William and Mary faced imminent collapse on more than one occasion throughout its long history, but its prospects were never more ominous than at the end of 1705. The College was without a building, without a faculty, and almost without students; its financial resources were depleted; and the debilitating effects of the animosity between James Blair and Francis Nicholson limited any hopes of revival. Yet recovery slowly began. If one were to look only at the peaks of its history over the next four or five decades—to perhaps the middle of the century—a second building on the ruined walls of the first, successful transfer of the charter in 1729, construction of the Brafferton, the chapel, and the President’s House, and the filling out of the faculty with a corresponding increase in students might seem to suggest steady progress.

In reality, those peaks alternated with periodic decline into controversy, weakness, and lack of direction. Nonetheless, in the process William and Mary did come to fill a valued place in the provincial culture. Also, as enrollment grew modestly, a larger number of those who had studied at the College—if only for two or three years, often divided between the Grammar School and the faculty of philosophy—made their entry into the public life of the colony. The College thus began to fulfill the more secular of its original purposes. If the Indian School and training in divinity lagged along less successfully, a predominantly English and clerical faculty and a beginning of instruction in divinity still gave some expression to the second and more religious and imperial purpose embedded in the charter.

A Second Try, 1706–18

Accounting for the gradual recovery from the debacle of 1705 is not easy. The College had few resources left beyond its lands and James Blair’s iron will, the latter of which some might have perceived as being more the problem than the solution. Some of its crown and provincial revenues were continuing, but they could hardly meet normal operating costs, let alone the expensive construction of a new building. On this occasion Blair announced no new grand designs or promotional trips to England, and, for a few years at least, there was no governor capable of providing strong support on the one hand or, on the other, presenting a useful foil for the president’s ambitions.

Indeed, Blair’s lack of a major political opponent in the governor’s office for more than a decade may have been vital in affording the president time to concentrate his considerable energies on the precarious situation of the College. Nicholson remained something of a problem, since his term as rector did not expire for some months after his removal as governor, and he continued as a trustee until his death some years later. But as Blair turned to the task of rebuilding, Nicholson had finally left the colony, and Blair’s longtime ally, Philip Ludwell, had succeeded to the position of rector.^[1] The new governor, Edward Nott, enjoyed Blair’s good opinion, but he lived only a year after taking office, succumbing to a fever in August 1706 before the relationship with the president had time to sour. The capture on the way to Virginia of his designated successor, Robert Hunter, by the French during Queen Anne’s War, caused the colony to remain for four years under the acting governorship of Edmund Jenings, the aged and ineffective president of the council. Blair started out on good terms with the next governor, Alexander Spotswood, who arrived in 1710 and immediately proved a firm supporter of the College during his first years in office; the all but inevitable break with Blair was still some years away.^[2]

When Blair turned to the work of rebuilding, his first task was to find new financial support. On this occasion he sought to set an example, informing Archbishop Tenison that to support the effort, “I have fully parted with my salary . . . , though I had an undoubted Title to it, being named President under the Great Seal of England and that during my natural life.”^[3] In truth he had lost the salary by an action of those trustees who opposed him in June 1705, but he now indeed served without stipend until 1721, when the remaining trustees, having become more sympathetic, secured a ruling from the lord chancellor that provided him with two thirds of the £150 specified by the charter, to be paid “from 1718 until the College be founded.” With the transfer of the charter accomplished in 1729, the College was adjudged to be “founded,” and he then began to receive the full stipend.^[4] More important, Blair’s self-congratulation at the surrender of his salary occurred in the context of a letter that he sent to Tenison primarily to seek the archbishop’s help in gaining support from Queen Anne. She responded with a grant of £500 from the quitrents and a promise to match money raised in Virginia. The queen then added an additional £500 in 1710 upon receipt of a second appeal. The president also won a renewal by the General Assembly of its export tax on skins and furs.^[5]

Within four years of the fire, the trustees resolved to proceed with the new building, even though not all of the needed funds were yet in hand. William Byrd II recounted a meeting on August 4, 1709, at which the members present “at last determined to build the college on the old walls and appointed workmen to view them and [compute] the charge.” Six weeks later, on September 13, they debated the question once more and stood by their original decision, although Byrd joined a minority who voted in favor of a fresh start on another location. Then, at the end of October, John Tullitt, who had supplied brick for the capitol a few years earlier, offered to carry out the building work if he could cut wood from College lands and if the institution would bear the cost of bringing workers from England. The trustees agreed to his terms on December 8, and construction began to go forward.^[6]

It is less dear what the College was doing to remain in operation during the rebuilding. Byrd identified the meeting place of the trustees on one occasion as the “school house,” suggesting that once again the Grammar School had found temporary quarters. In 1706 Arthur Blackamore replaced Inglis as grammar master, serving, although not without controversy, until discharged in 1717. As early as October 1709, the College in the words of William Byrd “agreed to turn Mr. Blackamore out . . . for being so great a sot,” but the master gained another chance when he petitioned that “if the governors of the College would forgive him what was past, he would for the time to come mend his conduct” That was the last of neither his lapses nor his self remorse, but in the end he seemingly paid a higher price for his support of Governor Spotswood than for his alcoholism, once Blair had resumed his warfare on colonial governors.^[7]

Despite his problems Blackamore was a man of interest and talent, as J. E. Morpurgo rightly observes, the College’s “pioneer man of letters,” who seemed able to move freely among the social elite of Williamsburg. He produced a Latin poem, Expeditio Ultramonte, in 1716 to celebrate Governor Spotswood’s famous journey to explore the Virginia mountains and the land beyond with a group of associates whom he dubbed the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe. The poem served in that year as one of the Latin quitrent poems that the College had to present to the governor each November 5th. After his return to England, Blackamore published in 1720 a collection of three novels, The Perfidious Brethren: Or the Religious Triumvirate Displayed in Three Ecclesiastical Novels, dedicated to Spotswood, and in 1723 Luck at Last, with an appealing dedication to one of his Virginia students, David Bray:

Several years are now passed, since I had the honor to be first acquainted with your worthy parents and, by consequence, to have some familiarity with yourself, being then a minor, the growing and only hopes [sic] of their family, and living more directly under their roof. I need not recount to you the effect of that acquaintance, nor how a closer correspondence was cultivated between yourself and me as you grew up. I am confident it is so fixed in your memory as not easily to be forgotten.^[8]

In the same year of Blackamore’s appointment, 1706, the College, moving at last to fulfill the terms of the Boyle bequest, appointed Christopher Jackson as master of the Indian School. Thus far it had done little to attract Indian youths, apart from the compulsory enrollment of a few captive Indian children originally bought as slaves.^[9] As Francis Nicholson had attempted earlier, Spotswood made a strong point of encouraging the development of the Indian School from his first arrival in the colony. He possessed a broad vision of Indian policy, a mixture, to be sure, of his economic interest in increasing trade, strategic concern with lessening hostility between colonists and Indians, and some genuine philanthropic and religious feelings.^[10] Taking advantage of his various conferences and negotiations with Indian leaders, he had secured by July 1712 the enrollment of some twenty Indian boys, including the son of the queen of the Pamunkey people. Spotswood noted that “they have a Master to teach them and are decently cloathed and maintained, so that they seem very well pleased with the change of their condition.” On another occasion he reported that “there are several that can read and write tolerably well, can repeat the Church Chatechism, and know how to make their responses in the Church.”^[11] His success, in fact, outran the resources of the Boyle funds, but his strong efforts to persuade the burgesses and council to help with additional support met only stubborn resistance. He complained bitterly that the burgesses would not even allow a debate of his proposal, and to the Board of Trade he accused the legislators of being only interested in “extirpating all the Indians, without distinction of Friends or Enemys.”^[12]

Christopher Jackson remained as Indian master until 1716, but Spotswood shifted much of his effort after 1715 to the support of an Indian school that he established at his trading post, Fort Christanna, south of the James River. The governor hoped that the school there might prepare some students to go on to William and Mary, for Charles Griffin, the teacher whom Spotswood had hired, proved popular and attracted a number of young scholars.^[13]

During the recovery of the College between 1706 and 1715, it also proved possible for the first time to fill one of the philosophy chairs by the appointment of Tanaquil Le Fevre as professor of natural philosophy and mathematics. The effort was ill-fated, for he lasted only for a few months in 1711 and 1712. By Spotswood’s report he arrived in the company of an “idle hussy” who was forced to return to England at the governor’s expense. Even without that distraction, Le Fevre “appeared negligent in all of the posts of duty and guilty of some other irregularitys that the Governors of the College could no longer bear with him,” although he showed some signs of reform and found a place in the colony as a private tutor.^[14] Thus, the first effort to introduce instruction at William and Mary at a more advanced level came to nothing.

The accomplishments of the first decade after the great fire of 1705 were indeed modest, but they were enough to keep the Grammar School in operation, to give some vitality to the Indian School even in the face of the indifference of Blair, the Visitors, and the leaders of the General Assembly, and slowly to carry forward a second building. By about 1715 or 1716, one could sense a quickening of energy and an effort by Blair and the Visitors to make William and Mary the force in the life of the colony that it could hardly become while it remained exclusively a grammar school.

Once again the College building in itself became a compelling symbol of recovery. At least by 1716 it was possible to reoccupy the structure and use it for some activities. By 1721 the two original wings, the main one on the east and that housing the hall, were complete. The progress can be measured by two payments totaling £900 to the undertaker John Tullitt in late 1711 and early 1712 and at the same time a resolution of the Visitors approving the purchase of iron beds for the scholars and an order to England for furniture for the kitchen, brewhouse, and laundry, plus a bell of eighteen inches diameter.^[15] Other orders before the end of 1712 included “1 Ingine for Quenching Fire” and “Sash Glass” for fitting into the window frames of the hall.^[16]

Just as Francis Nicholson had played a prominent part in the work on the first building and the first town plan for Williamsburg, Alexander Spotswood figured significantly in the design and construction of the second building and in revising the Nicholson town plan and carrying through the completion of some of the remaining public buildings. The Reverend Hugh Jones, who joined the College faculty during the last stages of work on the second building and hence had perhaps more firsthand knowledge of it than he did in attributing the first building to a design by Sir Christopher Wren, wrote with undoubted accuracy that the new structure “has been rebuilt and nicely contrived, altered and adorned by the ingenious direction of Governor Spotswood.”^[17]

The building that by 1721 stood complete, apart from the later addition of its chapel wing, although retaining the surviving walls of the first building and therefore some of its dimensions, was in other respects altered. The elimination of a third full story, the raising of the ground level by three feet on the east front, and a smaller cupola all made for a lower, though still imposing, facade. The east front lost one of its balconies, and the elimination of the third story required a different roof treatment on the west side, adding a series of transverse roofs. It is this building in its two forms—original and restored—that has graced the campus for two-thirds of the long history of the College.^[18]

At this early stage of the building, when it was barely completed, we know less than can be determined in later years about the uses to which specific rooms were put. Apart, however, from the fact that the hall doubled as the chapel until the third wing was constructed, there were probably few changes. The Grammar School had its classroom on the first floor to the right as one entered through the main door on the east front. The kitchen was in the basement under the hall. The order that had been placed for beds suggested that students had once again moved into the building, probably on the top floor, and there were rooms for the few faculty members yet appointed and for President Blair. The grant of permission for William Levingston to use the mathematics room at the southeast corner of the first floor “for teaching the Scholars and others to dance untill his own dancing school in Williamsburg be finished” might suggest that there was still room to spare in the rebuilt structure.^[19]

The approaching completion of the College building was but one indication that the College was reviving, even moving toward full implementation of the terms of the charter. Since Philip Ludwell, a Blair ally, had replaced Nicholson as rector, it became easier to present a united front in College affairs. With the more favorable political climate during the first years of Spotswood’s administration, Blair moved to claim the seat in the House of Burgesses that the charter conveyed, even though he was as yet unable to meet the requirement that to elect its own burgess the College be “a body Politick and incorporate, in Deed and Name,” that is, have filled its full complement of six masters and secured the transfer of the charter.^[20] In 1715 the “President and Masters,” which at that time comprised only Blair and the grammar and Indian masters, elected Peter Beverley, former speaker of the House of Burgesses, to the College seat. But the Committee on Privileges and Elections reminded the president that he had earlier declined to elect a representative because of the lack of sufficient masters and the failure to achieve transfer of the charter, and denied Beverley’s right to sit.^[21] With no better claim Blair was able, however, to manage the election and seating of John Custis in 1718 and Thomas Jones in 1720 by taking advantage of the growing opposition of the burgesses to Governor Spotswood.^[22]

Blair and the Visitors also made a more systematic effort to increase and strengthen the faculty than at any earlier time. After John Robinson had been consecrated as bishop of London and appointed in 1714 to a term as chancellor of William and Mary, Philip Ludwell, rector of the Board of Visitors, sought his assistance in finding a suitable appointee for the chair in natural philosophy and mathematics. Robinson responded with the recommendation of a recent recipient of a master of arts from Jesus College, Oxford, the Reverend Hugh Jones, who had already declared himself “fully bent for the American plantations.”^[23] The attention that Jones gave to the College in his Present State of Virginia (1724) , which extended far beyond his having made the first attribution of the College building to the genius of Sir Christopher Wren, has made him justifiably appear as one of the most important members of the faculty in the colonial era, despite a comparatively brief tenure of five years. In that time he emerged as an active, shrewd spokesman for the faculty and the Virginia clergy and another in the growing list of James Blair’s bitter opponents. While his description of Virginia and the College, published in England after he had resigned, was undoubtedly colored by his increasingly adversarial relationship with the president, it remains one of the most perceptive and revealing accounts of the early College.^[24]

Hugh Jones arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1717. His youth—he was only twenty-four—proved no bar to his ready acceptance in the colony, not least of all by Governor Spotswood himself, of whom Jones wrote “that it is difficult to be determined in which respect he chiefly excelled, either in being a compleat gentleman, a polite scholar, a good governor, or a true churchman.”^[25] Almost immediately after his arrival, the governor took him on a journey to his trading post and school for Indians at Fort Christanna, where Jones gained his first experience with American natives. There he discussed their education at length with Charles Griffin, the master of the school that Spotswood had founded. Thereafter, Jones displayed a growing interest of his own in the education and Christianization of the Indians.^[26] The following year on April 23, 1718, the House of Burgesses chose him as its chaplain, and at times he also “had the favour of being lecturer” at Bruton Parish Church.^[27] Within two years Jones also began to serve Blair’s old parish at James City, agreeing to preach on two Sundays out of three.^[28]

Clearly, Hugh Jones also took his teaching responsibilities seriously. His emerging interest in Indian education was one indication. We also know from a deposition which he gave many years later that after Bishop Robinson had promised him the Virginia appointment, he took additional instruction in algebra, omitted in his earlier education, under the tutelage of a master or fellow of Christ Church, Oxford.^[29] Although appointed to the professorship of natural philosophy, he concurrently served in the demanding appointment of Grammar School master for several months, an additional duty which, he reported, “I easily perform.”^[30]

After his return to England in 1721 and before he once again came to the Chesapeake, although never again to the College, Jones not only published The Present State of Virginia, but also another work, An Accidence to the English Tongue, which was essentially a textbook of grammar and rhetoric intended for the use of such disadvantaged groups as boys in the colonies, “the Female Sex,” and the ”Welch, Scotch, Irish, and Foreigners.” He also prepared similar works on mathematics and the Christian religion that seem not to have been published.^[31] However strong the tone of condescension in Hugh Jones’s sense of the purpose of these works, in both the Accidence and an appendix on Virginia education in The Present State of Virginia, he outlined a serious, carefully conceived plan of education, the latter focusing especially on the improvement of William and Mary.^[32] Later in his life, from the mid-1740s into the 1750s, Jones also wrote several essays arguing from his mathematical knowledge in favor of reform of the calendar, an equivalent rationalization of British coinage, weights, and measures, and the use of eight rather than ten as the base of arithmetic. Although he anticipated the adoption of the New Style Calendar by Parliament in 1751, neither his mathematical work and the association it brought him with Philadelphia intellectual circles nor the educational texts he had written earlier marked him as a scientific or mathematical scholar of note. Rather, he was more nearly a well-educated, competent, and conscientious teacher, and colonial William and Mary was to see relatively few of those among its faculty.^[33] Hugh Jones was also one of a relatively limited number of the early faculty who took their religious faith with total seriousness. Although realistic about the easygoing ways of Virginia Anglicanism, Jones was satisfied as to the commitment of Virginians to the established church, a view mirrored in his often-quoted statement that “Virginia may be justly esteemed the happy retreat of true Britons and true churchmen for the most part; neither soaring too high nor drooping too low.”^[34] His writing was replete with evidence of his own deep personal piety, and he had plans and hopes for the improvement of the church in the colony no less than of the College. Upon his return to the Chesapeake in 1725, he served as rector of four parishes, one in Virginia and three in Maryland, over more than thirty-five years, until his death in 1760.^[35] In effect, he devoted far more of his long life in the colonies to his religious than to his educational concerns.

However, in that brief period from 1717 to 1721, when Jones was professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, he put his mark on the College. In truth the first serious occupant of either of the two philosophy chairs, given Tanaquil Le Fevre’s fleeting and inconsequential presence, Jones was central to the seeming recovery and improvement of the institution, and his departure was one of the circumstances that once again dashed those hopes. In his beliefs, in his close association with Governor Spotswood, and in his plans for the improvement of William and Mary, he provided another example of the imperial and Anglican vision for the College. And that made an eventual conflict with James Blair all but inevitable.

Hugh Jones’s virtues serve as a reminder that at about the time he arrived in Virginia to take up his duties, Arthur Blackamore was nearing the end of his tenure as Grammar School master, his promised reform never having come to pass. He had decided to try the course of returning to England to take holy orders, but according to Blair, even as he prepared to come before the Visitors so that they might send him home with some sort of reference, “that very day he was so in his cups, that he did not think fit to appear, and to sollicit his own business.” Blair complained that the years he had “spent in scandalous acts of drunkenness, admonitions, endeavours of amendment, and relapses” had gone on under a patient Board “till at last the [Grammar] School was dwindled away to nothing.” The president explained, “there were not ten scholars left . . . and there was no way to retrieve the School, but by changing the Master.”^[36] As a solution Blair turned to his old opponent, the original Grammar School master, Mungo Inglis. He now returned for three years, remaining until his death in 1720.^[37]

Inglis had at the least been a competent teacher. Having him and Hugh Jones serve together and the position of master of the Indian School filled—in 1716 by the appointment of Christopher Smith in place of Christopher Jackson—gave the College by 1717 the largest and strongest group of teachers it had yet attracted. With the second building nearing completion, a good working relationship established between Blair and the Visitors, and a College representative seated in the House of Burgesses at least for 1718, there seemed enough good news to offset the decline of the Grammar School under Blackamore and a continuing lack of resources. At least until the departure of Hugh Jones in 1721, improvement in instruction must have continued.

Blair Bags Another Governor, 1718–22

Yet, the modest success that the College seemed to have achieved proved transitory, and by the early 1720s, William and Mary was once again in crisis. Hugh Jones had observed that after the fire of 1705 the College had “Phoenix-like as the city of London, revived and improved out of its own ruins,” but as much as he wanted to see such an “important foundation” prosper, his more considered assessment was far bleaker:

For it is now a college without a chapel, without a scholarship, and without a statute. … There is a library without books, comparatively speaking, and a president without a fixed salary till of late: A burgess without certainty of electors; and in fine, there have been disputes and differences about these and the like affairs of the college hitherto without end.^[38]

The only question that one might raise about Jones’s gloomy description is why he did not also label it a College without a faculty. With his departure neither philosophy post would again be filled until almost the end of the decade, and even the post of Grammar School master, which Jones had apparently also filled after the death of Mungo Inglis, remained vacant until the arrival of Joshua Fry in 1724.^[39]

The Indian School, to which Spotswood had given so much encouragement, continued to languish. Even though Hugh Jones thought the Indian School, like the rest of the College, could be reformed and made effective, he clearly believed that it had so far failed in its mission. Young Indians had been difficult to recruit, they had died in some numbers from disease or neglect, and they had all too often fallen “into the worst practices of vile nominal Christians” or returned home without baptism to “follow their own savage customs and heathenish rites.” In truth, Blair and the colony leaders, whether acting as burgesses and councillors or as governors of the College, never proved forthcoming with support for the education of Indians, exerting no more effort than the minimum required to keep the income from the Boyle bequest flowing. Nor had the governor’s efforts to find additional religious and philanthropic support in England fared any better. The final blow came in 1717, when the Privy Council repealed Spotswood’s 1714 Indian Act. On this had rested his educational and mercantile efforts at Fort Christanna and, in many respects, his broader efforts to pursue an evenhanded Indian policy.

Even before that news could reach the colony, a new Indian master at the College, Christopher Smith, who arrived in 1716, turned out to have so few Indian scholars that the Visitors agreed to supplement his meager income from student fees with free pasturage for his horse and firewood for his College rooms. They also allowed him “the liberty of [the] teaching of such English Children as shall be put to him” and provided “that a partition be erected at the charge of the College to separate the said English Children from the Indians.”^[40] This pioneering experiment in segregated education may have been the most telling of all of the College’s largely unsuccessful experiments in the education of Indians. Even the appointment in 1720 of Charles Griffin, who had been the popular and effective teacher at Spotswood’s school at Fort Christanna, could not entirely reverse the poor fortunes of the Indian School.

While these problems of staffing and recruitment were very real ones in their own right, undergirding them and contributing heavily to the difficulties that the College continued to face was President Blair’s increasing preoccupation with undermining yet another governor of the colony. The fight with Alexander Spotswood arose in large part from a variety of political issues with which the College itself was not centrally involved.^[41] James Blair, however, was. He and his family allies, who comprised a majority of Spotswood’s council, became early leaders of the opposition to the governor. The contest came in time to center particularly on ecclesiastical affairs and therefore to involve Blair as the commissary. Once again Blair’s diverse roles as councillor, commissary, and president inevitably drew the College into the fray, even when it scarcely served its best interests.

Conflict developed slowly, even though Spotswood set out from the first to advance what he regarded as the interests of the empire, often showing himself to be disdainful of provincial politicians. Opposing them on a variety of issues, especially land grants, tobacco regulation, and Indian policy, he particularly antagonized the powerful alliance of the Harrisons and their relatives, Blair included. By 1718 the opposition broadened to include a majority of the members of the House of Burgesses, who voted to send an address to the king that they hoped might undermine Spotswood at home.^[42] In defending himself to crown officials, the governor poured out his distaste for James Blair, “a Staunch Achitophel,” and his powerful knot of relatives. But it was Blair himself, Spotswood charged, who was recognized by everyone as the author of all the “Letters, Memorials, Remonstrances, and whatever else they design.”^[43] By 1719 the lords of trade had essentially backed the governor, and Spotswood in turn was at pains to convince royal officials that he had restored harmony in the colony, although he did so largely by yielding to Virginia interests and indeed joining with them in the appropriation of huge land grants for himself.^[44]

However, no truce was possible with James Blair, for the two men were determined to fight on over ecclesiastical affairs. The issue was an old one. Spotswood, like several of his predecessors, wanted, first, to appoint clergy to vacant parishes without a recommendation from the vestry and to “collate,” that is, approve, appointments made by the vestry, and, second, to induct parish rectors who had served with good behavior but whose vestry refused to make their appointments permanent. Blair as commissary once again sided with the Virginia laity in seeking to deny the governor such powers, while Spotswood gained the support of the larger body of Anglican clergy against their presumed leader. In earlier years, while the relationship between the two remained harmonious, Spotswood had not forcefully asserted his authority over the church, even permitting Blair to accept an appointment by the vestry as rector of Bruton Parish in 1710 without raising the issue of his right of collation. Over the next six years, Spotswood moved, apparently without great opposition from vestries, to appoint clergy to most of a dozen or so vacant parishes. In the first heat of the more general conflict that erupted by 1718, Spotswood grew more aggressive and Blair more resistant.^[45] The governor refused to induct two clergymen recommended by their vestries, one of them being Blair himself, who had arranged for his vestry to present him precisely in order to create a test case for the courts. After the lords of trade had backed him, Spotswood then moved ahead to induct two other clergymen whom their vestries opposed.

The confrontation reached its climax in a convocation of the Virginia clergy that Blair called for April 1719 in the hall of the College building—a further indication that the rebuilt structure was fully ready for use. While the stated reason for the gathering was to pursue an inquiry by John Robinson, the bishop of London, into the validity of the ordination of some of the Virginia clergy, it turned into a full-scale contest between Blair and a majority of his fellow clergy who opposed him. Of the thirty-seven clergymen then assigned to the colony, twelve were absent, eighteen were present in opposition to their commissary, and seven sided with him.

Since Hugh Jones, who had not yet left his post as master of natural philosophy, quickly emerged as Blair’s leading opponent, the controversy became one that was in part a College affair. Jones was in the forefront of those who challenged the validity of Blair’s own ordination, charging that it was Presbyterian and not Anglican despite his license from the bishop of London.^[46] The meeting turned increasingly tumultuous. Blair sought to defend himself, but his opponents stood their ground. Hugh Jones attacked a sermon he had delivered earlier at the convocation, and the majority adopted a statement supporting Spotswood, reiterating their doubts about the commissary’s ordination, and deploring the state of the church in the colony. While Jones failed in a move to ask the governor to suspend Blair as commissary, Blair’s seven defenders were reduced to adopting after adjournment a minority address. To this Blair added two lengthy papers reviewing the history of the dispute over clerical appointments in the colony.^[47]

Although a handful of disgruntled clergy, frustrated at the frequency with which they were at the mercy of determined Virginia vestries, was hardly a source of power in the colony or even of influence with their English superiors, Spotswood, with their support added to his recent vindication by the lords of trade and his newly established harmony with the General Assembly, must have thought that he had Blair for the first time on the defensive. Moreover, he had by now secured a favorable ruling from the solicitor general in England on his full right of collation to use as a further weapon against Blair. If so, he reckoned without his opponent’s tenacity. When Spotswood confronted the council with the solicitor general’s ruling on December 9, 1719, Blair and Philip Ludwell countered with an opposing opinion upholding the vestries that they had obtained from the British attorney general.^[48]

Although both sides agreed to a court test of the conflicting interpretations, based on Spotswood’ s refusal to induct Blair at Bruton Parish, Blair did not choose to wait on the outcome of what might have been a protracted case, working its way through the General Court and then to England on appeal. Instead, he embarked in the spring of 1721 on his fourth trip to England. Spotswood noted suspiciously that his mission was “(as he gives out), about the college affairs,” although Blair had demonstrated scant concern about the declining state of the College during the accelerating controversy of the previous three years.^[49] Blair even had the cheek to offer to perform any service for the governor while in England, prompting Spotswood to remark that “I shall be contented with his not offering to do me any Disservice.”^[50] Although Blair’s old English patrons were largely gone, he seemed to have no difficulty accomplishing his true mission of securing the removal of Spotswood. The accumulation of controversy around the governor, some dissatisfaction among crown officials over his self-interested reversal of position on Virginia land policy, and the eagerness of the new prime minister, Robert Walpole, to place one of his own friends in the appointment were this time likely to have been more important than Blair’s efforts. But James Blair had his victory, which came in the end as no surprise to Spotswood, who had begun to hear reports that he would be replaced and that Blair had drawn the new lieutenant governor, Hugh Drysdale, under his influence even before they sailed for Virginia on the same vessel. In one of his characteristically astute observations on Blair, the outgoing governor noted that “Parson Blair was likely to act as Prime Minister” in the new administration.^[51]

By the time he returned in October 1722 from a final and successful Indian diplomatic mission in New York, Spotswood found that Drysdale had arrived. Apart from a six-year return to England beginning in 1724, Spotswood continued to live in the colony, developing his lands and iron works at Germanna in the new county of Spotsylvania that he had helped create. He could afford not to hold grudges and at his death in 1740, provided in his will that his books and scientific instruments should go to William and Mary.^[52]

As for the College, Blair’s victory offered no immediate boon. It is true that he devoted some of his time during the trip to England to finding new resources for the institution, yet he had helped to undermine another governor, one whose support for the struggling College in the preceding decade had outweighed in some respects that of Blair. Even in the midst of his fight with the legislature in the stormy sessions of 1718, one of the few bills that Spotswood had not vetoed was one that appropriated £1,000 to the ”Visitors and Governors” of the College “for the maintaining and educating such and so many of the ingenious scholars, natives of the colony, as they shall think fit.”^[53] Four years later Blair may well have wondered where scholars, ingenious or otherwise, might be found, or, for that matter, with the departure of Hugh Jones, who would instruct them. Perhaps the only consideration that made the situation less desperate than the near collapse of 1705 was that William and Mary had a newly completed building, even if there were few to occupy it.

The Charter Fulfilled, 1722–29

James Blair, as three governors had learned, was a man of resolution and force when he chose to pursue an objective. If the College had not always been for him the most urgent of those objectives while he maneuvered for political and ecclesiastical power and social and economic position, circumstances now changed. Whether Blair had consciously decided that he had to give priority to the College if it were to survive or whether his accumulated power freed him from the necessity of further political confrontation, he now turned his full attention to reviving the institution he had worked so hard to create.

The social and political elite of Virginia which the College served had itself undergone a further transformation and maturation. Its leaders, now more often second or even third generation Virginians, were more confident, more prepared to devote some of their resources to gentility and learning, preferably learning that had some practical application. The College had a role to play in that pursuit, not, to be sure, by the promotion of advanced scholarship but, as the charter had stated, by the encouragement of “pious educating of youth in good Letters and Manners.” The establishment of the scholarship fund of £1,000 in the midst of the controversies just ended was a harbinger of such concerns, having come by the vote of the political leadership.

But it was Blair on whom fell the responsibility for reviving the College. Although the urgent needs were those of faculty, students, and money, he was no more able than many modem university presidents to resist the attractions offered by the highly visible monument of new buildings. In addition to some further work toward completion of the Main Building, Blair brought to completion in 1723 a new structure to house the Indian School, named the Brafferton in recognition of the Yorkshire manor from which the income for Indian education was derived.^[54] If there seemed to be almost no Indians to occupy it in the beginning, for the first time the College had paid attention to its obligations to the Boyle bequest. Yet Blair may have had in mind, too, other uses of the space, such as housing the library, for the Brafferton was never occupied solely by the young Indian scholars and their teachers.^[55] If nothing else, in 1723 completing any new building was an act of consummate boldness.

The president turned his attention as well to financial problems. Governor Drysdale, who served only four years before dying in office, was willing to help but was not capable of taking the strong part that Nicholson and Spotswood had before their breaks with Blair.^[56] Blair more than ever had his solid link with the provincial leadership, including men like Sir John Randolph, who despite an early death served at one time or another as burgess for the College, speaker of the House of Burgesses, and attorney general; and Robert “King” Carter, a rector and Visitor of the College, member and president of the council, acting governor after Drysdale’s death, and probably the wealthiest Virginia planter of his time.^[57] More than most of his contemporaries, Carter had strong ideas about education, championing a very traditionalist view that “kept in the old way of teaching the Latin tongue” and employed “the old school books that we and our forefathers learned.”^[58] While Carter did not depart from an earlier preference for educating his sons in England, he now began sending the younger boys to William and Mary before they completed their schooling abroad.

The most tangible evidence of growing support for the College was the assembly’s passage, with support from Carter and Governor Drysdale, of a 1726 act levying a duty of one pence per gallon on liquors imported into the colony, the proceeds estimated at about £200 per year to be paid to the College semiannually. To make the law acceptable to British authorities who would review it, the duty applied only to spirits not imported from Britain. The president, masters, and others at the College were to get their alcohol duty free, a considerable inducement to a faculty not always distinguished in the colonial period by its temperance.^[59]

With the liquor duty passed but still needing royal assent, Blair now prepared for still another journey to England. It was his fifth and, since he was now past seventy years of age, proved to be his last. Lobbying for approval of the new duty was, however, only a part of his mission. The “Humble Address” to the king that he and the Visitors prepared before his departure was an appeal for substantial new support from the royal bounty. No less important, Blair was determined at last to accomplish the transfer of the charter into the hands of the president and masters and to recruit the additional faculty members that would be necessary to satisfy the condition that the faculty must be at full strength before the transfer from the trustees could be made.

By this time the “longest livers” of the eighteen original trustees numbered only three: Blair himself; his old ally Stephen Fouace, who had now been in England for many years; and, finally, the enemy of both men, Francis Nicholson, who had recently retired from his last governorship in South Carolina because of ill health and was now residing in London. Not surprisingly, the governor turned out to be a major problem, for the news of the proposed liquor duty had aroused his antagonism even before the more important issue of consenting to the transfer could be raised. Nicholson was determined in particular to block the use of any of the proceeds of the duty for salaries of the president and masters so long as the College buildings remained incomplete. He poured out his objections in his own memorial to the lords of trade and succeeded in securing a ruling that the duty should be approved only with the restrictions on the use of the revenue that he sought.^[60] The assent of the crown was delayed by the death of George I, but his successor George II gave his approval early in the new reign.

Nicholson remained determined, however, to use his position as a surviving trustee to block the transfer. It was probably Nicholson who arranged for the publication in 1727 of the old 1697 report to the Board of Trade that Blair, Henry Hartwell, and Edward Chilton had prepared but never published. In their effort to undermine the governorship of Sir Edmund Andros, the authors had gone out of their way to praise Nicholson for his conduct in his first term as governor of Virginia. He was, they wrote, “their good Governor, who had been the greatest Encourager in the Country” of the College.^[61] At the same time, Nicholson determined to have his revenge for never having been allowed to present his case in the hearing that led to his removal, for he now published anonymously a lengthy collection of all the papers and documents that he had assembled to defend his conduct. The Papers Relating to an Affidavit … against Francis Nicholson, Esq. left historians a more complete record of the arguments in that earlier controversy and added some details to the history of the College that might otherwise have been lost, but it proved of no effect in blocking the transfer. In March 1728 Francis Nicholson died, and Fouace and Blair could have their way without further difficulty.^[62]

While the possible confrontation with Nicholson was still developing, however, Blair and Fouace were sufficiently optimistic about the ultimate transfer of the charter to turn to an important preparatory task. Relying in part upon “mature deliberation” with William Wake, the archbishop of Canterbury and current chancellor of the College, the two trustees prepared a detailed body of statutes that would carry out, and to some extent expand upon, the provisions of the charter affecting governance, faculty structure, curriculum, student discipline, and the like.^[63]

The statutes reaffirmed the position of chancellor, thereby preserving a link with British ecclesiastical authority, and continued to provide for a faculty consisting of the president and six masters—a complement that was yet to be achieved. The tripartite division of the schools—grammar, philosophy, and divinity—and, in addition, the Indian School, likewise remained. The curriculum and requirements for each, however, received further definition. Scholars in the Grammar School were expected to complete four years of Latin and two of Greek and to stand an oral examination before the whole faculty at the age of fifteen before they could enter the School of Philosophy. There students would study rhetoric, logic, and ethics under the professor of moral philosophy and study physics, metaphysics, and mathematics under the professor of natural philosophy. Those who completed two years in the School of Philosophy were eligible for the degree of bachelor of arts, presumably after examination, and there were provisions as well for awarding the master of arts. The method of instruction was that of disputation and the presentation of “Declamations or Themes on various Subjects” rather than by tutorials. The professor of moral philosophy was explicitly required not to confine himself to the traditional study of Aristotle, but also to introduce modem writings “such as those derived from Newton and Locke”—a rare concession to modernity in the statutes. The two divinity professors were required to employ similar teaching methods and, and in the case of one of the professors, to teach Hebrew and the Old and New Testaments, while the other was to emphasize the “common places of Divinity, and the Controversies with Hereticks.”

Students were, as in English universities, divided between scholarship or free students, who had to take their lodging and food in the College, and students who paid their own way with the option of boarding where they chose or of renting available College rooms, apparently somewhat better than those provided the scholarship students. The statutes specified a strict moral code for the younger Grammar School students and also required that they receive religious instruction. Philosophy students enjoyed the privilege of wearing caps and gowns, but nothing was said about requirements for moral conduct and good behavior, an oversight of which they were at times to take full advantage.

The Indian School, which had no English counterpart, had its own requirements of reading and writing, vulgar arithmetic, and religious instruction. In effect, the classical education of the Grammar School was not duplicated, and Indian scholars could not have progressed to the philosophy school. The statutes also repeated the arrangement made a few years earlier for Christopher Smith that permitted the Indian master to accept white boys from Williamsburg for tutelage—an implicit recognition that the number of Indian students was unlikely to provide their teacher with full employment and an adequate salary .

In fixing the College calendar, the statutes followed the English custom of three annual terms, using Oxford nomenclature but specifying a duration for two of the terms that had no English counterpart. Hilary term opened the calendar year on the first Monday after Epiphany and ran until the Saturday before Palm Sunday, which followed English precedent After a brief vacation, the Easter term opened on the second Monday after Easter, ran only a few weeks, and closed with another break. An interminable Trinity term began the Monday after Trinity Sunday and dragged through the summer and on to mid-December—small wonder that students might stage a ”barring out” of the masters to win an early Christmas vacation.

The statutes set no specific academic requirements for the faculty, although a preference for Anglican clergymen was already established in custom. Masters were required to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, the statement of doctrine contained in the Book of Common Prayer, and to take an oath of allegiance to the English monarch. They were also required to remain single, presumably so that they might reside in the College and supervise the students more closely, since even those in the philosophy school were often no more than sixteen or seventeen years old. The masters with the president constituted the faculty and were reaffirmed in their right to elect a representative to the lower house of the General Assembly, a right that with the transfer of the charter could be expected to be exercised with regularity.

The president unlike the faculty could marry but had to be in holy orders and at least thirty years of age. The statutes stripped away many of the powers that Blair had exercised, denying future presidents the right to dismiss faculty on their own or to decide larger questions of policy without a vote of the full faculty, in which the president had only a single vote. Blair at his advanced age seemed to look ahead to successors whom he did not wish to see as powerful as he had been, and he no doubt anticipated also the prospect of a full complement of faculty rather than the skeleton faculty, usually the grammar and Indian masters, that had so far prevailed.

On the important matter of College governance, the statutes, if anything, added further complication to the uncertain division of authority between faculty and Visitors that the charter had provided. As the charter had specified, the faculty would with the completion of the transfer decide many day-to-day matters and manage College finances. But the Visitors perhaps gained a specific power or two beyond the broad mandate that the charter had already provided them. In particular, they gained the explicit right to amend or otherwise change the statutes, provided that such alterations were considered at two meetings before adoption. Moreover, they retained the right to appoint faculty, although the question of who might dismiss them remained unclear and would in the future become a bitterly fought question between faculty and Visitors.^[64] Blair remarked at the time of the adoption of the statutes “that after the Transfer the Govrs of the College will have a greater power and I less,” although that comment referred to the unambiguous diminution of his own authority, not to that of the faculty collectively.^[65]

Like the charter itself, the new statutes followed a mix of English and Scottish precedents. In such matters as the calendar, the award of the baccalaureate as the initial degree, insistence on a bachelor faculty, and division of students between those on scholarship and those who paid in full, they followed English precedent. The instructional method of disputation was more characteristically Scottish, and the modest updating of instruction by introducing more recent authorities, such as Newton and Locke, also had a Scottish cast to it, since the Scottish universities had moved beyond those in England in modernizing their course of study.^[66] Affirmation of extensive powers for an external governing board likewise more generally followed Scottish examples. Innovative perhaps only in their eclecticism, Blair and those who advised him put together provisions that they thought workable in a colonial society, and if not answering every question that would arise in the future, they added some clarity and additional structure to the very general stipulations of the charter.

When Blair and Fouace completed their work, the statutes were signed and witnessed on June 24, 1727. There was still much to do before the transfer could be completed, but Blair, evidently thinking there was now more to be accomplished in Virginia, quickly embarked on the return voyage. At this point Nicholson was still alive and a threat to the undertaking. Blair sought to manage this by sending Sir John Randolph, already a prominent figure in College affairs, to deal with the old governor. As Blair explained in a letter of introduction to the bishop of London:

Mr Randolph is one of the Governours of our College; he was one of the earliest Scholars in it, and has improved himself so well in his Studies, that he is now one of our most eminent Lawyers. By his Acquaintance & interest with General Nicholson he hopes that he can prevail with him to joine in the Transfer of the College. I hope your Lordship will favour him with your best advice and Assistance.^[67]

Nicholson died, however, before he and Randolph could meet, but it was evident that Blair counted upon Randolph also to handle the larger business of the transfer, as he now proceeded to do.

In one respect, at least, Blair had met only partial success while in England. If he were to secure the transfer, he faced the necessity of assembling a full faculty of six masters, something that in the past three decades he had never come close to achieving. Now in 1726 and 1727, while energetically pursuing other objectives, he had found only one new master, the Reverend William Dawson, who had attended Queen’s College, Oxford, and received ordination in 1729 just as he departed for Virginia. The extent of Blair’s remaining problems, even with Dawson hired and the statutes completed, was apparent from an undated “Memorandum For His Excellency,” perhaps addressed to Governor William Gooch and written no earlier than late 1729, which gave a bleak assessment of the state of the College even as the transfer was being completed:

There is one master only his name is Fry & lately come over & one usher. The present Master in the Colledge is a very Young man but a good Schollar[;] he teaches the boys Gramar & Writing &ca there is [sic] no more than 22 or twenty three schollars in all. And no Indians at all. In the whole the Colledge is in all Respects in a very declining condition.^[68]

There was, in fact, more than a little smoke and mirrors involved in completing the remaining appointments with five men—three clergymen, one layman, and one postulant for holy orders—who were already in the colony, although four had received their education in Britain. They were, as colonial William and Mary faculty went, reasonably well qualified, only one, who served a brief time, proving incompetent. The real problem was, as Morpurgo observed, that “they meet together in the histories but, almost certainly, they were never gathered together in one room.”^[69] Yet, as one moved into the 1730s, they constituted the largest faculty Blair had yet assembled.

William Dawson, apparently the single recruit who came directly from England, proved to have the longest association with the College, serving as professor of moral philosophy until 1743 and then succeeding Blair as the second president until his death in 1752. The other requisite chair for the advanced instruction that had so far lagged at the College, that in natural philosophy, was filled by Alexander Irvin, traditionally described as an Edinburgh graduate. He came to Virginia in time to join William Byrd as a member of the group chosen to survey the Virginia–North Carolina boundary line in 1728, an expedition recorded by Byrd, in two versions, neither published in his own lifetime and both filled with unflattering descriptions of those who accompanied him or whom they met along the way. Irvin did not escape Byrd’s withering comments in the more secret and critical of his accounts. Initially, Byrd noted that he appointed Irvin when friends of the professor insisted that his “Fame for profound learning would give a grace to the undertaking and be able to silence all the mathematics of Carolina” and also because upon coming to the College, he had “so very few scholars that he might be well enough spared from his post for a short time.” Taking a great dislike to him, however, as weak, frequently drunk, and incompetent as a mathematician and surveyor, Byrd bestowed the nickname of Orion upon him in sarcasm and concluded, “The truth of it is he had been much more discreet to loiter on at the College and receive his salary quietly (which he owes to his relation to the pious Commissary ) than to undertake a business which discovered he knew very little of the matter.”^[70] Given Irvin’s absence with Byrd’s surveying party and his death in 1731, he could have done little to assist Dawson in getting the philosophy school on a sound footing.

Blair filled the two divinity chairs for the first time by appointing two clergymen already serving parishes in the colony. One was Bartholomew Yates, a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford, rector since 1700 of Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, and a former Visitor of the College. The other was Francis Fontaine, an Irish born member of a Huguenot family who had received his bachelor of arts degree in 1713 and his master of arts degree in 1719 from Trinity College, Dublin.^[71] Fontaine held the second divinity chair, frequently referred to at the time as the professorship in Oriental languages, and served concurrently as rector of Yorkhampton Parish in nearby Yorktown, a post frequently filled by members of the faculty.

Divinity students were infrequent in the early history of the College, but there was at least one at this time who also became master of the Indian School. John Fox began his studies at the College in 1724, became usher of the Grammar School in 1729, and usher of the Indian School in the following year. He then replaced as Indian master Richard Cocke, who was mentioned in the transfer as holding the post but who never reappeared thereafter. Fox, who was thus the first alumnus to join the faculty, simultaneously pursued divinity studies as well, eventually going to England for examination, possible additional study, and ordination. Blair wrote to the bishop of London enthusiastically endorsing Fox “as a sober, grave, studious young man, and very exemplary in his life and conversation.”^[72] Fox returned in eighteen months, resumed his faculty post, and remained until he resigned in 1737 to accept an appointment as rector of Ware Parish, Gloucester County.^[73] The Grammar School obviously continued to operate after Mungo Inglis’s death in 1720 and Hugh Jones’s resignation in 1721, but the first record of a new appointment is that of Joshua Fry (whom Gooch had praised), who is listed in the position at the time of the transfer. He seems to have come to Virginia as early as 1724, immediately after attending Wadham College, Oxford.^[74] With the death of Alexander Irvin in 1731, Fry moved to the chair in natural philosophy and held it until the early 1740s, when he moved to Albemarle County. Fry, one of the small number of laymen on the colonial faculty, has become better known for his collaboration with Peter Jefferson, the father of Thomas, on a major survey of Virginia’s boundaries and in the preparation of a highly regarded map of the colony, first published in 1751. Fry became a central figure in the development of the Albemarle region and in Indian diplomacy and frontier expansion, but his almost two decades at William and Mary, where he was respected for his teaching and mathematical skill, placed him among the longest-serving and most capable members of the entire colonial faculty.^[75]

If these appointments, apart from that of Dawson, were a matter of making do with persons whom Blair could find in the colony, all apart from Fox were educated at British universities. They firmly established as well the tradition of a predominantly but not exclusively clerical faculty—Fry in this case being the exception—and a related custom, for better or worse with respect to College duties, of the clerical faculty concurrently holding an appointment in a parish church. Blair had already established that precedent for presidents, and the two divinity professors, who undoubtedly had light duties at the College, followed suit. With Irvin’s death this faculty achieved, too, a completeness and a continuity of service, especially in the divinity and philosophy chairs, that made a promising beginning for more advanced studies at the College.

At a time when Blair was awaiting the outcome of the transfer of the charter, he had to face what must have seemed a serious challenge to William and Mary from an altogether unexpected source. George Berkeley, Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, dean of Derry in Ireland, and one of the most respected philosophers of his day, paid an unplanned visit to Virginia and to Williamsburg in the spring of 1729. He was on a voyage to Rhode Island when his ship was driven off course by a storm and put into Virginia waters. Berkeley was engaged in an effort to found an Anglican college in Bermuda, in some major part for the conversion of Indians, and he planned to purchase land in the New England colony to supply his institution with provisions. He had already secured a royal charter in 1725 for what was to be St. Paul’s College. Two years later he had been successful in securing by act of Parliament the promise of a generous grant of support from public funds, far more than had ever come to William and Mary. While awaiting the resumption of his voyage, Berkeley journeyed to Williamsburg for the day, visiting the College and dining with Governor Gooch.

The famous philosopher was undoubtedly the most prominent visitor ever received by William and Mary in the colonial era, but Berkeley’s intentions must have taken some edge off the visit. Nor did he seem to take any real notice of the institution that was already in existence and conducting an Indian school, even if only to learn from its difficulties. While it is dear that he met James Blair, Berkeley left only one surviving comment on the unplanned stop in Virginia. In a letter to his patron, John Perceval, Viscount Perceval, he simply noted that he had “received many unexpected as well as undeserved honours from the Governor and principal inhabitants.” He had begun, moreover, to think of transferring his projected college to a mainland colony, an even more direct challenge to William and Mary.^[76] Whether Blair made any response to Berkeley is uncertain, but one defender of the College who did not have an opportunity to meet Berkeley “on his exceeding short visit” did. William Byrd, a regular correspondent of Perceval, received an inquiry from him about the philosopher’s intentions. In his response to the idea, Byrd “took the liberty to call it a very romantick one.” Byrd continued, “The dean I may venture to say is as much a Don Quixot in zeal, as that renown’d knight was in chivalry.” Perceval made an effort to defend Berkeley, but, as matters turned out, the Virginian need not have worried. British politicians never came forward with the promised money, and after a few years in Rhode Island, Berkeley returned to Ireland as bishop of Cloyne and abandoned his ambition for an American college.^[77]

While James Blair carried out his efforts to complete the faculty, John Randolph remained in England from the middle of 1728 to handle the details of the transfer. With the statutes completed a year earlier, the faculty now appointed, and only the two favorably disposed trustees still alive, Randolph able to complete his business and to return to present the charter itself to President Blair and his faculty on August 15, 1729. At their next meeting, Blair and his colleagues met the formal requirements of the statutes by subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles and swearing allegiance to George II. Taking advantage of their new financial powers, they voted a payment of fifty guineas to John Randolph and twenty pounds to Stephen Fouace for their services in the effort.^[78]

The date of the completion of the transfer has no significance in the calendar of modem William and Mary. For the colonial college, however, Transfer Day on August 15 became a major event, celebrated with a formality resembling that now attached to Charter Day, the anniversary of the original grant of the charter by King William and Queen Mary. The celebration was not misplaced, for to those connected with the colonial college the transfer must have seemed, as it has sometimes been termed, a second founding, a time when William and Mary might at last begin to fulfill all the objectives outlined in the charter and reaffirmed by the statutes and the transfer.

The Completion of the College Buildings

Even while Blair was attempting to build the faculty and complete the transfer, he had already concerned himself with a further physical expansion of the College, especially the chapel wing of the Main Building, which must still have appeared incomplete with its unbalanced L-shape. He was soon able to enlist a powerful ally, the new governor of the colony, Sir William Gooch, in the effort.

Hardly more than a few weeks after Blair’s own return from England, Gooch arrived in Williamsburg with his family on September 8, 1727. The president invited them to stay as his guests at the College while the Palace was readied for them. Gooch described the College building as “very large and well built, with gardens and outhouses proportioned,” and he remarked as well on Blair’s courtesy and kindness. “But even yet,” Gooch continued with a note of apprehension, ‘”I can’t think him sincere.” Some months later he expanded on his suspicions in his often-quoted remark, “The Commissary is a very vile old FFellow [sic] , but he does not know that I am sensible of it, being still in appearance good Friends; the best Policy will be to kill him with kindness, but there is no perplexing device within his reach, that he does not throw in my way.”^[79] Even in his seventies, Blair was obviously unable to resist any opportunity to reach for power and influence.

When he made his perceptive observations, Gooch had already committed one act of kindness by agreeing with Blair on the desirability of completing the College chapel. “We are going to build the Chapell as fast as we can,” Gooch informed the bishop of London.^[80] Twice in 1729, in June and September, Blair reported to the bishop that the work was far advanced, but it took another three years before Professor William Dawson could write “that on June 28th 1732 our new chapel was opened with great solemnity. The Governor and his family were pleased to honour us with their Presence, and, it being the assembly time, the members of both Houses came in great numbers.”^[81] Almost immediately thereafter, at the end of July 1732, construction began on a president’s house that the 1727 statutes had promised “so soon as the College Revenues will bear these expenses.” It was by no means certain, in fact, that the £650 in estimated costs were available, but the president and four of the masters gathered on July 31 to lay the foundation, each laying one of the first five bricks.^[82] In October 1733 the building—and with it the major construction of the colonial College—was finally complete.

There is no reason to think that the College buildings underwent any extensive exterior alterations for the duration of the colonial period; indeed, the Main Building was clearly in need of major renovation by the 1770s from lack of careful maintenance. Surviving sketches and an early daguerreotype from sometime shortly before the fire of 1759 do not suggest any significant differences in that building, although the President’s House had to be rebuilt after it burned in 1781.

In the case of the Brafferton, Hugh Jones described it in his Present State of Virginia as simply “a good house and Apartments for the Indian Master and his scholars,” although he left the College too soon to see it as completed.^[83] The general conclusion has been that its builder was probably Henry Cary, Jr., on the logical assumption that he had recently completed the Governor’s Palace and would over the next decade build the chapel wing and the President’s House.^[84] The exterior dimensions of the Brafferton were fifty-two by thirty-four feet, and the height from ground to chimney caps was also fifty-two feet, making the north and south elevations a square. Each of the main floors of the Brafferton contained a single large room to the west with a center chimney and two smaller rooms to the east, each with a comer chimney. Although there is no clear proof, the larger chamber on the first floor would have almost certainly served as the Indian schoolroom. The one above it must have served from the beginning—or at the least soon thereafter, when Blair used Brafferton funds to enlarge the collection—as the library for the entire College. The two small rooms on one of the main floors probably provided an apartment for the Indian master, faculty living in the Main Building being provided with a two-room suite. Indian students, who had formerly been boarded in town, were likely to have slept on the third floor.^[85]

The chapel wing had been part of the plan for the first building and its successor. The possibility of constructing it had come up on many occasions before Gooch made his firm commitment in early 1728. Although an Anglican college that did not have a chapel for four decades was an anomaly, the delay had been feasible since the hall did double duty as a chapel. As early as 1705, Blair had explained the multiple uses of the room to a visiting Quaker and observed, “Here we sometimes preach and pray, and sometimes we fiddle and dance, the one to edify, and the other to divert us.”^[86] Hugh Jones had even suggested that “there is as yet no great occasion for the hall, so that it might be made a chapel and divinity-school, for which purpose it would serve nobly with little or no alterations.”^[87] But less than a decade after Jones made his observation, the College had its chapel, in the new south wing that closed a third side of the court to the west of the building. On the exterior it resembled the hall, apart from an absence of basement windows because of the burial vault under the chapel. The hall was now shortened to sixty-four feet in length, and the chapel constructed at the same length.^[88]

The interior appearance of the eighteenth century chapel is far more problematic, with little evidence on which to base a conclusion. Stone paving of the center aisle is described in an early nineteenth century letter.^[89] Several surviving documents provide proof of the existence of pews at the rear of the chapel and of a pulpit at the center of the main aisle in front of the Communion table—an unusual feature for collegiate chapels. An early reference in College accounts to the payment of twenty five shillings “for new covering the Chappel Forms” suggests that much of the seating was not in pews. Although ”Forms” can describe both the traditional choir stalls with backrests that are a common feature of collegiate chapels and are reproduced in the restored chapel, the word was more often used in the eighteenth century to describe a backless bench. Whatever its exact furnishings, the College now had a chapel dedicated solely to religious worship, in which students attended compulsory morning and evening services daily.

The President’s House was clearly intended to balance the Brafferton. To the casual observer the two structures do look very similar, but the President’s House is four feet longer on each dimension—height, length, and depth. Most of the additional height was devoted to the windows and chimneys so that its exterior walls are only a foot higher. The placement of windows is likewise different in that they are closer to the corner of the building on the north elevation and to the central door on the south. The builder, Henry Cary, also reduced the width of the north door and inside devoted all of the additional space to the rooms, thus leaving a hallway of the same width as that in the Brafferton. The first and second floors each had four main rooms rather than three; those on the south fronting the College yard were slightly larger. President Blair, now an aging widower, can hardly have needed all the space that the building provided, but he had always wanted his due—and somewhat more. To be more charitable, he may have been looking ahead to those who would follow him in the presidency.^[90]

To gain a somewhat fuller impression of the physical setting of colonial William and Mary we should look, too, now that all the buildings were completed, at their relationship to each other and to the gardens and yards that surrounded them. The Bodleian Plate, found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford during work on the restoration of colonial Williamsburg, is the only known eighteenth century representation of the entire complex. While it does, if studied closely, afford a good impression of the buildings and the grounds, it also distorts—somewhat necessarily to achieve the balance that it sought—the placement of buildings in relation to one another.

When the first college building was constructed—before there was, of course, a Williamsburg or a Duke of Gloucester Street—its east front ran along a nearly true north-south line. The subsequent town plan for Williamsburg, however, placed the main street on an axis that ran several degrees off a due east-west course, although not in itself a sufficient deviation to prevent an impression that the building directly faced the street at a right angle. By the time the Brafferton was constructed, it was, however, located on a line with the street and not at an exact right angle to the Main Building. Construction of the President’s House made the problem of preserving an impression of balance among the buildings and yet reasonable convergence with Duke of Gloucester Street more acute. The solution followed was neither that of building parallel to the Brafferton nor on the same angle with the Main Building, but rather to build it at a right angle to the Main Building. The slight irregularity, like the differences in the two flanking buildings, is not easily detected; and, as Marcus Whiffen has observed, “it gives the group of buildings a life it would otherwise lack.”^[91] In their classical and baroque style and in their placement of a central edifice flanked on the front by lesser structures, the College buildings marked a shift from an ecclesiastical to a domestic architecture. It could be said that the College at last had a completed group of buildings that gave expression to the ambitions those in the colony had for the institution.^[92]

From the first construction of the original building in the 1690s, there had always been concern with the appearance of the surrounding grounds, evidenced initially by the dispatch of the English gardener James Road to direct the landscaping of the College. All the earliest references mention in one way or another, as Hugh Jones did, “good courts and gardens” about the piazza, thus specifying that the gardens lay on the west side of the building. They are likely as well to put some emphasis on the utilitarian purposes of the plantings—in some part they were, in effect, kitchen gardens. ^[93] No specific comments on the appearance of the grounds to the east facing the main street survive any earlier than 1727, when Robert Carter, in recounting the reading of a proclamation on the College green to welcome the arrival of Governor Gooch, described the grounds as presenting “a sward of grass, not flower beds.”^[94] Gooch’s own enthusiastic reference to the College as “very large and well built, with gardens and outhouses proportioned” is less helpful, since in all likelihood he was describing the garden area to the west.^[95]

The construction of the Brafferton, the chapel wing, and the President’s House almost certainly brought more attention to the College yard opening on Duke of Gloucester Street. A 1729 document relating to the transfer of the charter described the College as “adorned with a handsome garden … [laid out] all in courts, gardens, and orchards,” although the writer failed to distinguish between the eastern and western elevations.^[96] By 1732 William Dawson provided the first specific information about the gardens on the east. Writing to the bishop of London to inform him of the laying of the foundation of the President’s House, he went on to explain that the two buildings to the front of the main structure would frame an existing “Garden planted with Ever-Greens kept in very good Order.” He also referred to a “Kitchen-Garden” on the west, confirming the long-standing accounts on the grounds there.^[97]

The Bodleian Plate, engraved sometime after the completion of the President’s House, corroborates Dawson’s description, clearly depicting a formal planting of clipped evergreens and bushes framing the paths and grass plots and an absence of large trees in the College yard. Nor does a much later description of the grounds in 1777 by the New York bookseller Ebenezer Hazard suggest any subsequent alterations for the remainder of the colonial era; he, too, observed on the east front of the College “a large Court Yard, ornamented with Gravel Walks, Trees cut into different Forms, & Grass” and on the west, “a Court Yard and a large Kitchen Garden.”^[98] Peter Martin remarks:

Both Hazard and the Bodleian Plate reveal a symmetrical, formal garden treatment such as Europeans felt was appropriate for a public building. There is no hint whatever of irregularity or variety. The design conveys firmly that this is a building of importance in the town. … From the windows of the buildings, the view of the garden would have presented ideas of order and grace—an emblem of what the college stood for in the New World.^[99]

The highly developed condition of the College gardens, as well as the completion of the three main buildings, provided a further indication that the period of the transfer of the charter had brought to a successful conclusion both the organizational and the physical structure of William and Mary. Neither accomplishment in itself guaranteed, however, a comparable realization of the College’s educational purposes. That task still remained for an aging president and his successors to face.

Blair’s Final Years

If James Blair was able to declare optimistically in January 1735, “Our College thrives in reputation and numbers of Scholars, and handsom buildings,” he had to recognize in the same letter to the bishop of London “a fatal blow of late in our revenues.” Still, enrollment had increased to about sixty by the mid-1730s—a figure around which it hovered with an occasional rise and fall for much of the remainder of the colonial period. That constituted, however, a significant gain from the twenty or thirty students who had attended a decade or two earlier, and it included some number of advanced students under the tutelage of the philosophy masters. Following John Fox there were divinity students as well, probably a somewhat larger number than once was thought to have been the case.^[100] Faculty positions generally remained filled for the remainder of Blair’s presidency. William Dawson continued to hold his philosophy chair until 1743, and Joshua Fry and John Fox remained until 1737. There was more interruption in the divinity chairs with the death of Bartholomew Yates in 1734, and only an intermittent appearance in the records of Francis Fontaine until 1741. After Fry had transferred in 1731 to moral philosophy, his replacement in the Grammar School, the Reverend William Stith, seemed to promise the addition of another strong master. Stith was allied to the powerful Randolph family through his mother, who was a sister of Sir John Randolph and for a time the College housekeeper, and by his own marriage to a cousin. He had attended the Grammar School, then studied at Queen’s College, Oxford, and received ordination before he returned to Virginia. Although later to be a much more controversial figure in both College and provincial affairs, he seemed an outstanding choice for the Grammar School. Indeed, Blair noted in a letter to the bishop of London that “the School has thriven much under his care,” and expressed some disappointment—and maybe a little impatience—when writing less than a year later that Stith “is weary of the School and intends to take a parish.”^[101] The parish turned out to be Varina, the one in which Blair had begun his Virginia career. It was here that Stith found time to complete his pioneering History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia, noted for its extensive and critical use of documentary sources.^[102] Edward Ford, a friend and later correspondent of William Dawson, seems to have filled the post for at least a part of the time between Stith’ s departure and the appointment in 1741 of Thomas Robinson. Ford was appointed at a meeting of the president and masters on June 26, 1738, and also appeared at a meeting in July 1741, while Robinson arrived in 1742 and remained for fifteen years, becoming one of those involved in the bitter controversies between faculty and Visitors in the 1750s.^[103]

With Fox’s resignation as Indian master, the faculty journals recorded the appointment of Robert Barret as his replacement, but in the following year on June 26, 1738, William Dawson’s brother, Thomas, is recorded as Indian master, a year after receiving an appointment as usher for the Grammar School. Dawson remained in that post until 1755. Another faculty member, John Graeme, subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles on August 9, 1737, and attended a faculty meeting on June 26, 1738. He does not otherwise appear in the records, but presumably succeeded Joshua Fry in the chair of natural philosophy; Fry was no longer recorded as attending a faculty meeting after Graeme’s arrival.^[104] Even with the small flurry of faculty changes in the late 1730s, a relatively stable and generally competent faculty served from the transfer to Blair’s death.

Blair’s last years at the College were, on the whole, quiet in other respects as well, in part a consequence of a decline in his physical vigor as he moved into his eighties. Too, Gooch’s popular administration and a lack of close imperial supervision of the colonies in these years created a period of calm in Virginia politics that freed the College from the round of disputes in which the president had so frequently involved it.

The peace that the College enjoyed did not necessarily improve its traditionally strained finances. In August 1732, while the President’s House was still under construction, Blair complained to the bishop of London that the proceeds of the one pence per pound tobacco export tax were “now extremely sunk by such bold frauds, as we are not able to redress without some assistance from the Crown.”^[105] The faculty, Governor Gooch, and the General Assembly joined to no avail in an effort to move against evasion of the duty that resulted in a second trip to England on behalf of the College by Sir John Randolph.^[106]

At the same time, Blair and the faculty were facing the problem of improving the College library, a necessary adjunct to all the other steps taken in the course of the transfer of the charter, and Randolph also carried with him to England instructions regarding this point, a list of books to be acquired, and a letter of credit for the purchase of books. In the face of the obvious lack of funcls, Blair turned to the one underutilized source of funds, the Boyle bequest, which at the time contained a surplus of some £500. And so he and the faculty joined in a somewhat disingenuous but ultimately successful proposal to house the library in the Brafferton and to purchase the new books needed for “a well chosen library ” from the bequest. They stressed the great benefit that would accrue to the Indian students from having books for the teaching of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, philosophy, mathematics, and divinity—a curriculum vastly richer and more advanced than that specified in the statutes for Indian scholars.^[107] The library gained, too, from the assembly’s 1734 renewal of the tax on liquors with a stipulation that some of the income should be used for books that would be marked as a gift of the legislators. ^[108]

Yet, the debt would not go away. Blair reported it at £1,000 in 1735, when he addressed another appeal to the bishop of London for stronger imperial support. What he particularly wanted was a diversion of a much more lucrative tobacco duty than the one the College already received on tobacco exported to other colonies. The president now asked that the long-standing duty of two shillings per hogshead on tobacco exported directly to Britain, which was much the larger part of the crop, be removed from control by the governor and his council, who used it for general expenses of the government and especially for the governor’s salary.^[109]

The move was perhaps a mark of the president’s desperation, and its hardly unexpected failure the token of changed circumstances in British ecclesiastical and imperial affairs that made extensive aid for the College an increasingly remote possibility. Edmund Gibson, the bishop of London throughout the period of rebirth of the College in Blair’s last years, and William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury from 1716 to 1737—the two bishops who alternated the chancellorship between them from 1721 to 1748—were certainly well disposed toward the College and helpful at times. Yet Blair lacked the intimate acquaintance with them that he enjoyed with some of their predecessors, who had been chancellors in the College’s formative years before 1714. Nor did Gibson and Wake have quite the same political influence at a time when domestic concerns outweighed imperial affairs. The College’s evolution in the direction of a more provincial institution owed something to what church and empire would not do, as well as to what Virginians did.^[110]

From the late 1730s, in the last half dozen years of life, Blair persisted in all his offices—president, commissary, councillor, parish rector—although not always able to perform their duties. Blair’s early antagonist, William Byrd, had long been a friend and active supporter of the College who frequently dined with Blair at the President’s House on trips to Williamsburg.^[111] He provided the most graphic account of these final years for the old president. On one occasion Byrd noted that in his mideighties—Byrd said eighty-nine—Blair’s “understanding is still very good, but he is so deaf that he is incapable of one part of his duty, which is to sit as chief justice of our supream court of judicature.” Byrd described being “forc’t to perform in his stead, being next oars, while he now and then nods in his chair.”^[112] William Dawson was clearly performing most of his presidential duties, as well as those as rector of Bruton Parish. But Blair insisted on his right as president of the council to serve as acting governor in 1740 while Gooch was away on a military expedition to the West Indies, hosting the annual king’s birthday ball at the capitol in October and bargaining sharply with Gooch as to the share of the salary that he would receive.^[113]

Finally, on April 18, 1743, at age eighty-eight James Blair died, his last illness caused by the gangrenous state of a rupture from which he had long suffered. From his large estate, left mostly to his nephew, John Blair, and to his brother and sister, he provided that his books should go to the College library and, in addition, he established a scholarship of £500 to support the education of a clergyman. Although the crypt under the College chapel already contained the grave of Sir John Randolph, who had died at age forty-four in 1737, Blair evidently chose burial beside his wife in the Jamestown church yard.^[114]

Despite his search for personal wealth and power and his long service in his other offices in both church and state, James Blair’s monument was above all else the College over which he had presided for fifty years, a span that is difficult to comprehend in today’s era of brief college and university presidencies. The record had its negative side. The College remained, even after all that had been accomplished at the time of the transfer, a fragile institution, but might have been less so without the effects of Blair’s struggle for personal power and influence, in the course of which he often embroiled William and Mary when its interests were not always at stake. Although he undoubtedly lectured, preached, and examined students, it is not clear that in an institution with six masters (and some of those positions vacant at many times), he ever taught, even though he would have been fully competent in the chairs of divinity and moral philosophy. Nor did he ever command the loyalty of the larger number of the Virginia clergy and the College faculty who, weak as they were, often constituted the strongest voice of the church in the colony.

Yet, if Blair left behind an institution that was still struggling, William and Mary owed its existence more to him than anyone else, not so much to his educational vision, although he must have had one, as to his sheer will and determination. Although he had been the ranking cleric in the colony and certainly used his ecclesiastical connections to advance the welfare of the College, Blair was preeminently a powerful political figure, an ally of the Virginia elite, and therefore a frequent opponent of governors and the imperial authority they represented. For a long time, he seemed to dominate the Board of Visitors as well, especially when he served as rector from 1723 to 1729, in the critical years leading up to the transfer. In many respects, Blair had not only built the College but had also made it a more provincial and less imperial institution.