Intellectual Manhood

University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South

Timothy J. Williams

• Éditeur: The University of North Carolina Press
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469618401
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Gender Studies

In this in-depth and detailed history, Timothy J. Williams reveals that antebellum southern higher education did more than train future secessionists and proslavery ideologues. It also fostered a growing world of intellectualism flexible enough to marry the era's middle-class value system to the honor-bound worldview of the southern gentry. By focusing on the students' perspective and drawing from a rich trove of their letters, diaries, essays, speeches, and memoirs, Williams narrates the under examined story of education and manhood at the University of North Carolina, the nation's first public university. Every aspect of student life is considered, from the formal classroom and the vibrant curriculum of private literary societies to students' personal relationships with each other, their families, young women, and college slaves. In each of these areas, Williams sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual history of young southern men, and in the process dispels commonly held misunderstandings of southern history. Williams's fresh perspective reveals that students of this era produced a distinctly southern form of intellectual masculinity and maturity that laid the foundation for the formulation of the post–Civil War South.

Part I: University
Idealizing Intellectual Manhood

The University of North Carolina was chartered in 1789, following a vague state constitutional mandate for at least one university to instill “useful knowledge” in the state’s youth.¹ Its founding was part of a national movement to establish new colleges for the new republic.² Prior to the Revolutionary War, the northern colonies boasted several colleges—including Harvard and Yale—but the College of William and Mary was the South’s only institution of higher education. After the Revolution, North Carolina’s leading Federalists envisioned a public university that would mold conscientious citizens.³ Other states soon followed: Franklin College (now the University of Georgia) and South Carolina College in 1801, and the University of Virginia in 1816. The greatest period of growth in southern higher education began in the 1820s, largely due to the proliferation of denominational colleges and the establishment of public colleges in states formed out of the Old Southwest and Louisiana territories: Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.⁴ In all, between 1800 and 1850 the number of colleges in the United States grew from twenty to more than two hundred, and many of them were in the South.

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.

Chapter One: Going to College

In 1853, the North Carolina University Magazine published an account of college life in an article entitled “Musings of a Student.” The anonymous author drew particular attention to the figure of the collegian: “Somewhat matured in mind, yet not strong enough to cope with the world, he despises his childhood, and casting off the schoolboy garb, vainly tries to wear the manly robe; yet it must be worn, for College life is so short that ere he is aware of it, he is ushered into the world where, unless it is worn, he must go down before the proud lance of some doughty knight. The object of College life is to learn to be a man, and in no place could it be better learnt.”¹ More than a rowdy ne’er-do-well, the antebellum collegian was an agent in his own maturation, struggling to leave behind boyhood in a seemingly epic struggle for survival in a frightening adult world.

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.

Preparing for College

Southern families went great lengths to provide for boys’ early education.⁴ Sons of planters often trained with private tutors and attended local academies. Largely elite institutions, these schools charged tuition and were not the same as public schools or “common schools,” which lacked political support in the region.⁵ Private academies flourished in the early nineteenth-century South, and in North Carolina about six new academies were chartered every year between 1800 and 1825. Most of these were day schools, and some were library societies or benevolent societies that operated academies.⁶ Generally, academies prepared boys for college entrance exams by offering rudimentary Latin, Greek, arithmetic, natural philosophy, and rhetoric. Students also practiced declamation and oratory within academy debating societies. Sometimes teachers encouraged certain pupils to consider college, but there was never an expectation for higher education. A young man (or his father) might write to college presidents for official catalogues in order to learn about collegiate entrance requirements, curricula, and expenses.⁷ If a young man made the choice for college, he could be admitted upon successful completion of an entrance examination, which determined the class a student would enter. Promising but underprepared students might be admitted to the university as “irregular” students who could attend classes in preparation for retaking the entrance exams, but they were not enrolled.⁸

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...