Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson's Struggle to Save the University That Changed America

Introduction

� Introduction The University of Virginia is one of the nation’s top public universities. Its alumni, known as the Wahoos, would say it’s not one of the best— it’s the best. The school annually tops collegiate rankings, routinely produces captains of industry, and turns out top-notch scholars the way lesser schools crank out football champions. The university’s endowment stands at an incredible $5 billion. Nearly two centuries aµer its creation, its success now seems preordained—its founder, aµer all, was the American genius Thomas Je≠erson. But his school—a radical experiment that would lay the groundwork for fundamental and dramatic changes in American higher education—almost failed. During the university’s first twenty years, its leaders struggled to keep it open. The school was oµen broke, and Je≠erson’s enemies, crouched and ready to pounce, constantly looked for reasons to close its doors. The university, his critics said, was godless, catered to the rich, and was built in the wrong place—“in a poor old turned out field” in backwater Charlottesville. And most important, its first students, though few in number, turned Je≠erson’s vision of an orderly “academical village” into an early incarnation of an ugly Wild West town. Although some students came to learn, many came to lark and laze. These students of the first two decades, oµen the spoiled, self-indulgent scions of southern plantation owners, sometimes the sons of prosperous merchants, led a life of dissipation. With a sense of honor easily bruised, they were reflexively violent. The wrong word, the wrong look could easily lead to a scu±e, if not a duel. Calling a young man a 2 Rot, Riot, and Rebellion “puppy”—innocuous by today’s standards—could get one shot. Cursing in the presence of a lady could lead to a whipping. The students brandished guns freely, sometimes shooting in the air, sometimes at each other. They secreted dirks and daggers and, with little to no thought and even less hesitation, stabbed each other. They pummeled, kicked, bit, and gouged each other. They brawled with town merchants, they scu±ed with the local wagoners. They cheated at cards for money. They robbed graves. They gambled on cockfights. They beat slaves. They cursed each other, townsfolk, and professors. They vandalized property (even taking a hatchet to the front doors of the Rotunda, the university’s signature building) and mutilated cows. They drank and drank and drank. And rioted. Their wrongdoing would have kept a modern city police department busy, but this was the mayhem of a tiny student body that averaged fewer than two hundred students per year. (In its first year, 1825, the school enrolled 125 students; in the following years, 177, 128, 131, 120, 133, 133, 140, 158; and in the tenth year, 205.) Modern readers can’t fully appreciate early students’ behavior and the agony it caused Je≠erson because even eyewitness accounts—couched in the polite language of the era—provide only a glimpse of the university’s raw beginnings. As the historian J. H. Powell noted, “The historian can never construct a record of events. All he can do is construct a record of records.”1 Still, the depth of the students’ depravity astonishes us today. Professors occasionally armed themselves, and with good reason. One professor was horsewhipped. Others were attacked in their classrooms . One was a target of a bomb—twice. Student William H. Hall of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, surreptitiously set an ink bottle packed with gunpowder on Professor George Tucker’s windowsill. Hall had corked the bottle, inserted a hollow quill through the cork, and run a fuse through the quill to the gunpowder. He lit it, but it failed to explode. His second bomb also failed to go o≠. Hall was expelled. His perplexed father wrote and demanded further investigation, noting in his son’s defense that the boy had just been expelled from Harvard College for the same o≠ense. “It seems extremely improbable that he should have so soon repeated” a bombing attempt, the father argued with logic muddled by love.2 Introduction 3 But such vicious acts were not uncommon in the school’s early years, and sometimes student behavior escalated beyond viciousness to full-blown rioting. The school endured at least a half dozen riots in its first twenty years. Hundreds of militiamen were called in...