral philosophy, someone clearly applied for him. The College was still suffering from the loss of the renowned Dew; giving the chair to the callow Peachy was to most of the professors unthinkable. According to Millington, they informed the Visitors “that as the College had been decreasing in numbers for several years, & had received a severe shock in the sudden & unexpected death of Mr. Dew, we were desirous that his place should be supplied by some man of acknowledged celebrity and who had obtained a degree of public confidence instead of by any young man who was unknown to the world. And we all wished Profr. L C Garland of Randolph Macon to be the person chosen. … “^[15] But instead of finding a candidate of Garland’s stature, said Old Yoss, “nepotism prevailed.”^[16]

The charge of nepotism conveniently introduces the question of why the Board hired Peachy in the first place, knowing the trouble their act might provoke. ”Nepotism” probably referred to the fact that Archibald’s father, Dr. Thomas G. Peachy, had been a Visitor from 1833 until 1845, serving as rector for two of those years. The family had long been intimately connected with the history of the College and the town, among other things being blood kin to James Blair. Archie, as his friends called him, even more than his father and brother, was an alumnus of alumni, having traversed the curriculum from the Grammar School, through bachelor and master of arts degrees, and a law degree under Tucker. Dew had lived with the Peachys and seems to have thought well of Archie. The family was still having money problems, and Archie was doing no more than eking out a living practicing law in Georgetown.^[17]  What could be more natural than for friends of the Peachys to give Archie a chance to come back home and apply his salary and fees as professor of moral philosophy to shore up the family’s finances?

Giving the Peachys a helping hand was only one consideration. Judging by Corbin Braxton, he and others on the Board were unhappy with the state of the College, and they may well have shoved Peachy down the faculty’s throat in hopes of precipitating a crisis that would pave the way for a complete reorganization. Braxton’ s letter to Dr. C. C. Cocke is worth quoting at length, for it gives an all-too-rare glimpse of the sort of thing that went on behind the scenes and affected the fate of the College in important ways. Braxton wrote:

We put old Wmsburg into a ferment by causing Profr Saunders to resign, a great blessing by the way to the institution [.I]f any thing can save it by now appointing new professors and a new Presdt it may possibly be resuscitated, but not I fear unless the lepas influence^[18] which overshadows the place can be removed. The cause of the resignation of Mr. Saunders, was the election of Mr Peachy as a professor[;] he said he was not on good terms with him and could not serve with him. … He doubtless thought we would reconsider, undo what we had done and ask him to do the same, but the shackles once being off, we received his resignation … ’tis said two of the other professors will do the same, all the better. Instead I think, if the college could be suspended for one or two years, to have the old place scoured, washed, whitewashed, and ventilated, it wd recommence under new and renovated auspices. [B]y that means there would be no old students to come back to teach the new [matriculants?], the real Wmsburg swagger, and other accomplishments of the place. It is said to be something new under the sun for the Visitors, to take upon themselves an independent action. Heretofore the students have governed the Faculty, and the Faculty the board of Visitors.^[19]

Braxton’s letter portrays a Board divided between (among other things) an old guard faction and shake-’em-up or clean-’em-out reformers. Events to follow would strengthen the hands of the latter, at least temporarily.

Saunders was by no means the only one shocked or angered by Peachy’s election. “Some think that A—— P—— will be appointed in [Garland’s] place,” wrote one well-connected citizen, “and it is said that the mere report of such an event, has already prevented many students from coming here.”^[20] A young lady reported to her uncle that “our town has been a complete whirlpool of indignation for the last fortnight, owing to the election of A. Peachy, which is not to be wondered at, considering the circumstances under which he was brought in …”^[21] The Students draped the statue of Lord Botetourt in black, with an inscription proclaiming that “even the mighty dead mourn the downfall of the college.” Some of them greeted Peachy at midnight of the day he arrived in town with a “Callithumpian band of tin pans and horns and all nonmusical instruments, till he must be deaf.”^[22] Peachy took a gun and went out to confront his harassers. When a dozen or so began to close in around him, his younger brother and another young man, James Christian, also came out with weapons. At this critical juncture, when bloodshed seemed possible, Professor Tucker, as he tells it, was called out of bed “to ‘prevent murder’. … I ran out nearly naked. …” The row had attracted a large number of dogs, which turned and rushed upon this strange apparition in flapping dressing gown. Tucker shouted to drive them away, and the students, recognizing his voice and fearful that he would recognize them, dispersed.^[23]

Besides callithumping, the students held a meeting and published resolutions declaring that because their “distinguished and esteemed President and Professor” had resigned on account of Peachy’s appointment, they deemed that event to be “fraught with the most ruinous and disastrous consequences to the dearest interest of William and Mary.” They urged Saunders to withdraw his resignation.^[24] Nearly all the students signed an anti-Peachy memorial addressed to the Board. Millington, for one, was puzzled as to the cause of the young gentlemen’s antipathy toward Archie.^[25]

Matters rapidly became more complicated. Learning that his appointment was the reason for Saunders’s resignation, Peachy challenged his former benefactor. The défi was carried by James Christian, the student who had helped stand off the callithumpers. He was the son of John B. Christian, judge of the Superior Court, a Visitor since 1844, for many years a member of the House of Delegates, and the brother of John Tyler’s first wife. Tyler was, of course, also a Visitor.^[26] The students regarded Christian as anti-Saunders, and they had callithumped him along with Peachy. An ensuing correspondence between Peachy and Saunders, which the former published in the press, ended with Saunders saying that he had no personal objection to Peachy’s character and knew nothing about him “injuriously affecting the honor of a gentleman.”^[27] So there was no duel. However, the professors dismissed young Christian from the College for an act of disrespect to the faculty, to wit, bearing a hostile message to the president.^[28]

Meanwhile, the faculty which had lived together peacefully under the amiable Dew was rent with ill feeling. Saunders had to persuade Millington not to resign. Tucker’s friendship with Minnegerode turned to poisonous hostility. The judge was Peachy’s only friend on the faculty, and he blamed Minnegerode for whipping up feeling against Archie. Tucker had declined to take part in young Christian’s trial because he could not be impartial, and he believed that Millington and Minnegerode should have recused themselves for the same reason. But, wrote Tucker, Minnegerode “had fastened on his prey; an opportunity offered to injure the Judge and James [that is, the Christians, father and son], & me, all of whom he hates, and to cast an indirect censure upon Archie, under whose contempt he is withering. He was almost black with passion, and the old man [Millington] was spotted as a toad. … The College must decline & my situation will be almost intolerable, as it is now.”^[29]

Angered by the dismissal of his son, Judge Christian began denouncing “the pernicious influence of these damned foreigners.” He meant Minnegerode and Millington, but Professor Holmes expected that “the spirit of nativism” might eventually turn on him as well. ^[30] The elder Christian probably blamed Minnegerode for charges made to the rector of Bruton Parish reflecting on his “moral and religious character,” of which he was found entirely innocent after an investigation.^[31]

These feuds, and especially Christian’s denunciation of foreigners, induced Holmes to submit his resignation in January, and thus was “confusion worse confounded,” as Tucker put it.^[32] Holmes told the Board that there was “no possibility of unanimity among the Professors, or of cordiality between the Faculty as a body and the students.” William and Mary was fast declining; he could see no hope of recovery in less than five or six years, and he did not want to jeopardize his reputation by being connected with “a failing College.” Moreover, his only income was from his profession. He predicted that no more than twenty students would enroll for the next session, and he could not support his family on a salary of $1,000 with few or no fees.^[33]

Minnegerode and Millington were both looking for other jobs. The latter, for all his fondness for Williamsburg, had been testing the waters even before the Peachy affair.^[34] Millington regretted his sequestration from the wider world of science and felt keenly the absence of Dew’s stewardship. Then the prospect of losing his friends Saunders and Minnegerode made the idea of staying on at the College even less attractive. He began to correspond with acquaintances in Richmond about the possibility of founding a college in that city, hoping to persuade his three dissatisfied colleagues to go with him.^[35]

To take four of the five professors plus Millington’s scientific equipment and his library of four thousand volumes to Richmond would have been tantamount to moving the College. This idea had, in fact, occurred to persons outside the institution, as they watched it tottering on the brink. One of the Enquirer’s correspondents had already written that the failure of the Board to deal with the developing crisis came at a time “when the press, the Legislature and the public are speaking and moving in reference to this subject.”^[36] A close observer of College affairs believed that the legislature had a “strong notion” of using William and Mary’s money for other purposes, such as a college in Richmond or—most horrific of all—to swell the resources of the University of Virginia.^[37]

The Visitors convened early in March 1848 for the first time since they had precipitated the turmoil by hiring Peachy. The town and the College had become a bear garden of feuds, fights, near duels, and scandalmongering. Now there was talk of moving to Richmond or taking the endowment for the benefit of the university. All this surely steeled the resolve and perhaps added to the numbers of the root-and-branch element on the Board. It appeared that the opportunity predicted by Visitor Braxton had arrived.

On March 3 the Board notified the faculty that it had assembled to investigate the condition of the College and was prepared to receive any communication on that subject the professors saw fit to provide.^[38] The latter responded by saying that they had nothing officially to report, except that existing conditions threatened results “absolutely fatal” to the institution. The Board knew as well as the faculty, the professors said, what those conditions were. Should they venture to suggest a remedy, they might “wander beyond their province,” a veiled yet unmistakable allusion to the Peachy appointment.^[39] In riposte, the Visitors asked the professors to tell them about this condition of things so direful for the future of William and Mary. A meeting was called to answer their interrogatory, but one faculty member was absent. Believing, as they told the Board, that the concurrence of every member was needed to answer a question of such importance, they could not comply with the Board’s request “with propriety.”^[40] The absent professor was Tucker, who had not attended faculty meetings since the dismissal of James Christian almost two months earlier. He had kept away, he told the Board, because of his desire to avoid personal unpleasantness. He would attend if necessary, “however hard it might be to discuss the interests of the Institution with those who, I believe, are seeking to undermine and destroy it.” Tucker had in mind Millington and Minnegerode; a Visitor had told him they were trying to set up a college—or perhaps the College—in Richmond.^[41]

The Board kept the pot boiling by sending Tucker’s accusations to his colleagues for their comment. None would condescend to respond. Having hit this brick wall, the Visitors immediately sent back a recapitulation of these exchanges and expressed the opinion that the best interests of the College would be served by the resignation of the entire faculty as of the end of the session.^[42] Saunders and Holmes had already done so, and Peachy had also resigned two days before, on March 1. In a long letter he detailed his sufferings at the hands of his persecutors, including a passage accusing Minnegerode of “treachery, intrigue & falsehood.”^[43] In any event, one way or another all the professors submitted their resignations effective in July.^[44]

Besides putting the skids under the professors, the Board accused them of selling land contrary to a Board statute passed in 1825 and claimed for itself a general superintendence and control of the faculty’s management of College funds. The Visitors also charged the faculty with a breach of contract because they had raised the price of board to the students in midsession. They criticized the dismissal of James Christian as “irregular,” and asked that he be readmitted. Then they turned their guns on the students and abolished all secret societies, possibly thinking that they fomented disorders and callithumping.^[45] The faculty fought back by denying that any statute was broken by the land sale, a sale, they said, made necessary because the College’s annual income was insufficient to support six professorships—meaning Peachy, of course—and by refusing to reinstate Christian.^[46]

Meanwhile, the Board was investigating alleged efforts to move the College to Richmond. There was a “high noon” showdown between Tucker and Minnegerode, the latter challenging the former at a Board meeting to prove his charge that the reverend professor was undermining the College by promoting such a project. Tucker had to recant, pleading insufficient information received from a Visitor. Millington repelled a similar charge against him made by Peachy. Holmes said that he had considered the possibility of starting a college in Richmond only if William and Mary should collapse, while Saunders denied ever having countenanced the idea.^[47]

This carnival of demolition completed, the Visitors blandly informed the public that “the harmony which has been momentarily interrupted” would be fully restored and the vacant chairs filled when the Board met on July 11 “by men, as eminent for their learning and virtue as their predecessors have throughout all time been.”^[48] It seems to have been the expectation of the Visitors, or some of them, that new men would be brought in.^[49] Here was a shock to the professors. Until now their dealings with the Board had been in-house, and their resignations had been at least technically voluntary. Now the public would think that they had been dismissed. With no assurances of being rehired, they might reasonably expect that such publicity would injure their chances for employment elsewhere. All the while, they were supposed to carry on with their duties to the end of the session as if nothing had happened. This seemed unfair. Even Tucker, who was on the side of the angels, so to speak, in l’ajfaire Peachy, began to get anxious when letters appeared in the newspapers nominating persons to take his place. He wrote to former students, a fiercely loyal lot, that a little counterpropaganda from them would be appreciated.^[50]

At length July 11 rolled around, bringing with it the convocation that would fill the six chairs. The Visitors resolved to exclude the former professors from consideration, with the understanding that the ban could be lifted in individual cases for cause. On the evening of the fateful day, a pathetic little scene took place: some of the ex-professors asked to plead their case before the Board, a request that this provincial Aulic Council graciously granted. It must have been instantly clear to each supplicant that he must pass what can only be called “the Peachy test”: could he get along with Archie? When poor Minnegerode, with no other job and no prospects of one, protested that he had made earnest efforts to work with Peachy, that gentleman sank him without a trace by telling the Board that the breach between them was irreconcilable. So the reverend was cast into outer darkness. Saunders had already notified the Board that he would not accept reappointment. Thereupon, the Visitors restored to their chairs Millington, Holmes, and Tucker, all of whom conformed to their curious model of collegiality. And the model himself, Peachy, was of course reappointed.^[51]

The dismissal of Minnegerode and the reelection of Peachy brought to the surface divisions within the Board.^[52] Three Visitors resigned. John Mercer, the rector, was one of them. He announced disgustedly that “the College, the church, the whole town, & every body & every thing in it has gone to ruin except the Lunatic Asylum, which really does rise & shine amid the chaos of infamy and stupidity.”^[53] A public meeting of “Many Citizens of Williamsburg” implored the three to reconsider, to make one more effort to save the “prostrate” College, but to no avail.^[54] By this time the community was divided between “Saunders-ites & Peachy-ites” with no neutrals allowed.^[55]

“Old Buck” Ewell and Bishop Johns to the Rescue

One who had experienced more than his share of academic troubles was watching the situation at William and Mary from afar through the pages of the Richmond Whig.^[56] This was Benjamin Stoddert Ewell, whose life would be almost indistinguishable from the life of the College for many years to come. He was, as the saying went, of the best blood of Maryland and Virginia, rich in pedigree but poor in purse. Like Robert E. Lee, he was one of the impecunious scions of good family who received their education free at West Point, from which he graduated third in a class of forty-five in 1832. The academy paid him the high compliment of keeping him on for three years as a mathematics instructor. Despite this promising beginning, an army career was not for Ewell, and he resigned from the service in 1836. Then followed a brief stint as a civil engineer for a Pennsylvania railroad. During this period he married eighteen-year-old Julia McIlvaine of York. Eleven years younger than her husband, she was afflicted with a deepening emotional instability that would be one of the heavy crosses Ewell bore in a life that had its full share of difficulties.^[57]

The dim prospects of the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad persuaded Ewell to seek a career in teaching, for which he had both a talent and a calling. After unsuccessful attempts to find a position in Mississippi and South Carolina, he accepted a professorship at Hampden-Sydney in 1839. That college was then so poor as to make William and Mary seem rich by comparison, and Ewell’s seven years at the former were a fitting preparation for his forty years at the latter. He worked hard to raise money and increase enrollments and demonstrated a marked ability to get along with students, trustees, colleagues, and townspeople. Then in 1846 he took advantage of what promised to be a chance to escape from the endless struggle for survival at Hampden-Sydney by accepting a newly established professorship at Washington College in Lexington. His two years there saw the school and the town ripped apart by personal, political, and religious dissension, punctuated by the resignation of the president. By early in 1848, Ewell was ready to move again.^[58] He asked friends to recommend him for Saunders’s chair at William and Mary, scheduled to be vacant in July.^[59]

When the Board convened in July, there were many candidates for the mathematics chair, but only Ewell’s name was put in nomination. He was also elected president as someone, perhaps the only one, who could “give peace to the discords which have rent the institution.”^[60] Ewell promptly accepted the professorship, but told the Visitors that he could not believe they would have elected him president if they had known of his “meager qualification.” He declined that office while expressing his willingness to serve until the Board could find someone else.^[61]

To take Minnegerode’s place, the Board picked New Yorker Morgan L. Smead, an accomplished linguist and a graduate of both Union College and the University of Berlin, where he received a doctor of philosophy degree. His marriage to a daughter of former president Adam Empie probably brought him to the Board’s attention.^[62] It was not a happy choice. His students, who called him “old Pomp,” resented his pedantry and irritability, and harassed him with disorderly conduct and practical jokes throughout his nine years at William and Mary.^[63] One lad got into trouble when he bored a hole in the ceiling directly above Smead’s lectern and poured water on the professor’s bald head.^[64] So far, so good. The troublemakers gone, their places filled: it must have seemed to the Visitors (those who remained, at least) that their strong right arm had shown faculty and students who was boss, and that the auguries promised well for 1848–49. But then Holmes and Millington resigned to go to the newly established University of Mississippi, the latter taking with him his scientific apparatus and his large library, making respectable scientific instruction impossible.^[65] Next Peachy quit and went to seek his fortune in California. In this he was successful beyond the dreams of avarice, for he was soon said to be clearing the gigantic sum of $10,000 a month in the booming California land title business.^[66] With Peachy, Holmes, and Millington gone, and Ewell not yet sworn in, there remained of the Society only Tucker, and there was some doubt as to his status. He had resigned in March but had never actually been reappointed, on the obscure theory that somehow he had not resigned. There was thus a period of several weeks when the corporation established by the royal charter ceased to exist. The corporation was indistinguishable from the College, and so from a strictly legal point of view, William and Mary was dead and its assets were at the disposal of the sovereign power that had succeeded the British crown: the Commonwealth of Virginia.^[67] Luckily for the College, state authorities were as inattentive as the Visitors were inept, and they did not proceed against the charter; one can easily believe that had Jefferson been alive, the College would have faced a writ of quo warranto in short order. If the charter had been forfeited, it would have been a fitting conclusion to an episode replete with mismanagement, vindictiveness, and neglect of duty—not the first or the last in the history of the Board, but one of the worst.^[68] Strangely enough, the Visitors professed to be taken unawares by what they called the “sudden and unexpected” departure of Millington and Holmes. When the former resigned, they believed they could replace him before the session opened, but when Holmes departed soon afterward, the matter became more complicated.^[69] President-elect Ewell warned against replacing them hastily.^[70] The upshot was that the Board announced to the public that because there was not sufficient time to allow new appointments to be made or to acquire new scientific equipment, the College would suspend lectures for a year, although private instruction, for fees, would be offered by Ewell, Smead, and Tucker.^[71] Given his experience at Hampden-Sydney and Washington College, Ewell might have wondered if he had chosen the right career.

One could, of course, see the situation as offering the kind of opportunity that Visitor Braxton had longed for the year previous—the old professors gone and the place shut down for a year to provide time for “reform” and “reorganization.” These words had been bandied about for some time by various Visitors, but without anyone specifying just what they meant. One citizen who deplored the “melancholy” state of the school believed that if it was to revive, it must be affiliated with the Episcopal church. He believed that this was the intent of the recently appointed Visitors, and in fact he was correct.^[72]  A symptom of this was the presence of William Meade, bishop of Virginia, as a regular member of the Board.

At the October 5 Board meeting, Ewell tendered his resignation as president, to take effect July 1, 1849. The Board accepted it and simultaneously elected (again) Bishop John Johns to take office on the same date. This time the diocesan convention approved, though not without substantial opposition. Subsequent negotiations hammered out the terms of the arrangement. Johns would accept no salary from the College and would continue to discharge his duties as assistant bishop. It was understood that his incumbency as president would last only as long as necessary to get the College back on its feet. His teaching duties would embrace only part of the subjects normally falling under the heading of moral philosophy, plus lectures on the “evidences of Christianity.”^[73] Thus a clergyman would once more lead William and Mary, one part of a plan to move it closer to its traditional allegiance as well as to the national norm of clergymen-presidents. Lending emphasis to the renewed entente with religion was the revival of the rule requiring students to attend daily prayers and church on Sundays. The Visitors were careful to inform the public that they did not intend to make William and Mary a sectarian institution proselytizing for a particular denomination, but merely to follow the example of so many colleges which were linked to a church.^[74]

Academic changes made at the April meeting of the Board moved the College still closer to its sister institutions. The faculty, at the instance of the Board, had already substituted a three-class for the traditional two-class system. Now this was extended to four classes: freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. A bachelor of philosophy degree created about a year later allowed those who did not choose the more stringent bachelor of arts program to come away with a sheepskin. The issuance of proficiency certificates in specific subjects for nondegree students continued, supplemented by a new certificate awarded for completion of a two-year “English or Scientific Course.” To buttress academic standards as well as to maintain discipline, the Visitors decreed that the professors must assign grades at each recitation and demerits for infractions of College rules according to a schedule drawn up by the Board.

These, combined with examination grades, would determine a student’s class standing. Quarterly reports were sent to parents or guardians. Here was begun at William and Mary the policy of numerical grades that would last until letters were substituted for numbers in the 1930s.^[75] The Board made a bow to the practical by stipulating that “agricultural chemistry”—the analysis of soils and manures—was now part of the curriculum.^[76]

To curb what Corbin Braxton had called “the Williamsburg swagger,” the Visitors announced new regulations that would “secure a system of rigid but parental discipline. … A Professor is ordained to reside within the walls of the College to aid in superintending the morals and manners of the students.” This meant that one professor would remain in the Main Building until bedtime, the duty being rotated. The shade of St. George Tucker could be heard muttering imprecations at this return to the ”beadle” system that had helped drive him from the College many years before.^[77] To beef up enrollments and give an appearance of institutional vigor, financial assistance was extended to “at least twelve youths of the state, whose circumstances will not afford the entire expenses of their education; and any number of indigent youths of good moral character and promise, who come well recommended, will be instructed without charge of professors’ fees.”^[78] Each professor could admit two students free of charge, and fees continued to be remitted for ministerial students. Perhaps a total of twenty or more students fell into one of these categories in a given year.^[79]

The revision of the laws that began in 1849 included an assertion of the Board’s plenary power to elect professors and to remove them for “neglect, incapacity or misconduct.”^[80] There were to be weekly faculty meetings at which records of the proceedings were to be kept and in the absence of which no actions taken could be considered valid. The teaching schedule and the selection of textbooks were to be determined by the faculty “subject to the control of the Visitors.”^[81]  Requiring a faculty monitor to stay in the Main Building clearly showed that the Board intended to hold the professors accountable for the students’ behavior. An innovation of potentially large importance to the faculty was a decision mandating the pooling and equal division of all undergraduate student fees.^[82] This enlightened policy was soon abandoned for the old method of allowing each professor to retain the fees from his own students, although in 1858 or 1859 pooling was reinstituted.^[83] The Board also quickly receded from the rigid four-class system and substituted a more flexible set of degree requirements in keeping with the practice that had prevailed, with fluctuations, since the reforms of 1779.^[84]

All this backing and forthing began with the debacle of 1848 and the determination of the Board, with dissident members gone and new members added, to discipline and modernize the College. Trial-and-error reforms dictated by those largely ignorant of what went on in the day-to-day process of teaching usually meant an unsettling and wasteful reinvention of the wheel.

Besides changes in the laws and academic program, the intermission of 1848–49 saw repairs to the buildings and the appointment of new professors. The former task fell to President Ewell. This was nothing new. The faculty had always been responsible for such matters, from the buying of shingles to the erection of fences. The work was endless; repairs never seemed to catch up with decay. A promotional article of the kind regularly inserted in the newspapers as if written by someone outside the College claimed that all the buildings had been “thoroughly repaired, the grounds laid out and improved, and [a] new and handsome enclosure put up.”^[85] Such was not the impression of a newly arrived professor. The town was bad enough—”a miserable, rotten place at best,” and the College was if anything worse. It was “a miserable unsightly pile of bricks, such dirty passages and strange inconvenient rooms and broken walls within I had never seen before. It did not seem possible that such a college could prosper or that respectable young men would be content to live in such a building.”^[86] So wrote Silas Totten, who assumed the chair of moral philosophy in 1849.

Totten’ s gloomy initial impression was almost immediately assuaged by the warm welcome extended to him by Judge Tucker and others, and he would remain at the College for a decade. An Episcopal priest and for eleven years president of Trinity College, Totten accepted the William and Mary post largely to escape disagreeable divisions at Trinity caused by the Oxford movement within the Anglican communion.^[87] As for the College authorities, there was among them serious concern about hiring a Yankee fresh from the presidency of a New England school. Was he “sound on the goose”? Might he be tainted with abolitionism and other foreign heresies? Bishop Johns investigated Totten’s views carefully and gave him passing marks.^[88] Totten came to be looked upon by some, including himself, as Johns’s right-hand man and almost certain successor, sharing with him the duties of the chair of moral philosophy as befitted a fellow clergyman. Although Totten was an interesting lecturer and was highly regarded as a minister, his rather extensive memoirs of his William and Mary years reveal “an arrogant and proud man, with an irascible and caustic personality, who was often dissatisfied with existing circumstances and unable to come to terms with his lot in life.”^[89] Almost alone among those whose opinions have survived, he disliked and distrusted Benjamin Ewell, possibly because Ewell and not himself succeeded Johns as president.^[90]

Henry A. Washington and William F. Hopkins filled the remaining vacancies left by the debacle of 1848. Hopkins had known Ewell since West Point, where Ewell had been one of his students. He had taught at several institutions since resigning from the academy, and was at the Masonic University of Tennessee when elected to the chair of natural philosophy and chemistry at William and Mary. Not especially anxious to come to the College in the first place, he left after a year to accept a better-paying appointment at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.^[91]

Henry Augustine Washington was of the Westmoreland County Washingtons, his mother being a great-niece of the president.^[92] His educational experience included Georgetown and then Princeton, from which he received his bachelor of arts in 1839. After studying in the private law school of John Tayloe Lomax, he practiced law for a time in Richmond. His political principles made him an eminently suitable person to teach the subjects so closely associated with Dew, especially political economy and history. Poor health dogged Washington throughout most of his adult life, although the nature of his disease is not clear. During its acute phases, according to Totten, he “suffered horribly from nervous excitement,” suffering that was at times “unutterable.”^[93] During an interval of recovery he married Cynthia Beverley Tucker, the judge’s idolized daughter, and he somehow found the energy to keep up his teaching for some years and to prepare for publication the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Everyone seems to have admired Washington’s fine qualities, and when ill health at last forced him to resign in 1857, the College retained his name in its catalogue so as not to lose the advantage of such an association. The next year while convalescing in Washington, D.C., he died from a self-inflicted and presumably accidental gunshot wound to the head.^[94]

So the roster of faculty was full: Johns, Tucker, Ewell, Smead, Totten, Hopkins, Washington. Only one, Tucker, was either an alumnus or a representative of an old Williamsburg family. The purge and reform Corbin Braxton had hoped for was complete. The College was ready for a new departure, free from the domination of an entrenched faculty and student practitioners of “the Williamsburg swagger.” And so it threw open its doors in October 1849 to welcome the throngs of young gentlemen who would patronize this purified mecca of higher learning.^[95] Instead, a grand total of twenty-one trickled in, many of them law students. Ewell, for one, was depressed, even though he probably was not surprised.^[96] The closure of the College for a year must have had an adverse effect on enrollments; how could one know when it might close again? Another reason might have been the appearance of cholera, which had driven the legislature from Richmond to Fauquier Springs and which was also present in Norfolk. As in the 1830s, cholera did not visit Williamsburg, but the reputed unhealthiness of the town may have led prospective students to believe that it would.^[97]

Whatever the reasons, the beginning of the session was, as Bishop Johns said, “a gloomy day to the new faculty. … In truth the college was worse than prostrate,” weighed down by a long-accumulating burden of religious and political controversy, internal dissension, falterings and closings, and the ever more formidable competition from the University of Virginia.^[98] And yet somehow it struggled on. Enrollments grew from twenty-one in 1849 to thirty-five a year later, and by 1854 had reached eighty-two, the most since 1843.^[99]

Ewell Takes the Helm

In 1854 Bishop Johns tendered his resignation, reminding the Board of the original understanding that his connection with the College had been for a special purpose and was never intended to last indefinitely. The experiment, he said, had “succeeded beyond our expectations.”^[100] His mantle descended on Ewell, who had never wanted it and who believed that the presidency should continue to be held by some prominent Episcopal clergyman. There was, indeed, one such on the ground who fully expected to be chosen, Silas Totten. He attributed Ewell’s election to “Old Buck’s” alleged flattery of Johns and to his own Northern birth. The latter was doubtless the decisive if not the only reason. The national controversy over Kansas and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 had so inflamed sectional feelings that the election of a New Yorker would surely have hurt the College. So Ewell accepted, setting his foot to the path that would lead to many years of unremitting toil and much discouragement.^[101]

A change in presidents was only one of the familiar vicissitudes with which the old school had to contend during the 1850s. When Hopkins resigned after only a year, Ewell assumed most of his courses, with some assistance from Totten. He kept higher mathematics, while simple mathematics fell to an adjunct professor, “a young man who is to live in the College to preserve order among the students.”^[102] Then little less than a year later, death ended Beverley Tucker’s long reign over the law school.^[103]  The Board promptly appointed George P. Scarburgh, lately of the old General Court. Able, if no orator, well liked by his students, Scarburgh did not take his seat until the beginning of the 1852–53 session, and he left three years later to accept a judgeship on the newly created United States Court of Claims.^[104]

Then came Lucian Minor, in many respects sui generis among William and Mary professors. A Virginian who had studied under James Semple in the 1820s, Minor led a wandering life during his early years, practicing law in Alabama and then traveling extensively, especially in New England, whose economic and social progress he greatly admired. His numerous contributions to the Southern Literary Messenger after his return to Virginia were of a quality to win the praise of so adamantine a Yankee as James Russell Lowell. At the time of his appointment to William and Mary, he was practicing law in Charlottesville in partnership with his well-known brother, John B. Minor, professor of law at the university. His talents did not extend to teaching. “What a perfect non-entity as a professor was old Mr. Minor,” recalled a former student. “I nick-named him, from his meek, hoary aspect, ‘the venerable Cherub’. … We all liked & respected him, however; he was a kind, good man.”^[105] The cherub’s stay was not long; he died of consumption in 1858.^[106] After a two-year hiatus, the chair of law was again occupied, this time by an alumnus of the University of Virginia, Charles Morris. He had served but a single session before war came to Virginia, a sad end to a chapter in legal education so brilliantly illustrated by George Wythe and the two Tuckers.^[107]

Besides deaths and resignations, there were the continuing aggravations of repairs and finances. Fund-raising, whether from the state, the federal government, or private persons, for the most part met the usual fate, although some members of the Board gave money to repair and improve the Main Building.^[108] The endowment at least held its own and was able to meet indispensable needs. The Board had initiated a policy of shifting funds from private loans secured by real estate to municipal, state, and corporate bonds, a wise decision given the history of bad debts which had eaten up a significant fraction of the endowment over the years.^[109]

Life in the town and College in the fifties went on much as it had done for decades past. Old men would look back with nostalgia even as their fathers and grandfathers had done before them. “My Williamsburg days were my happiest ones. There was a sort of semipoetic halo around the place for me. The moonlight shone more softly on those greens than it has ever done anywhere else—the girls were very sweet. …” Another alumnus admitted to “very tender recollections of my years spent in the Old Burg, then the home of the most charming social life I have ever known.”^[110] The young gentlemen seem to have been better behaved, perhaps because the temperance movement had brought to the community “cold water dinners”; nor did Williamsburg escape entirely the resurgent revivalism that swept much of the country and that might have reduced the incidence of misbehavior. But the old town never went to extremes, and even those who touted temperance were known to go on a bender.

There were several social and literary clubs on campus: Tau Chi, Theta Delta Chi, and the Phoenix, Philomathean, and Licivyronian societies. They accumulated their libraries, had their meeting rooms, held dinners, sometimes with bands, gave speeches, debated, and occasionally feuded with one another with adolescent hubris. The eldest society of all, Phi Beta Kappa, was resurrected from its long death by Totten and Smead, both members of Union College’s Alpha of New York, after they had first secured the blessing of William Short, the only remaining “founder” of the 1770s. Students came to regard election to Phi Beta Kappa as eclipsing in honor a degree from the College. And after graduation they could attend meetings of the Society of the Alumni, founded in 1842. No fewer than two hundred members were present at such a celebration early in 1859 in the Raleigh Tavern’s “hall of Apollo.”^[111]

Faculty and students, by and large, got along well, “Old Pomp” Smead being an exception. Most important of all, the young gentlemen loved Ewell. “Old Buck is a glorious fellow,” said one.^[112] As always, the character and personality of the president were of enormous importance to the harmonious functioning of the College. Ewell deserves the more credit because he was handicapped by his painful marital predicament. When he came to Williamsburg, he was at first separated from both his wife, Julia, and his only child, his daughter Elizabeth, who lived with her paternal grandmother in Prince William County. The absence of the former was a blessing. However, Julia eventually wore out her welcome at her parents’ home in Pennsylvania. Ewell’s mother refused to take her in for fear that she would become overfamiliar with the boys at a nearby school operated by Ewell’s younger brother. Finally, in September 1850 she joined her husband.

Soon the couple’s “battles and brawls” became a nuisance to the neighbors and a scandal in the town.^[113] Ewell began to decline social invitations, pleading his inability to reciprocate in the same style and manner which he had so often enjoyed in the homes of others.^[114] The real problem was surely Julia’s bizarre behavior. Her desperate husband confessed that she had become “so very violent, & goes to such lengths, I do not know how to keep her indiscretions of speech, & temper secret any longer. Indeed she grows more violent as she grows older.”^[115] This affliction was removed when Julia returned to her parents’ home late in 1851.^[116]

With Julia gone and his mother and daughter coming to live with him, Ewell could allow himself to breathe a little of Williamsburg’s seductive lotus-laden atmosphere that few ever seemed to escape. But there was such a thing as being too comfortable, and Ewell began to think that it was “absolutely necessary to infuse in the Faculty more energy & more of a spirit of enterprise.”^[117] He had reason to be concerned. After Johns resigned, enrollments fell from eighty-two in 1854 to fifty-eight in 1857, a development Ewell saw as cause and effect.^[118] The law course was particularly anemic under Minor, with only eight students in 1856—scarcely more than half the number of two years before.

A prominent member of the Board was likewise concerned, though perhaps not for the same reasons. This was Governor Henry A Wise, a Visitor since 1848 and a states’ rights Democrat who had won a heated gubernatorial election in 1855. He took the lead at an excited meeting of the Board held in 1858, on July 7 and 8. Reports came out that, among other things, Wise wanted to move the College to his native Eastern Shore of Virginia so the students could enjoy sea bathing. In fact, the governor’s educational ideas resembled in many respects those put forward by Jefferson in 1779 and later: a system of free public schools and intermediate colleges and academies, the latter serving as feeders for the University of Virginia. He failed to sell his plan to the legislature, and so, as Jefferson had done before him, Wise decided to reform William and Mary.

Ewell believed that the governor’s plan for the state was outdated and for the College, ill advised. He especially objected to Wise’s proposal to revive the Grammar School. Jefferson had found the presence of young boys to be disruptive and objectionable, and the president agreed. “A preparatory school is very well, if it is not kept within a half a mile of a College.” He saw nothing intrinsically wrong with the existing organization of “independent departments, with a limited liberty of choice to the student. This is the direction most colleges are taking. The old tread mill plan of 4 classes stretching or compressing the intellect to fit a certain standard, a sort of bed of Procrustes, has not the favor it had formerly.”^[119] Just as other institutions were adopting the elective system, some of the Visitors wanted to move to what was being abandoned elsewhere. The phenomenon of trendy obsolescence would reappear in the late twentieth century and would come to be known in some quarters as “the William and Mary lag.”

The Visitors and Ewell had a stormy session. “The Board made Ben mad 3 times,” his mother reported; “he threw up his Professorship, as well as the Presidency, they refused even to consider it, would not receive it[.] He told them some home truths.”^[120] They were willing, however, to accept his resignation as president in order to obtain the services of a distinguished Episcopalian divine, something Ewell himself had long favored. Another object was to get rid of Smead altogether. When he refused to take a hint and resign, the Board fired him, much to his dismay. Lucian Minor had died some weeks earlier, and Wise persuaded his colleagues to leave the chair empty, a decision that angered the local people.^[121] The Board elected to the presidency the Reverend Robert W. Barnwell, a respected scholar then at South Carolina College. When he declined, the Board asked Ewell to stay on, so “Old Buck” agreed to keep the job he had never really wanted.^[122]

When the dust settled, the College emerged without a law school and also without a grammar school; Wise had lost that part of the argument. There was a three-year course of study, which was nothing new, and students could attend any classes they wished as long as they included three departments. Even this requirement could be waived, so after all there was to be no Procrustean bed of rigidly prescribed courses. The Board did break new ground in creating a second language department. Comparatively young men headed both. Edwin Taliaferro would teach Latin and the Romance languages, again reviving Jefferson’s innovation, and Edward S. Joynes, Greek and German. The former came from a prominent Tidewater family, and the latter, according to an Enquirer editorial, commanded “an extended and influential family connection, second to none in the state, counting even among his immediate fraternity now living, no less than six men of high standing and influence.” Such men were expected to draw students to William and Mary from among their friends and relatives. After what was probably a vigorous contest, Robert J. Morrison won out over the well-known historian Charles Campbell as Henry Washington’s successor. Thomas T. L. Snead, who had replaced the popular Robert (“Old Boosy”) Gatewood as adjunct professor of mathematics, continued in that position.^[123]

After all of Wise’s huffing and puffing and spread-eagle eloquence, nothing much had changed. Smead was gone and modern languages were back, this time including German, and there were two language teachers instead of one. Some believed the law school was gone for good, but thanks to the efforts of Ewell, John Tyler, and especially Visitor Hugh Blair Grigsby, it reappeared in 1860 in the person, as mentioned, of Charles Morris.^[124]

Disaster

The session of 1858–59 opened with only forty-seven students as compared to sixty the year before; the absence of a law professor may have caused most of the decline. On the other hand, the buildings had been extensively repaired at a cost of $6,500, a great sum in those days, and the future seemed reasonably secure. The alumni society made preparations to celebrate the 166th anniversary of the issuance of the royal charter, a date that fell on February 19 (February 8, O.S.), 1859. It was to be a great event, adorned by an address by ex-President John Tyler. But then in the early hours of February 8, the Main Building went up in flames. Ewell was one of the first on the scene and went to the second floor to rout out several students living there. The fire began in the north wing and rapidly spread to other parts of the structure. The interior burned with a great roar, and the glare of the fire could be seen for miles around. The crowd that gathered looked on in stunned silence. Nothing could be done: within four hours the building was gutted.^[125]

Virtually the entire library of eight thousand volumes was lost, including Louis XVI’s gift, as were the scientific equipment, the original copy of the Transfer, and George Washington’s letter accepting the chancellorship. The chapel’s mural tablets honoring Sir John Randolph and Bishop Madison were calcined rubble. The contents of the Blue Room, consisting mainly of six portraits, the College seal, and some of the records, were saved.^[126] Perhaps worst of all, so much history and so many memories went up in smoke.

It might be said of the College and its well-wishers that this was their finest hour. Faculty, Visitors, students, townspeople, and friends everywhere rallied to rebuild and to keep the College in session. The anniversary celebration went forward, and suggestions that the College abandon Williamsburg received short shrift. A difference of opinion arose about whether to make use of the old walls, most of which were still standing, or to construct an entirely new edifice. The former course prevailed. It was quicker, cheaper, and saved at least part of the original structure as a symbol of continuity.^[127] Insurance money and private donations proved to be more than sufficient to rebuild and refurnish.^[128] William Barton Rogers, who was visiting Virginia at the time of the fire, returned to the scenes of his youth, viewed the blackened walls, and drove down Main Street (the present Duke of Gloucester Street), “recognizing familiar objects, and dwelling in dreamy sweet sadness on the past.” The Visitors asked for his advice on rebuilding, and later he would help in replacing the scientific apparatus.^[129] Some four thousand volumes acquired by gift and purchase quickly provided the nucleus of a new library.

Not all was sweet concord, however. At the Board’s February meeting, Henry A. Wise, possibly still smarting from his rebuff of the previous summer, sought to curb the faculty’s fiscal authority. Soon after the fire, the Society had paid $4,600 for a building behind the Brafferton to serve as a College hotel. This irked Wise. He proposed a resolution “declaring the absolute right of control in the Visitors over the Faculty, and preventing them from buying or selling any property for any purpose whatever without the previous assent of the Board.” Wise pushed his motion with his customary warmth, and was as warmly opposed by fellow Visitors Johns, Hugh Grigsby, and Bursar Tazewell Taylor. The resolution was subsequently amended so as merely to assert a general legislative control over the faculty.^[130]  At its July meeting the Board adopted a resolution diminishing the scale of fees, which recently had been increased by one-fourth. The faculty seems to have objected, but to no avail. Totten resigned in September, and there seems to have been some discussion of filling his chair with a new president, but this did not come to pass. It may be that so vehement a Democrat as Governor Wise did not like having so staunch a Whig as Ewell at the head of the College.^[131]

Work on the Main Building proceeded rapidly, and on October 11, 1859, with much ado the Grand Masonic Lodge of Virginia put the capstone in place. The new building was a far cry from the old in appearance, with two square Italianate towers flanking the front entrance. Jefferson probably would have compared it to a brick kiln with shot towers.^[132] The dedication ceremonies also saw John Tyler installed as chancellor, the first to hold that office since Washington.

William and Mary had once more risen phoenixlike from its ashes. Students and townspeople were ready to resume their accustomed round of classes and balls, courting and commencements, visiting and gossiping. But the world beyond was about to break in upon them all as it had done eighty years before. Five days after the 1859–60 session opened, the fanatic abolitionist John Brown descended on Harper’s Ferry to begin the violent revolutionizing of the South. Northern sympathy and support for this bloody-handed horse thief shocked Southerners as nothing else had ever done, and they began to look to the defense of their homes against the armed invasion many feared was coming. The next year saw the breakup of the Democratic party and the election of a president by a wholly sectional party for the first time in the nation’s history. Then followed the secession of South Carolina and the failure of all attempts by Congress to reach a compromise. A last-ditch effort to save the Union and avert war, the Washington Peace Convention in February 1861, was the work of Chancellor John Tyler, but it came too late to stop the rush to Armageddon. Then came the outbreak of hostilities at Fort Sumter.

Benjamin Ewell bitterly opposed secession and hoped to the end that disunion might be prevented. Yet he and the faculty could do no other than agree to the students’ petition, presented in January, to permit them to organize a military company, and they asked the governor to equip it with two brass cannon.^[133] Ewell accepted the captaincy, though still hoping for peace. Then, on April 17, the Virginia convention reacted to Lincoln’s call for militia to invade the Deep South states by taking the Old Dominion out of the Union. The moment of decision had arrived; Ewell offered his services to the commonwealth.^[134]

At a called meeting on May 10, the faculty resolved that with war imminent, most of the students already gone from the College and the rest preparing to follow, “the exercises of the College be that day suspended.”^[135] They prepared a circular announcing to the public that the College would reopen in October “if the state of the country shall permit.”^[136] It did not. Soon afterward Confederate military authorities took possession of the campus and used it as a barracks and a hospital.^[137] There were a few faculty meetings in the ensuing months of 1861, and there was some hope that William and Mary might reopen early the next year. This turned out to be impossible, and the faculty braced for the worst. In February the bursar was directed to tum over all bonds and other papers of value to Hugh Grigsby to be kept at his home in Charlotte County.^[138]

By March a great Northern army under Major General George B. McClellan was landing at Fort Monroe; more than 100,000 men, it would be. During these months Ewell’s main duty as a Confederate officer was to draw up a line of defensive works east of Williamsburg. Meantime, the town filled up with refugees from those parts of the Peninsula occupied by Union forces.^[139] Early in May the Yankee juggernaut began  to move. The Confederates fought a bloody rearguard action east of Williamsburg along the lines laid out by Ewell.^[140] Then they continued to retreat toward Richmond, leaving the town to the invaders. During June and July, a series of attacks near Richmond by General Robert E. Lee drove the enemy away from the Southern capital. By midsummer most of the Union army had moved back to northern Virginia, but the Federals maintained an outpost in Williamsburg for the rest of the war.

The town’s painful experience under Union rule cannot be recounted here, but painful it was.^[141] The people enjoyed a brief, deliriously happy deliverance on September 9, 1862, when a small force of Confederates drove the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry from the town in headlong flight, some troopers not stopping until they had reached Yorktown. The Southern soldiers then withdrew. The humiliated Pennsylvanians returned, got drunk, and fired the Main Building. Townspeople, mainly women and children, rushed with buckets of water to save the College, only to be driven off by the drawn sabers of the Union warriors. The fire roared on and eventually died away, leaving a smoking shell. When the rubble cooled, the soldiers broke into the vault and stole the silver fittings from the coffins of the honored dead.^[142]

The walls of the Main Building still stood, as they had after the fires of 1705 and 1859, and eventually they would again enclose an academic building. But the College that would fill them would be very different from what it had been before. Like the Old South, the old William and Mary was gone forever.