For all the anxiety and uncertainty of the 1870s, life did go on at the College. In fact, despite the upheaval of the war and the suspension of classes in 1868–69, the continuities with both the prewar and immediate postwar periods were more striking than the changes. The curriculum, faculty responsibilities, College governance, student discipline, intellectual and social activities—in none of these areas was there significant innovation.

The Curriculum and Faculty in the 1870s

In July 1871 a New York Times editorial entitled “The ‘New Departure’ in Colleges” praised many schools for adding more science to the curriculum and moving away from the traditional emphasis on Greek, Latin, and pure mathematics.^[1] William and Mary was not part of this trend. The first three departments listed under “Course of Instruction” in the 1874 catalog were Latin, Greek, and mathematics.^[2] True, Ewell had fought to hire Richard Wise to improve instruction in natural sciences, but the College’s meager resources limited what Wise could do. One former student recalled his course as interesting but not very advanced because of the lack of necessary equipment.^[3] And the Grammar School master, J. Wilmer Turner, reported to his brother in 1870:

Dr. Wise teaches Chemistry some three hours a week. … He also teaches or is expected to teach Physiology. You will doubtless see more set down in the catalogue; but … Professors do not teach all they profess to be able to teach.^[4]

Wise’s service as librarian, college physician, and, later, his off-campus attempts to supplement his salary may also have lessened his impact as a science instructor.

In any case, only the bachelor of philosophy degree, which one graduate described as a consolation prize for those who were able to attain proficiency in just two departments instead of the usual four, allowed a student to omit Greek and Latin.^[5] The bachelor of arts, still a three-year program, required at least one year’s work in all departments.

During the 1870s the master of arts was the only four-year degree at the College, and unlike its modern equivalent, it required additional breadth rather than advanced work in a single discipline. Three of the five prescribed courses were in mathematics; the other two were advanced metaphysics and English literature. In addition, students had to demonstrate proficiency in two modern languages. Candidates for all three degrees had to submit a final essay to be read at commencement, if the faculty so desired.^[6]

The faculty controlled the curriculum as they did most other aspects of campus life. Management of the College property, as well as “the care, government, and instruction of the students,” came within their purview, according to the College laws. Although their actions were “subject to the inspection, direction and statutes of the Visitors and Governors,” the president and professors exercised the day-to-day authority at the institution. In modern terms, they were the administration.^[7]

Meeting weekly, the faculty dealt with everything from academic requirements to student discipline to the College’s economic problems. As there were as yet no academic ranks, and no faculty member in the 1870s had an earned doctorate, they met more or less as equals. Age, experience, or force of personality might strengthen the influence of one or another individual, but only the president enjoyed special powers. He had general supervision over the affairs of the College, served as chief spokesman for the institution, and presided over faculty meetings. In those meetings he was empowered by the College laws to cast a second vote to break a tie. He could also call a special meeting, as could any other two professors.^[8] Many of the president’s duties involved additional responsibilities rather than additional authority; his administrative tasks came on top of his academic work. Rather than standing apart from the rest of the faculty, he was, as Ewell had once said of young Frank Preston, first among equals.

When the College reopened in October 1869, the Board and the faculty agreed that each professor should spend at least three hours a day in the classroom. Recitations would begin at 9:00 a.m., and there would be no Saturday classes.^[9] However, the small enrollment quickly frustrated these plans; there were simply not enough students to keep all faculty members fully employed. Responding to complaints about professorial absences from the College, Ewell admitted to the Board in July 1871 that he had not been able to enforce the three-hour-a-day rule. To counter the criticism, he gave a detailed accounting of every faculty member’s activities for the 1870–71 session.^[10]

Wharton and McCandlish, each of whom was responsible for two languages, did, in fact, teach three hours a day, and neither had missed more than a day or two of classes. Wilmer and Snead had only two regular courses, but Wilmer taught a Bible class on Sundays and led the daily chapel services; he had been absent a few days because of illness.^[11] Snead ‘s classes consumed about one and a half hours a day, and he did have outside employment both as a surveyor and as a land company agent, a position Ewell confessed he had advised Snead to accept. Like Snead, Richard Wise also had other commitments. His three science classes required only two hours a day, so he practiced medicine in town. In addition, he missed two or three weeks at the beginning of the session, during which time Ewell taught two of his classes. Again Ewell defended the professor. He explained that Wise had offered to resign when he discovered he would have to be away from campus for more than a few days in the fall, but Ewell had rejected the offer. Finally, Ewell reported that he himself had only one very small class in natural philosophy that required about three hours a week in instructional time. Moreover, he had been out of town for approximately eight weeks to lobby for the College in both Richmond and Washington.^[12]

Although the College laws clearly forbade a professor to engage in any occupation that interfered with his teaching, Ewell realized that he had to allow underpaid and underutilized faculty members to supplement their incomes if he hoped to keep them at William and Mary.^[13]  His own travels, he believed, were essential to the survival of the institution.

Ewell’s strong defense deflected the complaints for the time being, and in the fall of 1871, he helped push through a controversial faculty resolution designed to employ the professors more fully. He proposed that in addition to William and Mary’s existing preparatory department, each collegiate department should establish its own preparatory classes “for such students as can enter some regular College Department.” These classes would be taught “by the Professors of the respective Departments, when their regular classes do not give them three hours of recitation per day.”^[14]

The faculty divided evenly on this motion. Wilmer and Wise voted in the affirmative with the president, while Snead, McCandlish, and Wharton opposed it. Ewell thereupon cast his second, presidential vote, and the resolution carried, four to three. The dissenters, who argued that these new classes would both lower standards at the College and put it in direct competition with its own Grammar and Mattey School, questioned the legality of the resolution. Only the Board of Visitors, they contended, had the authority to make such a change. Ewell agreed to submit the dispute to the Board, and in mid-November the faculty formally asked the Visitors to meet on this issue as soon as possible.^[15] “There is no personal difficulty whatever,” Ewell assured Grigsby. “The policy & legality of the Faculty action are doubted & honestly so.”

All the same, Ewell knew that it was essential for the Board to uphold his authority, as exercised through the faculty. “It is absolutely necessary, for subordination, that the Visitors define to some extent, the powers of the Faculty over its members,” he told Grigsby. “For each member … to do as he pleases, may give satisfaction, but not as men are generally constituted, success.”^[16] When the Board met in December, it endorsed the disputed resolution and affirmed the right of the legal majority of the faculty to set policy for its members. The Visitors also received McCandlish’s resignation and authorized Ewell to make another trip to Washington to work for an indemnity.^[17] For all his amiable, apparently easygoing manner and his lack of well-defined presidential powers, Ewell was clearly the dominant force at William and Mary.^[18]

In what was perhaps another move to quiet their critics, the faculty voted in October 1871 to return to Saturday recitations. A schedule from this period shows classes running from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Saturday. Most courses met for three hours a week, except for junior Latin and intermediate mathematics, both of which had five meetings, and junior mathematics, which required six.^[19] As full as the schedule looked on paper, however, the reality remained that the College had neither enough students nor enough money to support the faculty. Even McCandlish’s departure did not solve the problem.

In June of 1872, Ewell reported to the Board that the faculty would have to be reduced to four professors and one assistant if annual salaries were to be kept from dropping below $800. He did not want to see any professorships abolished; they could just be left vacant, and the remaining faculty members would offer the necessary courses. He suggested that Professor Wharton be asked to take over McCandlish ‘s Latin and French classes. Ewell apparently persuaded his colleagues of the wisdom, or at least the necessity of his plan because they all joined him in a letter of resignation to the Board, an action intended, they said, to give the Visitors a free hand in reorganizing the College.^[20]

The Board accepted the resignations and then promptly rehired everyone except the unfortunate Snead. General Taliaferro argued for five professors, but the majority favored Ewell’s proposal. The Visitors set the salaries for the president and the professors at $800, with a $200 supplement for Wilmer to compensate for his extra classes. Both Ewell and Wise acquired new titles; Ewell became professor of mathematics as well as natural philosophy, and Wise became Ewell’s assistant in natural philosophy while retaining his professorship of chemistry and physiology. Wise’s salary actually rose by $100, but Ewell, who no longer received extra money for his work as president, Wilmer, and Wharton all suffered pay cuts.^[21] A year later in July 1873, the Board resolved that salaries for the president and professors should henceforth be $1,000. Unfortunately, the College was so frequently in arrears for the rest of the decade that it rarely met its contractual obligations. In the summer of 1875, the faculty described themselves as “laboring for the minimum amount of salary upon which they [could] live,” and by the late 1870s they were being asked to accept College bonds for up to half of their pay.^[22] For the 1877–78 session they were guaranteed only $500 in cash and for the next year a mere $400.^[23] Even that tiny amount did not materialize during the following session. “To support himself & family Dr. Wharton has recd but 200 Dolls. since July 1st 1879,” Ewell told the Visitors in August 1880. “He needs the balance 200 Dolls. due him, and so does Dr. Wise, his 150 Dolls.” Ewell, too, was in straitened circumstances.^[24]

To say that the faculty lived frugally is an obvious understatement. For a time, both Wilmer and Wise occupied the President’s House, while Ewell frequently stayed at his farm outside of town.^[25] Other professors boarded at the College Hotel or with local families. Fortunately for their morale , they were not alone in their penury. As one student remembered Williamsburg in 1870, “Everything betokened poverty and paralysis.”^[26] Howev er small and irregular their salaries, faculty members had at least the promise of an income. Moreover, the hope of obtaining the federal indemnity that Ewell pursued so zealously year after year periodically raised their spirit, as did various schemes for increasing the enrollment. But success proved elusive. Accumulating disappointments gradually eroded their faith, and the steadily worsening economic position of the College finally disheartened even the most dedicated among them.

Wilmer left in August 1876 to take a chair at the University of the South in Sewaee, Tennessee.^[27]  His replacement as professor of belles lettres, the young Lyon G. Tyler, son of former United States president and former chancellor of the College, John Tyler, remained only a little more than a year.^[28] Wise, who had several times sought other positions, even as he labored to keep the College afloat, finally resigned in August 1880 after he became assistant physician at the asylum.^[29] Wharton stayed for another year before he, too, conceded defeat.^[30]

As the full professors departed, one by one, several assistants and adjuncts filled in for varying lengths of time. Charles S. Dod, master of the Grammar School, also served as adjunct professor of Latin, French, and mathematics in 1874–75 and then as professor of those subjects the next year—until he collapsed under the weight of his frenetic schedule. As student Warner Taliaferro explained to his father in early May 1876:

Mr. Dod, who lost his mind about a month ago, is expected at the Asylum in a few days; he … is now considered incurable. Over-work the Drs say—at the time of his attack, besides attending to his College duties he was writing a Latin grammar, a French grammar, a novel, & various articles of a scientific nature for magazine publication: so that he only slept 4 out of the twenty-four hours.^[31]

Student J. Cannon Hobson, Henry Wise’s grandson, covered many of Dod’s classes until the end of the session.^[32] Another student, the brilliant Jennings Wise Garnett, served as assistant professor of belles lettres and metaphysics during his third year at the College in 1876–77.^[33] When Tyler resigned in November 1878, the College hired the Reverend Dr. Henry Wall of Bruton Parish to lecture on philosophy for not more than $100.^[34] And at Ewell’s insistence, 1876 graduate William G. Jones returned to William and Mary in 1880 to teach the elementary classes in several departments. He remained until the summer of 1883, when poverty forced him to resign. “I wanted to help Col. Ewell and the College as much as I could,” he recalled many years later; “but, I got so little money that I could not afford to stay longer.”^[35] In the end, only Benjamin Ewell stayed at his post during the interregnum when the College ceased to offer collegiate classes between 1881 and 1888.

The Grammar and Mattey School

While Ewell and the Visitors struggled to keep the College alive, the history and fortunes of the Grammar School diverged from those of the collegiate program.^[36] The two rooms of the new school erected by the Visitors in 1870 accommodated 34 students under the tutelage of J. Wilmer Turner in the first session, but the enrollment dipped to 27 and 28 in the two succeeding years, after Williamsburg launched its public school system in early 1871. From February to June of that year, the three city teachers—one black male and two white females—taught 40 black children and 35 whites in rented rooms or existing private schools.^[37]  The small amount of money that came in from the state went for teachers’ salaries while the city council paid the rent and operating expenses. The next year enrollments rose to 119 blacks and 193 whites, again with three teachers and rented rooms.^[38]

Given the difficulty of finding adequate space for the city’s pupils, the small enrollments at the Grammar School, and the limited funds available to both the city and the College, it is not surprising that the school board soon approached Ewell and the faculty about a joint effort. In August 1873 the board asked to use the Mattey School for the next academic year, in return for taking over the College’s obligations to the Whaley Trust. It promised the faculty a voice in the conduct and staffing of the school. Ewell agreed, provided that the curriculum included Greek and Latin and that fifteen students were designated Mattey Scholars on the recommendation of the College faculty. He also insisted on proper maintenance of the building and furniture. With this agreement, the Grammar and Mattey School became Williamsburg’s white male public school, an arrangement that continued for the next eleven years.^[39]

Although details of this town-gown venture are few, cooperation may have been made easier by the fact that the chairman of the school board from 1873 to 1882 was William H. E. Morecock, the longtime secretary of the Board of Visitors.^[40] In addition, most of the teachers had some connection with William and Mary, either as students or faculty members. Charles S. Dod was the first master of the new school in 1873–74, but after one year he became an adjunct instructor at the College. Several of his successors—M. L. Lipscomb, Carter H. Harrison, Sydney Smith, and J. R. Copeland had equally brief tenures. William G. Jones taught for one year after he graduated from William and Mary in 1876 and again in 1883–84, after he had returned to Williamsburg to help Ewell tutor young men when the College suspended operations. Cary P. Armistead’s four years, from 1877 to 1881, represented the longest commitment during this period.^[41]

In September 1884, with the fourteen-year-old building needing renovation and modifications and the College closed, the school board made a new arrangement with President Ewell. The College consented to lease the Grammar School lot and building to the city for ten years beginning October 1, 1884, “for the education of white children—male and female—by white teachers,” again with the proviso that the College faculty would nominate fifteen indigent children from Bruton Parish each year. For its part, the school board would see to the needed repairs and return the property in good condition when the lease expired.^[42] Although this agreement later occasioned a bitter clash between the city and the College, in the mid-1880s it seemed an eminently sensible arrangement. Otherwise, it is difficult to see how the College could have honored the terms of Mary Whaley’ s bequest.

The Grammar and Mattey School teacher and principal from 1884 to the turn of the century was William and Mary graduate John S. Charles, who enjoyed the friendship of both President Ewell and Richard Wise. (Wise served on the school board for four years during the 1880s.) In fact, during the interregnum Charles and his family lived in the Brafferton rent free, in return for protecting the College property.^[43]

Life in the Classrooms

Despite the economic difficulties and uncertain prospects of both the College and Williamsburg, the students from the 1870s had fond memories of their days at William and Mary. Many, in fact, became loyal alumni who devoted considerable time, energy, and political skill to revitalizing the College over the next several decades. Their small numbers, shared experiences, and close ties to both faculty members and townspeople seem to have created a strong sense of obligation to the institution. Even those who had attended classes for only a year or two proudly acknowledged William and Mary as their alma mater.

One particularly active graduate from the early 1870s was Robert Morton Hughes, a prominent Norfolk lawyer and state Republican leader, who served on the Board of Visitors from 1893 to 1918 and as its president after 1905.^[44] Several men who finished their studies in 1876 staunchly supported the old College. James L. Gordon of Albemarle County was a Board member from 1888 to 1893. The popular Democratic orator, lawyer, and amateur historian Beverley B. Munford also served on the Board; his widow, educational reformer and political activist Mary-Cooke Branch Munford, became William and Mary’s first woman Visitor in 1920.^[45] Both Warner T. L. Taliaferro, one of General Taliaferro’s sons, and William G. Stanard of Richmond, head of the Virginia Historical Society and editor of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, remained good friends of the College. In addition, L. Winder Lane, Jr., a student between 1877 and 1879, was twice secretary to the Board of Visitors and College treasurer; his contemporary, poet and literary critic Charles W. Coleman, a son of Cynthia Coleman, served as College librarian for five years. Other local graduates from the Peachy, Armistead, Spencer, and Brooks families also maintained a lifelong interest in William and Mary.

The eventual success of many of these men and their abiding loyalty to the College would seem to speak well for the education they received from the small, underpaid faculty. But, in truth, the content and quality of the academic work done during this period are difficult to determine. Alumni memoirs and reminiscences recount innumerable tales of pranks, sports, disciplinary scrapes, and social occasions for every glimpse of classroom work or serious study. Surviving student correspondence exhibits a similar pattern, and letters of faculty members are only sporadically revealing. Any picture of the academic life of the College is necessarily fragmentary and impressionistic.

Beverley Munford, who candidly admitted that he preferred parties to studying, nevertheless remembered receiving a thorough indoctrination in Jeffersonian principles of limited government from Professor Wilmer. He learned the evils of any interference with contracts and commerce, the dangers of special privilege, and the overriding importance of individual liberty. He also recalled his Latin courses, especially Virgil, with some pleasure , and he credited the College with strengthening his love of history. Greek and mathematics were less to his liking.^[46]

Warner Taliaferro also had trouble with Greek and mathematics. In January 1875 he told his father that he had almost dropped Greek because he was struggling as the only preparatory student in with the junior class. But when the professor set aside an hour for him to recite by himself, he began to improve. He still complained about overwork, however, with two French, two German, two mathematics, and one Latin class, in addition to the Greek.^[47] A month later he repeated his plaint to his mother and at the same time revealed that students did not always have as much freedom to choose their courses as the catalog implied. “As if I had not enough already,” he wrote, “Col. Ewell has made me take two classes of Math the thing of all others which I most despise.”^[48] Whether Taliaferro’s class work was as onerous as he claimed in these appeals for parental sympathy like Beverley Munford, enjoyed an active social life. He also tried to keep abreast of current affairs, especially when his father was a candidate for lieutenant governor on 1875.^[49]

Perhaps because of his later service on the Board of Visitors, Robert M. Hughes paid more attention to the academic side of College life in his reminiscences than many of his fellow alumni did. He had positive memories of Professors Wharton, McCandlish, and Wise; and although he thought Wilmer “was not as approachable as the others, due partly to the fact he was a minister,” he singled out the clergyman’s belles lettres course, which covered rhetoric and composition, for praise.^[50]

Wilmer also touched the life of the Grammar School master, J. Wilmer Turner, who went on to become an Episcopalian minister. During his first year at William and Mary, Turner studied privately with Wilmer, reciting for him every Friday night He speculated that religious education lay closest to Wilmer’ s heart. “I believe it to be Dr. W’s earnest desire, not to say ambition, to establish a sort of Seminary here (of which I may be the firstfruits, if I remain),” he told his brother.^[51] Wilmer’s dream is perhaps one measure of the optimism with which William and Mary reopened in 1869; it withered soon enough.

Although many former students paid tribute to Benjamin Ewell’s character and influence, surprisingly few discussed him as a classroom teacher. One of Professor Wilmer’s sons, C. Breckinridge, who graduated in 1876 and also became a minister, remembered Ewell as “a genial, kindly old gentleman; an excellent mathematician; and a professor who took personal interest in his students.”^[52] Another alumnus described the president as “droll and sometimes smutty,” but agreed that he was devoted to his charges.^[53] The students reciprocated fully. In William Stanard’s words, “‘Old Buck’ loved the College and his boys with equal fervor and received from the students full measure in return.”^[54]

Fortunately, George P. Coleman, another of Cynthia Coleman’s sons who studied with Ewell in the mid-1880s while the College was closed, added some realistic detail to this chorus of praise. Coleman concurred that Ewell was “a wonderful teacher,” even though his favorite injunction to Coleman was, “‘Go to the board, you little ass.'” Ewell worked his charges hard. “I would meet him at 10 o’clock in the morning and stay in one continuous class until two that afternoon,” Coleman recalled. “He would take up first one thing and then another.” Even on days when he had a hangover, the president would simply put a cold cloth on his forehead and go on with his teaching. Innovative and versatile, Ewell knew how to bring a student’s talent to the fore and how to make him think for himself. He also knew how to make a subject interesting. When instructing Coleman in mathematics, for example, he had the boy study ballistics and shoot the sun with a sextant, appealing activities for a teenager. Coleman, who went on to a career in road building and politics—he was state highway commissioner from 1913 to 1923—believed that Ewell gave him a solid foundation for his later work, especially in the principles of engineering.^[55]

Some of the students who encountered Ewell near the end of his career also worked with his successor at the beginning of his association with the College. Though later generations of William and Mary graduates would remember Lyon G. Tyler as notoriously distracted and absentminded, he was an alert and enthusiastic young professor in 1877. Acutely aware that he would be learning a great deal as he taught his classes, Tyler was pleased to discover that the library was well stocked in his field. He was gratified, too, to have his own key, so that he could consult the books at will. (Such free access was an important perquisite, for the library was open only two hours a week.)^[56] When the session began in mid-October, Tyler learned that he would probably have two classes, with a lecture every morning from nine to ten. He described his teaching style in terms familiar to novice instructors everywhere:

As to speech-making, I do very little of that. My lectures come too often for me to pretend to write or prepare, in anyway, a set speech. … I find however (tho’ I am not naturally fluent) that I express myself tolerably well; & I hope to improve as the session goes on.^[57]

Whatever inspiration young Tyler might have provided for his students was cut short by his resignation early in the 1878–79 session. (He had only two students in his senior class and eight in the junior group that fall.) He thought he had enjoyed some success as a professor, and Ewell, Wise, and Wharton all commended his teaching upon his departure, but no student accounts of his classes seem to have survived.^[58]

If most of those who attended William and Mary in the 1870s retained little more than a few principles of their favorite subjects and scattered memories of colorful faculty members, they may not have differed much from most of their contemporaries. College education at that time was still as much about building character as about imparting specialized knowledge.^[59] Even Benjamin Ewell never claimed that William and Mary offered more than the beginnings of a good education. Many classes emphasized drill and rote learning. There was little emphasis on library work; not only were the hours extremely limited, but students could check out no more than two books at a time for a maximum of two weeks.^[60] Mental discipline was more important than creativity. Yet the hours of recitation in Latin, Greek, mathematics, philosophy, rhetoric, modern languages, and science prepared many of the post-Civil War students to read law, attend seminary, or undertake further study at the University of Virginia.

Student Discipline and Social Life

The student life these men recalled so warmly was austere by modern standards, with minimally furnished classrooms and living quarters and a long list of “Laws for the Government of Students.”^[61] Robert Hughes, who matriculated in the fall of 1870, remembered the lecture rooms as having nothing more than long benches. His room in the College Hotel was heated by a wood fire and lighted by kerosene lamps. “Most of the students were so poor they carried their own wood and water to their rooms, but [Hughes’s and his roommate’s] combined wealth enabled [them] to hire a negro boy for a trifling sum.” Meals he described as lacking in variety but substantial, and like other residents of and visitors to Williamsburg, he recalled with pleasure the area’s abundant fish, oysters, and game.^[62] Students who boarded at the Wythe House with Henry Wise’s daughter, Mrs. A. J. Hobson, or at the Tucker House, run by Mrs. Coleman, may have enjoyed greater comfort and access to Williamsburg social life than those who lived at the College Hotel. Warner Taliaferro, for example, told his father in January 1875 that he had enjoyed a splendid Christmas season because, as a boarder at Mrs. Hobson’s, he was invited to everything.^[63]

The rules governing student behavior ranged from specific prohibitions against dueling, possessing deadly weapons, gambling, becoming intoxicated, and using profanity to general exhortations to industrious, respectful, gentlemanly conduct. Students could not give parties or travel more than five miles from Williamsburg without permission, nor could any of them deliver a public speech until it had been “revised and approved by the President.” In virtually all areas, the faculty had the final say. Even without solid evidence, they could dismiss any student who “habitually” neglected his studies, was “addicted to any vice or immorality,” or set a bad example for his fellow students. Moreover, one catchall regulation specified that the faculty had the power “to forbid and punish any offences against good order or propriety not herein enumerated.”^[64]

On paper students had no rights, yet discipline, at least as alumni recalled it years later, was neither terribly strict nor harsh. The laws themselves provided that “a candid confession of a fault and a promise of amendment may, in most cases, mitigate the punishment or entirely prevent it.”^[65] In addition, several people remembered cases in which President Ewell allowed convicted offenders to spend their suspensions on his farm.^[66] On occasion, he also helped miscreants escape the wrath of townspeople, as when he advised friends of the young man who “threw a dead owl up the aisle of the Methodist Church” during a Sunday night service to spirit him out of town.^[67] Ewell’s reprimands were often so kindly that students believed he actually enjoyed their high jinks.^[68]

Some alumni reminiscences made no mention of the laws; what they recalled instead was a broadly shared code of conduct. According to Beverley Munford, who attended both the Grammar School and the College, “in all matters of deportment [the students] were simply admonished to observe the standards which control gentlemen.”^[69] There was no ordinance against a student’s drinking, ” Warner Taliaferro remembered, “but he was supposed to drink like a gentleman.” (Drunkenness, however, was grounds for expulsion.)^[70] The Honor System had not been codified in 1875, when William Stanard attended the College, but the older students helped orient the newcomers to the institutional standards. “We were simply made to understand that there were several things William & Mary men couldn’t do, viz: lie to professors (which included pledges at examinations) and cheat at cards.”^[71]  Students also enforced the code. “There were no student councils or formal trials” in Robert Hughes’s day; but “the student who did anything dishonorable was either boycotted or, if the offense was a grave one, was told to leave College.”^[72]

Recollections differed as to the amount of drinking and card playing among the students. Archie Brooks thought that there was not a lot, although he agreed with Robert Hughes that Williamsburg had an abundance of bars. Students were forbidden to visit “any tavern or tippling house” without permission, but in those days even the grocery stores sold whiskey.^[73] William G. Jones, who may have been a purer spirit than most, claimed that Williamsburg had only a few saloons, and he recalled very little student drinking and card playing.^[74] In contrast, William Stanard remembered “a good deal of drinking and card playing,” mainly among the older students.^[75] Warner Taliaferro noted that “all of us students drank a little.”^[76] In fact, young Taliaferro once upset his mother by mentioning that he had been invited to Mr. Peachy’s house to drink “hot whiskey punch & play ‘seven up’ for five cents a corner.” When she expressed alarm, he quickly assured her that he would never gamble and emphasized the pious atmosphere at the Wythe House. (Mrs. Hobson expected all her boarders to attend her Sunday morning Bible class.) As a final argument—which his mother may not have found especially comforting—he reported that “Williamsburg is very much changed (from all accounts) since last year. [T]hey say that there is not one half of the drinking and gambling here this session [1874–75] that there was last year.”^[77] Despite these disclaimers, President Ewell noted in his report for 1875–76 that there had been more card playing than usual during the session, and he urged the Board to ban cards and any other games of chance on College premises.^[78]

As to the pranks students played, there was greater consensus. Stealing the clapper from the College bell was a perennial favorite, as were decorating the professors’ lecture rooms and dressing up the statue of Lord Botetourt.^[79] Most of the alumni denied that any hazing occurred, but all recalled various tricks played on the new students.^[80] Local residents were also targets of student antics, such as the elaborate process known as either “setting the town aright” or “putting the town to rights,” which actually involved disrupting the community as thoroughly as possible in a single night. Warner Taliaferro remembered changing gates and putting carts or buggies on top of buildings, and William Stanard described “a beautiful job” from his student days: “Wagons, carts, carriages … a dozen large outhouses (on some of which lawyers’ and doctors’ signs were placed), and various other obstacles, blocked the street from the church yard wall over to the fence on the other side.”^[81]

Archie Brooks recounted an even more spectacular prank from his time at the College. One April Fools’ Day eve the students built an enormous bonfire behind the center of the Main Building and raised the alarm at one minute past midnight. Residents awoke to see flames shooting high into the air above the old buildings, and recalling past disasters, rushed to the campus to try to save whatever they could of the structures and their contents. They were furious when they discovered the hoax.^[82]

Fortunately for the denizens of Williamsburg, the students were not always in such high spirits. Gashes between town and gown were the exception, not the rule. Most of the time, the young men, their professors, and the local citizens got along quite well. According to Robert Hughes, “there was no town-gown hostility; for town and gown were one and not separate bodies.”^[83] Cooperation and interdependence characterized the religious, social, and intellectual life of the community. Students used many of the town’s facilities, and residents often attended campus events.

Although the faculty in the fall of 1869 made attendance at daily prayers in the chapel optional, according to the laws, all students were expected to worship at one of the Williamsburg churches on Sunday morning.^[84] Throughout the 1870s students remained overwhelmingly Episcopalian, Methodist, and Baptist, with a few scattered Presbyterians and Disciples of Christ enrolled from time to time. There were also two Catholics, one “Christian,” and a single Jewish student, Zach Hofheimer of Norfolk, who attended for two sessions, from 1869 to 1871.^[85] Students indicated their religious preference at matriculation, and they were expected to maintain that affiliation. However, William Stanard recalled that because many of the town’s prettiest girls attended Bruton Parish, a lot of the boys became Episcopalians for the duration.^[86] The fact that they could escort young ladies to Sunday night services may also have brought students into churches they would not otherwise have attended.^[87]

The purely social occasions where students and townspeople mingled included plays, minstrel shows, musicals, parties, and dances. The dramatic presentations, utilizing the talents of both groups, attracted enthusiastic audiences whether they were mounted in the chapel at the College or the auditorium at the asylum. One alumnus remembered Archie Brooks beating the bones in the minstrel shows, and Warner Taliaferro recalled two student-produced operettas—Grasshopper and Vasco da Gama—at the asylum. The students staged “a comic opera” in the chapel in 1876 and offered a joint town-gown production of The Lady of Lyons during the 1877 commencement festivities. Lyon Tyler gave high marks to a drama presented in April 1878. Although a little hurried, it was “very well acted,” he told his fiancée.^[88]

Most of the parties and a number of the dances occurred in private homes. Students welcomed the invitations , although William Jones thought that “a good many of the boys at the College were not invited into the best social circles.” However, he remembered hearing Van F. Garrett, later one of the Seven Wise Men, play Thomas Jefferson’s violin at some of the dances.^[89] Beverley Munford, who had grown up in Williamsburg, seemed to be welcome everywhere, as were the Taliaferros, the Hobsons, and others with long-standing ties  to William and Mary or links to a powerful local personage such as Mrs. Coleman. Lyon Tyler, as might be expected, was a frequent guest during his brief professorship. In fact, he described “a great party” at Mrs. Coleman’s in June 1878. More than forty people attended; “most came as characters from Dickens’ novels,” and one young woman “made a very smart speech on ‘woman’s rights.’”^[90]

There were also weekly dances at the asylum, and although students could bring dates, they were expected to dance with the convalescing inmates.^[91] “These affairs gave the patients the opportunity to meet and mix with normal people,” Warner Taliaferro recalled.^[92] Apparently, this forward-looking therapy was generally successful, though William Stanard did remember one overenthusiastic young woman who declined to relinquish her partner until the attendants came and carried her off.^[93]

For the intellectually inclined, the town offered literary or reading clubs, one of which had approximately thirty members— “about twenty ladies and half as many gentlemen (students).” The founder and president of this group was Mrs. Hobson, “by far the most enterprising person in town,” according to Warner Taliaferro.^[94] Many more students were involved in the two campus literary societies, the Phoenix and the Philomathean, whose weekly debates and annual celebration also attracted a good number of local residents.

Established before the Civil War, the societies each had a room in the reconstructed Main Building, but the exact details of their revival after the Civil War are not clear. Grammar School master J. Wilmer Turner told his family in the fall of 1869 that  he was ”busily engaged in establishing a literary society in the College, for which I have undertaken to write out a Constitution, By-laws, etc.”^[95] The task proved more difficult than he expected, however, because none of the William and Mary students knew anything about such a society. Moreover, he had created the basic structure from memory and after a few weeks, seemed to doubt its soundness. He asked his  brother to send him printed copies of the constitutions of the societies at the University of Virginia. His brother obliged, and by mid-January 1870 Turner reported, “My ‘Literary Society’ is taking a fresh start & I begin to entertain bright hopes of her future.”^[96] Turner never said whether his society was the Phoenix or the Philomathean, but William Jones claimed in his reminiscences that the Phoenix was reestablished first and that Mrs. Robson’s two sons, J. Cannon and Henry W., who entered the College in 1874, revived the Philomathean. The Hobsons’ friend and boarder, Warner Taliaferro, also helped.^[97]

By the mid-1870s both groups were flourishing. Almost every student belonged to one or the other, and the societies had renewed contact with alumni members such as Colonel Lamb and General Taliaferro. The 1874 constitution for the Philomathean established a one-dollar initiation fee, a one-dollar assessment for the “library fund,” and dues of twenty-five cents a month. There was also a schedule of fines for various minor offenses. The society met every Saturday evening during the session for a debate and joined the Phoenix in a special display of oratory during finals or commencement week.^[98] No comparable Phoenix document has survived, but the group’s fees and regulations must have been very similar to those of the Philomathean.

The questions Philomathean members debated between 1874 and 1876 ranged from the political and historical to the philosophical and psychological. Among the topics for the fall and winter of 1874 were: “Are political parties beneficial to a country?” “Was the fate of Sir Walter Raleigh deserved?” as well as the hoary “Which is mightier, the pen or the sword?” During the next session they considered another ancient query, “Are riches the road to happiness?” in addition to “Should church property be taxed?” and “Is the spanking of a five year old baby too stern a proceeding?”^[99]

The skills honed at these weekly gatherings were put on display at the close of each session, when the students competed for prizes and medals before a large crowd of relatives, friends, and visitors. Beverley Munford, whom his contemporaries considered the best orator of their generation, won “a volume of Shakespeare for excellence in declamation” and “a gold medal” for being the top debater in his society.^[100] That these competitions were an important aspect of finals is one indication of the centrality of the literary societies in the life of the College during these years. Another is the regularity with which members of the Board of Visitors attended these occasions. Grigsby and Lamb, the two diarists among the Visitors, almost always mention celebrations of the literary societies in their accounts of commencement week, even when the Board meetings claimed most of their time.^[101]

A detailed description of the joint celebration in June 1876 can be found in the diary of Chloe Tyler Whittle, a young Norfolk resident who accompanied Visitors O. S. Barten and George Woodbridge to the speaking. “The room [in the Main Building] was brilliantly lighted & soon filled with ladies handsomely dressed in almost ball style,” she recorded. After the society members marched in and answered the roll call, General Gordon’s son, “a pretty little fellow,” gave the salutation. “His speech was of the school boy style,” Whittle judged, but J. Cannon Hobson’s valedictory was a different story. This talented boy of seventeen, who planned to study for the ministry, had already that spring taught several classes in place of the institutionalized Dod. His subject was “Duty,” and he exhorted his fellow students to make it their watchword. He also called for an emphasis on moral and spiritual progress rather than material gain in celebrating the nation’s centennial. “The concluding speech was good,” Whittle said, “but the event of the evening was Mr. Hobson’s oration.”^[102]

The literary society prizes were the only academic honors available to students in the 1870s since Phi Beta Kappa remained largely inactive until 1893. President Ewell and Colonel Lamb tried to revive Alpha of Virginia in the summer of 1875, but surviving records indicate that they held only one meeting. That occurred on July 2, when Ewell, Lamb, and three other pre-Civil War members—Professor Wilmer, General Taliaferro, and the Reverend A M. Randolph, future Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Southern Virginia—gathered at the President’s House to elect officers and select new members. After making Wilmer president and Lamb secretary, they charged Lamb with gathering up all the chapter records he could find and notifying chapters elsewhere of Alpha’s rebirth. The new initiates included faculty members, Visitors, and an alumnus.^[103] Apparently the chapter planned to elect undergraduate members the next year; however, no initiation followed.^[104] Why the 1875 group was unable to sustain the chapter is unclear, though it seems likely that the struggle to save the College, which obviously took priority, absorbed all their time and energy. In 1877 alumnus Robert J. Graves of Philadelphia talked with Colonel Lamb and Hugh Grigsby about calling a Phi Beta Kappa convention, reorganizing the Alpha chapter, and endowing a Phi Beta Kappa professorship at the College, but nothing seems to have come of these proposals either.^[105]

A more frivolous group active in the mid-1870s was the Ugly Club. Brought to the College in 1874 by Jennings Wise Garnett, his brother Yelverton, and T. Ritchie Stone, three new students from Washington, D.C., the club periodically chose the ugliest, the prettiest, the wittiest, and the laziest man on campus as well as the leading ladies’ man. The designated homeliest student received a pair of boots, an honor he was expected to acknowledge in a humorous speech to the club members. The group seems to have been patterned on the Ugly Club at the University of Virginia.^[106]

For their first meeting, the organizers of the William and Mary Ugly Club, acting in the spirit of contrariness they hoped to celebrate, invited Professor Wharton, the faculty member “they considered the least adapted for the purpose,” to address the group. But the man many students thought to be “a scholar of the dry-as-dust order,” with a wintery disposition, turned the tables on his hosts. Without cracking a smile, “for half an hour, he kept the audience in a steady roar of laughter.”^[107] With that unexpectedly auspicious beginning, the club was apparently well launched. Warner Taliaferro remembered that it later held some meetings at the asylum auditorium, and Colonel lamb pronounced the Ugly Club celebration during the 1875 commencement “very entertaining.”^[108]

One other organization that attracted a number of students was the Wise Light Infantry, a local volunteer militia company organized by Richard A. Wise in the summer of 1871.^[109] Although it seemed to function primarily as a social and ceremonial body—helping at the unveiling of a Confederate monument in Richmond, for example, and parading at the state fair—rumors that its members had displayed hostility toward the United States government complicated the College’s campaign for a federal indemnity in 1872. Apparently the company had been unjustly maligned, but President Ewell had to fend off allegations of disloyalty among students and faculty.^[110] The charges are ironic in light of Richard Wise’s eventual conversion to Republicanism. Despite its commander’s changing political affiliations, the Light Infantry continued its activities into the 1880s.^[111]

For the majority of students who did not drill with Richard Wise, there was a variety of other outdoor activities and sports. William Stanard recalled that he and his friends spent much of their spare time out in the country—walking, fishing, and ice skating.^[112] Warner Taliaferro remembered that Wise, in his less militaristic moments, sometimes took students sailing on the York River. In his role as College physician, Wise also on occasion ordered students to take constitutionals in the country to improve their health.^[113] But the sports with the greatest appeal were baseball and football, both played on the Courthouse Green. As the College had no athletic facilities and as there was as yet no intercollegiate competition, most of these contests were decidedly informal.^[114] Sometimes the Grammar School boys challenged the College students; sometimes students took on local residents. In the absence of any “star athletes,” most of the players doubtless demonstrated more enthusiasm than skill.

One of the baseball enthusiasts was James Lyons Taliaferro, Warner’s older brother, who found the sport helped compensate for the general dullness of Williamsburg. In May 1873 he told his father that the students were excited about an upcoming ball game “between the Modocs, a club which we got up about a month ago, & the Raleigh, which is about two years old and composed of men twenty five years old but very much out of practice.” However the Modocs fared that day, young Taliaferro was still “much occupied” with “Base Ball” a year later.^[115]

Although the game Taliaferro and his friends played in the 1870s was almost identical to modern baseball, their version of football involved only kicking. And, according to William Stanard, any number could play.^[116] The youthful energy unleashed by this soccerlike game was so great that the eccentric and sometimes irascible Visitor Montagu Thompson, whose house faced the Green, once tried to persuade the city government to ban the contests. “His reason was that a mob, following the ball, so frequently deluged his front yard.” The students responded to Thompson’s complaint by hanging him “in effigy from a tree in front of his house.”^[117] The games continued.^[118]

Black–White Relations

Most of the alumni memoirs and reminiscences described town-gown relations in whites-only terms, but a few of the former students also recalled their contacts with some of Williamsburg ‘s many African-American residents. Although the numerous servants, waiters, washerwomen, and cooks who served the students generally went unremarked, two of their number stood out Everyone knew Malachi Gardner, Benjamin Ewell’s young carriage driver and general factotum, and Edloe Washington, the janitor who rang the College bell. Gardner, whom Ewell called “Professor,” had worked for the president’s family since he was a small boy. For nearly thirty years, he drove Ewell back and forth between his farm and the College and saw to his wellbeing. During the interregnum, when Ewell came to the President’s House for several hours every day to tutor local boys, answer letters, and show visitors around the campus, Gardner was his constant companion. Elizabeth Gilman, wife of Daniel Coit Gilman, the president of Johns Hopkins University, recorded her impression of Gardner in the spring of 1887 after she and her family had visited the College.

Malachi carries all the keys and unlocks and locks up the doors and knows just where to find the books needed. His little heart is all occupied with the old place and if for any reason the Colonel is prevented from coming in, Malachi feels the responsibility of the possible visitors’ disappointment deeply. He knows all the musty old college jokes and when the Colonel showed us in the old record book of a hundred years and more ago the wanton deeds of lads who have been gone a century, Malachi respectfully buried his face in his little woolen cap and when he positively could bear no more of ‘ye sprightly boyes’ he tiptoed into the hall to titter.^[119]

George P. Coleman remembered from his tutorial sessions with Ewell that during hot weather Gardner would put a large bottle of water by Ewell’s chair so that the president could periodically wet his bald head to cool himself off. He also recalled that Gardner usually rang the College bell to let the town boys know that it was time to come for their lessons.^[120] Another of Gardner’s duties, which he himself described in a 1938 interview, was making certain that Ewell, who “liked to take a toddy,” got home safely when he had been drinking. “If he got too much,” Gardner reported, “he would just sit down and go to sleep. I have waited for him many a night until one o’clock for him to wake up so I could drive him out to the country.”^[121] Edloe Washington, who rang the College bell in the 1870s, figured in fewer reminiscences, but according to Robert Hughes, the students dubbed him the “Professor of Bellology.”^[122]

Of course, neither Gardner nor Washington emerges from these scattered memories as a fully rounded human being; in fact, Gardner comes perilously close to the stock figure of the faithful black retainer. Yet there is evidence of a more complex racial landscape in post-Civil War Williamsburg. Blacks made up some 55 percent of James City County’s population and counted for more than a third of the city’s residents in 1870, and during the ensuing decade they enjoyed significant political power. “At no place in the country are civil & political rights more freely accorded to all classes than in Williamsburg ,” Benjamin Ewell assured Republican Representative Legrand Perce in early 1872. “Colored men sit on juries & hold town offices; republicans for the most part. There is a healthy good feeling between white & colored.”^[123] Ewell may have exaggerated the town’s racial harmony in order to strengthen the College’s appeal for federal funds, or he may have generalized too broadly from his own optimistic outlook. Other more conservative residents, like Montagu Thompson, took a darker view of the situation.^[124] Ironically, Robert Hughes, son of a prominent Republican and a future Republican leader himself, offered a less happy assessment when looking back on this period. “The relations between the races were strained” during his entire time in Williamsburg, he recalled, “though … no actual outbreak of any consequence occurred.”^[125] Still, Hughes’s picture, painted sixty years after the fact, may be less accurate than Ewell’s contemporary sketch.

Alumnus Julian A. Salle offers some support for Ewell’s interpretation in his recollections of the late 1870s and early 1880s when “the best orator in town” was John M. Dawson, the black Baptist minister. Salle, who had attended Dawson’s church to hear him preach, described the minister as a cultured man and remembered that Dawson had persuaded Miss Kate Custis to accept his daughter as a music student.^[126] Certainly, the freeborn Dawson, who reportedly had attended Oberlin College before the Civil War, was a powerful figure in the local African-American community. Since coming to Williamsburg in 1866, he had combined his ministry with an active political career, serving at various times on the Williamsburg city council, in the state senate, and as treasurer of James City County. In 1882 he ran unsuccessfully for Virginia’s at-large congressional seat.^[127] That Miss Kate, a daughter of old Williamsburg, agreed to tutor a daughter of the town’s leading black Republican surely bespeaks a more relaxed atmosphere than Hughes portrayed.

The Struggle to Survive

As the fortunes of the College declined throughout the late 1870s, the residents of Williamsburg remained staunch allies of President Ewell in his constant struggle to maintain William and Mary in its historic location. At least twice when the Visitors seemed on the verge of closing the College, local citizens joined with the faculty to persuade them to grant a reprieve.^[128] Yet, in practical terms, Williamsburg still had little to offer. As late as 1878, Lyon Tyler described the townspeople as “awfully poverty-struck.”^[129] The long-awaited railroad was still several years from completion. The area’s one durable asset was its history, and even that did not always confer the hoped-for benefits.

Although the Board reaffirmed its commitment to Williamsburg in 1879 when it rejected the overtures from the University of the South, by 1880 the College was, weaker than ever. None of the various committees the Board had appointed to examine the school’s financial problems had come any closer than had Ewell or Bursar Wise to solving them. Closure was again on the agenda when the Board finally achieved a quorum (after three attempts) in late August of that year.^[130]

The meeting was an odd mixture of pleasant sociability and fiscal futility and ended with a decision to keep the College open for another academic year. Ewell plied the Visitors with California champagne and cigars at the same time he begged for money for unpaid faculty salaries and past due expenses.^[131] The Board learned that there was little hope of realizing anything from the liens the College held on land in Prince George and Sussex counties because the political upheaval occasioned by the rise of Readjusterism was depressing land prices in that part of the state.^[132] It authorized Ewell to borrow $1,000 to meet pressing needs, accepted the resignation of Richard Wise (with relief), and then seized on the suggestion that the Yorktown centennial celebration in 1881 might provide a fund-raising opportunity for the College.^[133] To at least one Board member, none of this was much more than the postponement of the inevitable. As Visitor D. Gardiner Tyler told his younger brother Lyon, “we could do nothing to avert [the decline] of the old college.”^[134]

Clearly, Ewell and the Visitors were grasping at straws. There was little reason to think that the Yorktown celebration would confer any particular benefits when the College had been unable to capitalize on the national centennial in 1876. Ironically, the Yorktown exhibition did help speed the completion of the rail line through Williamsburg, but it was too late to save William and Mary. By the time the first Chesapeake and Ohio train reached the city in October 1881, the College had no collegiate students.

The Interregnum

Documenting the decision to close the College is difficult, in part because President Ewell insisted throughout the 1880s that the school was in fact open. In early 1883, for example, he penned an indignant letter to the editor of the Richmond State to refute a news item that described William and Mary as deserted. “The College of William and Mary is neither deserted nor dead,” he wrote. “Since the reduction of the Faculty … , the work has been, and is now, very limited, and chiefly local.”^[135] That limited and local work consisted of Ewell and an occasional assistant tutoring Williamsburg boys at the preparatory level, but it protected the charter and maintained the fiction of historical continuity.

The absence of any clear statement of closure also strengthened Ewell’s argument. After the Board of Visitors met in July 1881, Ewell’s daughter believed that her father had once more won ”his annual battle” to keep the College open.^[136] At that meeting some of the Visitors’ decisions did seem to assume continued educational activity. They elected a recent graduate, William G. Jones, acting professor of languages for 1881–82 and resolved to pay him $400, the same salary as President Ewell. They also set aside $200 to compensate one or two instructors to be appointed and assigned duties by the president and the executive committee of the Board. In addition, they made General Taliaferro an agent of the College, charged with raising funds from both alumni and citizens to restore the endowment. However, when the Visitors accepted the resignation of Professor Lyman Wharton, they eliminated any possibility of collegiate courses in the coming year.^[137] Moreover, because the Williamsburg school trustees had been operating the Grammar and Mattey School for several years, the College could not even maintain the level of preparatory education it had in 1868–69. In effect, William and Mary ceased to operate as an institution of higher education without formally closing.

Although the suspension of classes in 1881 represented the defeat of more than a decade of hope and effort, the minutes of the July Board meeting are as spare and unemotional as any in the surviving records. Fortunately, perhaps, Hugh Grigsby, one of William and Mary’s most dedicated supporters, did not live to see this failure. He died in April 1881 and was memorialized at the July meeting, as was another longtime Visitor, William Peachy. Colonel Lamb could not attend.^[138] For many of the other Board members, like Montagu Thompson, the suspension so long anticipated may have been anticlimactic. Moreover, like Ewell, the Visitors sometimes maintained the fiction that the College was still operating. In June 1882 they resolved that the “College of William and Mary shall be continued for the reception and education of students for the year commencing … October 1882 and ending July the 4th 1883.”^[139]

During the interregnum Benjamin Ewell came more than ever to personify the College. Because he rode in to the campus every day to tutor students, greet visitors and conduct tours, correspond with faithful friends of William and Mary, and do all in his power to keep the College’s name before the public, he assumed for some the status of a folk hero. For example, President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University, after visiting the College with his wife and daughter in the spring of 1887, described Ewell as “the embodiment of the genius loci, the watchful & faithful guardian of a grand idea.”^[140] Many others who wrote about William and Mary during the 1880s mythologized the president as the devoted, grey-haired old bell ringer for his habit of having the College bell rung each year on the second Wednesday in October to prevent the charter from lapsing. (The fact that his servant Malachi Gardner sometimes used the bell to summon Ewell’s local pupils apparently contributed to the story that Ewell rang the bell daily.)^[141]

Although Ewell stood at the center of the campaign to revive William and Mary, past faculty members and others played supporting roles. One of the first serious proposals for reopening the College came from a former professor of Greek and German, Edward Joynes, in March of 1882. Now on the faculty at the University of Tennessee, Joynes strongly urged Ewell to convert William and Mary into a coeducational normal school. He pointed out that the rise of public education in Virginia had created a great need for competent teachers and argued that if the College offered the requisite professional training, it could probably gain both Peabody Fund money and state support. Although it is unlikely that Ewell accepted Joynes’s contention that there was no hope of restoring William and Mary as a liberal arts institution, he thought the normal school idea well worth exploring.^[142]

The Board of Visitors met in Richmond in late March 1882 to do just that.^[143] Although the Visitors refused to consider surrendering the charter to the state legislature, they suggested that if the General Assembly would grant the College $12,000 a year to establish a normal school, the governor might appoint six Visitors to the Board. Rector Lyons also approached Peabody Fund agent J. L. M. Curry to see if the fund’s trustees would match the state’s contribution. Curry replied, as his predecessor had to earlier queries, that the fund aided normal schools “established, supported, and controlled by a state.”^[144] State control was the sticking point Ewell later recalled that the governor and a number of the leading legislators favored the scheme, and that on that basis Curry promised an $8,000 annuity. But some of the Visitors balked.^[145] As Colonel Lamb recorded in his diary, “Considered question of giving college to the State for a Normal College, but question was unfavorably received.”^[146]

Ironically, the plan rejected in 1882 was very similar to the one that finally brought the College back to life in 1888. For several years after 1882, Ewell and the Visitors pursued a number of other strategies, but by the end of the decade, even those who had never been enthusiastic about the normal school idea, had to admit there were no good alternatives.^[147]

Meanwhile Ewell tried to persuade the Board to spend some money on maintenance of the Main Building. “As long as the college Building & Grounds are kept in good order so long may a hope be entertained of the restoration of the Institution,” he reminded the Visitors in 1884, when he estimated that he needed at least $300 to repair the building’s roof, walls, and broken windows.^[148] Such minimal patchwork proved inadequate, however, and by 1887 Elizabeth Gilman painted a picture of “old walls … crumbling away” and cows “grazing peacefully on the playgrounds.” “It is a most pathetic place,” she declared, “full of the past with no present but one of dreary decay, and no future.”

In Mrs. Gilman’ s eyes, Ewell was almost as pathetic as the ruins over which he presided. She judged his efforts to arouse public interest in the College “hopeless.” “The public has long ago forgotten all about poor old William and Mary,” she wrote.^[149]  But there she was wrong. In 1883 William S. Perry, the bishop of Iowa and historian of the Episcopal church, asked Ewell for illustrations of William and Mary for a chapter in The History of the American Episcopal Church. “I am anxious to give the College a fitting representation in a work which will be largely circulated,” he explained.^[150] Charles F. Richardson, a faculty member at Dartmouth College interested in the history of Phi Beta Kappa, also published pieces on William and Mary in the mid-1880s.^[151] Senator Hoar told Ewell in 1884 that he would be glad to do anything he could to help restore the College. He found his opportunity two years later when he renewed his plea for contributions to William and Mary in a widely noticed speech at Harvard’s 250th anniversary celebration. He still believed that Harvard men had a special obligation to the venerable Virginia institution.^[152] A few months earlier, another Massachusetts resident, Edwin D. Meade, had made a similar appeal on behalf of the College during a lecture in Boston. Drawing a vivid portrait of the institution in decline, he called it “one of the saddest things in America.”^[153] None of these efforts had an immediate impact, but Ewell recognized their public relations value. In 1887 he published newspaper accounts of Hoar’s and Meade’s speeches, along with various letters of support for the College, in a small pamphlet that could be used in future lobbying campaigns.^[154]

The most substantial evidence of continuing concern for William and Mary during these years was a new, concise history of the College by the distinguished Johns Hopkins historian Herbert Baxter Adams.^[155] Published in 1887 by the United States Bureau of Education, Adams’ s booklet told the story of William and Mary from its founding. It was a solid piece of scholarship.^[156] When Adams considered the post-Civil War years, he waxed indignant that the Congress had refused to honor William and Mary’s claim, especially when the national treasury bulged with surplus funds. “An institution which was once a beacon of learning and of political intelligence … has been suffered to decline by a nation which owes it an actual although paltry debt of $70,000.”^[157]

Except for Adams’s contention that William and Mary should have long since moved out of Williamsburg, Ewell was very pleased with the history.^[158] So also was Visitor Warner Jones,^[159] who hoped and believed it would help William and Mary finally get its bill through Congress. “That is a matter we should not let sleep, but should urge with renewed vigor,”^[160] he wrote Ewell in June 1887. It was impossible to mount an effective campaign while the school was closed, but when William and Mary renewed its quest for compensation in the early 1890s, the Adams monograph was indeed a valuable aid. And in 1888 it helped persuade the General Assembly to make an annual appropriation to William and Mary.^[161]

While President Ewell stood guard over the historical College, the Board of Visitors tried to solve its current problems. Although they met less frequently than when the school was open and sometimes had difficulty getting a quorum, most of them were remarkably faithful to their charge.^[162] Judge William Crump, who was elected rector in December 1883 after the death of James Lyons, led the Board through most of the interregnum. Among the most active members were Colonel Lamb, General Taliaferro, P. Montagu Thompson, Judge Warner T. Jones of Gloucester, and D. Gardiner Tyler of Charles City, an 1877 appointee. The Reverends O. S. Barten and Charles Minnegerode also attended many meetings. John Goode resigned in December 1887, just before General Joseph Johnston made his first appearance as a Visitor.^[163]

After its initial rejection of the normal school plan, the Board devoted most of its energies for the next four years to sorting out the College’s tangled financial problems. But that was a daunting task. Collecting money owed to the school in order to pay off the debts the school owed was a perennial difficulty; frequent rumors that the legislature was about to reduce the dividends on state stock exacerbated the situation.^[164]  Even verifying the College’s assets and liabilities was not easy. For example, Warner Jones and Montagu Thompson reviewed all of Bursar John Wise’s reports from June 1876 to July 1883 and concluded that as of July 1, 1883, assets totalled $69,484.03. But in the next sentence they admitted that figure might be too optimistic.^[165] Estimates of the College’s income and debts varied, too. In 1883 Ewell reported that by ceasing to offer classes the Board had managed to reduce the debt “from twenty odd thousand dollars to about one-fourth of this amount,” but a Board of Visitors committee listed it as $7,974.00 in July 1887.^[166] Income seemed to average about $2,000 a year, and in the early 1880s, the Board allowed Ewell about $1,000 for himself and the College. ^[167] Even during the interregnum, however, the Board sometimes had to authorize Wise or Ewell to borrow money.^[168]

Several of the Visitors disliked the borrowing because it added to the debt they  were trying to eradicate. But as the charter granted the faculty (now reduced to Ewell) significant control over College finances, they were not able to refuse his requests. Warner Jones was so unhappy with Ewell’s stewardship in 1884 that he wanted Taliaferro, Goode, and Crump to persuade the next session of the legislature to amend the charter “to give control of the finances of the College to the Board of Visitors instead of the Faculty as now.”^[169] Nothing came of this suggestion, but the tension between Ewell and some Visitors persisted. In July 1885 Montagu Thompson angrily complained to his friend Jones that the president had done nothing to carry out the Board’s directives of the previous summer to sell the College Hotel and several other pieces of property to help pay off the debt. “Not one step has been taken,” he fumed. Moreover, the school’s affairs were “daily growing worse.” Only prompt action would save it from bankruptcy.^[170] Of course, Thompson always took the darkest possible view of WIiliam and Mary’s financial situation, but his outburst was symptomatic of the unhappy conditions at the crippled institution.

The Campaign for a Normal Course

By late 1885 the Visitors had accomplished all they could without additional funds. Despite their best efforts, several large debts remained uncollected and surplus property stood unsold. Moreover, the College buildings were steadily deteriorating. Meeting in the College library in November, the Board resolved to approach the General Assembly yet again, and by January a committee had drawn up a bill to  establish a normal course for white male teachers at the College.

By limiting the enrollment to men and calling for a course that would operate alongside the regular collegiate classes rather than for an entire normal school, the authors disarmed some of the traditionalists who had objected to the 1882 proposal. They also avoided any talk of handing over the College to the state. Instead they asked for an annual appropriation of $10,000, in return for which the governor would name half of the members of a new joint Board of Visitors. The ten existing Visitors would continue as a self-perpetuating group, and the governor would retain responsibility for filling the other ten seats. Students would be drawn from every jurisdiction in the state (each county and city would be entitled to at least one pupil) and would pay no tuition, as long as they agreed to teach for two years within the state.^[171]

After accepting the committee’s report, the Board appointed Taliaferro, Jones, and Thompson to lobby for its passage in the General Assembly.^[172] Although Taliaferro  and Jones had powerful political connections, they did not have an easy time with the College bill. (Thompson seems to have played little role in the fight.) There were many calls on the limited funds in the Virginia treasury, and William and Mary had to  compete with established state institutions. At the end of the 1886 session, Ewell counseled Jones not to be discouraged by the lack of progress. “It will never do to halt, or  to stop your labors, because not immediately successful. Like the rest of mankind Legislators require to be pressed & importuned.”^[173]

Pressed and importuned they would be, for the Board was firmly committed to  establishing a state-supported teacher-training program at the College.^[174] The Visitors renewed the charge to the lobbying committee at each of their next three meetings, and they even considered reestablishing a grammar school in the fall of 1887 that could be absorbed into the normal program when the state finally voted an appropriation.^[175] Nothing came of the special session of the legislature in the spring of 1887, “called mainly on account of the embarrassed condition of the State, growing out of the debt question.” As Warner Jones had predicted, the atmosphere was not conducive to increased spending.^[176]

Despite that disappointing beginning, 1887 was not a wasted year for the College. The Richmond State reported the arguments of Jones and Taliaferro for fairness both to white males and to the eastern part of the state. They had pointed out that while there was state support to train white women and black Virginians of both genders, Virginia made no provision for the young white man who aspired to teach. And they returned to Ewell’s point that while Tidewater paid heavy taxes, it received few benefits from the state. “The request is a most just and reasonable one,” the editorial declared in late 1887.^[177] It was also modest, compared to the demands from other institutions. In 1887 Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College at Blacksburg  had requested $40,000 for buildings, in addition to its $20,000 annuity. “It seems to me it ought not to be considered unreasonable or presumptuous for Wm & Mary to ask for the small appropriation which we ask for in our Bill,” Warner Jones observed.^[178]

For a time in 1887, there also seemed to be a promise of a large sum of money in Great Britain from the estate of Sir Robert Boyle. Recalling the Mattey Fund, Ewell and the Visitors pursued the claim for nearly a year before discovering that there was in fact no Boyle money.^[179] Another piece of hopeful news was Bursar John Wise’s belief that he could realize $10,000 on the Mayo debt, one of the larger claims held by the College, but never during Ewell’s tenure would the school see any money from that source.^[180]

Declaring poetically that the College “‘hath become as an oak whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden that has no water,’” President Ewell told a correspondent in June 1887 that he hoped for renewal by the time of the school’s two hundredth anniversary in 1893.^[181] For once the perennial optimist was too pessimistic. Help arrived in less than a year, when the 1888 General Assembly finally agreed to appropriate $10,000 annually for a normal course at William and Mary.

Aid from the State

Much of the credit for the success of the College’s bill belongs to the indefatigable Taliaferro and Jones. As Ewell later noted, they worked ceaselessly from the first to the last day of the session on behalf of the College, “neglecting all other business, undergoing, thereby, pecuniary loss.”^[182] They had several invaluable allies, however, without whom the bill would never have passed. Their fellow Democrat from Gloucester County, James N. Stubbs, served as floor manager and made the major speech for the bill in the Senate; Lyon G. Tyler, who had returned to Virginia in 1882 and was now a Richmond area Democratic delegate , sponsored and fought for it in the House of Delegates.^[183] On the Republican side, Colonel Lamb lobbied some of his friends, but the key figure in that party was Richard Wise, who threw himself into the struggle.^[184] Working with Jones and Taliaferro, he gained support from white and black delegates. He managed to win over representatives from southwestern Virginia, who feared that an appropriation for William and Mary would lessen the chances for increased support for Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, by proposing a mutually beneficial coalition.^[185] Wise’s friend, Alfred W. Harris, a black delegate from Dinwiddie County who had fought to establish Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute six years earlier, called up the William and Mary bill in the House of Delegates for the final debate. He and the six other African-American representatives voted to aid the College. ^[186] Outside of the legislature, Richard F. Beirne, owner and editor of the Richmond State, provided strong editorial support. A long piece on January 19 rehearsed all of the arguments in favor of the bill, and a shorter one on February 24 prodded the reluctant lower house to add its approval to that of the upper.^[187]

The importance of the bipartisan support is evident in the final votes. On February 14 the bill passed the Senate, 24 to 5. The yes votes included 14 Democrats and 10 Republicans; only 1 Republican and 4 Democrats voted no. The Republicans were even more important in the House of Delegates, where the real battle was fought. There the vote on March 1 was 57 to 27 in favor, with 29 Republicans and 28 Democrats voting yes and 2 Republicans and 25 Democrats opposed.^[188] Surely it was a tribute to both the College and Benjamin Ewell that such disparate groups and individuals could come together to rescue the beleaguered institution. Taliaferro, Jones, and Tyler were dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who despised Readjusters and Republicans. Lamb and Wise had been both. In earlier years, when they were all still Democrats, Taliaferro had railed bitterly against both Richard and John Wise for thwarting his bid for the gubernatorial nomination. Lamb had been a loyal supporter of General William Mahone, the Readjuster leader who was anathema to Taliaferro, Jones, and Tyler.^[189] Yet these men managed to put their differences aside when the welfare of the College was at stake. As Richard Wise told Ewell in a jubilant letter announcing the passage of the bill, “We all worked like thunder.”^[190]

The legislation that Governor Fitzhugh Lee signed on March 5, 1888, was almost identical to the original bill introduced two years before.^[191] It was accepted by the existing Board of Visitors, with all present except General Johnston, and with President Ewell in attendance, on April 10. President Ewell was, of course, deeply gratified at the passage of an act which promised William and Mary “new life, health and strength.”^[192] His faith that his fellow citizens would not allow the historic College to perish had at last been rewarded. As he prepared his final report, however, he must have been aware of how close to death the school had come. His description of the various College buildings was a litany of neglect and decay; he could not even give an estimate of the total cost for repairs until the new Board decided how much would be completely rebuilt and how much just patched up.^[193]

Ewell submitted his report at the next meeting of the Board on May 10 and tendered his resignation as both president and professor. “Since I was elected in 1848,” he wrote, “all the members of the Board of that day, and all of my associates in the Faculty—the number then was seven—have ‘joined the great majority’ & therefore I am the only survivor.”^[194] The Board accepted Ewell’s resignation the next day and elected him emeritus professor (later changed to president emeritus) with an annual compensation of $400. At Colonel Lamb’s suggestion, the Visitors asked Ewell to continue his stewardship of the buildings and grounds until the next Board meeting, though they also authorized a building committee, consisting of Montagu Thompson, James Stubbs, and Dr. E. G. Booth of Carter’s Grove, to make $2,500 worth of repairs.^[195]

Although the president’s friend, General Johnston, thought the Board had treated him shabbily by not retaining him as a professor at full salary, Ewell pronounced himself satisfied with the arrangement voted. He considered that the Board had been “kind and liberal” in allowing him the same stipend he had received for the past eight years, he told Warner Jones. Moreover, he had no desire to continue in office; just a month shy of his seventy-eighth birthday, Ewell knew the time had come for a younger man to lead the College.^[196]

Ewell’s approval of the Board’s unanimous choice for his successor—John L. Buchanan, the state superintendent of public instruction—may have eased the transition. General Johnston suspected that some Visitors distrusted Ewell’s commitment to normal work.^[197] But if he lamented the passing of the strictly literary institution he had guided for so long, Ewell never said so publicly. Instead, he spoke of William and Mary’s opportunity to provide much-needed competent teachers for the public schools, and he tried hard to persuade Buchanan to take the presidency.^[198] Ironically, Buchanan had less faith in the new departure than Ewell did. Appalled by the decrepit condition of the College, he declined the appointment in early July.^[199]

As Ewell faithfully performed his transition duties—cleaning, removing debris, draining the College yard, supervising workmen, traveling to Richmond to retrieve some of the College’s stock certificates—the Board hired faculty members and resumed its search for a new president.^[200] At the end of August, the Visitors elected Lyon G. Tyler, whose ties to the College and recent work for the normal school bill Ewell appreciated. Although he was wary of intruding or meddling, Ewell later offered occasional aid and advice as Tyler settled into the presidency.^[201]

In retirement Ewell remained deeply concerned about the welfare of the College, though he generally maintained his distance from the campus unless specifically invited to return. At times he brooded over bad investments and potential donors who had given their money elsewhere during his presidency, but he also enjoyed recounting the legislative triumph of 1888. When the Tyler administration renewed the quest for a federal indemnity in 1892, he stood ready to help; he lived to see the College finally gain the money in 1893. Ewell was also able to participate in the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the granting of William and Mary’s royal charter, at a thriving institution with more than two hundred students enrolled for that session.^[202]

In August 1888, when he sent Warner Jones a bill for thirty-three dollars for his expenses during the transition, Ewell commented that for him, aiding the Visitors and readying the College for a new session had been “a labor of love.”^[203] That also seems an apt description of Ewell’s long campaign to restore William and Mary to some semblance of its former glory. Happily, although much of the restoration and rebuilding occurred under his successors, his labor did not go unrecognized or unrewarded.

When Benjamin Ewell died in June 1894 at his farm in James City County, both Williamsburg and the College paid him tribute. Buildings were draped in dark bunting, and flags flew at half mast. A great crowd of students, faculty, and townspeople escorted his body from the train station to the College chapel for the funeral and then to his burial place in the College Cemetery. Within a week the College renamed the old College Hotel, Ewell Hall.^[204]