Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South

INTRODUCTION

Introduction Afew years ago, as I sat in the reading room of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I became hopelessly diverted from my original task by a fascinating collection of letters. What had caught my attention was a series of correspondence from the late antebellum period between Andrew McCollam Jr., a student at Centenary College in Louisiana, and his parents. I found myself caught up in McCollam’s description of his life at college—his hopes and fears; his favorite academic subjects; his homesickness; his friends; and his struggles to establish himself as an adult. When he returned home a few years later, he was no longer a child, but a man of the world.1 What struck me about McCollam’s letters from more than a century ago was that there was so much familiar about the struggles of adolescence in leaving home for the first time; but college in the Old South also represented something different from the familiar. Reserved almost exclusively for the sons (and some daughters) of the wealthiest planters, college life was not a representative existence for most southerners. I wanted to be able to understand what motivated these young men and women. What forces helped to determine their behavior, attitudes, and accomplishments? After all, these students would become the future economic and political leaders of the region. How, then, did their college experiences shape them, and how much did their society shape their college experiences? In my search to answer these questions, I pursued two major lines of inquiry: 1) what have other scholars said about college life in the Old South? and 2) what can primary sources tell me? The answers to those 1 questions have resulted in this book—a new look at the college student experience in the Old South. First, let me discuss what others have said about college students in the antebellum South. In 1928 E. Merton Coulter published College Life in the Old South, which would shape an understanding of higher education ’s role in creating southern leadership for generations. Coulter focused his study on the University of Georgia, arguing that the southern college community conformed to definable “type,” and that there “were no fundamental differences in what happened” at major southern universities . The typical college student that emerges from Coulter’s pages is a member of the southern aristocracy, who “took the business of going to school seriously, although he worked just as hard in doing mischief called forth by an educational system which took its students young and which in dealing with them considered them still younger.”2 Although I agree that it was possible for southern college students to be similar across the region, using the experiences from one institution, the University of Georgia, to support this thesis always seemed less than satisfactory to me. In more recent years numerous scholars have offered expanded views of southern college life. Most colleges and universities have an official history, and most of them provide small glimpses of college life in between long, dry accounts of the activities of presidents, trustees, and faculty . In 1987, however, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz broke new ground in her sweeping treatment, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present. This work attempts to describe how college students’ lives have evolved in the United States since its founding. Horowitz has produced a very present-oriented work, beautifully crafting the story of how modern campus life came to be. Her main focus is that collegians have not been homogeneous; in fact, there has been a steady development of different groups on college campuses since the end of the eighteenth century. She asserts that, through her research, she has found “three distinct ways of being an undergraduate , with their male and female variants: college men and women, outsiders , and rebels.” Of the three, she argues, college men and women and outsiders were prominent in the period before the Civil War.3 College men and women were the insiders, the creators of campus alls of onor 2 life. According to Horowitz, this campus life “was born in revolt.” She asserts that at all colleges the wealthier students broke the rules and led revolts. In general, the nineteenth century brought the growth of a “genteel ” temperament, which was the result of wealthier families creating individualized, self-indulgent children. Genteel sons...