The Struggle for Solvency, 1782–1812

“After so long a silence, my friend, where shall I begin? Like Cain, I have been a vagabond since August last. But have at length returned to this place, for little else indeed, than to be a spectator of misery & ruin.” So wrote the Reverend James Madison, president of William and Mary, to James Madison, Jr., upon returning to Williamsburg.^[1] Although Cornwallis had surrendered more than four months earlier, the College still served as a hospital for ailing French soldiers. The Main Building had been damaged, the library and “philosophical apparatus” partially vandalized by successive military occupations, and the President’s House gutted by fire. Madison was lodging with the only other faculty member then in town, Charles Bellini, who had withstood all the calamities of war ”with a Fortitude worthy of an old Roman descent.”^[2]

What a distressing outcome, Madison must have thought, to the bright expectations of December 1779, when the College had been transmuted into a fledgling university that Thomas Jefferson had hoped would stand at the apex of a new, statewide educational system. But that system never secured legislative approval, and the College was left adrift, bereft of its customary revenues by the Revolution at a time when money was needed more than ever.

A few months later, the more famous Madison received another letter about William and Mary, this time from Edmund Randolph, who was in Williamsburg to attend a convocation of the Board of Visitors. “Some of us”—a significant qualification—”will labor, if we have not too far exhausted the funds, to restore it to its process of an university, and give it the energy which the new institution possessed before the invasion.”^[3] In this the Board did not succeed.^[4]

There was little in the way of funds to exhaust. Before the war the College’s annual revenues amounted to between £5,000 and £6,000 sterling, mostly from custom duties. These had gone with independence. Now it depended largely on rents from the 20,000 acres of land it had received in the royal charter many years before. These brought in only some £500 in 1780, an income slightly augmented by the General Assembly’s grant of one-sixth of all surveyors’ fees to the institution.^[5] Collecting fees, rents, and payments on private debts accruing from the sale of land in something other than depreciated paper currency was another matter. In 1780 the president and masters announced that the College, “having suffered very considerably by accepting current money” instead of tobacco or sterling, would thenceforth require payment in tobacco. They threatened to sue delinquents, probably with little result.^[6] The payment of student fees was also a problem. Professors George Wythe and Robert Andrews having returned to Williamsburg in August 1782, the College advertised its opening with the admonition that because of the “inconvenience … formerly felt” it would be necessary for “the usual fees to be paid upon entrance.”^[7]

Some small additional income was realized when the legislature added money resulting from the survey of military land grants to the previously assigned surveyor fees, which came to a trivial sum; it also gave William and Mary state-owned land in Williamsburg and near Jamestown.^[8] Besides real estate, the College’s “whole money capital” remaining by 1786 came to $2,500.^[9] One bright spot was a French indemnity for the burning of the President’s House. Rebuilding took until 1786, during which time a house was rented at £50 yearly as a presidential residence.^[10] Madison, whose books and furniture were lost in the fire, received compensation at least for his library. The reverend gentleman may have regarded this as the return of bread cast upon the waters, for when he informed Jefferson of the conferral of an honorary degree on the Marquis of Chastellux in March 1782, he expressed the hope that “this most honorable mark of distinction wch. Our University can confer, would be active in having compensation given for our great losses here.”^[11] What was to become a time-honored collegiate practice of cultivating influential friends was carried further by awarding degrees to Jefferson and Madison (the future president).^[12] In those cases, as events would show, no bread came back—far from it. Nor did the College benefit noticeably when it prevailed upon a somewhat reluctant George Washington to assume the vacant chancellorship a few years later.^[13] Chastellux, on the other hand, secured a gift to the library of two hundred volumes, courtesy of Louis XVI. These would have been an even more useful addition to the collection had they not lain forgotten for several months in a Richmond warehouse, reposing amidst barrels of sugar and oil and arriving at the College much damaged.^[14]

On the debit side, in 1787 the General Assembly diverted part of the surveying fees to finance new educational enterprises. One was a public seminary to be located somewhere in what is now northern West Virginia. This was, the act stated, only “just and reasonable,” because the inhabitants of those remote counties were deprived of the “advantages arising from the establishment of public seminaries within this state.” Even worse, the legislature shifted surveyor fees collected in the District of Kentucky from William and Mary to Transylvania Seminary.^[15] Such events portended even greater and more dangerous competition in later years. Likewise disappointing was the loss of income from the Brafferton lands after an expensive litigation in the British courts.^[16]

These conditions soon led the College to begin to eat the bricks out of its own house. “Surplus” slaves were sold to get money to repair the buildings, and in 1786 part of the recent state land grant was disposed of for a paltry price. Four years later the College did rather better, receiving £3,400 for 364 acres in York County.^[17] These were mere drops in the ocean, and in 1792 Board member Edmund Randolph reported that the College had “received no accession to its old resources, and continued poor. … [T]he emoluments are too low to invite men of genius to the different chairs. … I might venture to challenge the United States with the talents of bishop Madison, the president, as a natural philosopher, but he lingers at the College for very peculiar reasons. …”^[18] On July 1, 1793, a century after the granting of the charter, the bursar confessed that the treasury contained “not a shilling.”^[19] The Board inquired into the financial condition of the old school a few months later and discovered that “the necessary disbursements considerably exceed the annual revenue thereof, in so much that unless this defalcation be shortly supplied there is danger that this useful institution cannot continue to be carried on according to the present or more extensive plan.” Moreover, much money was needed to make repairs, ”which deficiencies can only be supplied by the sale of certain lands belonging to the College. …” The Board then empowered the president and masters to sell for not less than 15 shillings an acre all lands in Sussex and Isle of Wight counties, two lots in Williamsburg, and all lots in the town of Hampton.^[20]

Even such desperate remedies failed. As the new century opened, the College was limping along on $3,500 to $4,500 a year, unable even to make essential repairs to its decrepit structures.^[21] The bursar’s reports show little improvement as the years passed, with an average annual income during the rest of Madison’s presidency of about $4,300. Efforts to raise money from state-authorized lotteries, a favorite expedient of educational institutions in those days, brought embarrassments and a lawsuit, but little money. Proposals to sell land in King William County seem to have produced at best a modest increase in revenue at the expense of depleting the most important part of the endowment. Simply stated, the institution was a financial cripple. Its only possible salvation lay in public appropriations, but that required political support and powerful friends. In 1809 Governor John Tyler urged that public assistance be extended, even that William and Mary become a public institution, but nothing came of his proposal.^[22]

Jefferson’s Great Reform Unravels

Soon after the tum of the century, Jefferson wrote Madison to inquire about the possibility of finding a place at the College for Thomas P. Smith, a well-known Philadelphia chemist who came recommended by none other than Joseph Priestley. Had the chair of chemistry, botany, and medicine included in their “reformation of the plan of the College in 1779” escaped the subsequent “demolition” and “ruin” of that plan?^[23] Madison replied that although the chair had not actually been abolished, two professorships of humanity created to staff the revived Grammar School had absorbed the position. He hoped that the Visitors, who had not met for several years, could be persuaded to convene and that they might eliminate one or both of those professorships, thus making room for Mr. Smith and a resuscitated medical chair. He could not predict what might happen. “The Visitors seem to have abandoned the College,” but perhaps the new members he expected to be chosen would do something useful.^[24]

What had happened to bring about the “demolition” and “ruin” of the great reform of 1779? There were those who had resisted the new dispensation from the first. Some were probably dismayed by the policy of admitting students without requiring the usual preparation in Latin and Greek, now, along with the Grammar School, deleted from the curriculum.^[25] They may have felt, with John Adams, that they would as soon think “of closing all my window shutters to enable me to see, as of banishing the classics, to improve republican ideas.”^[26] They may have been disturbed as well by the apparent violation of the charter of 1693 wrought by these changes. Revolutionaries though they were, they retained a powerful respect for vested rights. The Tidewater gentry were overwhelmingly Anglican in persuasion; however nominal their devotion, some doubtless resented the sweeping away of the chairs of divinity to make way for Jefferson’s new model university.^[27]

Finally, there was the Reverend John Bracken, who had lost his faculty position when the Grammar School ceased to exist. He had a substantial personal following dating back to his successful contest with Samuel Henley for the rectorship of Bruton Parish Church, a place Bracken filled from 1773 until his death in 1818. His marriage in 1776 to Sally Burwell, daughter of Carter Burwell of Carter’s Grove, is good evidence of his social standing. Moreover, he was for a time mayor of Williamsburg and head of the commissioners who governed the insane asylum. Later, in 1812, he would succeed Madison briefly as both president of William and Mary and bishop-elect of Virginia.^[28] Bracken had no intention of giving up his fight to be restored to the faculty as head of the Grammar School, and so he became a rallying point for the opponents of the 1779 reforms and all they stood for.

When the Board of Visitors met in September 1782 to prepare for the reopening of the College, one eminent member feared that Bracken’s obdurate refusal to accept his fate and his threats of legal action might lead the Visitors to revive the Grammar School and with it “that injurious professorship.”^[29] Several days later he reported that “thus far our reformation continues to receive support. But some of the gentlemen, who scrupled at the deposition of the grammar school, appear to doubt our power [under the charter] to establish new professorships. I fear, that the next meeting will have a stroke at law and physick. … Should the law-school be overturned, the college will be reduced to a desart.”^[30]

The Visitors at least tacitly reconfirmed the reform, although not without complications. At some point it was discovered that the clerk of the Board had not made a record of the statute of 1779 when it was passed. The only surviving version was an extract published in the Virginia Gazette.^[31] No one knew how faithful a representation that was, or if it had passed at two readings on two different days as the Board’s rules stipulated. The secretary had also failed to keep a record of the next meeting in 1780, and so to settle the matter the Board finally readopted the statute in 1784 as it had appeared in the Gazette.^[32]

Those members who wanted to “have a stroke” at the medical chair were no doubt pleased by the departure of Dr. James McClurg. Even as the Board was meeting back in 1782, this distinguished gentleman was in Philadelphia “reconnoitreing the ground on which he has been invited to build his future fortunes”; that is, he was investigating an offer to join the medical faculty of the University of Pennsylvania.^[33] He did not take that position, but by 1784 he had left Williamsburg to open a medical practice in Richmond. So vanished an important element in Jefferson’s first “university,” and along with it William and Mary’s claim to the second oldest chair of medicine in the country. It was a paper loss; there is no evidence that Dr. McClurg ever did any teaching.^[34]

As for another part of the plan, the nation’s first chair of modem languages, its luster was not much enhanced by Charles Bellini. This rather tragic figure had the warmth and charm of his native Italy—women, he told his students, were the pabulum vitae—and had earned Jefferson’s indulgent affection and patronage. He was the only one of Jefferson’s numerous correspondents who addressed him as “My Dearest Thomas.” But however engaging personally, Bellini was far from being an accomplished linguist. He could offer, besides his native Italian, only French and a smattering of Spanish and German. Few students patronized his classes, and he tried to eke out his meager income by teaching in a private school. Struggling to care for an invalid wife, his own eyesight fading, and toward the end, left almost speechless by a stroke, he came to be a pitiable liability.^[35]

The third addition under the 1779 plan, the law school, survived despite the resignation of George Wythe in 1789. St. George Tucker succeeded Wythe and, as discussed below, maintained the reputation and dignity of the chair of law until his departure in 1804.^[36] In the long run, however, Wythe’ s leaving may have been a far heavier blow to the future of William and Mary than anyone could have realized, for it gravely affected Jefferson’s attitude toward his alma mater.

For several years after the College reopened, Jefferson was highly complimentary about the quality of education it offered. In 1785 he asserted that, with the exception of modem languages, everything a youth needed could be acquired as well at William and Mary as at any place in Europe.^[37] He told a young friend it was “the best place to go.”^[38] He even urged John Adams to send his son, John Quincy, to William and Mary,^[39] a conjunction of events staggering to the imagination. The climate, which was to become so mephitic in Jefferson’s mind when his new university was in prospect, was “remarkably healthy.”^[40] He wrote Ralph Izard in 1788 approving his decision to send his son to the College. “I know of no place in the world, while the present professars remain, where I would so soon place a son.” Madison was “a man of great abilities,” Bellini an excellent language teacher, but “the pride of the Institution is Mr. Wythe … professor of law in the College. He is one of the greatest men of the age.”^[41]

But then Wythe, in Jefferson’s words, “abandoned the college of William and Mary, disgusted with some of the conduct of the professors, & particularly of the ex-professor Bracken. … The visitors will try to condemn what gave him offense and press him to return; otherwise it is over with the college.” Wythe did not return, and as the years passed nothing happened to restore Jefferson’s good opinion. The institution, he wrote to Joseph Priestley, was just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it.” His purpose now was “to establish in the upper country … an University on a plan so broad and liberal and modern as to be worth patronizing with the public support.”^[42] As far as he was concerned, it was “over with the college,” which entered upon what he later called “its long and lingering decline.”^[43]

Meanwhile the enemies of reform and the friends of orthodoxy were at work. As a meeting of the Board drew near in 1784, Rector James Innes urged St. George Tucker to attend. “The interests of our friend [Walker] Maury require your attention that day—the Spirit of the FHC is not, I trust, yet dead.”^[44] The Board majority forestalled Thermidor on that occasion, but the struggle continued. The next year Beverley Randolph pressed Tucker to come to the convocation, for “unless a majority of liberal souls are present we shall be Priest ridden.”^[45]

A contest was under way between two factions, one trying to save the 1779 reorganization, the other to restore Bracken and his Grammar School and probably the defunct divinity chairs as well. The FHC to which Innes referred was a dub established at the College in 1750; it was a fraternal society especially active in the 1770s. Among its members had been Jefferson, Tucker, Innes, Beverley Randolph, possibly Madison, and Walker Maury. Maury was the son of James Maury of Parson’s Cause fame, who had kept a grammar school in Albemarle County and had counted among his pupils young Thomas Jefferson. Walker Maury opened his own school in Orange County at some time during the Revolution and called upon his FHC brothers for support and patronage.^[46] He and his school would come to represent the cause of the proreform Jeffersonian liberals even as Bracken represented the antireform conservatives.

The people of Williamsburg wanted a grammar school for their children, and in that very dose-knit society the importance of such considerations should not be underestimated. Ex-professor Bracken had opened a school in his home in 1780, where at least one pupil found him to be “testy and petulant,” although a very good scholar. Then in 1783 business called him to London, and his school dosed its doors. Walker Maury decided that this was an opportune time to move to Williamsburg.^[47] The town secured the use of the old capitol building by act of the General Assembly “for the purpose of accommodating a grammar master, and fitting it for the education and instruction of youth.” One suspects that Maury’s FHC brothers were the prime movers in this. However that may be, Maury brought his school to Williamsburg late in 1783, took over the commodious if dilapidated capitol, and began classes early in 1784. Still more help, at least on paper, came from the legislature, which authorized Williamsburg to hold a lottery for the benefit of Maury’s school, without mentioning it by name. Among Maury’s students were a stepson of St. George Tucker and Jefferson’s much-beloved nephew, Peter Carr. The academy also received the flattering attention of the president and masters of the College, who superintended its operations on behalf of the city fathers. George Wythe’s “passion for the improvement of youth” was well known, and he regularly visited the classrooms.^[48] And Jefferson, from afar, took an interest in the enterprise. The curriculum included Greek, Latin, French, arithmetic, and bookkeeping, and Bellini, who had few students at the College, garnered extra fees by teaching Italian. It seemed an ideal solution all around: a grammar school that prepared students for collegiate studies without eviscerating the 1779 reform by drawing upon the College for faculty positions and salaries.

This was a promising beginning, and Maury had hopes of further improving his situation by being appointed master of a revived Brafferton Indian School. Income from the Brafferton estate was supposed to be devoted to the Christianizing and education of “infidels”—Indians—in accordance with the testamentary wishes of Robert Boyle. Payments had been suspended with the outbreak of the Revolution. Now that peace had come, Maury expected the Board to take steps to recover this income and revive the Indian School. Maury wanted the mastership and the salary that went with it. Something over a year earlier, Bracken had agreed to accept this post in lieu of the abolished Grammar School professorship, then had changed his mind. Now Rector James Innes believed Bracken might change his mind once more and urge his friends to support his claim, hence Innes’s request that Tucker come to the convocation to protect the interests of “our friend Maury.” Maury also asked for Tucker’s help in enlisting the votes of Beverley Randolph and others.^[49]

One possible stumbling block was the lack of “infidels” (Indian infidels, at least). There having been for a long time a conspicuous absence of Indians at William and Mary, the Board was pleased when General George Rogers Clark offered to send it some, not the first time, incidentally, the College had tried to import this once redundant commodity. It was all to no avail. Even the FHC brothers could do nothing for their friend on this occasion, for the Brafferton income would be forever lost in the English courts. There was to be no Indian School, no “infidels” for Maury and Bracken to scuffle over.^[50]

Left to his own resources, Maury ultimately solved part of Bracken’s problem for him. He ran his academy into debt, alienated his associates, and proved himself to be temperamentally unsuited to handling high-spirited boys. One can discount to some extent John Randolph’s description of Maury as being “the most peevish and illtempered of pedagogues,” who treated his brother Theodorick with “shocking barbarity,” driving him from the school. Even without the testimony of one who could not have been any teacher’s pet, Maury’s own letters are a sufficient indictment.^[51] The upshot was that in the fall of 1786 Maury accepted an invitation from the city of Norfolk to take charge of a local academy, thus leaving his rival a school closely affiliated with, though fiscally separate from, William and Mary.^[52]

All that now remained was for the conservatives to attach the school to the College and thereby restore Bracken to the faculty. This would signalize their victory over the Jeffersonian—FHC liberals, and the future course of the College would be charted for all to see, including Jefferson. The details of what happened have not survived, but the result is clear: Bracken won. By this time he had taken legal steps to force the Board to restore him to his former position. The case was postponed until 1790, when the highest court in the state, the Court of Appeals, ruled against him.^[53]   He need not have worried. Soon afterward, possibly that same year, the Board reestablished the Grammar School with Bracken as master and professor of humanity in the College and appointed a second professor of humanity to assist him. Turning away from the stark secularism of 1779, it passed new statutes creating the degree of doctor of divinity, which was promptly bestowed on Bracken, and decreed compulsory attendance at prayers. Finally, despite his invincible republican principles, Madison was consecrated bishop of Virginia by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1790, an event that seemed to reemphasize William and Mary’s long history as an arm of the Church of England. It could be said that the Board was progressive in its reactionary  response, for it anticipated a general revulsion against the secularization of education that set in a few years later.^[54]

Such was the state of affairs Jefferson had in mind when, in 1800, he alluded to the “demolition” and “ruin” of his ambitious reformation. As for Mr. Smith, for whom he had sought a position, the bishop had to tell his old friend that there was none. The Board had met and had done “nothing of consequence.” The Grammar School continued. The medical chair remained empty. It was, said Madison, “easier to move mountains than to eradicate old Prejudices. They seem, like the stone of Sisyphus, to be eternally tumbling back upon us.”^[55] The Board had succeeded brilliantly in one important respect: it had deprived the College of the good opinion of its most distinguished and influential alumnus, perhaps the one man whose patronage could have changed the history of William and Mary radically. With him as its champion, it might well have become the university of Virginia. After all, that had been Jefferson’s original intention.

The Board, to give it its due, did bestir itself at this time to see what was going on at the institution for which it was responsible. Possibly at the instance of several new members, a committee was appointed to investigate the state of the College.^[56] There was some reason for so doing. By 1800 poor Bellini was decrepit to the point of not functioning. “Old Bellini professes to teach Modern Languages,” said one student, “which amounts to a total exclusion of the knowledge of them.” As for Professor Robert Andrews, he spent too much time pursuing his political career in Richmond and not enough teaching mathematics. “The result of the examination of his class last year ought to have disgraced him.” A public letter to the Virginia Gazette accused unnamed professors of holding other positions that prevented them from being at the College during the academic terms.^[57] In fact, St. George Tucker openly criticized his colleague Andrews for his membership in the General Assembly, a violation, Tucker said, of both state law and College statutes.^[58]

If pluralism was wrong, however, Tucker was a sinner too. Like his predecessor he held judicial office as well as his professorship. This had been the case when he joined the faculty in 1790. The Board had raised no objection then, but the membership had since changed. Because judicial and academic terms did not coincide on the calendar, Tucker shifted the latter to accommodate the former. Moreover, so as to have his library at his fingertips, he held classes in his home instead of at the College. None of this should have been a problem if the College had enforced the rule that law students must have “the requisites for the Batchelor of Arts.” Some did not, attended other classes as best they could, and therefore experienced some inconvenience. Yet, on the whole there was probably little reason why Tucker should not have been allowed to continue as he had been doing.^[59]

Nevertheless, the Board decided that he must conform: teach at the College during the regular terms. Still worse was a new statute Tucker first saw in a Richmond newspaper, directing that “the rooms in College inhabited by Students be visited at least twice a week, by the president and professors in rotation.” In extenuation of this blunder, it should be said that the Board was trying to put a stop to student misconduct such as had recently produced much potentially damaging publicity.

Tucker was in no mood to think of extenuations at this particular time. Never a man to suffer fools gladly, whether they be Visitors or not, he was in the midst of a crisis in his judicial career that was not likely to sweeten a naturally acerbic disposition. Just when he hoped to replace the deceased Edmund Pendleton on the Court of Appeals, he faced charges of soliciting a bribe. Added to these distressing allegations, of which he was completely exonerated, the Board’s order directing him to act as a dormitory manager must have been the last straw.

One can sympathize with him. To tell this distinguished judge and eminent legal scholar that he must go nosing around students’ rooms was an act of folly surpassing the limits of fatuousness normally expected even of governing boards. In a withering letter to the rector, Tucker said he had never dreamed that he “might be required to inflict upon my students the ordinary discipline of a village school,” or that “a person deemed worthy of the station to which I was elected and of that which I held in the commonwealth, previous to my election to the professorial chair, could have received a mandate to perform the duties of a beadle,” thus degrading him in the eyes of his students, of the public, and “the man in his own eyes.” So he resigned on December 9, 1803,^[60] a blow to the prestige of the College second only to the resignation of George Wythe.

Tucker’s successor was his friend William Nelson, judge of the General Court, participant in the revisal of Virginia laws in 1792, and member of the Board of Visitors. Notwithstanding these respectable credentials, the chair of law ceased to be in any way notable, and despite the fact that Nelson remained on the faculty until his death in 1813, little is known of his professorship. It is recorded that “he danced very merrily, tho he had silvered locks,”^[61] but such a nugget, however piquant, is scarcely relevant

There was another resignation in 1803: Bellini. His health wrecked, he died impoverished the next year. Quite possibly on the recommendation of Jefferson,^[62] Madison chose Louis Hué Girardin to take the chair of modern languages. Born Louis François Picot, Girardin was a native of Dreux. He attended the lycée at Rouen and then went to Paris to study law. Through the favor of a high government functionary, he was introduced to the literary life of the city. He was a moderate royalist during the French Revolution and found it necessary to escape from the country when the Robespierrian phase began. Joining a French man-of-war, doubtless under the name Girardin, he arrived in the United States in 1793 and for the next four years found employment at Georgetown’s Roman Catholic seminary. Nothing is known of his life during the next several years except that he tried to start a school in northern Virginia. At William and Mary he taught French, history, and geography, but his main enthusiasm was natural history, especially botany, upon which he lectured.^[63] Girardin was a man of broad intellectual interests and a distinct step up from Bellini.

In 1806 and 1807, Girardin became an important element in a plan devised by Bishop Madison and Joseph Carrington Cabell for the reorganization and rehabilitation of William and Mary. Cabell had taken his bachelor’s degree in 1798 and during his years at the College had won the bishop’s affectionate regard. Later, he began to study law, but delicate health led him to undertake extensive travels in the United States and Europe. It was an exciting and enlightening experience. He met Washington Irving in Naples, discussed Swiss educational methods with Johann Pestalozzi, dined with the Polish patriot Thaddeus Kosciusko and the French historian, the Comte de Volney, and obtained entree to the literary circle of the notorious William Godwin. In Paris he listened to the lectures of Georges Cuvier and other savants and there viewed “all the branches of natural history under the aspects of new and captivating splendor.”^[64]

Upon his return to America in 1806, Cabell met President Jefferson, who received him warmly. This was not surprising. The two had a common interest in science and education. Cabell was highly connected among Virginia’s elite and was a close friend of Isaac Coles, the president’s personal secretary. Resisting Jefferson’s offer of various federal offices, Cabell returned to Williamsburg and married a stepdaughter of his former law professor, St. George Tucker.^[65] There he met Girardin and discovered their common interest in natural history. He also met another émigré, G. C. de La Coste. This gentleman had unsuccessfully endeavored to raise subscriptions for a natural history museum in New York and, failing that, was trying to sell his collection. From this concatenation of circumstances arose the idea of a statewide society for the promotion of the natural sciences whose visible symbol would be a museum of natural history at William and Mary. Such museums were very much in vogue in those years.^[66]

Simultaneously Cabell undertook a close study of the College. It was a depressing experience. There were, he told his friend Coles, “five able professors … who are more miserably compensated for the services they render, than any five men in America.” Had he the power, he would make better use of the College’s limited funds. The Grammar School should be abolished and along with it Bracken’s professorship. He would also abolish the chair of law. It was of little use, he said, because Nelson’s judicial duties meant that he had to rush through his course so rapidly as to be of little benefit to his students. To replace these two chairs, he would create a professorship of chemistry, completing “the circle of experimental science,” and transform the professorship of modern languages into a chair of natural history whose occupant could give private lessons in French or Italian. This would “complete the circle of physical science.”^[67] He hoped that the Visitors would initiate the reform at their next meeting by appointing Girardin to the natural history chair. Otherwise Girardin, then almost impoverished—”perishing,” as Cabell put it—would have to find a new position in Richmond in order to support his family. The new program for the College was developed jointly by Cabell, Girardin, and Madison, and was approved by the Society, the collective name of the president and professors.^[68]

The other project, the science society and museum, needed prominent friends and contributors. Cabell asked Coles to approach Jefferson. Should the society become a reality, he said, Jefferson would be offered the presidency, with the governor and Bishop Madison as vice-presidents and Girardin as secretary. Girardin would also be the curator of the museum; he was the only man, in Cabell’ s estimation, equal to that task.^[69] Coles’s reply was very discouraging and reflected Jefferson’s view of the matter. The old College, said Coles, “is declining, and perhaps the sooner it falls entirely, the better, if it might be the means of pointing out to our legislative body the necessity of founding an institution on an extended and liberal scale. … Instead of wasting your time in attempting to patch up a decaying institution, … found a new one which shall be worthy of the first State in the Union.”^[70] Jefferson, one can be sure, did not want a brushed-up William and Mary to stand in the way of the founding of his university.

It is somewhat ironic that when Cabell replied to his friend he saw little chance of the legislature creating a new institution in the foreseeable future; for it would be Cabell himself as a member of that body a few years later who would do so much to make Jefferson’s dream a reality. Now, however, in 1807, he believed they should make the best of what they had, while continuing to hope that some day the state might move William and Mary to Richmond or even establish an entirely new university in the “upper country.”^[71]

So the science society was stillborn, a society that might have helped give the College an enhanced reputation and a more secure place in the estimation of those who would eventually have to decide whether or not to give it public assistance. Even without the society, much the same might have been accomplished by enacting the Cabell-Madison reform. Unfortunately, the Board of Visitors did not even appoint Girardin professor of natural history. He thereupon resigned and moved to Richmond, and the chair of modern languages sank to the level of a part-time French instructor, one A. Plunkett.^[72] Cabell gave up on the College and moved to his home in Amherst County, where he ran for the state legislature. There he would be a few years later, ready to work mightily to found that deadly competitor of the College for public favor, the University of Virginia. One can never know for certain what the Board’s inaction cost William and Mary; perhaps the cause was hopeless. Still, Madison must surely have been reminded again of the stone of Sisyphus; or, as he lectured on mechanics, he might have wondered if even the lever of Archimedes could have moved the Visitors off dead center.

Scarcely had Madison appointed Girardin and Nelson to fill the places of Bellini and Tucker when he lost his mathematics professor, Robert Andrews, who journeyed to that great college in the sky in 1804. The bishop promptly sought Jefferson’s help in finding “a Person for that office, who shall be, in every Respect, perfectly qualified.” Did the president think William and Mary might attract Mr. Jared Mansfield, whose “ingenious Dissertation” Jefferson had sent him? Of course, the old problem remained. As Edmund Randolph had observed some years before, “the emoluments are too low to invite men of genius to the different chairs,”^[73] a refrain Madison now repeated. “The emoluments may be rated at $1,000 per an.—too little indeed to attract men of real talent. …”^[74] Jared Mansfield was one of those men of real talent. Then surveyor general of the United States, thanks to Jefferson, Mansfield’s Essays, Mathematical and Physical, (1801) was considered to be the first original work of mathematical research by an American.^[75] Even though his salary was then $2,000, Jefferson thought he might prefer the “more tranquil” environment of Williamsburg to the wilds of Indiana, whither he and his family had just moved.^[76] Madison also asked Secretary of State Madison to persuade Mansfield to accept,^[77] but to no avail. Maybe the price of tranquility was a little too high.

Next to be approached for advice was Philadelphia’s Benjamin Rush, the famous reformer, patriot, chemist, and physician, and the greatest bleeder and purger in medical history. Madison asked about a Mr. Robertson, said to be studying medicine under Rush. Might he be disposed to fill a vacant professorship at William and Mary? Possibly Madison was attempting to revive the medical chair by appointing someone who could teach medicine as well as mathematics. And if Robertson should not be interested, could Rush supply information about “a Mr. Blackburn, who, I understand, was recommended to you, upon his first arrival in this country? Or, if you are acquainted with any other Person, distinguished for math. & sciences, & also of the purest morals, who would wish for such a place,” Rush’s help would be much appreciated.^[78]

George Blackburn accepted and remained until 1811. He came to be known as “Old Triangle” to the students, at least one of whom gave him a glowing report as a teacher. The bishop, whom for some reason Blackburn came to dislike, considered him to be “a good calculator.” Blackburn supplemented his income by opening what the nineteenth century persisted in calling a “female academy.” His work at the College was sufficiently arduous without taking on additional responsibilities. Entering students were so notoriously deficient in mathematics that the Board decreed that the mathematics professor must give remedial instruction to any who were “unacquainted with the common rules of Arithmetic, Vulgar and Decimal Fractions, and the numerical extraction of Roots.” Blackburn made a virtue of necessity by advertising for private pupils, remarking on the “strangely defective state of preparation” of the young men coming to the College.^[79] He would not be the last professor to notice this phenomenon.

Mathematics, law, natural and moral philosophy (Madison), at least one modern language, and Greek, Latin, and other preparatory subjects (Bracken’s Grammar School)—the basic curriculum remained intact. This was no mean accomplishment under the circumstances, even if the loss of Wythe, Tucker, and Girardin, and the abandonment of the ideals of 1779 reflected a steady decline. With the bishop bailing furiously, the ship was still afloat.

Enemies Without, Disorders Within

During the years Madison was grappling with the problems already described, he also had to devote his energies to defending the reputation of the College from a variety of attackers. For some years visitors from the North, especially from New England, had not infrequently been condescending or even hostile. “[T]he exterior of the college is not splendid,” remarked Francis Asbury, soon to be a Methodist bishop, “and [there are] but [few] students; the Bedlam-house is desolate, but whether because none are insane or all are equally mad, it might, perhaps, be difficult to tell.”^[80] A few years later in 1785, Noah Webster, perhaps irked because the local gentlemen were not as attentive to his lectures as he thought they should be, accused Virginians of having “much pride, little money on hand, great contempt for Northern people, & amazing fondness for Dissipation.” He spent some hours with George Wythe, whom he found to be “a great man for Virginia, & a sensible man anywhere.”^[81] These remarks were fulsome praise, however, when compared to the report of the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, the geographer. The state of the College, he said, was “incredible.” Little was demanded of the professors, and the students were allowed to skate, game, and dance “without control.” There were no public prayers, and there had not been a divinity student for years.^[82]

That was in 1786. Far worse was yet to come. When political parties sprang up in the wake of Alexander Hamilton’s centralizing policies at home and the French Revolution abroad, Federalist writers, seeking any means to discredit the Republicans, sometimes singled out the College as an inculcator and disseminator of Franco-Jeffersonian abominations. When the Republicans carried the election of 1800, there were Federalists who actually expected to see the tumbrils rolling down State Street in Boston, with the wives and daughters of the unlucky passengers surrendered to the lust of godless revolutionary mobs. That was what Jeffersonian Republicanism stood for, and the College of William and Mary was a reeking cauldron of that poisonous brew. “[Y]ou are made the Author,” Madison wrote Jefferson, “of all the Mischeifs [sic], & of all the Evils which the College has so widely disseminated.”^[83] There was a time when he believed that the College’s reputation for republicanism, and Republicanism, had done it more damage than anything else.^[84]

Unquestionably, heterodox religious as well as political ideas affected most of the students, as they did students at other educational institutions of the time. Many people saw William and Mary as a hotbed of radicalism, a hurtful perception that persisted until the advent of a new conservatism in the 1820s and 1830s.^[85] Until then, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. As one undergraduate wrote, each of them acquired “the spirit of scepticism … as soon as he touched the threshold of the college.” It was the “first step toward knowledge. … That it leads to deism, atheism, etc., I will acknowledge, but on the same grounds we may object to reason.”^[86] The image of the College as a sink of irreligion is vividly conveyed by the observation of a newly arrived student who said that he was “somewhat surprised” to find its president, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in Virginia,” so firm a Christian.”^[87]

As for politics in the 1790s and early 1800s, a large majority of students and all but one of the faculty were ardent Republicans, with both a large and a small r. When the bishop, partly to tone down the impression of the College as a center of Jacobinism, suggested the wearing of black arm bands to mark the passing of George Washington, the young bloods thought this was going too far. The general might have been the father of his country, but he was also president when Hamilton and others of his ilk gave birth to Federalism. In those heady days, student letters were dated “A.R.”—in the year of the Republic—and addressed to “Citizen.” John Adams went up in flames, in effigy, and Jefferson’s elevation to the presidency evoked a joy that “almost bordered on madness.” Students whooped through the streets, and an equally jubilant Professor Tucker asked them all in for a glass of wine. Jeffersonians and Republicans most of them undoubtedly were.^[88]

Madison did his best to protect the College without compromising its principles or his, which were the same. It was not a pleasant duty. One accusation especially alarmed and angered him. It came from no less a figure than the Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, an architect of the New Haven school of theology, and a deep-dyed Federalist conservative. Dwight charged that William Godwin’s Enquiry  Concerning Political Justice was taught at William and Mary, a treatise he saw as one of the fragments of European infidelity “vomited,” as Dwight put it, toward America. Now little known and less read, Godwin had traveled from nonconformist minister to atheist. His Enquiry , published in 1793, preached a ruthless hedonistic utilitarianism that seemed to point toward anarchy. After experiencing a brief vogue, it sank in the tidal wave of reaction to French revolutionary excesses. Godwin and his Enquiry were thus anathema, not only to Dwight, but to most Americans who knew anything of his ideas.^[89]

Naturally the bishop could not allow the College to be tarred with this brush. “I observed in the different Papers,” he wrote the other Madison, “such harping upon the Introduction of Godwin in Wm & Mary, that I determined to check, if possible the current of Malevolence; especially as your Inquiry evinced, that the Supposition of such an Introduction was one of the Engines which has occasionally played off against Virginia. … Nothing so strongly marks the Virulence & the Meanness of the disappointed Party [i.e., the Federalists and their chagrin at the election of Jefferson], as their little Tricks to excite popular Odium.”^[90]

He responded in a pseudonymous letter to the National, Intelligencer, one of the journals in which Dwight’s statement had appeared. Describing himself as one who had been educated at William and Mary, “J.C.” denied that Godwin had ever been used as a text or as a “medium of instruction.” In fact, he had “never heard that author mentioned at a lecture; except for the purpose of animadverting upon some of his doctrines, which were held to be both erroneous and dangerous.” Then Madison proceeded to give a ringing vindication of freedom of inquiry—academic freedom—and republican principles. “But neither the works of Godwin, nor of any other philosophical writers, are there proscribed. The principle which governs the philosophical school is, that truth fears no discussion. … On the contrary, the student is urged to diligent and honest enquiry, and to decide for himself from the best evidence he can collect.” In the political course, “republican principles are there fostered and inculcated, not because they suit a particular administration; but because they are founded in the nature of man. … We cling to them with ardor. They are the touchstone by which we try the verity of every political hypothesis, and the purity of all political conduct.”^[91]

Dwight’s allegation had scarcely been repelled when student misconduct seemed to justify those who claimed that irreligion and anarchy were the inevitable consequences of Jeffersonian teachings. This particular outbreak, in 1802, followed the expulsion of two young men because of a duel. Some of their friends deemed the punishment unjust. They broke windows in professors’ houses, the chapel, and the church, tore up prayer books and Bibles, and vandalized a shop.^[92] Although Madison was firmly opposed to dueling, in those days there was much sentiment for allowing gentlemen to uphold their honor by convincing means.^[93]

The New York Post reported the disorders, a report copied by other papers. The College, it said, “was completely broken up … and thus dies one of the oldest and wealthiest [!] seminaries of learning in the United States of America. These may be considered some of the blessed effects of the modem, or Jeffersonian system of religion; for party-politics, instead of science, appear long since to have been the primary object of instruction in that University—and from that foul source have flowed many of the heretical doctrines of the present day.”^[94]

Madison replied with admirable spirit The College, said he, knew not what “Jeffersonian religion” was, but it did boast of the man himself as “one of her brightest ornaments.” As for political indoctrination for party purposes, such had never been attempted. “No, sir, the politics which are here studied are those general principles of government which have their foundation in the imprescriptible Rights of Man, which the God of Nature has consecrated, which the Revolution of America made known to the whole world, and which the people of this rising empire will never abandon.”^[95] Jefferson himself could have done no better.

The enemies of Thomas Jefferson attacked the man and his party by attacking the College. Conversely, Madison defended his friend and republican principles by defending the College. In the bishop’s philosophy the two were and ought to be inseparable. To sons of the Enlightenment such as Madison and Jefferson the preservation of republican government depended upon the proper education of the people. In addition, however cosmopolitan they might be, they believed in the necessity of Virginia’s preeminence in the nation. Their country, as many Virginians called the state, must remain the bulwark of those principles then under attack by a Federalist party with a monarchical squint The pride Virginians took in assuming the role of national leaders had roots deep in the seventeenth century, when Tidewater became the home of so many members of the Kentish gentry. They brought with them the well-founded conviction that of all English counties theirs was the intellectual and political leader. This transplanted attitude received reinforcement during the Revolution and early national years, when the Old Dominion, the largest and most populous state, seemed far more than merely first among equals. So it was only a seeming paradox when Madison staunchly defended William and Mary even as Jefferson disparaged it: they both were upholding the indispensability of education to Virginia’s preeminence as the fountainhead of republican government, the bishop by protecting the College, Jefferson by planning a new institution that could do all that the College was unable to accomplish.^[96]

Student behavior, such as the outbreak of 1802, continued to threaten William and Mary’s good name and to supply ammunition for critics such as the New York Post, as well as for others closer to home. It was a very painful problem. Even though enrollments were rather small even for that day, averaging about fifty,^[97] there was often no shortage of hell-raisers. Raising hell was, of course, a student tradition with an ancient pedigree; still, one receives the impression that extracurricular high jinks were unusually frequent during the eighties, nineties, and the early 1800s. In 1784 the Society deemed it necessary to threaten “banishment” for excessive drinking and “every kind of rioting or obcenity [sic].”^[98] Madison came to believe it was better to scatter the students through the town to room and board in private homes rather than have them live together at the College, which he thought “promoted frequent quarrels and preconcerted mutinies.”^[99] The students protested against his policy in 1796,^[100] and indeed there seemed to be little connection between their conduct and where they lived.

Misbehavior, not to use a stronger word, ranged from “the custom of pulling down steps, breaking carriages etc.,” the decapitation of Lord Botetourt’s statue (later ingeniously repaired by the president) , and throwing bricks through the windows of unpopular citizens, to more serious outrages. The latter included invading Bruton Parish Church, breaking up the Communion table, throwing prayer books and Bibles across the churchyard, and smearing the pulpit “from one end to the other, with human excrement.” On another occasion the lads broke the church windows and badly damaged the organ. Most bizarre was the disinterment of a female corpse, which was then placed “on the floor of an empty house in a situation too shocking to describe!!!” Duels, actual or incipient, were a periodic occurrence.^[101] One observer believed parents were becoming fearful of sending their sons to William and Mary “lest their morals should be perverted.”^[102]

On the other hand, William and Mary students should not be seen as unusually violent or irreligious. The same things were happening on one campus after another, sometimes worse things. At least at the College, students did not physically attack the faculty, as they did in the 1799 uprising at the University of North Carolina. One historian has called this student lawlessness “the legacy of the Revolution,” and another, referring to antireligious violence, said it was part of the “vast movement to secularize education which was rapidly gaining momentum throughout the nation,” a reaction to the ecclesiastical domination that dated from the very inception of systematic education in the medieval universities. ”Rebellions” were a periodic occurrence. At Princeton in 1807, after three students were expelled for drunkenness and insolence to professors, “the student body protested in a manner that seemed to presage organized rebellion. The faculty met, and to an obbligato of crashing windows and ripping stair-rails, suspended one hundred and twenty-five of a student body of less than two hundred.”^[103] At Williams College blasphemous undergraduates conducted a mock Communion, while in the Yale dining hall others sneeringly offered bits of bread to a lone student who had just come from the Lord’s table.^[104] William and Mary was pretty much in the mainstream of events.

The Visitors passed disciplinary rules the counterparts of which could be found at colleges across the land. The statutes published in 1792 allowed the drinking of spirits “in that moderation which becomes the prudent and industrious Student,” but banned “duelling, gaming, quarrelling, profane swearing and cursing, immorality of any kind, and all breaches of good order and decorum,” in or out of the university precincts, with penalties extending from reproof to expulsion at the discretion of the Society. The young men were forbidden from “making balls” or “dining or supping in any public house.” Good morals and irreproachable conduct were prerequisites for receiving a degree.^[105] On paper, at least, it was moderate drinking or nothing.

Rules changed from time to time, and enforcement fluctuated from draconian severity to Christian mildness. After the 1802 affair, which Madison feared had inflicted “a great injury” on the College, the Board and the president decided to show that they meant business. New statutes made suspension or expulsion the only punishment for everything down to a mere “breach of decorum.”^[106] “No one will be permitted to remain here one hour,” declared the bishop, “after he has evinced a Spirit of Insubordination, or of inattention.” He was confident that this “system of excision” would succeed.^[107] For a while it did, although periodic pruning continued to be necessary.^[108]

In 1806 the College decided to compel junior students to live and board on campus so as to reduce their expenses and to guard against “dissipation and idleness.”^[109] There was no consensus among educators at this time as to whether dormitory living promoted or prevented trouble. If surveillance was easier, so was the opportunity for planning mischief.^[110] The bishop appeared to be damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, because another outbreak occurred in 1808. The Visitors responded with more restrictive regulations. Besides the usual injunctions against drunkenness and so forth, students now had to remain in their rooms and study during specified hours of the day. When disorderly conduct occurred at the College, every student who was in the College at the time was to be considered guilty unless he could prove his innocence, an unfortunate example of guilt by association.^[111]

The Board and the Society could also temper justice with mercy. Not only was this right, it was prudent; too much strictness could lead to falling enrollments as more colleges sprang up to compete for students. The Society often remitted or softened prescribed punishments, and in 1810 the Board adopted a statute that sounds very much like the bishop. The “sublime object of the charter,” it said, was to promote “religion, morality, and learning,” and so it was important not only for punishments to be just, but for the door of forgiveness always to be open. To extend mercy, after all, was “the surest means of obtaining mercy from our Heavenly Father.” Now any student expelled in the past or in the future from William and Mary or any other college could be readmitted by making atonement, acknowledging his offenses before the Society, and promising to sin no more. Thenceforth, no one would ever be “beyond the Pale” forever.^[112] It was a graceful, even eloquent statement, and perhaps a more faithful reflection of the spirit of the place than all the duels, vandalism, and riots.

Living and Learning

The young men of William and Mary were as much a part of Williamsburg as they were of the College, and the one may have been almost as important to their education as the other. The removal of the capital to Richmond in 1780 was a severe blow to the town’s intellectual and social life, let alone its political importance. Only a village with a couple of hundred houses and fewer than fifteen hundred people, Williamsburg was left with the College and the asylum—the lazy and the crazy, as someone said. Yet, in the eyes of its inhabitants, Williamsburg was no mean city. They still saw trailing clouds of glory from the heroic days of the Revolution, when the old town witnessed a concourse of great men and great events.

The social fabric remained for many years essentially eighteenth century in texture, with an unpretentious gentility and a generous hospitality. One who knew Williamsburg intimately said that it contained “fifteen or twenty families, who were in sufficiently easy circumstances to live well, but not to throw away money in ostentatious expense. They all, or nearly all, kept their carriages, gave dinners occasionally, and drank wine; and, following no occupation that engrossed their time, the pleasures of society were at once necessary to them, and more relished.”^[113]

Students’ reactions to the town and its people varied like those of other visitors. They were much interested in the young ladies. A somewhat priggish Kentuckian complained that “the female society in this place has fallen off very much.” He found “very few girls of exquisite or genuine refinement. . . . There is a certain looseness of manners and conversation amongst them that I do not admire.”^[114] No doubt they had been teasing him. To another, by contrast, Williamsburg deserved “the title (which Homer gives Greece) of the ‘land of lovely dames,’ for here may be found beauty in perfection, and not only beauty, but sociability in the ladies.”^[115] One chap from the country found the people “extremely gay and extravagant. There have been not less than four balls since I came to town. … To one who has spent his life in Louisa, where a ball is almost a phenomenon, this must appear the height of extravagance.”^[116]

The rule against students giving balls was circumvented by having a townsman send the invitations. At one, which two-thirds of the students attended, a tipsy Richard Pollard fell several times while dancing and was “conveyed” out of the room, only to return and continue “making a noise.” Some of the revelers missed lectures the next morning; they were, alas, still drunk and unable to arise.^[117] There were spontaneous nocturnal frolics, at times inspired by quantities of eggnog. Balls, routs, and squeezes, wine and pretty girls: what more could one ask? As for the friendliness of the people, the students were virtually unanimous. They were “remarkable for their hospitality and familiar deportment toward strangers,”^[118] as “polite and hospitable as any people I have ever been with.”^[119] Students often criticized their fellows or the College, but they rarely had anything but good to say about the townspeople with whom they lived, dined, and made merry. Many looked back on their Williamsburg days with a poignant nostalgia.^[120] “Believe me, I did not know my attachment to Williamsburg till the time had arrived when I was to bid Adieu,” wrote Carter Henry Harrison. A classmate found Richmond society agreeable, yet when that word was “applied to a people or place, Williamsburg presents itself and causes me to experience all those pleasing (tho mournful) sensations which are produced by recollection of past pleasures.”^[121]

Sociability required at least some pocket money for proper clothes and for repaying obligations. For some this was not a problem. A sixteen year old might arrive at the College with his horse and personal servant.^[122] Others had trouble making ends meet on what their families allowed them. George Blow told his father that he had to spend money if he was “to associate with the best company.” His letters are a querulous litany repelling charges of extravagance and trying to document his actual penury. Then there were boys who were truly poor; yet one way or another they managed and even had a good time.^[123]

Not all extramural activities were fun and games. As at other colleges, self-improvement societies came and went—literary, debating, legal, legislative. One of the oldest dedicated to “social and improving intercourse” was Phi Beta Kappa, but it had not survived the British invasion of 1781. Seventy years would pass before it rose from the ashes, only again to be destroyed by an enemy army. Luckily, the New England chapters established by Alpha of Virginia survived and gave continuity to what ultimately became a national honor society, one that a resurrected Alpha chapter would join toward the end of the nineteenth century.^[124]

Such societies, while they lasted, could be a useful adjunct to formal education. The main business of the students, however, was going to classes, taking examinations, and for some, earning degrees, the purpose being to become gentlemen educated as befitted citizens who might be called upon to take their places among the leaders of the commonwealth. At their inception, the Jefferson-Madison reforms of 1779 gave students great freedom. As Madison proudly wrote Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, “The doors of the university are open to all, nor is even a knowledge in the Ant. Languages a previous Requisite for Entrance. The Students have the liberty of attending whom they please, and in what order they please, or all the diffr Lectures in a Term if they think proper.”^[125]

This system reminds one somewhat of the loosening of academic requirements during the Vietnam War era. According to Jedidiah Morse, the students attended lectures or not as it suited them, with no recitations, no examinations, except when candidates for a degree, and no public speaking.^[126] After applying due skepticism to the accuracy and impartiality of Morse’s report, one suspects that laissez faire had gone too far. The Visitors evidently thought so. In 1788 a new statute required all students to conform to a regular course of study, save those who were twenty-one years of age and intended to study law.^[127] Thus began the whittling away of another William and Mary “priority,” the elective system; by the following year students might find themselves compelled to take certain courses whether they wanted to or not.^[128] Alternating relaxation and tightening of academic rules continued to occur down through the years.

Statutes published in 1792 elaborated on the 1788 regulations. All new students not excepted as before were to enter the mathematical and philosophical “schools.” At the end of the year, the Society would determine for each the best program of study to pursue. Any student, however, could attend the “school of Modern Languages,” that is, Bellini. Considerable flexibility remained; nevertheless, to call this or anything that preceded it an “elective system” as that term is understood two hundred years later is anachronistic. Furthermore, requirements for a bachelor of arts degree were detailed and explicit, as were those for bachelor of law,^[129] so much so that they would have seemed “arduous and strange to a classically oriented Yale or Harvard boy.” There was “striking insistence on specific attainments in advanced mathematics, physics, logic, and rhetoric, with only ‘a competent knowledge’ of the ancient languages required.”^[130] Traditionally, most students did not stand for degrees, nor did they in any numbers for some years to come. Besides the two bachelor’s degrees, the statutes authorized the master of arts, doctor of law, and doctor of divinity. The last two were honorary, and the master of arts was so seldom awarded as to be a curiosity.^[131]

Senior students proved their proficiency in routine course exercises and examinations and by composing a thesis to be delivered publicly. The last was a distinction sometimes extended to juniors, who were not always pleased to be singled out for this honor. In the 1790s taking a degree could be a grueling process indeed. Few were willing to undergo this trial by fire even when the bishop urged them to.^[132] Littleton Waller Tazewell, a future governor and United States senator, decided to take the plunge. He described his ordeal as follows:

The student who wished to obtain a degree, notified this wish to the President, and applied for an order for his examination. This order the President immediately gave him directed [him] to some one of the professors. When the examination by this professor was completed (which usually occupied several days) the student received from him a sealed report directed to the President. Upon presenting this he received from the President a new order for examination, directed to some other professor, who pursued the same course with the first. When all these reports were presented, if a majority of them were unfavourable to the applicant, he was told by the President, that he was not consider’d as sufficiently prepared to receive a degree. But if some one or two only of the reports were unfavourable, the student was advised by the President, to pay special attention to the particular subjects in which he was believed to be then deficient; and having done so to apply thereafter for a new order for a further examination upon these studies. So soon as favourable reports were received from each of the professors, the student then received an order to attend a convocation of all the faculty of the college, for the purpose of undergoing a new examination by this convocation. At this meeting the President presided, and the examination was conducted by each professor in turn, who did not then confine himself to his own branch, but in the course of his examination ranged through all the collegiate studies. When this examination was over, the student retired, and on the next day was informed by the President of the result. If this was favorable, he was then directed to prepare a thesis upon any subject he thought proper, and to deliver the same when prepared to the President. If this thesis when exhibited was found objectionable in subject, style, or matter, he was required to prepare another, or to amend that which he had prepared. And when the thesis was finally approved, he was then informed, that he was entitled to a degree, which would be confer’d upon him before a public assembly. … He was therefore directed to commit his thesis to memory, to be deliver’d by him as an oration on that day, and to apply to each of the professors, for a list of such questions and duties as they would propound to and impose upon him on his publick examination, to the end he might be thoroughly prepared for this last experiment.

Tazewell came through with flying colors and received his diploma from the hand of Bishop Madison, who bestowed upon him a “high eulogium … deliver’d before a large concourse of persons, who were there assembled, to witness this then singular spectacle, because such was the difficulty of obtaining a degree in this seminary at that time, that no such honor had been confer’d for many years before.”^[133]  Although not taking degrees was commonplace in England as well as America, the bishop must have felt that the paucity of diplomas, this lack of what the late twentieth century administrator would call productivity, might give rise to the impression of ineffectiveness. In 1798 he took action. A dozen of his students in the political class had been so attentive and had improved so much that he decided they deserved bachelor’s degrees. One of them, though he accepted the honor, disapproved of the president’s liberality. It cheapened the degree by giving it for what amounted to good behavior. “This, however, may be attained by the most Rustic fool among us. Man, says Godwin, in his Enquirer, differs from the Brute Creation by the faculty of intellect & if he wished to be still farther removed from that Creation, let him cultivate his mind, & wear the marks of an improved understanding.”^[134] Although Madison did not make a practice of handing out degrees, productivity was encouraged by statutes adopted in 1802 that prohibited a student from continuing at the College beyond his second year without special permission unless he had received a degree.^[135]

Commencement ceremonies, including the conferral of degrees, have been called “an exercise in institutional public relations,”^[136] as indeed they still are. At William and Mary they occurred on July 4 at Bruton Parish Church. The bishop opened the proceedings with a prayer, followed by “orations” whose length must sometimes have tried the patience of the public. In 1806 they embraced such widely disparate topics as an ingenious justification of usury, a description of the form of government best suited to promote “the arts, sciences, and morals,” and a timely analysis of the rights of neutral shipping on the high seas. Satisfaction was expressed because on this occasion the orators had departed from an all-too-familiar species of eloquence marked more by sound than sense, a style born of the “sanguine temperament and high-tone passions” of young Virginians, and had moved on to a more temperate style in which manner gave way to matter.^[137]

The educational process at the College retained something of the loose-jointed look of 1780 despite the tightening up prescribed by the 1788 and 1792 statutes. Other colleges, including Harvard, Columbia, and Dartmouth, had the conventional freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years. William and Mary had only two: junior and senior. The difference probably was more apparent than real. Freshman and sophomore years at other institutions were largely devoted to the ancient languages, and students who came with such preparation could enter as sophomores, juniors, or sometimes even as seniors. Most entering students at William and Mary either came through Bracken’s Grammar School or from one of many such schools, often excellent ones, in other parts of the state. They entered the “philosophical and mathematical schools” as juniors, “students” as opposed to the lowly “scholars” of the Grammar School.^[138]

There was much overlap between William and Mary’s curriculum and that of other American colleges. All offered natural philosophy, moral philosophy, mathematics, and so forth. There were also significant differences in what was taught. At the College theological education was conspicuously absent. Furthermore, even when the names of the courses were the same, the content could be strikingly different. Madison taught natural philosophy and moral philosophy. The latter, usually the province of college presidents, covered so many subjects and had been so deeply invaded by political theory that the mere title was almost no indication of what was going on in the course. Of William and Mary a well-informed commentator said that there was “probably no College in the United States in which political science is studied with so much ardour, and in which it is considered so preeminently a favorite subject, as in this.”^[139]

Madison himself clearly distinguished between “morals” and “the political course,” which was customarily subsumed under moral philosophy. Probably he leaned toward the opinion of Jefferson, who believed time spent in attending moral philosophy lectures was time lost, man having been born with a moral sense. “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better then the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”^[140] With respect to moral philosophy, neither Madison’s lecture notes nor the class notes of any of his students have been found. Fortunately, the books he assigned on political and economic subjects are known, and it is a revealing list. Included were Locke’s On Civil Government, Rousseau’s Contrat social Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois, Vattel’s Le droit des gens, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and the financial papers of Albert Gallatin,Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury.^[141] Wrote a dedicated republican to a friend, “Watson, when Rousseau, Montesquieu, Smith & Vattel are the Text books on politics at this College, how can the Political tenets of the young men be wrong?”^[142] The “morals” part of the course leaned heavily on those eighteenth century Scottish philosophers who had left such a deep impression on educated Americans generally.^[143]

Madison was probably equally enthusiastic as a teacher of science—natural philosophy—as he was of politics. In this he was typical of his generation and his faculty colleagues. George Blow discovered the depth of the bishop’s interest when he made the mistake of staying late at a ball the night before an eclipse of the moon, because Madison kept him up all the next night watching the event through a telescope. George told his father he was very tired.^[144] Besides the telescope, the College owned the once superb scientific apparatus sent over from England before the Revolution by William Small. It was still most useful, even if damaged and somewhat the worse for wear.^[145] The students also benefitted from a respectable library of possibly four thousand volumes, small compared to Harvard’s thirteen thousand, but as large if not larger than any other college library at the turn of the century. Although older works predominated, especially in theology and classical literature, students might have had access to the scientific treatises in Madison’s own more up-to-date library.^[146]

Madison’s thirty-five or so lectures fell under seven main headings: properties of matter (including gravitation and magnetism), mechanics (“of bodies falling perpendicularly,” and “of pendulums,” for examples), electricity, pneumatics (mainly the properties of gases), hydrostatics, hydraulics, and optics. The bishop began with an introductory lecture explaining the “inducements to study this science.” One was its great utility, that is, its practical applications, a very eighteenth century emphasis. Then there was “the Gratification the mind receives in the pursuit of this Science,” which satisfied the curiosity implanted in the human mind “by the wise author of Being.” Next came the “novelty and grandeur of the subjects belonging to natural Philosophy,” such as magnetism and electricity (which were probably the favorites with the students). Moreover, nature and humanity furnished inexhaustible materials for the application of this knowledge; the intellect need never lack for exercise. And finally, it is “the Source of some of the sublimest conceptions of the great Author of the Universe—as he will be best convinced of who understands the Science best.” Madison then gave a sketch of the history of the subject and credited Francis Bacon with being the ”Father of the present system of Philosophizing” by virtue of his use of inductive reasoning and experimental method.^[147]

Madison taught these courses from 1784, when he traded mathematics to Robert Andrews for moral philosophy, until his death in 1812. He may have lacked originality, have been solid rather than brilliant,^[148]  but he was a faithful and successful teacher.” Fish and oysters are very good food at times, but in my opinion not near equal to Mr. Madison’s lectures with which I am enamoured, and without which I think no man can boast of a good education.”^[149]

The bishop’s able teaching of these basic courses for so many years was the College’s mainstay during a long, difficult period. Yet for more than twenty of those years, William and Mary’s reputation depended even more on the chair of law and the two renowned jurists and scholars who occupied it from 1779 until 1804: George Wythe and St. George Tucker. Wythe was of the utmost importance to the institution. Jefferson’s almost religious veneration for this man and his belief that it was “over with the College” when he left were only a slightly exaggerated manifestation of the place Wythe had attained in the opinion of Virginia’s governing class. His long career in Virginia and national politics as a member of the House of Burgesses and then the Continental Congress, as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, as chancellor of the state, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and then to the state ratifying convention, where he helped tilt the scales to ratification—all of this combined with impeccable personal integrity, devotion to educating the young, and deep scholarship to give the College a prestige no one else could have brought to it, save perhaps Jefferson himself.^[150]

Nor were his interests merely political and legal. Everything in nature intrigued him. Littleton Waller Tazewell, one of several boys who lived with and was tutored by Wythe, told how his teacher “imported a very complete Electrical Machine together with a fine Air Pump, and sundry other parts of a philosophical apparatus. And when this arrived, most of our leisure moments were employed in making philosophical experiments, and ascertaining the causes of the effects produced.”^[151] An even smaller boy always remembered when Wythe, to whom he was a stranger, took him into his house and held him up to a windowpane to show him “the working of the bees in a hive” attached to the glass.^[152]

Legal training was almost a necessity for a career in public life in America. Before the Revolution young men aspiring to the bar either had to serve as a lawyer’s apprentice or cross the Atlantic to the Inns of Court. Independence brought new constitutions and new laws that made the Inns of Court professionally obsolete. Beginning in 1780 the alternative to apprenticeship in Virginia would be to study in the nation’s first school of law under the tutelage of George Wythe.

To him the law was only part of a man’s preparation for civic responsibility and indeed for life in general. Its study should be based on a sound classical education, which for Wythe was almost an obsession, and accompanied by broad interests such as those embraced by natural and moral philosophy. Wythe required his students to participate in mock legislatures as well as moot courts. An expert in parliamentary as well as legal procedure, he was an ideal teacher, even if, as he presided watchfully from the chair, the amateur solons found him a daunting figure.^[153]

Wythe’s lectures, known to have survived until at least 1810, have unfortunately disappeared, as have his students’ class notes; speculation as to what he taught must therefore be confined to generalities. His lectures probably leaned heavily on Matthew Bacon’s New Abridgement of the Law. Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a landmark of legal scholarship as popular in America as in England, figured prominently in his course. This was fitting, for as Blackstone was the first to give university lectures on English law in his country, so Wythe was the first to do so in America.^[154]

Whether Wythe’s influence upon those who studied with him was due more to his teaching or to the example of his character it is impossible to say, but that he made a profound impression is undeniable. The virtual unanimity of reverence expressed by his students was put in terms which, were it applied to any other man, would almost strain credulity. Jefferson’s encomiums were echoed again and again. A poor student whom Wythe took into his household to help him continue his education wrote a friend, “Were I to expatiate on the many blessings I enjoy in the house of this good old gentleman … I should swell this letter to unconscionable length. … He is not indeed without faults … but he certainly approaches nearer to perfection than any man I have ever seen.” He was a “second father” to him. “You cannot perfectly comprehend the divine virtue of Mr. Wythe without living in his house. His heart is a receptacle of all that heaven can bestow on a human being. … ” ^[155] Besides his collegiate and judicial duties, Wythe also undertook the education of younger pupils. He seems almost always to have had some under his care, and in 1787 he advertised the opening of a school in his home “for reading some of the higher Latin and Greek classics, and of the approved English poets and prose writers, and also some exercises in arithmetic.”^[156]

If the high distinction achieved in later life by so many of Wythe’s students is in any measure attributable to the man himself, he was truly a pillar of the republic: Jefferson, John Marshall, Henry Clay, James Monroe, Spencer Roane—the list goes on.^[157] He was, in truth, the pride of the institution.

William and Mary necessarily suffered a serious blow when Wythe resigned his professorship. Although no one could replace him in every respect, the chair of law itself sustained little damage. Its new occupant was St. George Tucker, member of a prominent Bermuda family, who had come to Virginia in 1771 to matriculate at William and Mary. Tucker made his mark in Virginia affairs in several ways—by fighting in the Revolution and serving as a delegate to the Annapolis meeting that paved the way for the Constitutional Convention. A Wythe student and a highly regarded member of the General Court, Tucker was more than learned in the law. He had the same broad-gauged intellect, the same “fidgity mind,” as someone has called it, so typical of his generation. For instance, he liked to invent things, from household conveniences to what he might have called luminescent telegraphy; he once sent a message by coded light signals from the cupola of the capitol to Bishop Madison at the College. He was an amateur astronomer as well as a poet of no small talent.^[158]

Blackstone was the most important text for Tucker’s course, although his young men had to plow through the usual legal bibliography of the time, including the law student’s Gethsemane, Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes. It was Blackstone, but a Blackstone modified and amplified by Tucker to accommodate the statutory and constitutional consequences of Independence. Eventually he published his own edition of Blackstone with voluminous commentaries on the Commentaries. He was a demanding teacher with rigorous standards, as was his mentor Wythe. Because of the time constraints imposed by his judicial calendar, he covered much ground at a rapid pace. He expected his students to continue their studies between terms and even to operate their own law society to provide experience in courtroom proceedings. “My Trunk had been constantly stored with a variety of literature,” Joseph Cabell wrote a friend, ”but my Table has seldom contained more than Blackstone, Coke and the Virginia Laws.”^[159] If to some Tucker might appear haughty or austere, he was respected and by no means inhospitable. “Tucker has us under the whip, he has been remarkably polite to me. I have dined there several times since my arrival here.”^[160]

Tucker had two main purposes: to give these future leaders of Virginia, perhaps of the nation, the ability to understand the nature and workings of government so that as participants or as citizens they could judge accurately the performance of those in authority. Secondly, he intended to build upon Wythe’s foundation and make the study of law a highly structured professional training, based upon what would be called today a liberal arts background, as indeed Blackstone himself had advised. Together, Wythe and Tucker gave to formal legal training in the United States the character it would have for many years and in some respects still has.^[161]

Tucker is remembered not only for his Blackstone and his law course, among other things, but for his “Dissertation on Slavery,” a plan that grew out of his law lectures. He presented his proposal to the General Assembly in 1796, hoping that its extreme gradualism might attract a majority by appealing to the lowest common denominator of antislavery sentiment. Tucker was far less exceptional for his dislike of slavery, which was shared by many of Virginia’s leading men, than for his attempt to secure legislative approval for a specific plan of emancipation. Jefferson complimented Tucker on his essay, while questioning his failure to consider what should be done with the freed blacks. This was the sticking point that made abolition so unthinkable for large numbers of his fellow citizens and would give rise to the quixotic American Colonization Society twenty years later. St George Tucker had preferred the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution; he was an unequivocal defender of state sovereignty and the right of secession as well as an enemy of slavery.^[162] In the 1830s another Tucker in the chair of law, his son Nathaniel Beverley, would defend slavery as well as state sovereignty, and the College itself, under the leadership of Thomas Roderick Dew, would be seen as an intellectual bulwark of both.

The Good, if Reluctant, Shepherd:
Nunc Dimittis

In the autumn of 1807, Bishop Madison asked Thomas Jefferson to appoint him collector of customs at the port of Norfolk. The recipient of this request must have been startled; the collector’s office, always a magnet for sharp practices and outright corruption, was the last place one would expect to find a clergyman. It was a pathetic plea. “Hitherto I have laboured for others; but not for myself. It is not then to be wondered at, that I should seek for an office, which may offer some emolument, & eventually, perhaps, be confer’d upon my Son.”^[163] It was to be a sinecure. John, his son, would do the actual work and would thus be able to leave his position with a Baltimore mercantile firm and be spared the dangerous voyages that caused his father much anxiety.^[164] As it happened, the president had offered the collectorship to someone else.^[165]

This was by no means the first time Madison had considered leaving the College, either to take the presidency of one of several institutions that from time to time sought his services or simply to retire. By the 1790s his faith in William and Mary ‘s future was sinking fast. For Madison and the College, as for the moribund church Madison headed, the times were out of joint. In an era of Anglophobia, here was a College founded by the British monarchs whose names it still bore, dedicated at birth to propagating the state religion. Independence had broken official ties, and the Tory faculty members had departed. But there remained others in Anglican orders and a president who had been consecrated a bishop by the See of Canterbury. This did not sit well with many Virginians. Even while subjects of the crown, they had seen little need for an indigenous prelate, having done very well without one for quite a long time.^[166] “When I speak of the Bishop I feel the highest veneration for his character as a Man, but I like him not better for his canonicals, they will not let men be enough of Republicans—besides he went to Great Britain for the exalted station. Now who wou’d ever be sent to Heaven by such a people?” So said John Tyler, father of the future president of the United States and later governor of Virginia and a member of the Board.^[167] Moreover, the bishop confirmed the hostility of Protestant evangelicals by his unsuccessful fight to hold on to the church’s glebe lands, and he offended believers in strict separation of church and state by urging tax support for all denominations. True, the Board had abolished the divinity chairs in 1779, but then, as pointed out, thirteen years later had instituted a divinity degree and made prayers compulsory.^[168]

Conversely, where liberals saw a relic of monarchy and an established church, conservatives saw a hotbed of freethinking, Francophilism, and disorder. Led by a living anomaly, a Jeffersonian bishop, suspected by both ends of the ideological spectrum, William and Mary had something to offend everyone. The resulting lack of political support, especially Jefferson’s, reduced to the vanishing point the College’s chances of replacing its lost public revenues.^[169]

With the conservatives in a majority on the Board of Visitors, Madison began to look for an escape. By the early 1790s Jefferson was talking about a new university “in some central position.” The bishop had heard that the other Madison might soon retire from Congress and run for the General Assembly. Might he not become the “Patron & advocate” of this plan? If it came to fruition, it might affect his cousin’s future. He had been thinking of retiring to “some comfortable little Farm in a healthy Part of the Country.”^[170] A few weeks later, he repeated his wish to see such a university started and expressed hope that Jefferson and Madison would join forces to promote it. Virginia needed a top-to-bottom renovation of its educational system, “a mode of education, which shall tend to strengthen and not depress the mental faculties” and thus conduct the mind from infancy onward to “real science.”^[171] He was ready to abandon the College if it could be replaced by something better, a new institution where there would undoubtedly be a place for him. The purpose of education, as Madison conceived of it, was to produce good Christians and good republicans, the one necessarily also being the other. In the late 1790s, he wrote Jefferson, “I am persuaded Republicanism can never acquire the Ascendency it ought in this Country, until a plan of Education, somewhat similar to yours is carried into Effect with Sincerity & Ardour.”^[172] He still had in mind a new, or at least a relocated institution as part of such a system. “A college fixed in the middle of the State, & conducted upon a plan, such an experiment [based upon] a real knowledge of the proper method of instructing youth (the most different possible from any hitherto pursued) [would] be an object highly worthy of legislative consideration. Until such a seminary, such a university be formed, Virginia will never acquire the preeminence, which may, & ought to distinguish her.”^[173]

The legislature showed no signs of founding a new university, and a few months after his letter to Jefferson, Madison told some of his students that he intended to leave the College soon.^[174] He perhaps had in mind an invitation to assume the presidency of Columbia College. He had made inquiries and discovered that the duties were “by no means laborious,” but he had not made up his mind what he would do.^[175] Less than a year later, he received another offer, this time from Transylvania College in Kentucky, not far from where his brother lived. Madison began to plan a visit to that state when summer came.^[176]

But he did not go to Columbia or Transylvania. His health was declining, his weariness growing. He hoped for rest, not new responsibilities. In 1803 he removed himself from consideration for another presidency. “I am anxious for Retirement. But when, or how that desirable object is to be attained is the Difficulty.”^[177] The burdens he had been carrying for many years began to tell. The demands upon his strength when acting quite literally in loco parentis, his often heavy teaching schedule, the management of College affairs generally—all these would have been more than enough to absorb the energies of a robust constitution, something the bishop had never possessed.^[178] Added to these were his labors over the years as a member of the Insane Asylum’s governing board, and of course his episcopal and pastoral duties which, although they diminished as the church dwindled, still deducted from a finite supply of vitality.^[179] Madison could not bring himself to surrender the episcopate, surely one reason he had been reluctant to accept a position outside Virginia, and his 1805 request for the appointment of an assistant bishop to help carry the load was not granted.^[180] And all the while the dropsy and congestive heart failure that would eventually prove fatal slowly grew more debilitating.^[181]

Most troubling was the state of the College, which showed no signs of improvement. There was a budget deficit in 1806 and another was in the making in 1807. In the latter year, the science society and museum project had fallen through, and Girardin had left to teach school in Richmond. The chair of modem languages vacant, the chair of medicine long since defunct, the fame of the chair of law now only a glimmer from the past—no wonder Madison wrote Jefferson with his strange request to be made collector at Norfolk.

The struggle continued for five more years. Then in the last weeks of 1811 his weakened heart rapidly gave way. Toward the end of January he made his will, and on March 6, 1812, in his sixty-second year, he died. Dr. Philip Barraud, a very old friend, wrote St. George Tucker, “I am deeply affected by your last Letter in many ways. The recital of our Friend’s Death, altho Expected, has agitated my Heart. … I am really of [the] opinion, my dear Tucker, that I have perhaps never known a man capable of as active virtues and usefulness, as the late Bishop Madison, who was altogether made up of such chaste, mild and amiable materials; or who, while he possessed the perfect refinement and even elegance of a Gentleman, never departed from an original simplicity of Deportment that seemed to owe all to Nature.”^[182] President Madison was buried in the chapel of the building where he had taught for nearly forty years.^[183] He was finally at rest, and still at the College.