“The Simpleton Bracken”

Institutions of higher learning in the late twentieth century are of a size, complexity, and wealth inconceivable in Bishop Madison’s day. They have dynamics and momentum not easily changed. The class of professional administrators that has sprung up to preside over these educational conglomerates often resembles a sort of bureaucratic lichen, on but not of the host to which it is attached. Not infrequently the modern president “cometh up, and is cut down,” professionally speaking, “like a flower,” or “fleeth as it were a shadow,” moving upward, or downward, or sideways to another college, usually having done rather little to alter the direction in which the institution was already moving and leaving behind few changes that would not have occurred under almost anyone else. A fading repertoire of anecdotes, not necessarily complimentary, and eventually, perhaps, a posthumously named building may be the only relics unique to the departed.^[1]

It was not so in earlier times. Then, no one could think of Yale without thinking of Ezra Stiles or Timothy Dwight, or of William and Mary without thinking of Madison. In an academic community consisting of a handful of faculty and a few score of students, the character and reputation of the College depended to no small degree upon who was president. This truism was never more vividly illustrated than when the Reverend John Bracken became the ninth man to hold that office.

The record reveals little concerning Bracken during the years following his reinstatement as professor of humanity and master of the revived Grammar School. Almost as little is known of the school itself. Madison reported in 1800 that it had not fulfilled the expectations of its champions. Enrollment, about sixty in the mid-1790s, had slipped to a mere thirty-two by the time of Madison’s death.^[2] Students’ letters often discuss various professors, but not Bracken.^[3] The state of Bruton Parish, of which he was rector for so many years, seems to have been quite dismal even when taking into consideration the general decay of the Episcopal Church in Virginia. William Meade’s account of his ordination in 1811 by Madison, assisted by Bracken, is suggestive. The church itself he found to be in “wretched condition,” with the winter wind swirling through broken windows. The shivering congregation numbered only seventeen, all of whom were friends and relatives of the ordinand.^[4]

Late in the winter of 1812, with Madison’s illness clearly entering its final phase, Bracken resigned his professorship and the mastership of the Grammar School,^[5] apparently confident of becoming the next president.^[6] Nor was he disappointed. With an unseemly haste possibly calculated to forestall the development of an opposition, the Board elected Bracken, who rounded things off by preaching the bishop’s funeral sermon.^[7] Together with the declaration of war on Great Britain, this event would come to be seen as a major cause of the College’s sharp decline during the next two years. Dr. Philip Barraud wrote St. George Tucker three days after Madison’s death, “I do feel mortified at the want of respect to the memory of the Dear old Bishop by the Convocation and I am not satisfied with the appointment [of Bracken]. In my opinion it gives the Death blow to William & Mary”^[8] Later in the year, James Semple, a Visitor and later professor of law, told Jefferson that the College had “sustained a rude shock in the appointment of Mr. Bracken to the presidency.”^[9] Jefferson was even more cutting; he deplored the failure to select someone of real ability instead of “the simpleton Bracken.”^[10]

Bracken’s ecclesiastical career paralleled his presidency. Like one of those natural philosophy experiments then so popular with undergraduates wherein a dead dog was made to breathe by galvanic stimulation, Bishop Madison’s passing stirred the vestigial Episcopal church into a semblance of life. The first so-called annual convention since 1805 met in Richmond on May 13, 1812, with twenty-eight delegates representing eighteen parishes—five less than in 1805.^[11] As one of the few survivors of the colonial era and for thirty-nine years rector of the “cathedral” church of the diocese, John Bracken was what one historian has called “an automatic choice for bishop among the older delegates.”^[12] Nevertheless, his election met with an unrelenting opposition from a small minority led by William Meade, who years later would become bishop of the diocese. Meade objected because of Bracken’s “unworthiness” for the position, although not making an explicit imputation of moral turpitude.^[13]

After several months Bracken decided to decline the office. In his sermon for Madison he had mentioned both his poor health and unspecified family problems; and so at age sixty-six he may not have felt equal to assuming even the insignificant duties of a moribund church, along with the presidency of the College, especially considering the problems facing both.^[14] In the eyes of many, he had become, one suspects, a somewhat shabby relic of a bygone age. Not long after his double promotion, a visitor to Williamsburg remarked that “the president [of the College] , who is also the new Bishop looks more like a tavern keeper than a divine. Indeed, I am told he has nothing divine about him but the name.”^[15] Possibly he had a drinking problem, as the following anecdote suggests. Having been invited to officiate at a wedding, the Reverend Bracken did not appear at the appointed time, whereupon the bride’s father sent out a search party.

We started and got to york and lo Mr Bracken alias (the Round Bellied Vicar) could not be found anywhere[.] Majr Griffin began to be very uneasy and sent off a servant to look for him[.] about Eight oClock he came in all covered with mud and water the greatest sight you ever saw—It seems the Worthy old gentleman with Miss Elizabeth Gatliff in the gigg with him had started from Wmsburg at eleven Oclock in the morning[.] being in his Cups he took the Martens Hundred Road and went to the [Carter’s] Grove before he discovered he had lost his way, he then turned back and got almost to Mr Semples farm[.] he there upon a dead level upset the Gigg and broke it and fell on Miss Elizabeth Gatliff and almost killed her. We had grand doings there and Majr Griffin gave us some Wine which he said was the age of his daughter which he had saved for Her wedding.^[16]

Bracken’s tenure as president was quite as inglorious and almost as brief as his episcopal career. Probably seeking to mitigate the bad impression his election had created, the Visitors invited two alumni known to be close to Jefferson to join the faculty. One, Joseph Cabell, seems briefly to have considered accepting, but did not.^[17] The other was Peter Carr, Jefferson’s nephew. Judge Semple traveled to Albemarle County to persuade Carr—to his uncle “the dearest of living men”—to accept a professorship.^[18] Carr’s friends urged him to do so, and he did make a tentative commitment to the Board rather against his personal inclinations. But he would go no further in the matter as long as Bracken was president. William H. Cabell, Joseph’s brother, a former governor, and now a member of the Court of Appeals, consulted with Carr and with William Wirt, the renowned attorney, to see if there was a legal way of deposing Bracken. Carr concluded there was not. As for Bracken’s resigning voluntarily, Carr said, “I know the incumbent too well, to believe that any scruples as to his fitness for office, would induce him to give up the emoluments attached to it.”^[19] As long as Bracken was there, Carr believed that the income from the salary and fees he could expect would be insufficient to support him.

Something had to be done about Bracken, said Governor Cabell, for without some change, “the College is gone.”^[20] “If the Gordian knot cannot be untied,” a Visitor wrote Jefferson, “I would at once cut it.” The Board now included members elected since Bracken’s elevation, and it began to take the necessary steps to force him out.^[21] Having in mind a layman, it amended the statute of 1728 requiring the president to be in holy orders, a stipulation that had doubtless facilitated Bracken’s election in the first place.^[22] Then a committee was appointed to look into the causes for the unhappy state of the College. It met, received word from the president’s friends that he was willing to resign, and reported that “such a change … in the state of the university” would make further investigation unnecessary.^[23] On the same day, and surely not coincidentally, Bracken addressed a somewhat curious note to the rector of the Board: “Having for some time intended to resign the office of President of Wm and Mary College whenever peace should take place, I am willing even now to resign provided such resignation take place from the first of October next.”^[24] By peace he meant, of course, peace with Britain, which was not then in prospect. He did not explain the connection between his incumbency and a state of war. The allusion was probably an effort to save face: he had not intended to stay on very long anyway, he was saying, and so he was willing to unburden himself “even now.” In any event, the Board now had his resignation in writing, something it had insisted upon, and so it agreed to let him stay on until October 1.^[25]

During Bracken’s two years, the Board presided over changes in the faculty and the curriculum. In July 1812 the professorship of humanity and the Grammar School were discontinued. Four professorships were announced: law, mathematics, natural philosophy, and chemistry, the separation of the last two being a temporary expedient.^[26] The Board made no mention of moral philosophy, although it evidently did not intend for the subject to be dropped permanently.^[27] Madison had taught both natural and moral philosophy; as president, Bracken taught nothing. Probably he was not qualified to teach the former or trusted to teach the latter.

The chair of mathematics was empty. The irritable George Blackburn had finally wearied of trying to teach adolescents who were so woefully unprepared. Matriculants avoided his subject both because they were not ready for it and because it simply was not popular. Few students meant few fees to augment his salary of $500. He had appealed publicly to the Visitors to establish a school under his supervision. Entering students would have had to take an entrance examination; those who failed would then have enrolled in Blackburn’s school, thus supplying, as he put it, a competence for his family and hopes for his old age. The Board took no action, and Blackburn resigned early in 1812 to take a position at South Carolina College, where the “emoluments” were much greater.^[28]

Jefferson was ready as always to use the College as an asylum for displaced academics of the right political stripe, and he recommended Josiah Meigs as a replacement for Blackburn. This gentleman had been at Yale under the genial Ezra Stiles, but when Timothy Dwight, a Federalist, assumed the presidential office, Meigs, an ardent Jeffersonian, found his situation awkward. He refugeed to the gestating University of Georgia, made himself unpopular by attacks on the trustees, and by 1810 found himself unemployed.^[29] As it happened, the Board had already picked a local candidate, Ferdinand S. Campbell, a recent graduate and former student of Blackburn’s. This young man had stepped in to complete the bishop’s moral philosophy course in the spring of 1812 and also to carry the Grammar School through the end of the session. When Blackburn heard of the Visitors’ intention, he objected. “Your College,” he told them, “has recently been wounded,” and “if you appoint those to office in it who are themselves only beginning, you should not expect that in the existing State of Science it can rise very high above its present condition.”^[30] The Visitors nevertheless stuck with Campbell, a decision that may have derived at least in part from his recent marriage to a well-connected widow ten years his senior, Elizabeth Corbin, granddaughter of Carter Braxton.^[31] Campbell inspired a banal undergraduate jingle so invariably quoted whenever he is mentioned that one hesitates to break with tradition: “Here comes old Ferdy / With a rectilinear walk / His head full of diagrams / And his pockets full of chalk.”^[32]

The College was briefly fortunate in attracting Dr. John Maclean to the chair of natural philosophy and chemistry. A Scot with a medical doctorate from Aberdeen and a diploma in surgery and pharmacy from Glasgow, where he was for several years on the faculty, Maclean had come to the United States in 1795. He settled in Princeton on the advice of Benjamin Rush and soon joined the faculty of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) as professor of chemistry. The young Benjamin Silliman was the recipient of Maclean’s help when just embarking upon what was to be an outstanding career in chemistry. His benefactor, said Silliman, was “a man of brilliant mind, with all the acumen of his native Scotland; and a sprinkling of wit gave variety to his conversation. I regard him as my earliest master in chemistry. … “^[33] Internal changes at New Jersey, including a new president, induced Maclean to come to William and Mary despite the meager salary.^[34] Unhappily, his failing health forced him to resign early in 1814. He returned to Princeton and died there in February. His replacement, Thomas P. Jones of Philadelphia, undertook his duties in the fall of the year. Nothing is known of his recruitment or antecedents. His stay at the College would be brief and unpleasant.^[35]

Meanwhile, Judge William Nelson, he of the silvery locks and nimble feet, passed to his reward in 1813. Conveniently at hand to keep the chair of law from growing cold was his nephew, Robert Nelson, judge of the chancery court for the Williamsburg district.^[36] This may have been one of several incidents that would lead Jefferson to accuse the College of sacrificing its character on the altar of nepotism and favoritism.^[37]

“But We Hope a New Era Has Risen upon Us”

Finding a new president was naturally a matter of greatest importance. The College was suffering from the loss of Madison, frequent changes in the faculty, renewed student misconduct, falling enrollments, and dislocations caused by the war with Britain. There was a crying need for strong leadership, a man of substance and stature who could rescue the foundering institution. Here Joseph Cabell intervened and helped to persuade his friend Dr. John Augustine Smith to take the presidency that he had probably persuaded the Board to offer him.^[38] Unquestionably, Cabell believed he was doing the College a service.

Smith was an alumnus, originally from Westmoreland County, and the first layman president of William and Mary. He would hold that office until 1826. A recitation of the bare facts of his life leaves the impression of a successful man. He studied medicine in London, became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and by 1807 was on the faculty of New York’s newly formed College of Physicians and Surgeons as professor of anatomy and surgery. This college affiliated with Columbia in 1811, leading to his sharing a professorship with the well-known physician, Wright Post. Possibly this change induced Smith, never a good sharer, to return to the College in 1814. His post—William and Mary career would take him back to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, of which he became president from 1831 until his retirement twelve years later.^[39]

So far, so good. On the other hand, when one looks behind the biographical sketches, one finds that wherever Smith was he became a focus of controversy and contention. If he always had his supporters, he never failed to raise up bitter enemies. Thomas Cooper, himself no slouch at antagonizing people, disparaged both his professional qualifications and his character. At best a tolerable dissector, ignorant of the classical languages, bad tempered, duplicitous: such was Cooper’s assessment. Late in Smith’s career, while he was president of the medical college in New York, a colleague whom he had displaced repeatedly and publicly accused him of mendacity, trickery, dishonorable intrigue, and professional incompetence, to name only a few things. There were surely two sides to this quarrel, yet the charges are too circumstantial to be dismissed out of hand. Perhaps more telling are some unintentionally revealing passages from an in-house history of the school: “He was thought by some to be more versed in philosophic generalities than in the exact details of specific information. … Though not distinguished for any remarkable traits of scientific originality,” and so forth.^[40]

The picture drawn by Smith’s critics during his William and Mary years reveals a man almost pathologically tenacious in opinion and purpose, an egocentric, self-righteous, insensitive authoritarian who could not abide opposition and whose chief joy was the exercise of power, in the acquisition and use of which he was not especially fastidious. Either the Visitors did not see these traits when they selected him, or if they did, were more impressed by the invincible self-assurance with which they were necessarily accompanied. In the crisis of the College they may have believed that after the gentle Madison and the incompetent Bracken, self-assurance was needed above all else. Moreover, they must have realized that Smith was intelligent and perceptive. He saw as clearly as anyone and more clearly than most what was wrong with the College and what had to be corrected. Unfortunately for all concerned, his overbearing personality would prevent him from accomplishing what he knew needed to be done.

The new president unconsciously illustrated this fact in what might be called his inaugural address, delivered at the opening of the College in the autumn of 1814. Everyone agreed that William and Mary was in a “depression,” a “fallen state,” a “wretched condition.”^[41] It was sick. Dr. Smith thereupon gave his diagnosis in a manner described by the Richmond Enquirer as both impressive and argumentative.^[42] Smith’s points were well taken, yet his elucidation of them had something to irritate almost everyone.

The most important immediate cause of the College’s decline, he said, was the war with Britain. Few would have disputed that. But then he went on quite gratuitously to question the expediency of the war, thus offending those who had supported President James Madison’s call to defend the national honor. He gave particular attention to the General Assembly’s action in repealing the time-honored exemption of students from militia duty. Pointedly alluding to what he called the “ostensible” purpose of the law, he said its actual effect was to favor the rich over the poor student. The former could escape to seminaries in other states where “juster laws” encouraged learning.^[43] The members of the legislature who had voted for the law, to say nothing of their constituents who agreed with it, could not have been pleased when accused by innuendo of passing an unjust law for the ulterior purpose of favoring the rich over the poor.

Next, Dr. Smith complained of critics who had besmirched the College’s reputation by “industriously” spreading rumors that doctrines hostile to Revelation were taught within its walls. “little do those who have propagated such reports resemble Christians, in one respect at least, that is, if they could believe such a man as Bishop Madison could have been a hypocrite.” Then, in a grudging and ineptly phrased attempt to reassure the devout, he said: “My own opinion on this subject may be singular; but putting the verity and importance of christianity out of the question[!], as pertaining more particularly to the clerical profession, I do think some knowledge of the rise, progress and effects of religion essential to a well educated Gentleman,” better to enable him to “detect the latent springs of human action.” Therefore, he was “decidedly in favor of a Professorship of Divinity being established in the College.” One may doubt if this announcement won over many of the sanctified.

The third cause of the College’s low repute was “the total want of discipline,” although he asserted, correctly, that conditions were far worse in some other seminaries. Nonetheless, the enemies of William and Mary, “for reasons which are well known,” took great pains “to blazon forth whatever irregularities were committed by the students of this College.” How unfair, when at the root of student misconduct was the “public at large.” Among them, “during the fever that was produced by the French Revolution, nothing was heard of in this country, but Liberty and Equality, the latter exempting beardless citizens from parents’, and of course collegiate authority, the former allowing them to indulge in every untoward propensity.” Not to worry, however, for this Francophile “phrenzy” had passed, and if any youths should bring lingering symptoms of the infection to William and Mary, they would simply be expelled. His conservatism in these matters was à la mode in other colleges at this time.^[44]

Finally, prospective students had been kept away by Williamsburg’s undeserved reputation as a disease-ridden place. Smith conceded that the town was “very unhealthy” during the late summer and early fall, but that for the months when the College was in session it was quite a wholesome place. As proof he claimed that since 1782 only two students had died of “complaints peculiar to this lower country.”^[45]

This extended account of President Smith’s address may shed some light on events that occurred during the succeeding years of his incumbency and help to explain why the “new era” many looked for did not come to pass. Still, at the time the Board and others must have thought there was good reason to expect that the College had turned the comer. The despised Bracken was gone, and the new president was obviously forceful and confident, even if not the soul of tact. The new rector of the Board was the youthful Robert G. Scott, son-in-law of the late Bishop Madison, who was just setting forth on a successful legal and political career that would carry him to the top echelons of the Richmond bar and into the councils of Virginia’s movers and shakers.^[46] The curriculum was, at least for the moment, relatively complete. Unlike Bracken, Smith would teach, his subject being moral philosophy. Campbell had mathematics, Jones offered natural philosophy and chemistry, enhanced by an enlarged experimental apparatus, and Nelson held the chair of law. Modern languages remained dormant, the long-dead chair of medicine remained dead, but the degree in divinity was still on the books, ready to be revived by Smith. An innovation of debatable wisdom was the elimination of a knowledge of languages, ancient or modem, from degree requirements, and the prolongation of the course of study from two to three years, a change that tended to increase the cost to students and that would have to be abandoned in the hard times of the 1820s.^[47] In an access, some would say excess, of generosity, the Board more than doubled faculty salaries.^[48]

During the honeymoon period of Smith’s presidency, the Visitors were disposed to give him whatever he asked for with respect to the internal governance of the College. At his request, now he and he alone would meet with and report to them. This contrasted to the practice in Madison’s time, when the whole Society made such reports. Again at his insistence, Smith was given the responsibility of inquiring into and describing to the Visitors just how well each professor was performing his prescribed duties.^[49] The new president was determined to use an iron hand in controlling the students’ behavior, academic and otherwise. As a member of the Board recalled, “He applied to the visitors to strengthen the arm of the faculty, and a statute was passed authorising them to inflict the punishment of suspension or expulsion upon any student who refused to give evidence upon his honor, against any other student … or who refused to make a solemn declaration of his own innocence.”^[50] He even went so far as “to dismiss young men from the institution, without trial, without permitting them to be heard in their own defense. … He would meet a young man … [and] accost him after this manner, ‘you have done this, (naming his offence) don’t deny it; I can prove it upon you; you are dismissed the College.’ From this sentence there’ was no appeal.”^[51]

The Board of Visitors issued an address to the public at the conclusion of the first session under Smith’s leadership, announcing the success of the new regime and laying greatest emphasis on “the introduction of a strict system of police.”^[52] The system was indeed strict, and as administered by Smith it was to raise up powerful enemies and provide the College’s critics with a sharp-edged weapon during a most important turning point in its history. A less arrogant man might have learned something from the outcome of a contretemps that occurred during the spring term in 1816. According to Smith, “A Gentleman, whose son is a student here, was grossly insulted” during a chemistry lecture. The students refused to identify the offenders because of their “mistaken notion of honor.” Therefore, the chemistry lectures were suspended.^[53] The gentleman in question was Robert Greenhow, sometime mayor of Richmond, the College’s agent for the collection of surveying fees, and a former member of the Board.^[54] At this time the number of boys from Richmond was larger than it would be for years afterward. Richmond parents, including Greenhow, held a meeting which produced a prompt resumption of the chemistry lectures.^[55] One angry parent was former Governor Cabell, who asked his brother Joseph if it was “right in the professors to involve the innocent with the guilty? … The Professors must give over the idea of compelling the students to give evidence against each other, & themselves.” He would never, he said, place another son “under the guardianship of men who are capable of such injustice.”^[56] Far from backing off, Smith’s “state of the College” message that summer defended the policy that had so embittered Cabell and others.^[57] During the next session, no fewer than eighteen students were suspended and two expelled, ten of the former for the crime of breaking into the belfry and ringing the College bell.^[58]

Less than a year later, there was another controversy that should have made the Visitors wonder what kind of loose cannon they had on their hands. The precipitating incident was a midyear change in the professorship of chemistry, Dr. Robert Hare replacing Dr. Thomas P. Jones. The course fee per student was twenty dollars per academic year, but Hare charged twenty dollars for the remaining half year. Forty-five students remonstrated against this as unjust. Hare complained that the remonstrance constituted an attack on his character, and Smith suggested to the students that they apologize. Thereupon, most of them signed a statement disavowing any intention of wounding the professor’s feelings; it was the act alone to which they objected. Smith deemed this to be inadequate and demanded a total retraction of the remonstrance. When the students refused, the Society suspended twenty-five of them.^[59]

The grand total of suspensions and expulsions for the sessions of 1816–17 and 1817–18 came to fifty. As for the Hare imbroglio, the reaction of the community was that the conduct of the president and the professors was “equally as reprehensible as that of the students.”^[60] The incident would come up again and again. Seven years later a member of the Board would tell a legislative committee that “when at one fell swoop twenty-nine [sic] high minded and honorable young men were sent from the College, for asking justice at the hands of a professor in dignified language, the public mind became most strongly prejudiced against the institution.” Smith himself came to be seen as “high-handed and arbitrary, tyrannical in his disposition, and inclined to magnify frivolity and indiscretion into crime.”^[61] The only immediate reaction by the Visitors was to prohibit the charging of full fees for half-year courses.^[62]  Ultimately and belatedly, when the College seemed threatened with extinction, the Visitors would humbly and publicly acknowledge the unwisdom of the statute requiring self-incrimination and informing.^[63]

Smith was not the first nor would he be the last president to suffer in reputation because of failure to deal effectively with student unrest. Although many pointed to the president’s unfairness and excessive severity as the main cause of the trouble, there was blame enough for everybody. Students came to the College at an early age; many were no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Once there, a goodly number behaved like spoiled brats. On the other hand, their misbehavior can be seen as partly the consequence of frustration. Their ignorance of and hatred for mathematics even at the most elementary level had been notorious for years, and they were frequently little better prepared for other subjects. While a student, William Barton Rogers, who would one day succeed his father, Patrick Kerr Rogers, as professor of natural philosophy, said of his fellows that “with the exception of about eight, there was perhaps never an assemblage of young men so totally destitute of genius and so miserably deficient in understanding. Yesterday … Dr. Smith inquired of a student what was the nature of material substance, the answer was, ‘One which affects our senses and exerts reason!’ Father asked the same person for a definition of a solid; after much hesitation, a good deal of muttering, and abundance of broken sentences, the gentleman answered with great philosophical gravity that it was ‘A-a -body which was solid.’”^[64] So the College too often consisted of irritable, penurious professors force-feeding the incomprehensible to beardless malcontents. In the confining precincts of a small college in a small town, trouble was inevitable.^[65]

When all due weight has been given these reasons for student discontent, the fact remains that Smith’s disciplinary system greatly exacerbated matters. Nor were the students alone in feeling the president’s heavy hand. The coveted duty given him by the Board of reporting annually on each professor caused dissension and ill will that spilled over into the student body and the community. The first to fall under Smith’s hostile scrutiny was Dr. Thomas P. Jones. The president told the Visitors that even before Jones had assumed his professorship in the fall of 1815, he had been instructed to prepare himself in mathematics as an essential qualification for the teaching of natural philosophy. Moreover, Jones was to write a new introductory lecture for the course. He did neither, and so Smith sent him to Campbell to study mathematics and did not allow him to teach natural philosophy during his first term at the College. The Board was apprised of these problems in 1816.^[66]

The Visitors remarked huffily that they had expected something better after all the special consideration they had given the chair of chemistry. They invited Jones to come before them and defend himself. He did so, and on that occasion the Visitors found his explanation to be satisfactory. The students, to show their animosity toward Smith as much as their sympathy for Jones, gave the latter a testimonial dinner.^[67]

In July 1817 Smith reported Jones’s continuing deficiencies, alleging that neither his lectures in natural philosophy nor in chemistry were scientific, but were “what are called popular lectures.”^[68] Meanwhile, a Visitor had heard rumors about Jones; the man would have to go, he told Smith.^[69] The press reported charges circulating among the people of Williamsburg concerning Jones’ s “forgetfulness of that dignity of deportment which became the chemical chair of so venerable and rich an Institution as William and Mary.”^[70] This time Jones resigned before the opening of the 1817 session, ultimately moving on to a successful career at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.^[71] According to one identifying himself only as “Alumnus,” Jones left because “the want of harmony existing between himself and the President, gave disgust to a sensitive and superior mind like his. And he refused to remain in the humiliating condition of being subject to the inquisitional eye [of the president].”^[72]

Robert Hare succeeded Jones, but illness prevented his teaching in the fall term, leaving a gap in the curriculum during that time and preparing the way for the famous fee uproar already described. Well on his way to becoming one of the most accomplished scientists of his day, Hare was another in a series of distinguished men for whom the College was a way station on the road to bigger things. No doubt the fee debacle made leaving Williamsburg easier, but he had never intended to stay. For him William and Mary was merely a place where he could hone his teaching skills until he could secure an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, which he did in 1818. He remained there for the balance of his career as professor of chemistry in the medical school.^[73]

Simultaneously with Hare’s resignation, Judge Robert Nelson unexpectedly expired at the age of forty from “bilious fever.”^[74] A year elapsed before the Board filled the chair of law with Judge James Semple of the General Court, like all previous law professors a former member of the Board. He was the brother-in-law of John Tyler, the future president of the United States and a member of the Board.^[75] The chair of natural philosophy and chemistry remained vacant for the same period, during which the Society consisted only of Smith and Campbell. This fact, combined with the unusually large number of suspensions and expulsions in 1817 and 1818, produced a sharp drop in enrollments from which the College was not to recover fully until the mid-1830s.^[76]

The professorship of natural philosophy and chemistry fell to Patrick Kerr Rogers, appointed at the same time as Semple. Remembered chiefly for the achievements of his four sons, William Barton in particular, Rogers was a Protestant from Northern Ireland who settled in Dublin, then fled to the United States in 1798 to avoid the consequences of his open support of the rebellion of that year. He took a degree in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, but as a practicing physician, first in Philadelphia and then in Baltimore, he was a financial failure. For years he and his family struggled with debt, poverty, and pursuing creditors. In 1819 he applied to Jefferson for a professorship in the University of Virginia, only to find that it was not ready to open its doors and that in any event Jefferson had offered the chair of chemistry to Thomas Cooper. Jefferson may well have referred Rogers to William and Mary, as he had done for others before.^[77]

Rogers was a big, ruddy-faced, sensitive, affectionate, excitable Irishman.^[78] That he and Smith would collide is not surprising. Before his first year was over, Rogers had an encounter with a student who happened to be Smith’s nephew, John A Dabney. Rogers criticized Dabney’s conduct before the rest of the class. Outside, Dabney accosted him in a menacing manner and warned the professor that “his gray hairs only protected him from the punishment which his conduct merited.” Rogers reported this insulting behavior to the Society: Smith, Campbell, Semple, and himself. Rogers voted for expulsion, the others for suspension, a vote that Smith, the relentless disciplinarian, took pains to show had nothing to do with his relationship with the culprit.^[79] Two months later several students complained that Rogers had hurt their feelings “very much.”^[80] In Philadelphia, Rogers had been accustomed to lecturing to adults, including professors of the University of Pennsylvania,^[81] so he may not have been prepared for the restiveness of a William and Mary classroom.

Such incidents no doubt encouraged President Smith to discharge with extra zest his cherished duty of reporting on the professors to the Board. He proposed to visit Rogers’s class and watch what went on. Regarding Smith as at most primus inter pares among the professors, Rogers objected to his role as the Board’s nark and resented in no uncertain terms the proposed visitation. He was perfectly willing for Smith to examine his students or to be present when he examined them, but would not acquiesce in a colleague’s sitting in judgment on him personally. “The control or mastership which your alleged duty involved must poison the harmony of the society as long as they are exercised. In my department they have already evinced their mischievous operation” by projecting an attitude of suspicion and mistrust.^[82]

On another occasion, during the February examinations, Smith and Semple were talking about something else while Rogers was questioning his students. Their conduct, Rogers told the Society, was “indecorous” and “insulting both to himself and to the students some of whom had actually spoken to him on the subject.” The conversation went downhill from then on, with Smith declaring that he would “not sit there and be insulted” and would dissolve the meeting if Rogers kept on. He did, and Smith did.^[83] Other incidents of a similar nature occurred periodically. There was fault on both sides. Smith complained that he had no control over Rogers, who, he charged, “lectured when, how, or not at all as he thought proper.” The lectures in natural philosophy ceased in mid-May 1821, “perhaps for the want of a class,” and there was a two-week hiatus in the chemistry lectures that Smith could not account for.^[84] No wonder many came to attribute the College’s troubles to a “highly censurable president” and professors “ever jarring and quarreling with each other.”^[85]

Everything Smith touched, it began to seem, turned to acrimony; he accumulated enemies at a rapid rate. Even so, he might have turned the tide somewhat if he had been able to assuage those critics who saw him and William and Mary as tainted with deistical heresies by establishing an Episcopal seminary at the College. Certainly there was ample historical precedent. The royal charter of 1693 had proclaimed the training of priests to be an essential duty of the institution. The deistic tendencies of the Enlightenment were fast retreating before the ground swell of evangelicalism then beginning to spread over the country. Even Episcopalians adopted it, in a tasteful form, of course, and strenuous efforts were under way to reinvigorate the church in Virginia. The College’s traditional, if suspended, role in the propagation of the gospel, the library ‘s excellent theological collection, and the church’s need for ministers all lent plausibility to the idea of reviving a chair of divinity.

In the fall of 1814, not long before he traveled to Williamsburg to take Bracken’s place, Smith encountered Richard Channing Moore on the streets of New York. It was an odd coincidence, for Moore had recently been chosen to replace Bracken as bishop of the Virginia church. Smith raised the subject of reviving a chair of theology at William and Mary. Moore was agreeable, and the following year Smith addressed the church’s convention and asked the members to find money for the enterprise. Moore and others pursued the matter, and in the early twenties the Committee on the State of the Church recommended the establishment of a theological seminary at the College. Steps were taken to solicit funds and to secure the cooperation of the Maryland and North Carolina churches.^[86] Meanwhile, Smith had been at work, and the Visitors created a professorship of humanity and universal history, as they called it, with a salary of $1,000 plus the usual fees.^[87] The Board directed the faculty to make a provisional appointment before the opening of the fall session.^[88]

President Smith may not have taken the Board wholly into his confidence. Traditionally, the professor of humanity had been master of the Grammar School, defunct since 1812. At least one Visitor and possibly others believed the new chair was prelusive to the rebirth of that school.^[89] Smith had other ideas. He contacted the Reverend Reuel Keith, rector of St. John’s in Georgetown. Keith accepted and told Smith that “he had talked with the most respectable members of the Episcopal Church both laity and clergy, who have promised their active exertions in favor of the College. The Reverend Mr. Meade was especially warm on the subject and will use his influence to turn the current of students from his part of the state to Williamsburg. …”^[90] The board of trustees of the prospective Episcopal theological seminary later appointed Keith professor of theology with a stipend of $200, stipulating that he was to deliver his lectures at William and Mary. A Low Church, Calvinist Episcopalian from Vermont, Keith was an earnest young man “of fine attainments, and great simplicity of life and manners,” but “nervous, … moody, and subject to spells of deep depression” from which he would emerge and pass on to periods of “high exaltation.” He must have been a singular figure, with his tall, stooping frame, piercing eye, and intense emotions.^[91]

Just what Keith did at William and Mary and when he did it are not easy questions to answer. The faculty minutes of November 7, 1820, report that he had arrived and was ready to enter upon his duties, which he discharged until June, when he got Campbell to fill in for him so that he could visit his family. The faculty examined the classical (ancient languages) classes in July 1821, presumably consisting of students taught by Keith and Campbell. He did not meet with the faculty until November 7, 1821, having been ill, at which time the class schedule for the “Department of History” was decided upon. There were two classes, history and classics; there were no lectures in theology listed.^[92]

A member of the Board described the reverend gentleman’s position as “a perfect sinecure,” yet Smith insisted on keeping him on because, as the president put it, “it was essential to the interests of the College that a man of Mr. Keith’s description, should be retained in it, that it would make friends to the institution, that it would bring students to it.”^[93] This belief in the advantages of a connection with the Episcopal church would be a recurrent idea during the antebellum years.

Keith’s perfect sinecure meant that the project for a theological seminary at William and Mary was a perfect failure. His classes of any sort were always very small, and at length he had no class at all. During his years at the College, he may have had one or two ministerial students.^[94] So the experiment was abandoned in 1823, and the Episcopal seminary was located in Alexandria, although Smith would persist in his efforts to move it to Williamsburg.^[95] Thus, the claim for another William and Mary priority, that “instruction in American history antedates that of any other college by more than a decade,”^[96] is rather insubstantial.

Whatever credit Smith might have gained by ostensibly trying to return the College to its religious moorings was undercut by reports of his heterodoxy, if not worse. For example, Bishop Moore received a disturbing account from a highly connected individual relaying accusations directed at Smith by “two young gentlemen” who were convinced that Smith held “atheistical” views. Moore knew that Smith was not orthodox and might be a Socinian or Unitarian, but he defended the president against these allegations of atheism. At the same time, he warned Smith to be careful and say nothing that could be construed as undermining the cause of Christianity.^[97] Coming from one who was both a bishop and a Visitor, this admonition would have been heeded by a prudent man. But Smith was not one to curb his tongue, and the taint of being anti-Christian continued to cling to him.

Thoughtful observers understood that external events as well as these internal problems powerfully affected the fortunes of the College. Smith doubtless spoke truly when he blamed the War of 1812 for falling enrollments. Williamsburg could not have seemed a very safe place for parents to send their sons, with the British raiding the Chesapeake Bay littoral in 1813, attacking the approaches of Norfolk, and committing shocking atrocities in the village of Hampton. The year following saw a great enemy expedition sail up the bay, crush the American army at Bladensburg , and capture Washington, D.C. The blockade worked a steady hardship on planters who lived by exporting; scarcity of money was added to fear of the British as a cause for scanty matriculations. Students of military age were sometimes called upon for service in the field.^[98]

Then the Treaty of Ghent opened up European markets for American commodities. Money became plentiful, credit easy, and these good times, together with the desire for an education of those youths who had been kept away by the war, were the main reasons for the surge in enrollments during the early years of Smith’s presidency. The average number of matriculations jumped from twenty-four during 1812–14 to eighty-seven for 1815–17.^[99] The upward trend was suddenly reversed by the large number of suspensions and the absence of two professors during the 1818–19 session. Next came the severe depression precipitated by the Panic of 1819, and the average number of matriculants^[100] fell to thirty-four for the years 1820–25, inclusive.^[101]

It is impossible to calculate precisely the relative influence on enrollments of external events and internal management, or mismanagement. Although economic cycles affected the number of students at institutions of higher learning, one statistically sophisticated study shows that in “the context of a wildly vacillating economy the variance of the attendance series is surprisingly low.”^[102] In the case of a particular college such as William and Mary, where attendance fluctuated greatly, probably internal causes ( e.g., John Augustine Smith) were at times relatively more important.^[103]

A period of low enrollments was a serious matter for professors because of lost fees. Even after salaries went up in 1815, fees were a significant portion of their income. For example, although Campbell received $1,250 in salary, he found himself financially embarrassed when he had to refund the fees of those students suspended in the wake of the 1818 troubles.^[104] Fee revenues were a major part of institutional income, although separate from it. In 1815 endowment income amounted to slightly less than $7,000. If all seventy-five students who matriculated that year had taken the prescribed three courses at $20 a head per course, the total from fees would have been $4,500. Actual or prospective loss of students was thus a serious matter for the professors and led them to begin looking elsewhere for employment. There can be little doubt that the attempt to move the College to Richmond in 1824–25, discussed below, owed a good deal to their desire to tap the relatively large pool of college-age youths in that city.^[105]

Careful stewardship of the endowment was naturally of the first importance. Well before the dark days of the depression, the Board came to suspect that both the bursar and the Society were mismanaging the funds. For one thing, what seemed an inordinate amount was spent on repairs, $2,242 in 1816 alone. During the years 1815–17, when the economy was booming, income totaled $20,519 and expenditures $28,461: three years of unprecedented deficits.^[106] A Board investigation convinced that body that William Coleman, former member of the Board and bursar since 1804, had gotten out of control and that the Society was spending capital. This was “highly improper” and must cease, the Visitors told the Society.^[107] Neither were they satisfied with Coleman’s bookkeeping, which left many things unexplained. They did well to be concerned. After Coleman died in 1819, his successor, Edmund Christian, experienced “much difficulty” in sorting out Coleman’s records. For example, there was no list of the bonds that had come into Coleman’s possession at the time he took office in 1804, and he had received other moneys or securities that he had never entered on the books. These and other irregularities, not to use a stronger word, plus other debts, eventually came to more than $10,000. The debt was in suit for many years after Coleman’s death and was finally compromised at $8,000.^[108]

One feature of the bursar’s records that immediately catches the attention of the modern student is the extent to which the College served as a lending institution, especially for certain well-placed people. During the seventeen-year period 1804–21, loans to sitting or former members of the Board came to at least $25,000, some of the debts being held jointly with relatives or associates.^[109] If done today, this would appear to be a clear conflict of interest.^[110] On the other hand, one should remember the comparatively undeveloped and informal system of credit prevailing in those years, wherein gentlemen endorsed the notes of family members, friends, and political allies and expected them to reciprocate when the need arose. The Society, which administered the College’s funds, probably saw nothing whatever wrong in participating in these commonplace practices. Nevertheless, as bad debts showed, the policy was not in the best interests of the institution.

One loan in particular would haunt the College for years to come. In 1811 the Society approved a loan of $24,705 to the prominent Jeffersonian politician, Wilson Cary Nicholas, soon to be governor of Virginia. This sum represented about one-fifth of the College’s wealth. In the aftermath of the Panic of 1819, Nicholas was an abject bankrupt. His insolvency threatened Thomas Jefferson with financial catastrophe, for Jefferson had endorsed $20,000 of Nicholas’s notes to the Bank of the United States. William and Mary came to the rescue. As the collateral for the Nicholas loan was sold, the money was then lent to Jefferson, enabling him to live out his remaining years in ease and comfort. Upon his death, his grandson and cosigner, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, took over the debt. The College was never able to collect fully, and that unhappy fact contributed mightily to its having to close its doors in the 1880s.^[111]

The depression of the 1820s deepened as Mr. Christian struggled to bring order out of his predecessor’s accounts. Collection of moneys due was often impossible. “If it should be supposed,” Christian told the Society, “that the interest uncollected is greater than it should be, the Bursar can only say, that he finds it very difficult to collect interest from the most punctual of the debtors.”^[112] Even threats of legal action produced little, for the debtors realized that “suits cannot be instituted, without considerable loss to the College. … This will account for the circumstance that a full quarter’s salary is now due the professors.”^[113] Net losses from bad debts ran into tens of thousands of dollars, some of which was the result of fraud.^[114]

The nominal value of the “capital stock” in 1822 was $159,635.43. Because of bad debts and interest arrears, the estimated income for that year was a mere $6,457, a return of 4 percent. Estimates of operating expenses, salaries, and the like came to $6,504, to which were added items such as repairs, anticipated loss of capital, and so forth, for a total expected expenditure of $8,454.^[115] Year after year during this decade, debts turned sour, interest arrears climbed, and deficits recurred. It is difficult to see how these deficits were covered except by using capital, including the proceeds from the sale of land. In his report to the Board in 1821, President Smith said that if there was a deficit, land would be sold to make it up; yet in the same document he insisted that the Society never touched capital, as if land was not capital.^[116] Six years later the Society was still agonizing over how to meet the deficit without going into capital and admitted to the Board that if the Coleman debt (then in chancery) could not be collected, they would have to sell land.^[117] A year later the Board found it necessary to call in capital (loans) to pay arrears in faculty salaries.^[118] Selling land was nothing new. The more than 20,000 acres owned by the College before the Revolution had dwindled to 16,386 in 1804 and to less than 6,000 in 1821.^[119] The price of land fell with the price of commodities. Land sold between 1804–21 brought an average of $6.88 per acre; in 1824 the bursar estimated the value of the remaining 6,000 acres at less than $3.00 per acre—scarcely surprising when the price of wheat was so low that farmers fed it to their horses.^[120] Today the great benefaction of King William and Queen Mary has vanished, and the scattered landholdings of the College amount to a mere 2,000 acres.^[121] Scarcely anything in the history of the College is more disheartening than the dissipation of this resource.

“He That Doeth These Things Shall Never Be Moved” (Psalms 15:5)

Steadily falling income and enrollments in the early 1820s portended a precarious future for the College.^[122] That was not all. Looming menacingly on the horizon was the University of Virginia, which was expected to begin receiving students in the near future.

Thomas Jefferson had seen his comprehensive plan of public education come to nothing in the 1770s, but his interest in the subject had never died. As pointed out earlier, after his return from France in 1789 he relinquished any remaining hope that William and Mary could ever become a true university, worthy to stand at the pinnacle of a statewide system. He then focused his attention on founding a new institution near Monticello. The evolution of the University of Virginia from Albemarle Academy and then Central College is an engrossing case study in state and local politics as well as educational theory; it cannot, of course, be told here. Suffice it to say that with the indispensable and indefatigable assistance of Joseph C. Cabell, by now a state senator, by 1819 the university was legislatively launched, and the campaign for sufficient public funding was ultimately crowned with success. A plan by supporters of the College to trade their votes for a $5,000 annual subsidy to William and Mary came to nothing.^[123]

The threat posed by the University of Virginia was clear to the friends of William and Mary from the first. As the day drew near when this feared rival would welcome its first students, President Smith and others concluded that when the university’s doors opened, those of the College would close, so unequal would be the competition for students. Already young men who might have come to Williamsburg were looking forward instead to taking up residence in Jefferson’s new “academical village” at Charlottesville. The nearly deserted College presented a dreary contrast A tourist from New England reported his visit to “the ruins of William and Mary College. It has been very much neglected, and will soon go quite to ruin. The steps are mostly out of the place. Some of the windows are entirely broken out and most or all of them more or less broken, some not having more than three panes of glass in them. The cellar is used for a barn, and the building has more the appearance of a gaol in ruins than the remains of a college.”^[124] A distinguished alumnus advised his son not to matriculate at his alma mater. It was, he said, a “declining institution” about to relinquish “its flickering blaze.”^[125]

Joseph Cabell often visited Williamsburg, where he had close personal and family ties, and kept in touch with opinion in the College and the town. He believed that the College faction’s opposition to the university had been entirely broken, rendered “extinct” by the accelerating university bandwagon.^[126] John Augustine Smith said as much.^[127] The faculty saw their situation as “highly perilous,” though unwilling to admit it openly. Cabell knew these men and sympathized with them. Perhaps something could be done for them. “I think the President would gladly accept a professorship in the University,” Cabell wrote Jefferson, “as would Campbell and Rogers. If they were sure of their fixed salaries, they would be better reconciled to the course of events. But there are now but thirty-two students, and on the opening of the University a further reduction may be anticipated.”^[128]

Yet even as Cabell read the last rites over his alma mater, Smith and his coadjutors were preparing a counterstroke. The crisis called for desperate measures. What was to be done? Smith’s answer, seconded by Campbell and Rogers, though not by Semple, as well as by a large fraction of the Board, was to transfer William and Mary to Richmond. Smith knew he could count on influential collaborators in that city, some of whom felt injured because they had lost the university to Charlottesville.^[129] In Richmond enrollments would unquestionably increase dramatically. The city’s physicians and lawyers would demand a medical school and an enlarged law school. Perhaps the Episcopal Theological Seminary could be induced to leave Alexandria. Furthermore, the old College would once again be located in the state’s capital city, with all the advantages that would accrue from influential social and political contacts. Public and private financial aid would surely be forthcoming.^[130]

Cabell soon got wind of Smith’s bold strategy. In considerable alarm he informed Jefferson that he had discovered a “scheme” to move William and Mary to Richmond. Except for Semple, all the faculty favored it, and the proponents believed they had a majority of the Board on their side. What was even more ominous, influential men such as Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Enquirer, and Philip Norborne Nicholas, a leading banker and member of the so-called Richmond Junto, reportedly favored the plan. “The clergy, the Federal party, the metropolis, and probably the faculty of medicine throughout the State, will advocate the removal.” Cabell was naturally opposed because under these new circumstances the College would become a rival of the university. Still, he and other friends of the university would find it painful “to oppose an institution struggling to save itself, and to thwart the natural endeavors of literary men to advance their fortunes.”^[131]

This sound of a distant trumpet roused the old war-horse of Monticello:

The professors are the prime movers, and do not mean exactly what they propose. They hold up the raw-head and bloody-bones in terrorem to us, to force us to receive them into our institution. Men who have degraded and foundered the vessel whose helm was entrusted to them, want now to force their incompetence on us. I know none of them personally, but judge of them from the fact and the opinion I hear from everyone acquainted with the case, that it has been destroyed by their incompetence and mismanagement. … It is now dwindled to about twenty, and the professors acknowledge that on opening our doors, theirs may be shut. Their funds in that case, would certainly be acceptable and salutary to us. But not with the incubus of their faculty.^[132]

At this stage of affairs, Jefferson saw the removal “scheme” more as an opportunity than a threat. Should Smith and his followers persist, they would be admitting that the College was a failure. Then its endowment could be put to other use, and what better than the university? Only eight of the university’s ten professorships had been funded. The College’s endowment produced an income of $6,000 and would “give [us] the two deficient professorships, with an annual surplus for the purchase of books.” He told Cabell that their proper strategy was “to say as little as we can on this whole subject; give them no alarm; let them petition [the legislature] for the removal; let them get the old structure completely on wheels, and not till then put in our claim to its reception.”^[133]

Unaware of the ambush being prepared for him, Smith opened his offensive. On July 1 the Richmond Common Hall, the city’s legislative body, resolved to cooperate with any effort the College might make to remove to the capital, promising to provide a site and buildings at a cost up to $30,000. The resolution reached the Board through a member, Robert G. Scott, who favored removal. He told his fellow Visitors that in his belief the $30,000 would be augmented by the assets of the Richmond Academy, an institution which had never materialized, amounting to from $10,000 to $20,000, and by at least $10,000 in private contributions.^[134]

A few days later, Smith formally began his campaign. He was nothing if not blunt in his report to the Board. By examination time only eight students remained at the College.^[135] There would be fewer still when the university opened. “If an increase of students cannot be secured, the legislature will, doubtless, in a very short time, put an end alike to the hopes and the fears of the friends and the enemies of William and Mary. Something then must be done to obtain those numbers, without which the College cannot exist.” There was only one solution: move to Richmond. The choice was between a new location on one hand and annihilation on the other.^[136]

The Board was divided on the question of removal, but because its records have been lost little is known of the discussions that may have transpired. One outcome of the July convocation was the publication of a lengthy statement concerning the reasons for the low state of the College. It proposed a reformation that included the repeal of “odious” disciplinary statutes and promised to alter in some unspecified manner the duties of the president. The Board was then to meet in November to gauge the effect of this announcement on enrollments.^[137] The plan represented at least an ostensible compromise.^[138] A decision would be postponed until then, although critics of removal would argue that no improvement could be expected in so short a time, that the measures adopted were no more than the first steps in a general reformation, and that to regard what had been done as the finished work was merely a device intended to provide specious evidence that rehabilitation was impossible, hence that there was no alternative to removal.^[139]

Late in October the aged Marquis de Lafayette, then on his famous American tour, attended an elaborate reception at Yorktown celebrating Cornwallis’s surrender forty-three years before. He then proceeded to Williamsburg in a procession of carriages so long that the head was in the old capital as the tail was leaving Yorktown. John Augustine Smith was one of the three principal hosts at a dinner for the general at the Raleigh Tavern, where the guests included Chief Justice Marshall, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, Governor James Pleasants and his council, and other notables of state and national repute. Earlier that day Lafayette had gone to the College, where President Smith offered a welcoming speech to which the old hero made an appropriate reply.^[140] One can easily believe that all this was the breath of life to the doctor.

Even the invigoration of mingling with living monuments of American history did not allay certain misgivings that were troubling Smith. Perhaps he had heard something from one of the numerous political figures passing through town, for he called on Judge William Cabell, then staying at the house of St George Tucker, and “anxiously enquired” as to Jefferson’s course toward the College. Cabell replied that he knew nothing about Jefferson’s views, but that he himself favored removal because the College could then be useful in preparing students for the university. The College as a preparatory school for the university was not what Smith had in mind. “His countenance seemed to me, to fall very suddenly; as he made no reply, I went on to observe that if the College of William and Mary should be able with its limited means to rival the University with its ten professors, & immense income supported by the patronage of the legislature, that no friend of Literature could wish to repress it” Of course, Cabell told his brother, there was no doubt that the College would remain secondary and inferior to the University of Virginia and would never get “one cent” from the legislature. The people of Virginia could no more be made to regard William and Mary as the rival of the university than they could be made to believe “that the Frog could swell himself to the size of the ox.”^[141]

Fourteen of nineteen members of the Board attended the convocation of November 26. They voted eight to six to ask the legislature for authority to move the College. The recently elected members tipped the scales, and there were those who charged that they had been chosen with an eye to this outcome.^[142] President Smith was jubilant. Exultingly he exclaimed that “the removal of the College was the move on the chess-board that had escaped the eye of Mr. Jefferson; that it had thrown him all a-back, that he would never get over it.”^[143] Smith set out for Richmond to press his case before the General Assembly.

James M. Garnett, member of the House of Delegates from Essex County and one of the new Visitors, introduced the memorial. It was referred to the Committee of Schools and Colleges, which heard testimony and took depositions from Smith, Judge Semple, Board member John B. Seawell, students, citizens of Williamsburg, and others.^[144] Semple and Seawell were connected to John Tyler by marriage and like him opposed removal.^[145] President Smith attributed the College’s “depression” to hard times, the high cost of board in Williamsburg (something everyone seemed to agree upon), the small number of potential students residing in the Middle Peninsula, fear of the unhealthy climate of Williamsburg, competition from new institutions, the impending opening of the university, and—the only internal cause he would admit to—the unpopularity of the College because it had been “obliged” to send away so large a number of students at different times.^[146]

Those opposed to removal denied that the College was in desperate straits and blamed its small enrollment on Smith and, to a somewhat lesser degree, on the faculty. They pointed to the repressive disciplinary rules enacted at Smith’s behest, his tyrannical attitude toward his faculty, and his alleged attempts to discourage prospective matriculants so as to strengthen the case for removal. His reputation as a deist alarmed parents, who kept their sons from his contaminating influence.^[147] He was attacked by a member of the Board for denying that the legislature could of right instruct Virginia’s United States senators how to vote on particular questions. This was a dangerous heresy to those of the Jefferson faith. Said the Visitor, “By many, the entertaining such an opinion would be considered the greatest misfortune that could befall a son. It has acted as a complete barrier to all preferment in the State.”^[148] Moreover, said Smith’s critics, he habitually rushed through his classes and hurried off to his favorite pastime, hunting, annoying the good people of the town by riding booted and spurred through the streets, sounding his horn, with baying hounds following after.^[149]  Directly or implicitly, l’affaire Hare was raked up again in the committee, on the floor of the legislature, and in the newspapers.^[150]

In all of the arguments before the committee and elsewhere, it was to the interest of the proponents of removal to dismiss or minimize Smith’s failings and other internal considerations and to contend that unalterable external circumstances made the change imperative. Conversely, opponents blamed internal mismanagement that could easily be remedied by the Board of Visitors, whereupon the College would flourish in its ancient situation. The voluminous letters, memorials, and speeches must be read with this in mind, and also in the light of accumulated antagonisms stemming from issues such as founding the university, where to put it, concerns about setting up a state-supported stronghold of Jeffersonian deism, old Federalist-Republican grudges, local ambitions, and even the question of relocating the state capital. This does not exhaust the list of the factors, which would require a monograph to dissect.^[151]

Joseph Cabell found himself under increasing pressure from proremoval forces. Advice not to obstruct the measure came from friends and relatives who were themselves warm supporters of the University of Virginia. His brother William warned him, “I really think it would ill become the friends of the University who have got for that institution so much of the public money, now to oppose the wishes of a large portion of the State to remove another institution already endowed, to a place where it may be more useful to the public than it is at present.” If he himself were in the legislature, he would, as a friend of education and of the university, aid removal in any way he could, and he hoped Joseph would do the same.^[152] William and Mary could never rival the university, and the opposition of the university faction was beginning to make them look like dogs in the manger.

By mid-December Cabell began to retreat. He decided to vote for removal provided that the College came under legislative control and that half of its capital be used to begin the financing of an intermediate system of colleges. He took some comfort from the fact that the Richmond Common Hall, or at least a majority, saw William and Mary only as a means of preparing students for the university, even though the College lobby and the enemies of the university aimed at “a great institution connected with a medical school.” Should the champions of the university oppose removal, those who favored bringing the College to Richmond would in the future try to “defeat every measure brought forward for the University.” This clearly alarmed Cabell, for he believed that the influence of the city in the legislature was “vast.”^[153]

Yet when Cabell wrote Jefferson just four days later, he had changed his mind. Reflection had persuaded him to resist removal completely. “In taking this course, I oppose the wishes of my nearest and dearest relatives and friends, and bring upon myself the powerful resentment of the metropolis.”^[154] This letter crossed one from Jefferson, who told Cabell, “The proposition to remove William & Mary College to Richmond, with all its present funds, and to add to it a medical school, is nothing more nor less than to remove the University also to that place; because, if both remain, there will not be students enough to make either worthy of the acceptance of men of the first order of science. They must each fall down to the level of our present academies, under the direction of common teachers, and our state of education must stand exactly where it is.”

He then modified the strategy he had recommended to Cabell the previous May. First of all, he was glad the College had indeed asked the General Assembly’s permission to move and had thus acknowledged its legislative authority. This would help to finesse constitutional objections based on the Supreme Court decision in the case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), which had invoked the contract clause of the Constitution to protect from legislative interference the charter given Dartmouth in the name of George III.^[155] In the light of a warning from Cabell that there was no chance of getting William and Mary’s funds for the university, Jefferson took a new tack. With its authority thus conceded, the legislature now had the “happy opportunity” of using William and Mary’s endowment to create ten state colleges and so at last establish the intermediate stratum of education Jefferson had for so many years recommended in vain, and at no cost to the taxpayer. “Will you not have every member in favor of this proposition except those who are for gobbling up the whole funds themselves?”^[156] In the heat of the battle, he seems to have forgotten his role as the original gobbler.

Cabell made good use of this letter. After carefully blotting out some remarks sure to offend Richmonders, he showed it around circumspectly and to good effect. Both its substance and the fame of its author carried weight. Nevertheless, the proremoval forces continued to display disconcerting strength. More ammunition was needed. He appealed to Monticello for help: Jefferson must draft a bill abolishing William and Mary and establishing the collegiate system. “You alone can prepare a bill that will enable us to vanquish the host opposed to us.”^[157] So Jefferson took up his pen, and with a painfully arthritic hand he indited a statute to be introduced as a substitute should the House of Delegates be inclined to vote for removal. It contained this doomsday decree: “Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That the said College of Wm & Mary, from and after the 1st day of November in the ensuing year 1826, shall be discontinued and dissolved. …”^[158] The endowment would be used to erect the ten colleges, one of which could use the buildings of the old College at Williamsburg.^[159] Cabell promoted the plan energetically, for he “saw the gathering necessity of setting up the colleges against the Richmond party.” He wrote for the press an extensive essay, signed “A Friend of Science,” presenting a comprehensive summary of Jefferson’s educational ideas and recommending the distribution of the College’s “extensive endowments” over “the surface of the state.”^[160]

Meanwhile, the proposed transplantation of the College had aroused great interest, even excitement Smith was without question in his element when he appeared before the Committee of Schools and Colleges and treated the numerous members of the legislature who came to watch to “long harangues … on every branch of human knowledge.”^[161] He was described by one observer as “a very smart fluent little fellow.” Things seemed to be going his way. A vote in the House of Delegates on a collateral question appeared to presage success, as did the action of the committee when it reported favorably on removal.^[162] After considerable discussion, the House of Delegates agreed to allow Smith to defend the petition at the bar of that chamber, which he did on January 31, 1825. His was an able, aggressive, and unrepentant performance. He gave not an inch to his critics, even on the “obnoxious statute” on discipline. John Tyler, member of the Board, delegate from Charles City County, and soon to be governor of Virginia, spoke ably and eloquently in rebuttal.^[163] Other members spoke at length, reviewing the whole subject fully if somewhat repetitiously.^[164]

At length Cabell was able to tell Jefferson that “our efforts have eventuated in success … the College party have been defeated in the House by a majority of 24. You need not give yourself any further trouble on this subject.”^[165] President Smith had not expected to lose, and he informed Cabell that he intended to fight on by public attacks on the university party and on Jefferson himself. Cabell advised him not to.^[166] There was no point to it. The battle had been lost. Smith may have been “a very smart little fellow,” but he was no match for the old maestro on the little mountain in Albemarle.

The College might well have exclaimed, “Et tu, Brute?” to its alumni, from Jefferson and Cabell down through the ranks of other sons who had deserted it in its hour of need. For there can be little doubt that removal to Richmond would, in time, have transformed it from a struggling provincial seminary into a prosperous university, even as Jefferson and Cabell feared. Smith had been right. Yet the College owed him little thanks, because he had contributed both to its decline and to the failure of his own efforts to revive it. Not for the last time, a president’s arrogance and egotism had injured it grievously. Of course, some friends of William and Mary who for sentimental reasons cannot envision it as being elsewhere than in Williamsburg will rejoice at Smith’s failure. Others who ponder the full sweep of the College’s history may ask, what price sentiment?