During this time, the University of North Carolina gradually became one of the largest, most active universities in the region, with graduating classes around and sometimes surpassing a hundred students.⁵ While political and economic volatility riddled the university in its early years, after the War of 1812 aggressive new leadership and relatively stable state politics allowed the university to flourish, albeit with some occasional financial setbacks. Although the university was public, by virtue of its establishment by the General Assembly, it was not funded though state appropriations. Instead, funding came from the sale of the state’s escheats, but it had little more in state support.⁶ Also powering the university’s growth and expansion were national industrial developments associated with the so-called market, transportation, and communication revolutions, particularly technological innovations such as steam printing and transportation, which made educational materials easier and cheaper to obtain and created a national mass market for readers.⁷ Professors and students at North Carolina did not retreat from national developments, but embraced them as much as their coffers allowed, expanding to meet the state’s demands for educated leadership. As was the case elsewhere in the United States, higher education’s expansion had deep cultural implications, particularly with regard to extending middle-class, or bourgeois, values throughout the state. At the University of North Carolina students adapted many bourgeois values, especially industry, temperance, self-discipline, and emulation, to their intellectual culture. The pursuit of these values was intertwined with ideals of restrained manhood idealized in the notion of intellectual manhood, which students pursued in formal university settings.

Although significant social and political changes occurred during the antebellum period, the focus here is on the intellectual culture of higher education, which was defined by continuity. First, formal university life—its daily structure, literary societies, pedagogy, and curriculum—consistently catered to students’ transition from boyhood to manhood. This process was defined by struggles between impulse and restraint, mind and temperament, and dependence and independence, which were at the core of what young men thought manhood was all about. Sometimes student life, tied as it was to male youth culture, resulted in disorder and chaos, impeding students as they struggled to mature; other times, a more mature, intellectually grounded campus culture directed young men to lead mature lives. The curriculum, pedagogy, and literary societies addressed the tensions and growing pains associated with maturation by emphasizing mental and moral improvement, which was the prevailing educational philosophy of the time.

Second, mental and moral improvement was always a matter of individual self-development, or self-improvement. According to the historian Stephen Greenblatt, the self is “a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a structure of bounded desires.”⁸ While the self has always been an implicit focus in the literature on southern manhood, intellectual culture offers new insight into how precisely young men consumed and appropriated ideas about selfhood. Formal university life propagated ideas about self-development. The pedagogy and curriculum provided the means to understand, achieve, and express the self’s “personal order” by offering opportunities for mental and moral improvement, providing male exemplars of ideal selfhood, and encouraging emulation. Students carried these ideals and practices with them into their literary societies as well. In college, students also learned to articulate the self in letters, diaries, class compositions, and public orations, as well as private expressions of desire and love. This education, especially in the expression of self, was important for young men who would, as members of the educated class and the learned professions, assume leadership positions in families, communities, their state, and the nation.

Third, these pursuits of the mature self, embodied in the pervasive intellectual manhood ideal, were viewed as heroic. In this way, students’ efforts were characteristic of a Victorian world in which emulation and hero worship figured prominently. A mix of great anxiety and optimism challenged students along the way, but in learning to think, act, and speak like men, they came to imagine themselves as individuals with great heroic potential. The subjects of a classical education opened young men’s minds to the call to greatness by providing male exemplars of the self-fashioned ideal. Even if young men were not called to be great leaders, they learned that education elevated them above others. Thus, a classical education was always part of the web of power and exclusion that distinguished educated men from common whites, free and enslaved blacks, and women of all classes. The symbolic presence of young men’s perceived social inferiors gave urgency to the project of maturation, but at college power rested within and emanated from students’ more immediate male world.

Intellectual histories seldom treat these subjects from a student perspective, but students were always agents in the development of educational culture. The ways students tried to make sense out of formal education and maturation can help us make sense out of it as well, and better understand the cultural work and value of antebellum higher education. Part I considers formal sites where both education and the struggles to leave boyhood occurred—the campus, classrooms, recitation halls, and literary societies. These chapters uncover resources and structures of intellectual culture at North Carolina in traditions of student life, the university’s intellectual settings and resources, and the pedagogy and curriculum. The three chapters that follow reconstruct this intellectual world and show how it shaped young men’s transition from boyhood to manhood and created the perfect ambiance for idealizing and constructing intellectual manhood.

In no uncertain terms, these “musings” reveal what countless southerners believed was the purpose of college: becoming a man. Perhaps Harry St. John Dixon of Mississippi put it best when he wrote in his diary, “I will go to college to return a man!”² In the antebellum United States, becoming a man meant leaving childhood for adulthood, or “casting off the schoolboy garb,” as the Magazine author put it. Often, this process involved community testing and community approval, as some scholars have argued, but not always.³ Deeper emotional and intellectual work fueled the process of maturation, as young men considered the idea of manhood, specifically the intellectual manhood ideal expounded by the educated class. This ideal equated boyhood with temperament and impulsivity, and manhood with mind and restraint. Students had to work hard to leave boyhood.

Several tensions related to youth and maturation influenced the intellectual culture of higher education at North Carolina: boyhood versus manhood, impulse versus restraint, and dependence versus independence. Students relied on several important sources for making the transition from home to college and, ultimately, from boyhood to manhood. First, family relationships remained significant sources of stability for students, who continued to locate their emerging adult identities within their families. These relationships generally helped students in the maturation process, but sometimes presented challenges. Second, students received support from within the college community. Faculty encouraged young men to strive for eminence and distinction. They placed ambition at the center of the educational experience and used emulation and merit to promote studiousness and morality. Third, and most significantly, students helped one another mature into men as they gathered in literary societies, competed for grades and distinctions, and emulated one another. In the process, collegians learned how to speak the language of the emerging American bourgeoisie, who valued restraint, self-discipline, industry, sobriety, and emulation as means to manhood and even to greatness. In order to grasp the importance of this culture to young men’s development, it is first necessary to understand how young men and their families prepared for, invested in, and adjusted to college.

The case of William Bagley illustrates this process. Bagley began to think seriously about college in the summer of 1841, when he was a student at the Williamston Academy (where his father, a merchant, served as board member). He hoped to enter college as soon as possible but received only lukewarm support. His father questioned whether it might not be cheaper and more expedient for his son to continue a program of self-education. “He believes in a man educating himself I suppose,” Bagley complained to a friend in 1842. Nevertheless, Bagley’s father requested catalogues from colleges, including a university in New York, and young William ultimately decided to try for the University of North Carolina. “With the start I have I can go on & be prepared to enter any class in College, I think, with hard study, but still it will go much harder with me than if I were at some school where I could have the advantages of good society.”⁹ Bagley took t...