Collegiate Republic: Cultivating an Ideal Society in Early America

Epilogue

Epilogue • 195 • By the 1840s, a series of “wild-goose-chase” projects, as one student called them, began to plague the college world and its inhabitants. They threatened to distract the minds of the colleges’ refined, elevated beings from their ideals. Instead of relying on prudence and planning to plot out their future, many students began to embrace the notion of wild speculation , dreaming of adventures far from the college world and fortunes to be made overnight. College families had always identified the wider nation and its “erroneous” notions of virtue as a threat to their moral and intellectual order. This new worldly invasion into their virtuous world manifested itself in students and college “friends” contracting a variety of fevers that threatened to turn the republic upside down: “emigration fever,” “gold fever,” “Texas fever,” “military fever,” and “abolitionist fever.” A member of a Dickinson College family was able to observe “raging gould fever” in action as his Carlisle neighbors and a group of Dickinson graduates formed “companies” bound for California. One student marveled at the actions of student fortune hunters in Lexington, Virginia: “I did not think that men of their sense could be so easily deluded by such a palpable humbug” as “California fever.” Like his instructors, he disapproved of such behavior. He worried that his friends were leaving the college world prematurely, having “staked their lives at a great hazard.” A Washington College student monitored the similar career of his brother, who had left college without his degree determined only to “make money.” Moving from Tuscaloosa to New Orleans to Texas, the brother had tried surveying, law, and cotton planting, driven by a “fever” for cash. Without the right infusion of virtue, his brother feared, his brother would become prey for bad company. Sure enough, he was swindled by gamblers, left 196 • collegiate repuBlic alone and penniless in a distant Southern territory. These fevers infecting Americans young and old in the 1840s and 1850s reflected, to college families , a fearful threat to the moral and intellectual order they were trying to model and promote from their world.1 Passionate “fevers” also disturbed the culture of collective harmony promoted within the college world. When it began to infect college families , people took immediate notice. In 1858 a college lady from Lexington, Virginia, wrote to her brother about a “fever of excitement” gripping their college town. She had shocking news to report to him about the behavior of their Washington College president, George Junkin. The tensions between the college president and his colleague at the head of the new law school in town had become an “unfortunate and disgraceful affair.” As Mary Davidson reported, the college president and a judge “had a fight on the street yesterday morning.” It was well known that the two men held a grudge, since both wished to protect the interests of their separate institutions . Such bad blood between college officials was not unknown in college communities, yet college families usually fought each other through high-minded argument, wielding angry words in print or through public debate.2 The argument in Lexington proved “disgraceful” because the two men had exchanged loud insults and actual blows in public. Upon meeting one another on the street, the college president had criticized the law school and the moral behavior of the judge’s students. The judge then demanded an apology from the president, calling him “a vile calumniator.” The president refused and called the judge a “vile rum sucker,” a reference to the judge’s love of drink. The president’s attack was so personal, or, as Mary described it, such a “tender point,” that the judge, “in a great passion,” struck the president in the face. The judge’s law students, many graduates of Washington College, “set up a wonderful shout” as they watched these two self-appointed role models exhibit passionate, rather than prudent , behavior. Suddenly aware that the students were watching, or fearful that he was no match for the judge, the college president refrained from striking back and “very calmly walked away” in silence. So “what do you think of that?” Mary inquired of her brother, musing that the world was “coming to a woful end when right reverend Doctors are soundly boxed on the ears by dignified Judges of the Federal Courts.” The incident, she suspected, would “cause trouble” for the future.3 epilogue • 197 This incident reveals how far the...