Rot, Riot, and Rebellion

Mr. Jefferson's Struggle to Save the University That Changed America

Rex Bowman, Carlos Santos

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813934716
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Thomas Jefferson had a radical dream for higher education. Designed to become the first modern public university, the University of Virginia was envisioned as a liberal campus with no religious affiliation, with elective courses and student self-government. Nearly two centuries after the university's creation, its success now seems preordained—its founder, after all, was a great American genius. Yet what many don't know is that Jefferson's university almost failed.

In Rot, Riot, and Rebellion, award-winning journalists Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos offer a dramatic re-creation of the university's early struggles. Political enemies, powerful religious leaders, and fundamentalist Christians fought Jefferson and worked to thwart his dream. Rich students, many from southern plantations, held a sense of honor and entitlement that compelled them to resist even minor rules and regulations. They fought professors, townsfolk, and each other with guns, knives, and fists. In response, professors armed themselves—often with good reason: one was horsewhipped, others were attacked in their classrooms, and one was twice the target of a bomb. The university was often broke, and Jefferson's enemies, crouched and ready to pounce, looked constantly for reasons to close its doors.

Yet from its tumultuous, early days, Jefferson's university—a cauldron of unrest and educational daring—blossomed into the first real American university. Here, Bowman and Santos bring us into the life of the University of Virginia at its founding to reveal how this once shaky institution grew into a novel, American-style university on which myriad other U.S. universities were modeled.

1

“Acts of Great Extravagance”

On March 19, 1839, Professor Gessner Harrison, a mild-mannered scholar generally liked by the young men who attended his classes at the University of Virginia, strolled out of his lecture hall in the school’s stately Rotunda unaware that two students had come looking for him. They were both angry. And armed. William Binford and Thomas Russell had been ordered off the university grounds a month earlier for “gross violations” of school rules. Binford, from outside Richmond, had been suspended until the end of the session. Russell, a Yorktown native, had been dismissed altogether. Harrison, serving as the chairman of the faculty despite his youth, had ordered the two out of the university with the cutting remark that they had disgraced themselves. Now the two had returned on this winter day to avenge this slight to their honor.

They caught up to the professor of Latin and Greek not far from his classroom. Immediately, the two young men demanded that Harrison retract his statement (a standard request among gentlemen looking to satisfy their sense of wounded honor). Harrison, a native of Harrisonburg, Virginia, who was intimately familiar with the gentry’s code of conduct and the ease with which young gentlemen could be offended, declined, stating, according to one student’s account, “that when he took a stand it was very hard to move him.”¹ The powerfully built Binford then asked the professor if he would fight back if struck. A crowd of up to a hundred students had by now gathered around to watch. When Harrison replied that his religious views prevented him from exchanging blows, an enraged Binford seized him by the collar, shook him, and called him a coward. Suddenly, Russell pulled out a horsewhip—its leather hard enough to sting a horse’s hide and rip a man’s flesh—and slashed Harrison several times as Binford held him. The crowd of students, who had done nothing up to now to defend their professor, were roused to action. Horsewhipping itself was a violent though acceptable form of insult under the gentleman’s code of honor, but whipping someone who was being pinned down was far beyond the limits of gentlemanly conduct. The students freed Harrison from his attackers.

But, once loose from Binford’s grip, the humiliated professor told the two men they had again disgraced themselves. Infuriated, the two renewed the horsewhipping. “Neither of them pretended that I had done him any injury,” Harrison wrote later that day, his handwriting steady despite the beating, in the journal he kept as part of his duties as faculty chairman.²

Satisfied that they had punished Harrison sufficiently, Binford and Russell released him, mounted their horses, and galloped off down the Lynchburg road, “giving out that they were going to Mississippi.”³ After witnessing the assault on their professor, the other students made no move to capture them. But university officials rushed to obtain a warrant for their arrest and handed it to the local sheriff, and the school’s proctor promised him a one-hundred-dollar reward if he could capture the fugitives before they left Albemarle County, the rolling countryside that surrounded the fledgling university.

Harrison justified the expense as necessary, given the “assassinlike character of the outrage.”⁴ Binford and Russell, though, outraced their pursuers and escaped to Nelson County, southwest of Albemarle and beyond the local sheriff’s jurisdiction. Unluckily for the fugitives, they owed money to a member of the sheriff’s posse, a tailor. He refused to let the two men get away without paying their debts. Continuing the pursuit, the tailor caught up to them at the Nelson County courthouse and had their horses and baggage seized. The two men straggled back to Charlottesville on foot and lay low but bolted anew when the university obtained a second warrant for their arrest. The sheriff was nowhere to be found, so the school turned to a shopkeeper named Bailey for help. Though a merchant, Bailey had once been a constable, and the university reiterated its willingness to pay a one-hundred-dollar reward. So Bailey assembled his own posse and set out in pursuit. He caught up with the two students in Fluvanna County, east of Albemarle on the road to Richmond. The desperadoes did not submit without a fight, and during the shootout Russell was “dangerously wounded” by a shot from one of the posse members. Binford was brought to the jail in Charlottesville.⁵

By now, though, student sentiment had turned. Where before they had seen Harrison as the victim of an ungentlemanly act, they now saw Binford and Russell as two classmates being unfairly hounded by a repressive authority. A mob of up to 150 students, the greater part of the student body, gathered around the jail and threatened to break in and rescue their classmate, “all seemingly ready to commit acts of great extravagance,” Harrison noted in his journal.

Harrison and the proctor went to the courthouse to attend Binford’s trial (the wheels of justice turned considerably faster in the nineteenth century), only to find a local Baptist preacher, the Reverend Tinsley, pleading for leniency. Tinsley said Binford had expressed great and sincere regret. As the mob of students continued to threaten a violent breakout unless Binford was freed, Harrison consulted with “a number of respectable gentlemen of Charlottesville,” who told him university officials should simply drop the charges. No one, the gentlemen advised, would think that the threatening mob of students had intimidated the university into capitulating. “Finding it a question of great doubt whether the University would be benefitted by prosecuting the matter further, and considering the danger that it might rather be injured by such a course, the prosecution under the warrant was dropped after Binford had made a written apology, and a promise had been given by the students gathered in Charlottesville, to disperse quietly,” Harrison wrote in the journal. This course, he added, “seemed under the circumstances altogether preferable.”

The mob of students, though, did not disperse quietly despite their promise. Some of them attacked Bailey’s shop, doing as much damage as they could. Tired at last of the student unrest, the citizens of Charlottesville picked up their pistols and rifles and forcibly drove the students back to their dormitories. Binford was released, and Russell disappeared.

At the university, the students quieted down, at least for the moment. But soon, violence would erupt once more, as it had so many times in the fifteen years since the university’s founding. And this time, as people wondered out loud if Thomas Jefferson’s university was worth the bother, a professor would lie dead.

2

The Ugly Beginning

Among his many talents, Thomas Jefferson knew how to make enemies. Long before his profile was stamped on the nickel and long before his bust was carved into a South Dakota mountainside—in short, long before his image became a symbol of the American democratic impulse—the sage of Monticello had adversaries, and they were legion. Many citizens of the new nation did not warm to the laconic Jefferson the way they did to his equally taciturn fellow Virginian George Washington. Upon the old general they virtually conferred Old Testament status. Meanwhile, the studious Jefferson, with his hair the color of hell-fire and his mind constantly at war with tradition, became a lightning rod for critics.

In his time, Jefferson was publicly accused of cheating his legal clients, detesting the Constitution, denying Noah’s flood, and turning his slave plantation into a “Congo Harem” by bedding house slave Sally Hemings, one of the hundreds of slaves Jefferson owned.¹ Weary of his world-shaking, “leveling” ways,² his conservative foes opined that the whippet-thin intellectual should stick to pinning insects and tinkering with swivel chairs. When he won election to the presidency in 1800, tradition holds, the women of New England hid their Bibles in their wells, convinced that Jefferson’s atheistic minions would snatch them up and cast them on bonfires.³ Even when he doubled the size of the nation with the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson’s detractors were unimpressed: thanks to an unabating anti-Jeffersonian sentiment, none of the states formed from the newly purchased land were named after the president. And, in a criticism that wounded him far more deeply than any of the crackpot assertions about his religious beliefs, political opponents accused him of running a con game to get the money he needed to build a university in Virginia. “There are fanatics both in religion and politics,” Jefferson complained to state senator Joseph C. Cabell, “who, without knowing me personally, have long been taught to consider me as a raw head and bloody bones.”⁴

Jefferson sowed the seeds of his own unpopularity as a young member of the Virginia legislature. Born in 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia, not far from the dusty trade town of Charlottesville, Jefferson was in his twenties when he won election to the state House of Burgesses in 1768. He was a young radical in the midst of what until then had been an archly conservative lawmaking body. Jefferson’s early years in the Williamsburg chamber passed quietly, but in 1776, after he had taken time out to ride to Philadelphia, attend the Continental Congress, and pen the Declaration of Independence (thereby putting the colonies at war and adding the entire British government to his growing list of enemies), he suggested to his fellow legislators that the laws of Virginia needed a thorough overhaul. They were a hodgepodge of ancient British law and turgid legalistic jargon, and furthermore, in Jefferson’s view, they enshrined superstition and unnecessarily restricted the freedom of citizens.

So in October 1776, Jefferson offered a bill proposing that the House of Delegates (formerly the House of Burgesses) appoint a committee of five members to reform state laws. His liberal allies backed the plan, and the House appointed Jefferson to the committee. He immediately set about rewriting the laws of Virginia, crafting so many bills that the General Assembly, slowed perhaps by the ongoing Revolutionary War, would need years to discuss and vote on them. By the spring of 1779 Jefferson’s committee had written 126 reform bills. Jefferson pushed his colleagues to adopt them, convinced that the revolutionary mood was the best time to make radical changes. “The time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united,” Jefferson wrote of his flurry of bill writing. “From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill.”⁵

The legislature, often descending into rancorous debate, took a decade to ponder Jefferson’s reforms. And though some bills—such as the one calling for the eventual emancipation of slaves—were never acted on, others passed, turning the Old Dominion into a testing ground for democratic reform. In accordance with Jefferson’s bills, the laws of primogeniture and entail, which restricted who could inherit and own land, were abolished. The capital was rooted up from Williamsburg and moved to the village of Richmond, more central to the state’s population. The death penalty, a possibility for petty criminals and horse thieves, was abolished for all crimes except murder and treason. And, importantly, laws compelling financial contributions to support religion were discarded.

Every change had its foe, however. The old aristocracy steamed at the land reforms that made it easier for the common man to hold property. The “Tories” of conservative Williamsburg were shocked to find themselves on the periphery of power as the state capital moved west. When Jefferson was nominated for Speaker of the House in May 1778, the conservatives, led by Benjamin Harrison (whose son, William, would one day become the nation’s ninth president), took the opportunity to punish him, sending him to inglorious defeat on a vote of 51 to 23.

The Episcopalians were outraged at the cut in state funding. So powerful were religious leaders, in fact, that they were able to stymie Jefferson’s religious reforms for years. Even after the General Assembly abolished mandatory contributions to religion in 1779, it was still a crime to deny the Trinity, and mothers and fathers could lose custody of their children if they did not subscribe to the Episcopal (formerly known as Anglican) creed. But in 1786, even though it was to cost him decades of enmity, Jefferson’s “Act for establishing Religious Freedom” became law, separating the church from state control and leaving citizens free to follow their own beliefs without fear of state punishment. The law is one of the three accomplishments Jefferson had carved into his gravesite obelisk. The others are the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the creation of the University of Virginia.

Still, any joy Jefferson felt at displacing the Anglicans from their place of prominence was tempered by the defeat of the bill closest to his heart—the bill for educational reform (titled the “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge”). In Jefferson’s view, the survival of democracy depended completely upon an educated citizenry: the ignorant could be led astray into any false political doctrine. Therefore it was imperative that citizens be educated at an early age. According to the plan Jefferson submitted to legislators, every child, boy or girl, would have access to a nearby state-supported elementary school. Superior boys would have access to secondary schools. A state library would be established at Richmond at a cost of £2,000 per year. And capping off the entire system, William and Mary College in Williamsburg would be converted from a church-controlled divinity school to a public university, free of religious dominance. Here, professors would emphasize science, mathematics, and modern languages over theology and the ancient languages of the Bible. The plan was radical, an assertion of the state’s responsibility for the education of its citizens and a full-frontal assault on the role of religion in higher education in an era when Protestant denominations controlled the nation’s colleges, public and private.⁶

The bill died a slow, agonizing death. Plantation owners paid the taxes in Virginia, and they couldn’t understand why they should foot the bill to send poor children to school. Without their backing, no bill could pass the General Assembly. Furthermore, debts from the Revolutionary War made Jefferson’s expensive educational reform too costly. Legislators, while enthusiastic in theory, refused to support it in practice.

The defeat, while giving Jefferson a clear picture of the conservative mind-set he was up against, also marked the beginning of his nearly half-century-long struggle to establish a modern public university in his home state. Galling to Jefferson, perhaps, was the success the religious groups were having at founding their own schools. While he was making no headway in the General Assembly, the Presbyterians had established Hampden-Sydney College in rural Prince Edward County in 1776, and they had followed that up six years later by creating Liberty Hall, an academy that ultimately would become Washington and Lee University. The Methodists and Baptists, meanwhile, were carrying out their own educational designs. Religious leaders had a head start, but Jefferson refused to give up his plan for a secular university.

In 1779, Jefferson was not only elected governor but appointed to the Board of Visitors of William and Mary, his alma mater. Full of his customary energy, he quickly set about to change the creaky old institution. And here he had temporary success. The school had been founded by the Church of England a century before the Revolution to supply the colony with seminary-trained Gospel ministers, to educate the young “piously” in “good letters and manners,” and to spread Christianity “amongst the Western Indians.” So said the school’s charter.⁷ Under Jefferson’s influence, the Board of Visitors abolished the two professorships of divinity and “Oriental” languages. In their place, the school established a professorship of law and police, one of modern languages, and another of anatomy, chemistry, and medicine. To the duties of the moral philosophy professor were added the law of nature and nations and the fine arts. But the Episcopal Church still controlled the college, and it resisted change. Other denominations, meanwhile, withheld their support, interpreting Jefferson’s involvement in the school as his support for the Episcopal denomination. And finally, the college languished because Williamsburg, as previously noted, was no longer the cultural center of the state—Jefferson had successfully pushed to move the state capital to Richmond.

But William and Mary wasn’t Jefferson’s only avenue toward creating a modern university. He toyed with a couple of other o...