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Introduction
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
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1 When Americans think of the Civil War, few images come to mind more often than those from the epic film Gone with the Wind. We remember Scarlett O’Hara’s early fright and growing fortitude as she loses and regains her estate. We remember Rhett Butler’s dry cynicism about his compatriots’ lust for war. And we remember, with incredulity, the African American servants who remain faithful to their masters through slavery and freedom. But we seldom remember the first lines of the film or the backstory they imply. As a turkey gobbles and horses laze in the sun, Scarlett’s admirer Brent Tarleton defends his and his twin brother’s academic failure. This story of the war begins with college. Brent’s opening lines tell us a lot about higher education in the 1860s, probably more than the filmmakers intended. First, college was an important rite of passage for wealthy white men in the antebellum South. Nothing in the film suggests that the Tarleton twins aim for intellectual careers; clearly they intend to follow in their planter father’s footsteps. Yet they have spent their formative years away from the fields, in the classroom. Scarlett’s implied rebuke for their expulsion shows the value their society placed on formal education. Second, Brent’s dismissal of that rebuke points to the war’s disruption of higher education. Patriotic young men, he believes, will leave their classrooms over the coming weeks and months to join the fight. The Tarletons may have misbehaved or failed their classes, but they would soon have left even if they had not been expelled. The departure of a large number of their classmates would have a devastating e≠ect on colleges. Finally, the exchange between Scarlett and her suitors implies that Introduction What do we care if we were expelled from college, Scarlett? The war’s gonna start any day now, so we’d have left college anyhow. —Brent Tarleton in Gone with the Wind, 1939 2 RECONSTRUCTING THE CAMPUS only men went to college. We hear nothing about the Southern belle’s higher education.1 Of these three implicit claims, only the last turns out to be false. Both white women and white men, albeit only a small minority of each, attended college in America before the Civil War. They did so for several reasons, but usually not for directly applicable professional training. The Southern planter class, in particular, enrolled primarily for social reasons. And the Civil War did indeed disrupt colleges. Throughout the nation, male students fled classrooms as they rallied to battlefields. In the South, physical and financial ruin posed additional challenges for colleges already starved for students. Yet the Civil War did not destroy American higher education. Most colleges in the North stayed open through the war years. Most in the South reopened after the surrender. Some of the Tarletons’ real-life counterparts —if, unlike the twins, neither expelled before the war nor killed during it—even resumed their studies after a four-year interregnum. But all was not the same. Like Scarlett’s plantation, colleges after the war were very di≠erent places from before. This book tells the story of that change: how colleges responded to the war and what the war and its aftermath did to colleges. It argues that the Civil War a≠ected higher education in two ways. First, colleges everywhere developed new relationships with the growing federal government that brought new funding, reshaped curricula , and gathered and spread information about American education. Second, wartime damage left Southern colleges with the need and the opportunity to rebuild themselves, often in new ways. With the support of state governments, colleges invented the new form of the comprehensive university and opened educational opportunities to previously excluded Americans. Though hardly gone with the wind, colleges in both the South and the North bore distinct marks of the Civil War. By 1861 higher education in America already had a long history. Almost as soon as the Puritans arrived on the beaches of Massachusetts Bay, they resolved to establish a college. The legislature created Harvard College in 1636; classes began two years later. Other governments and denominations eventually followed suit. The Crown established the Anglican College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1693. Connecticut founded Congregational Yale College in 1701. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire all founded colleges between then and the Revolution. Most of the colonial colleges o≠ered a narrow curriculum and...