A decade that witnessed the climax of the political contest between the colonies and Great Britain inevitably saw major consequences for the College. The ultimate success of the Americans stripped William and Mary of its imperial and Anglican connections, thus resolving the long tension over the kind of institution it would be. Perhaps because William and Mary was a prisoner of events beyond its control, the resolution of such a fundamental issue occasioned less strife within the College than had prevailed in the two preceding decades. That is not to say the contest between faculty and Visitors ceased; it continued in a somewhat muted fashion to the end of British rule. And with the advent of independence, the institution paid a heavy price both from the loss of many of its resources and from the impact of the war itself. William and Mary entered the new era transformed in both its constitution and educational program, but nonetheless severely weakened.

The Faculty Sets the Course, 1769–74

None of these momentous results was at all apparent at the beginning of the decade, when the faculty had successfully withstood the determination of the Visitors to establish complete authority over the College. The masters then set out, with scant regard for the political climate in the colony, to institute their own plan of reform, one that would provide a greater academic rigor but also reinforce British traditions at William and Mary. In that effort they had the firm and effective support of Norborne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt, the first resident governor-general to come to the colony since early in the century. Raised to the peerage only four years earlier after a remarkably undistinguished career, he gave little hint of the popularity and respect he would win in a brief governorship that came at such a difficult time. He went out of his way to appear conciliatory, sociable, and interested in the colony and its people, but College faculty were particularly supportive, sensing that he would be more sympathetic to their interests than Fauquier had ever been.^[1]

Elected, as governors customarily were, as a member of the Board of Visitors and rector, Botetourt immediately set out to act in a variety of ways as a patron of the College. It was apparent to him that, in addition to the severe problems of a decimated faculty and a demoralized group of students, the College buildings were, after forty years of heavy use, in a state of disrepair. No small part of their poor condition was the consequence of student vandalism—young Thomas Byrd’s early 1769 wrecking of the hall was only the latest example. Working through a subcommittee, the Visitors set about in September of that year to survey the repairs needed and arrange for the work.^[2] It was unlikely that the effort was completely successful, since the faculty continued to pass resolutions intended to stop further vandalism and punish offenders, until the masters finally determined in August 1772 to hire a watchman to prevent damage to the buildings and furniture.^[3] The poor physical condition of the College seemingly extended as well to the excellent scientific apparatus that William Small had so recently purchased. A faculty member, John Dixon, in the Virginia Gazette in 1771, quoted from a letter which complained that the instruments ”being suffered to lie in a Room like useless Lumber cause great Indignation in the Burgesses, who freely bestowed them for the Advancement of the Students in useful Knowledge.”^[4] Dixon sought to dismiss the charge by saying that such instruments were similarly treated in English universities; but at the same meeting at which the faculty agreed to appoint a watchman for the buildings, they also named Matthew Davenport to take care of the College apparatus.

The faculty were engaged, too, in an effort to raise academic standards and maintain discipline. Although no major steps were taken, the level of detail and frequency of attention to such matters in the faculty minutes from 1768 into 1770 contrasted with the relatively little notice given them in previous years. Students were forbidden to keep a horse or a dog at the College, and their parents were urged to see that they remained in attendance at all times when the College was in session. The roll was to be taken at all chapel services by one of the scholarship students. Examination of students for admission to the School of Philosophy was reaffirmed, and faculty votes permitting scholars to enter the “Moral and Mathematical School” were increasingly numerous. And there were renewed efforts to call in accounts due and to enforce collection of the fees and duties to which the College was entitled.^[5]

In the effort to encourage and reward academic performance, the faculty voted on July 9, 1770, to admit Edmund Randolph and William Leigh to “first Studentships,” and in the following year, Leigh’s Transfer Day oration for 1771 was published. Then, on February 14, 1772, the president and masters agreed that students in the philosophy school should in rotation deliver “Latin Declamations, of their own composition” in the chapel after the evening service on alternate Thursdays.^[6] By that time Governor Botetourt had made his own strong contribution to the effort by providing for the award of two medals annually to students in the philosophy school. One award was for classical knowledge and the other for scholarship in physical and metaphysical sciences, the faculty minutes coming to refer to them as awards in “Classical Learning” and “Philosophical Learning.” A formal announcement of the competition was made as early as 1770, but the first recorded faculty selection of recipients came in 1772, when the winners were Nathaniel Burwell and James Madison. Presentation took place at the Transfer Day celebration, which included “academical Exhibitions of the Students,” as well as “Entertainment” and “decent festivity.” Faculty minutes recorded additional awards of the Botetourt medals for the three ensuing years, to David Stewart and Samuel Shield in 1773, Joseph Eggleston and Walker Maury in 1774, and John White and Thomas Evans in 1775.^[7]

Botetourt and those who worked with him in establishing the medals must have hoped, too, that they might help stimulate students in the School of Philosophy to complete the examinations for the degree of bachelor of arts. The original terms of the award stipulated that “when the College shall appear to have a competent Number of young Gentlemen to be raised in succession to the Degree of A.B. then Prizes shall be appropriated to those who take the best Degree in the Arts and the Learned Languages.” While Botetourt did not live to see this part of his plan executed, the College was able to award its first baccalaureate degrees in 1772 to the two winners of Botetourt medals, Burwell and Madison.^[8]

By the spring of 1770, the College likewise succeeded in filling the three vacant faculty positions, another mark of recovery. At the beginning of the year, the Reverend John Dixon, an alumnus and rector of Kingston Parish, received an appointment to the chair of moral philosophy, but not long after, two clerics sent by the bishop of London, Richard Terrick, arrived. One, Samuel Henley, who had attended a well-known dissenting academy and ministered to a dissenting congregation before taking Anglican orders, was to be professor of moral philosophy. The other, Thomas Gwatkin, who had matriculated at Jesus College, Oxford, but did not take a degree at the time, was to hold the chair in natural philosophy. Dixon thereupon agreed to shift to the long-unfilled second chair in divinity. Like their colleague, John Camm, both new professors became thoroughly enmeshed in public controversies in Virginia, but both were also conscientious teachers who involved themselves in the efforts to reform the College.^[9]

During his brief tenure as governor and rector of the Board of Visitors, Botetourt seems to have instilled a new vitality at William and Mary and to have achieved what William Nelson described as “success in his Endeavours to repress some Neglects & Irregularities in our College.”^[10] The governor’s death on October 15, 1770, understandably brought a great outpouring of praise for his record in Virginia. It also occasioned an elaborate funeral, marked by the tolling of both the capitol and College bells, a march from the Governor’s Palace to Bruton Parish Church where Horrocks conducted the funeral and preached, and then a procession, in which both faculty and students joined, from the church to the College for the governor’s interment in the crypt of the chapel.^[11]

In the year following Botetourt’s death, poetic tributes appeared with regularity in the pages of the Virginia Gazette, and the General Assembly voted to honor his memory with a statue, appropriating 700 guineas to pay for it. A popular British sculptor of the day, Richard Hayward, executed the work, and it was placed in 1773 on the portico that joined the east and west wings of the capitol. With the removal of the capital to Richmond in 1780, the building suffered neglect with the result that the statue was vandalized and extensively damaged. In 1796 the architect Benjamin Latrobe, who was passing through a somewhat deserted Williamsburg, sketched it and noted in his journal, “A beautifull Marble statue of Lord Botetourt … is deprived of its head and mutilated in many other respects.” Not long after, in 1797, the College purchased it for $100 and moved it in 1801 to the campus, where it stood in front of the Main Building for 157 years, apart from a period during the Civil War when it was removed for safekeeping. It now stands in the Earl Gregg Swem Library.^[12]

The positive changes that the College experienced under Botetourt’ s patronage could not alter one circumstance—the controversy between the faculty and the Visitors did not entirely abate. In 1769 two more masters, Josiah Johnson and the redoubtable John Camm, flaunted the frequently ignored statute forbidding masters to marry and live away from the College. Camm’s wedding attracted the most attention, since at age fifty he deserted a long state of bachelorhood to take a young wife, Betsy Hansford, who was only fifteen years of age. The apocryphal story was that Camm initially approached Miss Hansford on behalf of one of his students, only to have her declare her love for him.^[13]  Many in the colony took a gossipy delight in Camm’s marriage, and the news spread to England when Martha Goosley wrote to a friend asking “why may not an old Man afflicted with the Gout have the pleasure of a fine hand to rub his feet and warm his flannells, comfortable amusement you will say for a Girl of fifteen but She is to have a Chariot and there is to be no Padlock upon her mind.” Some in the colony, especially the author of an essay in the Virginia Gazette, signed Tit for Tat, were more inclined to heap ridicule on the aging parson.^[14]

The Visitors were less amused at seeing Camm once again defy them. At the time the removal of Camm and Johnson to residences away from the College left only Emmanuel Jones to supervise the students who lived in the College. Twice the Board struck back with resolutions, on the first occasion simply noting on September 1 that the two masters were acting “contrary to the principles on which the College was founded and their duty as Professors.” Then, on December 14 they resolved that all professors subsequently appointed should reside in the College and that upon marriage they would be discharged. Just as they had bowed to the inevitable in exempting Camm from the prohibition against professors holding simultaneous appointment as rector of a parish, so they now yielded once more to the incumbent faculty, without whom they could hardly have kept the institution open.^[15]

In a matter of a few months, however, the Visitors returned to the attack in a much more aggressive manner, by proposing once again to revise the statutes and to strip the faculty of its fundamental powers over discipline and academic requirements. First, the Visitors proposed, as they had on an earlier occasion, that students who were dismissed by the masters should have a right of appeal to the Visitors, who would possess the authority to make a final decision and hence overrule the faculty. A second proposal sought to provide that any youth with a knowledge of “vulgar arithmetic,” whose parents so desired, should be admitted to the “Mathematical School.” Such a regulation, if adopted, would have had the effect of eliminating knowledge of classical languages as a requirement for admission to advanced study at the College.

Whether the faculty affirmation of an examination for admission to the School of Philosophy on January 27, 1770, came in anticipation of the actions of the Visitors is not clear, but at its next meeting on March 27, the faculty referred explicitly to the two proposed statutes in resolving that John Camm and John Dixon prepare a statement objecting to them. They were at the time the only faculty members other than Emmanuel Jones and the president.

Since Dixon, a Virginian, proved in time to be supportive of the Board on weakening the requirement in classics, it seems almost certain that John Camm actually wrote the long faculty protest which provided the main order of business at a May 2 meeting. By this time Henley and Gwatkin had arrived and, on this issue, immediately joined forces with Camm, although Henley later supported lifting the requirement in classics.

Not surprisingly, Camm’s statement for the faculty was uncompromising, first objecting to the right of student appeals to the Visitors and defending the masters as the best and most objective judges of student performance. His response was even more searching and outspoken on the lowering of standards for admission to advanced study. The College was not, the statement argued, an institution of learning for everyone, only for those who wished to pursue a regular plan of study “approved of in the most famous Universities,” one based upon classical knowledge, natural and moral philosophy, and the sciences. “The’ College is not design’d,” the protest maintained, “to be the sole Place of Resort for Education in the Colony; but the best Place for training up Youth, who are intended to be qualified for any of the three learned Professions, or to become Gentlemen, and accomplish’d Citizens.” It was necessary to avoid having the College divided so that it would “at best consist of Regulars & Irregulars[,] of real and nominal Academics, of serious Votaries of Science ascending to her Shrine by a natural Gradation, and idle Danglers about the Purlieus of a College.” William and Mary should “make its Way in the simple and unperplex’d Plan laid down in the old Statutes, and agreeable to the Establishment of Experience in more antient Countries.”^[16]

Traditionalist, elitist, almost quixotic in the American colonies of the 1770s, the faculty statement nonetheless captured the conception of the College and of the social and cultural order for which this small group of faculty was contending against all the forces of change bearing down on them. However much their uncompromising stance outraged many in the colony and contributed to an impression that the College was in disarray, they were men of intellect who were doing their job as professors effectively. And they had thwarted another move by the Visitors to revise the statutes.

However, the debate over the proper course of study at William and Mary did not abate; rather, it expanded into the usual public discussion. The tone was at times biting, whether the faculty members were contending with each other or joining forces against their external critics. Yet it was, on the whole, an informative exchange that often served to define central, underlying educational issues. Early on, one writer leveled a specific attack on the divinity masters, Camm and Dixon, alleging that they contributed little to the College or the colony. Dixon undertook to defend himself and his colleague, insisting that they did teach other students. He gave ground, however, on the question of a more practical curriculum, conceding that “the Students have but little time to spare, which might be better employed in teaching them to survey a piece of land, or carry a ship to sea, to measure a piece of timber, or gauge a cask, &c. than in demonstrating the propositions of Euclid.”^[17]

Seeing his instruction in natural philosophy and mathematics as particularly under attack, Thomas Gwatkin lashed out at the implication “that I ought to confine myself entirely to a few branches of practical mathematics; and even those … to be taught in the most slovenly manner.” Gwatkin objected that “the elements of Euclid so remarkable for conciseness and elegance, established by the consent of 2000 years, must be thrown aside” in order to give “young Gentlemen … the education of carpenters and excisemen.” At another time Gwatkin laid out in some detail the three-year syllabus that he followed in his teaching: all of Euclid, to be sure, but also plane trigonometry, logarithms, algebra, and “the properties of mechanical powers”; then practical mathematics, including bookkeeping and surveying; and, finally, physics, conics, solid geometry, and some attention to astronomy.^[18] If indeed Gwatkin held to the plan that he had outlined, he had raised instruction in science, at least mathematics and physics, to the highest level it had yet attained at the College, apart from the small group of students over which William Small had exerted so much influence. Gwatkin was admittedly not an enthusiast for the use of laboratory apparatus, but at the settlement of the estate of James Horrocks, Samuel Henley had purchased for the College a group of major works in mathematics and physical sciences from the late president’s library, heretofore a serious gap in its collections.^[19]

The debate over the proper course of study at the College continued and expanded into a public discussion in the Williamsburg newspapers. This wider group of critics ranged well beyond the Visitors’ rather narrow and somewhat self-interested proposals; they challenged the faculty’s whole conception of a proper course of study and criticized what they regarded as the low standards of the College. The campaign, carried on by persons who wrote under pseudonyms, often centered on the example of the College of New Jersey, which, it was argued, offered a less costly education and more flexible curriculum. The choice of a New Light Presbyterian institution as a model suggested that the impetus came from rising religious dissent in the colony, and indeed efforts to found Presbyterian academies in Virginia were already beginning to take place. The proposals also foreshadowed in important respects the reforms that Thomas Jefferson would seek to institute at William and Mary before the end of the decade. They included strong criticism of the continuance of the Grammar School as part of the College, which the Visitors had tenaciously defended in the 1760s, while accusing the faculty of seeking to undermine it. Some writers advocated, too, the institution of legal and medical education and, once again, the introduction of a more flexible curriculum. All became central aspects of the Jeffersonian program, although he would not have found the establishment of a Presbyterian educational tradition any more congenial than the perpetuation of an Anglican one.^[20]

The faculty continued to join in these debates, conceding the desirability of removing the Grammar School and expressing a willingness to expand the collegiate curriculum. Samuel Henley even shared John Dixon’s willingness to abandon classics as a required study, but in the end Thomas Gwatkin’s insistence on the Oxford and Cambridge model for the course of instruction reasserted the dominant view of the faculty during their confrontation with the Visitors.^[21] For the moment the views of the two most traditionalist members of the faculty, Gwatkin and Camm, still carried the day, once again thwarting the Board of Visitors. Yet, interest in what was taught at William and Mary now extended beyond the walls of the College and would produce far broader proposals for changing the curriculum than were conceived by either faculty or Visitors.

While the debate over instruction at the College was in progress, the faculty could not resist involving itself in another public controversy, one over the appointment of an Anglican bishop for Virginia. The highly unpopular cause did not directly concern the College, although a resident prelate could possibly have reinforced the faculty’s vision of William and Mary. The faculty, in fact, divided on the issue, Camm and President Horrocks supporting the idea while Henley and Gwatkin opposed it. The fight began in June 1771 when Horrocks, acting in his capacity as commissary, responded to a communication from New York Anglicans by calling a convocation of clergy to discuss the possibility of seeking a resident Virginia bishop. The idea was anathema to Anglican laymen both because the presence of a bishop would almost certainly threaten the power vestries held over the parish clergy and could also result in the establishment of an ecclesiastical court that would take away from the General Court jurisdiction over clerical misconduct. Bishops appeared, too, as a further imposition of imperial power over the colony, a scheme in the eyes of one critic “to trample into the Earth, the fair, the rising Plant of American Liberty.”

A vigorous newspaper and pamphlet debate went on for several months. Finally, the publishers of one of the Williamsburg newspapers noted in the March 12, 1772, edition their readers’ complaints “of their being tired of the Dispute” and promised to publish nothing more about it. Camm on one side, and Henley and Gwatkin on the other, had been active participants, among the few willing to sign their articles rather than employ pseudonyms. The two who opposed a bishop for once had won faculty members a vote of thanks from the House of Burgesses. Horrocks even had difficulty in persuading many of the clergy to approve the establishment of a committee, headed by John Camm, to draw up a petition to the bishop of London supporting the idea. In the midst of the battle, Horrocks departed for England on June 21, 1771, ostensibly for reasons of health, although it was widely believed, as Richard Bland charged, that he had gone because “he expects to be the First Right Reverend Father of the American Church.” That was not to be; on March 20, 1772, only days after the Virginia Gazette had discontinued debate, Horrocks died in Oporto, Portugal, ending further action on a Virginia episcopate.^[22]

Since Horrocks’s departure for England, John Camm had been serving, with some initial reluctance, as acting president Despite the combative role he had so often played, seniority and perhaps even a grudging respect won him the support of colleagues and Visitors for the permanent appointment. He took office on July 30, 1772; and, although there was one other candidate, Bishop Terrick lost no time in appointing him as the new commissary. Botetourt’s successor as governor, John Murray, Lord Dunmore, completed the traditional trio of offices by placing him on the council.^[23] If Camm had hopes of moving from Yorkhampton to Bruton Parish, they were not to be realized, nor were those of Samuel Henley, who had been substituting for Horrocks at Bruton. After a bitter factional fight among the vestrymen, marked by charges of Henley’s heterodoxy, another faculty member, the Reverend Josiah Johnson, won out. There followed perhaps the most lengthy and rancorous newspaper war of all those that had occurred in the Williamsburg papers during these years.^[24]

With the episcopacy controversy behind him and the weight of his new responsibilities on him, Camm uncharacteristically remained quiet and uninvolved in public controversies for the duration of his term. In the two years before the Revolutionary crisis broke open again in 1774, the momentum that the College had built up during the governorship of Lord Botetourt seemed to sustain itself. For a change, even College accounts generally showed a surplus under Camm’s administration.

Plans also moved forward for the completion of the quadrangle that had originally been envisioned for the College building. The Visitors advertised in the September 3, 1772, issue of the Virginia Gazette, seeking sealed bids for work to begin within a month. Construction was to proceed according to a plan, still extant for the first floor, that Thomas Jefferson had drawn at the request of Governor Dunmore. Jefferson’s proposal called for lengthening the chapel and hall wings by adding on each of the sides a wide vestibule in the middle and then two classrooms beyond that. At the rear, or west end, a new wing seemingly devoted to residential space would complete the quadrangle. The loggia on the original building was to be extended around all sides of the new interior court.

John Saunders, who had worked previously for the College on repairs and the construction of a stable, received the contract with terms that required the College to furnish materials. In November 1774 the College paid almost £500 for orders from England, and work on the foundation for the new west wing began. By 1777 Ebenezer Hazard observed in his diary that the addition had ”been discontinued on Account of the present Troubles,” and in September 1780 the College offered for sale scantling intended for the addition, which seemed to bring to an end any expectation of ever completing it.^[25] However, the decision to proceed in 1772 was perhaps another indication of the optimism that Camm and his colleagues felt about the prospects for enlarging and improving the College.

The election of John Camm as president in his own right at the end of July 1772 was followed in a matter of days by the granting of the first two baccalaureate degrees. That event brought to the forefront James Madison, a man who was to be the most significant figure in the history of the College since James Blair himself. Madison, a second cousin of the fourth president of the United States, entered William and Mary from his distant home in Augusta County in the fall of 1768 and quickly distinguished himself as a student. He received his baccalaureate and a Botetourt medal in 1772 at the age of twenty-three. The dedication of his Botetourt address to Samuel Henley suggests the influence on his education of at least one of this last and most ambitious group of teachers at the colonial College.

While still a student, Madison had filled the post of writing master. He had also begun to demonstrate the promise as a scientist that would later win him recognition, if not first rank, for his publications in several areas of scientific inquiry. Thus, when Josiah Johnson, the master of the Grammar School, died on April 4, 1773, and Thomas Gwatkin decided to transfer to that more lucrative post, Madison assumed the chair of natural philosophy. More than any other single person, Madison was to guide the destinies of the College for almost four decades.^[26]

Although Madison was preparing himself for eventual ordination as an Anglican clergyman, he was a disciple of his mentor Henley in his outspoken religious liberalism and an equally ardent defender of the political principles on which Americans based their stand against recent British measures. His Transfer Day address, An Oration in Commemoration of the Founders of William and Mary College, championed the principle of limited government based on a contract between rulers and ruled, upheld the ideal of individual autonomy, and declared those who sought to impose civil authority in matters of religious belief to be “open Enemies to Truth.”^[27] He seemed, too, from what we know, to be open to the reformist ideas about education that were attracting so much public discussion. Even with his essential loyalty to the Anglican church and to the English clerics who had been his teachers, Madison brought a new dimension to the faculty of the College at a critical time.

The Reemergence of the Revolutionary Crisis, 1774–75

For all the public controversy that had circled about the College and its faculty during the early 1770s, internal affairs at William and Mary had proceeded with relative tranquility under John Camm’s leadership. The College could not, however, escape the shattering effects of a full-scale reopening of the Revolutionary crisis by the middle of 1774. The catalytic event proved to be the Boston Tea Party of December 1773, by which Massachusetts colonists destroyed a shipment of East India Company tea that would be sold with the single remaining tax on the colonies required by Parliament. With latent hostility and intransigence awakened on both sides, the British responded with a series of restrictive measures, the Coercive Acts, on the commerce of the port of Boston and on the structure of government of Massachusetts. Although these events seemed far removed from Williamsburg, they reawakened resistance throughout the colonies, Virginia included. Moving within a year by stages—political protest, trade embargoes, the formation of revolutionary provisional governments, and, finally, armed resistance—the crisis drastically affected the lives of everyone. The College, its faculty apart from James Madison largely Loyalist and most of its students and Visitors avid partisans of the American cause, did not escape.

John Camm, Samuel Henley, and Thomas Gwatkin were, if anything, uncharacteristically quiet as the controversy broke. Gwatkin, even though he was personal chaplain to the unpopular Governor Dunmore, was actually invited to deliver a sermon at Bruton Parish Church on June 1, 1774, as part of a day of fasting and prayer called to support the people of Boston. He declined, but in diplomatic terms, explaining that he was troubled by “a disorder in his breast. “^[28] In late 1774 the faculty as a group adopted a statement congratulating Dunmore upon his return from a successful Virginia expedition against Indians in the western interior and in defense of the land interests of the colony. The Virginia Gazette carried the faculty address on December 8, 1774. The faculty drew criticism two weeks later but defended itself in a reply on January 5, 1775. In fact, on this occasion the whole colony, including the General Assembly itself, had been full of praise for the governor.^[29]

Dunmore’s popularity was, however, fleeting. By early 1775 a network of local revolutionary committees was busily engaged in enforcing a continent-wide nonimportation agreement against British merchants, and independent military companies were being formed to circumvent the governor’s command of the official militia of the colony. By April 3 Governor Dunmore, obviously alarmed at the weakness of his position, had indicated that he would resign as rector of the Board of Visitors, prompting the faculty to send Camm and Gwatkin to wait on him “to thank him most cordially for past favours to the College, and most humbly to request that he will continue to act as a Visitor & Governor of the College, & to afford his Protection to the President & Professors.” Dunmore, who was now supported by a small British naval and military force, brought matters to a head on April 20, 1775—a day after the fighting at Lexington and Concord—by attempting under cover of night to remove military supplies from the public magazine in Williamsburg. Prematurely discovered, the effort backfired, creating threats of a march on Williamsburg by some of the new independent companies. Within a few weeks, the besieged governor fled his capital and took refuge on a British naval vessel at Yorktown. With him aboard HMS Fowey were members of his staff and family, including three sons whom he had enrolled at William and Mary. He was no longer in a position to protect the Loyalist faculty members.^[30]

Thomas Gwatkin, despairing of his future safety, also fled with him and then returned to England. Gwatkin had only recently had a frightening experience when students gathered outside his door at night and began pounding on it. However, a later investigation suggested that the incident was more the result of a group of students returning from a local tavern rather than an intended threat. The chief offender was required to make a written apology. At about the same time, Samuel Henley also returned to England. Gwatkin and Henley had both found their situation increasingly difficult as they faced denunciations in the newspapers and increasing disobedience and disrespect from students. Henley on one occasion was accused of seeking to destroy “the liberties of the country” and of trying to “traduce the Church.”^[31]

Not long after, James Madison also left for England, temporarily, to seek ordination from the bishop of London. His absence left only John Camm, John Dixon, and Emmanuel Jones on the faculty. Before the end of 1775, the new rector of Bruton Parish Church, John Bracken, whose first attendance at a faculty meeting is recorded on November 1, 1775, replaced Gwatkin as the Grammar School master. Both philosophy chairs remained vacant until Madison returned to his post in natural philosophy in the fall of 1776. Although the College continued to operate, the political crisis was beginning to take a heavy toll, not only in the loss of two key members of the faculty, but also in declining enrollments. Even those students who remained were increasingly caught up in the Revolutionary movement, restive, and resistant to faculty authority.

The College did not escape the unrest that swept Williamsburg and much of the colony in the wake of Dunmore’s removal of the powder from the magazine. The student disorder outside Gwatkin’s rooms occurred in May. While it was resolved without disciplinary measures, the faculty, having seen muskets at the College, also ordered a search, although only one gun and one sword turned up. On September 14 the faculty established penalties for those who violated an order of the Visitors that no arms or ammunition be brought into the College and at the same time reaffirmed a prohibition on boarding students leaving the College bounds without permission. Then, in November, the masters had to deal with a serious fracas in which the students had attacked the gardener and “beat him cruelly.” In the course of assigning punishment to the two leading offenders, the faculty complained that the schoolboys had been mistreating the College servants and had shown contempt to the president and masters.^[32]

At the center of the unrest loomed the presence of a physical giant of a man, James Innes, a former scholarship student who had stayed on as usher of the Grammar School. Innes was gregarious and convivial, but impetuous. By some time in 1775, he had begun serving as a captain in the Williamsburg volunteer military company. Then, with Dunmore’ s removal of the powder and other supplies, Innes had organized a special guard for the magazine and its remaining contents and, for his effort, won a vote of thanks from the House of Burgesses.^[33] Despite a faculty regulation prohibiting the ushers from holding “every kind of Office or Employment in any military Society,” Innes continued to serve and actively recruit students. The faculty had also reprimanded Innes and his fellow usher, William Yates, Jr., for “spending a late evening at the Tavern with several of the Students who had no leave of Absence, especially since they continued with these Students till one of them at least was in Liquor.” It was this group of students who, returning from their evening of drinking, had disturbed Thomas Gwatkin.^[34]

Scarcely a week later, the two ushers were back before the faculty for organizing a petition against the College housekeeper, Maria Digges. Ostensibly, they objected to her poor performance, but her suspected Loyalist sympathies had probably motivated them at least as strongly. The masters conducted a detailed investigation, taking depositions from all the signers of the petition, who had very little specific evidence to offer. One student, the young James Monroe, future president of the United States, had to confess that he had none whatsoever. Finding no justification for the criticism, the faculty warned Innes and Yates to “confine themselves to the Duties of their respective Offices, and not to enter into Combinations with the Students for the future.”^[35] Innes paid little heed to these warnings and persisted, with support from the Visitors, who held that his “military Engagements were not incompatible with his Office of Head-Usher.” Camm lost patience, and finally, at a faculty meeting in which only Camm and Emmanuel Jones were present and voting, Innes was dismissed for “repeatedly absenting himself from the College for days and weeks together.”^[36]

James Innes went on to prominence in his state as an officer in the Revolutionary War, a lawyer, and a leading advocate of the federal Constitution in the Virginia ratification convention of 1788. To him fell the responsibility of delivering the final Federalist statement against Patrick Henry’s powerful oratorical attack on the document. Too much can be made of Innes’s misconduct at a time when he was barely in his twenties and caught up in the Revolutionary movement, although he was involved in another incident during his military service.^[37]

Although the episodes in which Innes was involved at the College were not in themselves important, they did exemplify how quickly the College had lost the sense of purpose that it experienced for a few brief years in the early 1770s. Now the faculty was once again all but decimated; and the students were scarcely controllable, their disorder aided and abetted by the ushers who had primary responsibility for their conduct The political crisis had begun to disrupt the College, and its difficulties had only begun.

It is, of course, true that periods of disarray were a staple in the history of the colonial College. Time after time William and Mary had appeared on the verge of collapse, and, more often than not, such crises were closely related to contests in colonial and imperial politics, which had always managed to right themselves. Few would have been prepared to admit in 1775, even a scant year away from an American assertion of independence, that the current crisis was deeper and less likely to be resolved, but such was the case. The same might be said of conditions at William and Mary, for the challenge to its old order in its own small world was equally deep.

The significant debate, between the faculty on the one hand and the Visitors and various newspaper writers on the other, over future curriculum, academic standards, and revisions of the statutes was in its own way the companion of the larger political debate over the nature of the empire and the political rights of the colonists. The push for educational change fashioned within the colony to meet American needs could similarly be seen as paralleling a widespread American assertion by 1774 of virtual colonial legislative autonomy within the empire. The late colonial faculty were not only the defenders of a more traditional education, but the most articulate spokesmen in Virginia for a more hierarchical social and political order.

In retrospect, perhaps the most telling point of all was a growing dissatisfaction of parents, Visitors, and students alike with the state of the College that matched their increasing disenchantment with British rule. The number of students was falling in any event, a consequence of both a general sense of crisis and the departure of some for military service. But parents were also making a conscious decision against sending their sons to William and Mary. George Washington, for example, declined to enroll his stepson, Jackie Custis, explaining to Jackie’s former teacher, the Reverend Jonathan Boucher:

From the best enquiries I could make whilst I was in, and about Williamsburg I cannot think William and Mary College a desirable place to send Jackie Custis to; the Inattention of the Masters added to the number of Hollidays, is the Subject of general complaint; and affords no pleasing prospect to a youth, who has a good deal to attain, and but a short while to do it in.^[38]

Boucher, who had been the boy’s tutor, was initially less critical of the College, but ultimately came around to Washington’s view. Young Custis, who was in modem parlance a “discipline problem,” went off to King’s College, New York. The always irascible Landon Carter complained that his grandson “has only improved his talk for trifling and loungings” at William and Mary.^[39] Even more directly critical of the state of the College, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall told his children’s tutor, Philip Fithian, a Princeton graduate, that William and Mary was “in such confusion at present, & so badly directed, that he cannot send his Children with propriety there for Improvement & useful Education—That he has known the Professors to play all Night at Cards in publick Houses in the City, and has often seen them drunken in the Street!”^[40]

These comments came from planters of the Northern Neck region of the colony, to the north of the Rappahannock River. As a group they had never sent their sons to William and Mary in large numbers, and Robert Carter seemed to be looking back to the stories of the faculty of the late 1750s more than to the tempestuous but morally upright masters of the 1770s. Yet, a general tone of distrust of the College was in the air.

Because he had been a student at the College in 1774–75, Granville Smith’s later comments to his kinsman, William Preston, were particularly telling. Smith remarked first about an unnamed acquaintance: “I do not think his Continuance at the College will be of any substantial Advantage to him, as he makes none or very little Progress in the Belles Lettres.” He continued, “He has not, as I know of[,] run into any Excesses; but his [he is] very pliable, and the College is by no Means under proper Regulations.” With regard to Preston’s own sons, whom he was contemplating sending to the College, Smith counseled that he wait until “their Judgments are riper, when they will be able to view Things and Appearances in their proper Lights.” Smith was especially anxious that they not attend until they had learned Latin and Greek and could enter “directly into the Schools of moral and natural Philosophy … for the present Professor of Humanity is not, in my Opinion, possessed of the most shining abilities.” Smith’s criticism was directed at the master of the Grammar School, John Bracken, who had taken up his post in 1775.^[41]

A Difficult Transition, 1776–79

Already severely disrupted by the events of 1774 and 1775, the College faced further trials as the colonies moved to the outright assertion of independence and full-scale war against Great Britain. President Camm was the last Loyalist on the faculty, so the principal cause of the dislocation of the College was the departure of older students for military service or the reluctance of parents to send their sons away from home at such a time. The failure of the Revolutionary government to move quickly to establish a new source of authority for the College also left its affairs in a state of uncertainty.

During 1775 and 1776, the leaders of the provisional Revolutionary government made no effort to remove Camm from the faculty or to exert any other control over the College. Instead, they exempted the faculty from military service and left the institution to find its own way. The College did have to fend off an effort by General Cherles Lee, the commander of an American force stationed in Williamsburg in the spring of 1776, to commandeer the College building as a hospital. But the Virginia Convention, the provisional body that replaced the colonial legislature, came to the rescue by holding that the building was not suitable for the purpose and too likely to suffer damage.^[42] Two weeks before the Convention made its decision, the College optimistically announced in the newspaper that the College “has been lately cleaned, and will be immediately plastered and whitewashed, to render it fit for the Reception of Professors, Students, Grammar Scholars, and Servants” and that the Trinity term would shortly open.^[43]

At the time, the Convention was in the midst of a meeting in Williamsburg at which on May 15 it initiated a move for a formal declaration of independence by the Continental Congress. It then proceeded, without waiting for the Continental Congress to adopt the formal Declaration of Independence (signed for Virginia by, among others, three alumni of the College), to write a new constitution and declaration of rights for the state.^[44] Apart from dropping the College seat in the new lower house of the legislature, the delegates took no further action regarding William and Mary. A seat filled by the vote of a handful of faculty probably did not seem very appropriate in the new republic, especially when its last occupant during the final months of the old General Assembly had been a Loyalist, John Randolph. He had been elected by the faculty at the urging of Dunmore in order to have an informant inside the body.

Change, even if slower than might have been expected, was, however, inevitable at William and Mary. Its agent was James Madison, who had returned ordained from England, where he had been under surveillance as a suspected American spy. By the fall of 1776, Madison had again taken up his chair in natural philosophy and had begun to tum his attention to reforming the College. Madison anticipated, as he put it in a letter to the Reverend William Smith of the College of Philadelphia, that “the approaching Assembly is to new-model our College.” Madison went on to explain that while the members “would fain have it beneficial to the Country,” there was no “Proper Plan, especially one as would suit this country the best.” His purpose in writing Smith was to ask him to send a description of the plan on which the College of Philadelphia operated, since some Virginians had proposed it as a model, although “without knowing scarcely what it is.”^[45]

Shortly before, a lengthy and anonymous address to “the Honourable the Convention of Virginia” laid out a plan in the Virginia Gazette for an enlarged Virginia college. The author, who obviously hoped that the Convention would act without waiting for the new permanent government to be formed, began by offering a sweeping vision for the institution, observing that “when we consider ourselves as an independent and a growing people, who shall one day make a figure amongst the greatest states on earth, we ought to lay a foundation for such a university as would then do us no discredit.” To implement such an ambitious design, the proposal called for an astounding fourteen chairs, retaining the four existing appointments in divinity and philosophy but adding others devoted to modern languages, history, law, “Humanity,” and the natural sciences. It also recommended that the General Assembly provide the necessary additional funding and that the College consequently become a public institution with the assembly having the right to review budgets and appoint members of the Board of Visitors. The nomination of a president, who would be expected to teach as well, would, however, rest with the faculty. There is a possibility that Madison himself could have been the author, since the statement accorded with his known views and was almost certainly the work of someone who knew the existing College well. In any event, the Convention did not consider the question; but the address, apart from its retention of the divinity chairs, defined very clearly the general direction that the reform efforts would take in the next few years.^[46]

A week later Madison took a step in which he was clearly the prime mover. Anxious no doubt to preserve the revenue that derived from the issuance of surveyors’ licenses under the new authority of the state, he moved at a faculty meeting on November 29, 1776, to eliminate the name of the king from such commissions on the grounds that “mentioning the Date from the Birth of our Saviour” was all that was required. The three other faculty members in attendance backed him; but although Madison had avoided an explicit reference to the removal of the king’s name in his resolution, John Camm still objected, entering his protest on the record. The president insisted that he was bound by oath to perform his duties under the royal charter and that Madison’s resolution was subversive of that principle.^[47]

Camm was thus as unyielding as ever in his belief that William and Mary indissolubly linked to the authority of the Anglican church and the British empire. A man now almost sixty, with a young wife and five small children, he was in no position to return to England, and so he stood his ground. Yet, for him to remain as president was clearly impossible, and so in the spring of 1777, the Visitors finally removed him, but on the grounds of “neglect and misconduct” rather than directly confronting his Loyalism. They took the occasion to rid themselves as well of the divinity master, John Dixon, and also of Emmanuel Jones, after his twenty-two years of uninspired service as master of the Indian School. Neither was a Loyalist, but Dixon almost certainly had no students, and Jones probably only one, named Baubee, or Bawbee, the son of an Indian woman and a Canadian Indian agent. The remaining faculty numbered only two—Madison, who became president “for one year” in the fall, and the master of the Grammar School, John Bracken, who had come relatively recently from England but cast his lot with the Americans. He also retained his post at Bruton Parish Church.^[48]

Madison, whose one-year presidency was destined to last far longer, took control of a bankrupt institution. The revenues derived from royal grants were at an end, the home government was also withholding the proceeds from the Boyle bequest, and no one in Virginia had moved to find other support. For the next three years, Madison seemed to spend much of his time abolishing scholarships for lack of funds, selling off some of the College lands and slaves, bringing other slaves to Williamsburg to replace hired labor at the College, and raising charges for tuition, room, and board. Later, in 1779, the faculty began to require a contribution from students to the library each year at the time of matriculation. In both 1778 and 1779, Madison also sought financial assistance from the legislature.^[49]

Despite the precarious finances of the College, Madison, now that Dixon, Jones, and Camm were all gone, determined to fill the moral philosophy chair. He appointed Robert Andrews, who was an Anglican minister but a graduate of the College of Philadelphia and, like the president, an ardent advocate of the Revolution. Andrews also served as bursar and clerk of the faculty.^[50] Madison attempted, too, to keep up College traditions, holding the usual Transfer Day observance in 1777. Madison preached, “recommending industry in the pursuit of science,” and two students, John Heath and William Nelson, delivered the usual orations, although Nelson’s was given in English rather than Latin.^[51]

Moreover, difficult times did not prevent a group of students among the small number who remained from launching a new fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa. Initially, five of them gathered on December 5, 1776, to found the organization, which they often referred to as the SP Society from the initials of the words Societas and Philosophiae, which appeared on their medal along with the Greek letters for PBK and other symbols. They had the model of the older but now inactive F.H.C. before them, and several student societies were already in existence at other American colleges.

Although not averse to ‘jollity and mirth,” especially in their anniversary celebrations at the Raleigh Tavern, and while pledging themselves each to become “the Brother of unalienable Brothers” and to assist one another in cases of “Distress,” the members also proclaimed high intellectual purposes. While the topics of debates that characterized their meetings were sometimes frivolous—for example, “whether the rape of the Sabine women was just”—the topics of discussion were usually more serious questions of morality, history, and political conduct.

The students who joined were uniformly advocates of the American cause, many performing military service in the course of the war; and debate topics sometimes ran to such questions as “whether any form of Government is more favorable to public virtue than a Commonwealth.” The provision in the laws for founding chapters elsewhere led somewhat incidentally to the grant of charters to Yale and Harvard chapters in 1779, perhaps demonstrating a degree of national consciousness. Yet, Phi Beta Kappa did not appear to be so much an organization formed to advance the cause of the Revolution as one founded for broader purposes in the context of those events. The chapter continued to initiate both students and noncollegians, a total of fifty in all, from 1776 until the closing of the College in 1781, when Phi Beta Kappa went into temporary abeyance. Its final meeting was called on January 6 for the purpose of securing the papers of the society because of the “confusion of the times and the present Dissolution which threatens the University.” Its founding was nevertheless a testimony to a degree of student vitality at an otherwise difficult time for the College.^[52]

The Jeffersonian Reforms, 1776–80

Despite his difficulties James Madison had not abandoned his hopes for a thoroughgoing reform of the College. In that effort he had support from Thomas Jefferson, who returned from service in the Continental Congress to take up a seat in the fall of 1776 in the lower house of the new Virginia legislature with hopes of securing far broader changes in the legal and political system of the state than the Constitution of 1776 had achieved. George Wythe, Jefferson’s law teacher, an important political leader, and a member of the Board of Visitors of the College, was also an ally. At his first session in the legislature, Jefferson was instrumental in securing passage of a bill providing for a general revisal of the entire colonial Virginia legal system. He was then chosen to chair a committee with four other members, one of them Wythe, charged with the task of drawing up the detailed set of laws that would carry out the revisal. For the next two and a half years, Jefferson threw himself into the task. The final report on June 18, 1779, contained drafts of 126 bills, including those which had already been introduced. Some of the bills passed promptly, others were eventually enacted, but some, including many about which Jefferson cared deeply, never passed at all.^[53]

The specific effort to change the curriculum and the governance of the College took place within this context of far broader efforts to reshape the legal system of Virginia. Education, however, was one of three or four matters of particularly vital concern to Jefferson, who sought to achieve an overall plan for republican education throughout the state, one in which the College would play a significant part. Jefferson spelled out his ideas in drafts of three proposed pieces of legislation. One was a “Bill for Amending the Constitution of the College of William and Mary, and Substituting More Certain Revenues for its Support”; another provided for a public library; and the centerpiece was his famous “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge.”

The last and most general of these measures is almost too complex to describe briefly. Essentially, it required the establishment under public auspices of a system of “hundred” schools, several of them in each county of the state, which would provide three years of free education for all white children, male and female. For girls there would be no further public schooling. Parents would also be expected to pay for further education of their sons, except that one particularly promising student whose family could not afford to pay would advance on a scholarship from each hundred school to grammar schools, one in each county, there to begin a classical education. One-third of those on scholarships would be dropped after a single year, and all of the remainder would be dropped after two years, except that one student at each grammar school would be maintained for another four years. At the end of that time, a single scholar from among all the grammar schools would be selected each year to attend William and Mary on scholarship. ff the plan seems very circumscribed in the small number of scholars who would receive more advanced education, its provision of three years of universal schooling for white children nevertheless far exceeded any opportunities for education that had existed in colonial Virginia.^[54]

In the case of the specific legislation for William and Mary, Jefferson carried forward the mix of public and private support that had always prevailed and that he also incorporated in the general education bill. However, he was as unequivocal as the seminal newspaper article of June 1, 1776, that the state should now control the institution. With the alteration of government and with the inherited deficiencies of the colonial College, it became, Jefferson noted, “the peculiar duty of the Legislature, at this time to aid and improve that seminary, in which those who are to be the future guardians of the rights and liberties of their country, may be endowed with science and virtue.” But, he also warned, the College had to become as “publicly advantageous, in proportion, as it is publicly expensive.” In more practical terms of actual governance, Jefferson provided for a smaller Board of Visitors, five in all, who were to be elected annually by the legislature and who would choose their rector.

Jefferson intended to cease instruction in divinity, although he proposed to retain the second divinity chair, often referred to as the chair in Oriental languages, as part of expanded instruction in languages. He provided explicitly that the Visitors were not to be restrained in any way by “the royal prerogative, or the laws of the kingdom of England” or by the “canons or constitution of the English Church, as enjoined” in the College charter. Jefferson also proposed to discontinue the Indian School in favor of maintaining missions among the Indians, both for teaching them and for collecting information about Indian cultures. He also wanted to discontinue the Grammar School.

Other than the elimination of further instruction in divinity, Jefferson stayed essentially with the anonymous proposals of June 1776 for an expanded faculty and a more extensive curriculum. However, he now specified only eight professorships: the two existing philosophy chairs (with the moral philosophy post widened to embrace fine arts); the redefined appointment in ancient languages; and five new appointments in law, history, mathematics, anatomy and medicine, and modern languages. In an appendix Jefferson listed a staggering group of subfields that each professor would have to cover. The president was to be chosen from among the eight professors and hence was expected to continue to teach. To supplant the former British chancellor, there was now to be a group of three chancellors, all elected by the legislature from judges on the higher courts of the state; they would have the power to remove professors for cause.

Recognizing that the old forms of support for the College provided by the crown were at an end and those provided by the colonial Virginia legislature (such as the tax on skins and furs) were no longer productive, Jefferson now proposed that the College be supported by a substantial duty on each hogshead of tobacco exported from the colony. He also required that money be provided to purchase one of the models of the solar system designed by the Philadelphia scientist, David Rittenhouse, in order to advance instruction in science at the College.^[55]

These were sweeping changes, stripping away the last vestiges of imperial political and religious influences, incorporating the strong attachment of Jefferson and others to the ideal of religious freedom, and providing the expanded areas of instruction favored by many of the earlier proposals for reform that appeared in Virginia newspapers. Jefferson in old age recalled the extent of his ambition and hopes, when he wrote that he drew the bill “to amend the constitution of Wm & Mary College, to enlarge it’s sphere of science, and to make it in fact an University.”^[56]

Bold vision and legislative enactment were, however, very different matters; and none of the education bills was among the parts of Jefferson’s program that fared well with Virginia representatives. While some individual bills were brought forward earlier, the legislature did not take up the full report of the revisors until 1785, after Jefferson had gone to France as American minister. The general education bill had been introduced once in December 1778 and again in June 1780 without success; it came up a third time in 1786 as part of the consideration of the full report. But it was only in 1796 that a weak law, authorizing local communities to establish public schools if they wished and retaining some of Jefferson’s wording, was passed. The legislation on William and Mary was presented by James Madison on October 31, 1785, and then postponed until the next session. Thereafter, it was dropped. Jefferson’s belief, expressed later in his life, was that, despite his effort to strip away the divinity school and the old British ecclesiastical connections of the College, “the religious jealousies … of all the dissenters took alarm lest this might give an ascendancy to the Anglican sect and refused acting on that bill.”^[57]

On June 1, 1779, well before the bill for amending the constitution of William and Mary had met its fate, indeed only a short time after he had drafted it, Jefferson left the Virginia legislature to assume the governorship of the state. As had been the custom with the colonial governors, although it was a recognition denied his predecessor, Patrick Henry, Jefferson was elected to the Board of Visitors. He was perhaps still hopeful that he might accomplish something at William and Mary.

In the face of the slowness of the legislature to act, it was the Board of Visitors that became the agent of change, almost as a matter of necessity, given the precarious financial condition of the College. On October 16, 1779, the Visitors petitioned the House of Delegates for assistance, an appeal that evidently went unanswered.^[58] Then, on December 4 the Visitors met and adopted a new statute that attempted both to solve the financial problem and also to reorganize the faculty and the course of instruction in a way that would realize at least some of the objectives of Jefferson and others. Both for lack of funds and of any source of authority that would replace the old royal charter, the Visitors did not attempt to add new professorships, choosing instead to redefine three of the six existing positions. They retained the appointment in moral philosophy, adding to its duties instruction in fine arts and in the law of nature and nations, and also the natural philosophy chair, leaving mathematics and the sciences to be taught by a single master. Even though it was vacant, they also kept the appointment for the Indian School, for they were still hopeful that, in spite of the Revolution, the Brafferton income might yet be granted to the College. In the case of the other positions, both the divinity chairs and the post of master of the Grammar School were eliminated. In their place the Visitors created new professorships in anatomy and medicine, modern languages, and law and police. The descriptions were virtually unchanged from the language in Jefferson’s pending legislation. The statute also provided that matters of curriculum would for the future be decided by the six faculty sitting with a committee of six Visitors, all voting together—a loss of complete faculty control over academic questions for which Camm, Horrocks, and Henley had contended so vigorously. The statute assumed that the president would be a faculty member who would continue to teach, as was the case with the incumbent, James Madison.

There were simply no new funds to cover the costs of filling five faculty positions rather than the three that were currently filled, and no doubt discontinuance of the Grammar School would incur a further loss of income from student fees. Getting over this hurdle required ingenuity. The faculty had already provided that the remaining scholarships would pay only the amount available in current income from the investments on which they rested, and a rise in student fees had become increasingly frequent. Now, the Visitors eliminated the commons, that is, ceased providing meals from student fees, arranging instead for a private contractor to take over the kitchen and serve meals to students who wished to pay for them. Most significant of all was the discontinuance of faculty salaries, leaving the professors to rely on fees paid by the students whom they actually taught.^[59]

The reforms were, as has so often been the case in the history of William and Mary, a matter of making do with existing and limited resources, and were certainly far less bold than Jefferson’s proposed legislation. Nevertheless, in a number of respects—especially in providing professional training in law and medicine, offering the study of modem languages, and eliminating the Grammar School and any strong emphasis on classical education—the 1779 reforms did meet many of the demands which had surfaced in the recent debates over the College. They also satisfied several of Jefferson’s key objectives, failing primarily (at least on paper) in the retention of the Indian School and the inability to expand instruction in natural science. And they made a gesture to the rising force of religious dissent in state politics by abandoning the divinity school.

It is this group of innovations in the faculty and curriculum that have been especially honored among the traditions of William and Mary as having established a long list of priorities in American higher education—the first university, the first elective system, the first law school, the first instruction in modem languages, to name the most prominently claimed. And in that same tradition, they are “Jeffersonian” reforms, in the popular imagination having been instituted by Jefferson almost singlehandedly. There is no doubt that Jefferson, who was serving with several of his friends and associates on the Board of Visitors of 1779, played a part in their introduction and found them at least a step in the right direction. However, apart from the phraseology used to define the new professorships, there is little about the brief, rather matter-of-fact character of the statute of December 4 that bears the mark of Jeffersonian rhetoric or imagination. Even while carrying out some similar objectives, it lacked the sweep of Jefferson’s draft legislation on the College, which began with a masterful review of its past history, laid out in some detail the areas of instruction to be covered by the additional faculty, and defined a broad new educational purpose for the institution. Admittedly, the move by the Visitors was a bold one to make at such a difficult time, and implicitly it shared Jefferson’s vision. No doubt Jefferson thought the half loaf was better than nothing at all.

There is no surviving record of Jefferson’s opinion at the time of the Visitors’ action. His first statement came only a few years later in his Notes on the State of Virginia, largely written in 1781 and early 1782, but published later in the same decade. There, after once again reviewing unfavorably the history of the colonial College, he wrote that “after the present revolution, the visitors, having no power to change those circumstances of the college which were fixed by the charter, and being confined in the number of professorships, undertook to change the objects of the professorships.” After listing the new chairs, he moved on quickly to express hope that his more full-fledged reforms in the draft bill on William and Mary would ultimately be realized. “It is proposed,” he declared, “so soon as the legislature shall have leisure to take up this subject, to desire authority from them to increase the number of professorships, as well for the purpose of subdividing those already instituted, as of adding others for other branches of science.”^[60] Only very late in his life, in writing his Autobiography, did Jefferson express more enthusiasm for the reforms of 1779 and assign himself a key role in their implementation. Then, as he reminisced about his old College, he asserted that “I effected, during my residence in Williamsburg that year, a change in the organization of that institution,” going on to take credit for the redefinition of the six professorships and the abolition of the Grammar School that in the 1780s he thought an insufficient reform.^[61]

The true test of the Visitors’ effort to reinvigorate the College had to come, however, from the manner and degree to which the statute was successfully implemented. The faculty lost no time in turning to the task. Within three weeks, on December 29, it met under the new statute, with all five professors in attendance, set student fees, fixed the date for opening the new term on January 17, 1780, and provided for the retention of five College slaves needed for work, paving the way for others to be sold to raise more funds.^[62]

One might well ask how a faculty was assembled so quickly. John Bracken, master of the Grammar School, found his position abolished out from under him, although he did not give up without a fight, ultimately bringing suit for reinstatement. Andrews and Madison were, of course, already on hand, and Andrews was able to provide the additional instruction required in fine arts. James McClurg, a Virginian and alumnus who had studied medicine at Edinburgh, accomplished some respected experiments “upon the Human Bile,” and then carried out further study in Paris and London, had then returned to Virginia and Williamsburg. He now accepted the new chair in medicine, although there is no evidence that he ever had students. After a year of regular attendance at faculty meetings, McClurg was recorded present at a single meeting two years later in 1783, and then resigned to move to Richmond.^[63]

The new professor of modern languages, Carlo Bellini, was one of the most colorful faculty members to serve the College during its first century. He had come to Virginia in 1774 with a group of Italians brought by Thomas Jefferson to help in his wine-producing experiments. By 1778 Bellini had begun to assist the Virginia Council of State with the translation of letters from Europe, soon achieving the title of clerk of foreign correspondence, which he expanded in a letter to his family as “Secretary of the State of Virginia for Foreign Affairs.” In the same letter, written in August 1778, he also identified himself as “Professor of modem languages in this University of Williamsburg,” suggesting that he might have begun offering some classes at the College before he was formally appointed to the chair in modem languages in the reorganization of late 1779. He was not paid by student fees, as the new statute had specified, and apparently received only a meager salary. Bellini continued to teach for some years after the College reopened at the end of the Revolutionary War, and much of what we know about him comes from that period in his life. His command of his native Italian was apparently good, and he had some knowledge of French. It seems unlikely that he knew any other European language, but he must have added a certain spark to life in provincial Williamsburg.^[64]

If anything gave some immediate substance to the 1779 reforms, it was the appointment of George Wythe to the professorship of law and police, announced in the Virginia Gazette as early as December 18. Wythe had for some years been a respected teacher of law students, including, of course, Jefferson; he employed the traditional instructional method of apprenticeship in his office. In 1780, his first year at the College, he attracted at least eight students, since there were enough to form two moot court teams of four each. One of them was John Marshall, who remained only a few months. In a letter to James Madison, the future president of the United States, Jefferson praised the beginning that Wythe had made, remarking:

Our new institution at the college has had a success which has gained it universal applause. They hold weekly courts and assemblies in the capitol. The professors join in it; and the young men dispute with elegance, method and learning.^[65]

Like most claims to priority in history, the assertion by William and Mary that it offered the first instruction in law in an American college has not gone unchallenged, notably by partisans of Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Tapping Reeve’s law school at his office in Litchfield, Connecticut. Inasmuch as George Wythe held a professorship of law and actually lectured to students who intended to become lawyers, the claim of William and Mary in this instance has merit. Of all the new chairs, this was the one that produced the most lasting result.

The War Closes the College, 1780–81

In the short run, however, the reorganization of the College under the 1779 statute had no chance to prove itself before British troops threatened, and ultimately occupied Williamsburg, forcing the dispersal of faculty and students and causing the College to close for a year. Just as it seemed to be making a new beginning, William and Mary found itself in a familiar position—on the brink of ruin.

The president was able in August 1780 to declare, almost certainly in a burst of excessive optimism, that “the number of Students is more considerable than heretofore and encreases daily.”^[66] By that time British troops under the command of Benedict Arnold, who had a few months earlier deserted the American cause, had been in Virginia since the first of the year. In part as a response to the British threat, the government of Virginia had dealt Williamsburg a crippling blow when the legislature voted to move the capital to Richmond, closing the Williamsburg offices on April 7, 1780, and reopening in the new capital on April 24.^[67] Despite the fear of the imminent invasion of Williamsburg , Arnold actually raided Richmond before going into winter quarters at Portsmouth, but Williamsburg never recovered from its loss of the seat of government. The College, too, was now separated from the authority that was likely to be decisive in its future.

A pervasive tone of fear and apprehension and the sense that the College was disintegrating was apparent in a letter to his guardian from a remaining student. John Brown, one of Wythe’s law students and a future United States Senator from Kentucky, reported on October 27, 1780, that he had become ill and that his condition had worsened “owing to my great uneasiness of mind occasioned by the Invasion of the English who have been expected daily in this Town.” He continued, “I am so weak that I cannot leave my Room in College which is intirely deserted by every Studt but one or two who are sick.” Brown thought it “more than probable that College will be suspended for some time,” and reported that Madison had talked of “resigning his professorship, & the Studts all turned Soldier & everythin in the Utmost Confusion.”^[68]

Even though the British had not yet struck at Williamsburg, conditions were worse still when James Madison wrote his cousin on January 18, 1781, that “some of the Professors thought it prudent to retire” and the College had become a “Desart.”^[69] In late March General William Phillips reinforced Arnold’s troops, and on April 18 the larger force entered Williamsburg, although it left without inflicting damage. At one point a volunteer company of students at the College fired on British sentinels, who returned the fire and drove them off, apparently without injury on either side.^[70]

The British army, opposed only by a small American detachment under Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, grew even larger with the arrival of the army commanded by Charles, the second Earl Cornwallis. Madison officially closed the College on June 1, and before the end of the month, Lord Cornwallis occupied Williamsburg, forcing Madison out of the President’s House and taking it for his own use. His stay was short, and Madison was able to reclaim his quarters. Yet, conditions remained unsettled in the old capital, and on July 21, Madison wrote his brother, William, that “the College is entirely broke up.”^[71] Madison began making his plans to leave, taking his slaves and effects with him. Of the faculty of 1779, only Bellini remained behind, occupying his rooms in the College building and attempting to protect the library and the scientific apparatus through all that followed.

By that time American forces were in control of Williamsburg, and the College was serving as a hospital for the wounded. Over the course of the summer and early fall, larger American and French forces, including those under the two commanders-in-chief, Washington and Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, collected at Williamsburg. From there they moved on to Yorktown and mounted the successful siege that brought Cornwallis’s surrender on October 19. Even then, after returning from Yorktown, the French forces lingered on in winter quarters and until late July 1782, when they left on relatively short notice. During the siege and in the post-Yorktown period, the College served as the French hospital; officers were billeted in the President’s House, and enlisted ranks in the Main Building. By early 1782 the faculty were chafing to get the College reopened.

The faculty, although committed to the American cause, were never entirely happy with the military occupation of the College. Some of their concern reflected an understandable apprehension about the threat to its physical properties. Even more, however, they seemed to believe that just as the College was gaining a new footing and attracting students, everything might collapse. While Washington was caught up in the last days of the siege of Cornwallis, John Blair, then serving as rector of the Board, wrote the commander-in-chief on behalf of the College. He complained mildly about “the unhappy Vacation, which the Necessities of the War have made much too long,” and especially about the French demand for the keys to an outbuilding, the Granary, where valuable College supplies were stored. The general returned a somewhat frosty reply only two days before the surrender ceremony. A few days later, George Wythe, who like Bellini was still in Williamsburg, wrote again to Washington, on behalf of all the faculty, to express their conviction that if the College could reopen, many of its former students were prepared to return and would be joined by others. He also made a special appeal to Washington to make certain that the French officers protected College property. On this occasion, with his victory achieved, Washington returned a more cordial letter to the president and the entire body of professors, in which he promised that the sick and wounded would be removed as soon as possible. Employing all the tact he could muster, he also declared:

The seat of Literature at Williamsburg has ever, in my view, been an object of veneration. As an Institution, important for its Communication of useful learning, and Conducive to the Diffusion of the true principles of National Liberty, you may be assured, that it will receive every encouragement and Benefaction in my power towards it’s reestablishment.^[72]

How well placed were the concerns of the faculty about the use of the College buildings was demonstrated when a fire broke out on November 23, 1781, in the President’s House. The wounded officers staying there were safely evacuated, and the fire was kept from spreading to the Main Building despite a lack of water and buckets. But the President’s House itself was destroyed and with it James Madison’s books, papers, and scientific instruments.^[73] The Main Building, even though saved, was obviously receiving heavy use. James Tilton, an American doctor who visited it to observe French practices in treating the wounded, commented favorably on the French physicians’ efforts to keep their patients “very neat and clean.” But he went on to note a serious problem that had led to the death of some of those treated, namely, the construction of a wooden privy at one end of the building, extending from the roof to a pit in the earth with a door opening into it from each floor of the hospital. “This sink of nastiness,” Tilton complained, “perfumed the whole house very sensibly and, without doubt, vitiated all the air within the wards.”^[74]

Since he hoped that the French would soon be leaving and that he could begin to plan the reopening of the College, James Madison had returned to Williamsburg by the spring of 1782.^[75] To help matters along and to demonstrate that there was good feeling toward the French, he called a meeting of the faculty on March 7 to confer on the French general, François Jean, Marquis de Chastellux, the honorary degree of doctor of civil laws. A little later, on June 12, Dr. Jean François Coste, the chief physician of the French forces, received the honorary degree of doctor of physic.^[76] Chastellux returned the compliment when he published an account of his American travels in which he praised William and Mary as “a magnificent establishment which adorns Williamsburg and does honor to Virginia.”^[77] Finally, when they knew the French were actually departing in July, the president and the masters presented a formal address to Rochambeau expressing their “esteem and gratitude for you and your brave troops.”^[78] Thus, despite the tension that it had sometimes occasioned, the French occupation of the College came to an amicable end, although the effort to obtain payment for the destruction of the President’s House, which had already begun, continued for a long time to come.

The End of an Era

On August 10, 1782, “the University of William and Mary” announced in a Richmond newspaper (since there was no longer a printer in Williamsburg) that a new term would open on the first Monday in October, with private instruction available for students who wished to come earlier. Students were advised, however, that they would have to board with local families until the College building could be repaired. An old era had ended, and the College was about to enter upon a new chapter in its history.

The legacy of the colonial era was decidedly mixed. William and Mary seemed to have survived when it might well never have managed to reopen. Yet, its always precarious finances were now a complete disaster. Most of its traditional revenues were lost. Obviously, the support that had come from British sources disappeared, apart from the lands that the College still retained; but it had for some years been a constant struggle to collect the £500 or so of annual rents from those lands, which were also declining in fertility.^[79] Even the revenues granted by the colonial legislature were no longer available, and the new state legislature did not move to offer other support. The destruction of the President’s House and a clear need to renovate the Main Building after the heavy use it received as a military hospital added still another burden.

For a fleeting moment, on the eve of the final Revolutionary conflict, the colonial College ironically had almost certainly achieved the peak of its academic strength, marked by a greater emphasis on advanced study in the two philosophy schools, a reinforcement of traditional classical education coupled with an effort to promote study of the natural sciences, and some encouragement of students to complete the baccalaureate degree. These developments had come, of course, primarily at the hands of a small group of English faculty, especially John Camm, Thomas Gwatkin, and Samuel Henley. They may have disagreed on some intellectual and theological matters but were united in their vocal, even aggressive, defense of a close association of the College with the Anglican church and the empire and of the perpetuation of a traditional course of study modeled on the British universities.

While these men may well have given the College the academic rigor needed to see it through a very difficult period, they also imposed, however inadvertently, a heavy liability on its future. They did so by drawing such a sharp line between their own views and the emerging demands in the colony for a very different style of education, one that was less traditional, more permissive in its requirements, and more oriented toward the practical and the vocational. The struggle over the destiny of the College thus came to parallel, as indeed it always had, the larger political battle between imperial control and colonial autonomy. With that larger question resolved in favor of independence and republicanism, the College risked becoming a remnant of the old and discredited order, notwithstanding the attachment to the new era of some of its strongest supporters, such as Madison and Jefferson.

Indeed, it proved difficult for William and Mary to shed its inheritance, especially with the failure of Jefferson to secure the thoroughgoing reorganization that he attempted in his reform bill. His recognition of the decisive opposition of a growing body of religious dissenters to assumption by the state of future responsibility for the College was telling. And the College would live for years to come, in the view of many Virginians, with the burden of appearing to remain too closely allied with the surviving remnant of Anglicans who organized the Episcopal church and made the College president its first bishop. In the absence of legislation clearly defining a new basis of authority for the College, the surviving force of the royal charter became, and for some time remained, a complication rather than the historical ornament that it has been in the twentieth century. The persistence of its influence circumscribed, for example, the reforms that were undertaken in the Visitors’ statute of 1779.

Yet, one should not paint an altogether gloomy picture. The 1779 reforms, limited as they were, attempted to accomplish much of what Jefferson and others sought with respect to a more secular and practical curriculum and an enlargement of the powers of its external governing board.^[80] With all its problems, William and Mary was prepared to enter a republican and American era. Above anyone else, the key figure in the transition was its president. Educated well at the College under the last Tory faculty, ordained to the Anglican clergy at the very time of national independence, yet republican to the core and supportive of efforts to transform the College, James Madison more than anyone else took the College out of the old era and into the new.

In 1782 a very difficult part of that road lay ahead, but nothing better illustrated the spirit in which Madison approached the task than his exchange of letters two years earlier with the president of Yale, Ezra Stiles. Stiles, although defensive because he felt the New England colleges had long “been held by our Southern & Western Brethren with ineffable Contempt,” believed the time had come for a more generous view. “We are,” he wrote, “rather to glory that an Infant Republic of Letters is to be found in America.” For the future its colleges should “cultivate a mutual Intercourse & honorable Friendship with one another.” Madison responded with characteristic generosity, affirming his own high opinion of the people of the eastern states, especially because they excelled in science. He, too, expressed his wish for a “Republic of Letters.” And “surely,” he added, “it belongs to our Colleges & Universities to lay the Foundation from wc [which] the future glory of America shall arise.” And so Madison turned to rebuilding a College whose doors, he declared, were “open to all” and whose students possessed “the liberty of attending whom they please, and in what order they please, or all the diffr [different] Lectures in a Term if they think proper.”^[81]