Collegiate Republic: Cultivating an Ideal Society in Early America

Three Building the College World “An Elegant Sufficiency”

• 83 • John and marianna Waddel were seven-year-old twins when their father Moses, an academy teacher and Presbyterian minister, accepted the post of president of Franklin College in Athens, Georgia. In 1819, the whole family left their home in South Carolina and rode west to help expand the college world. John recalled their first impression of Athens, and it was not positive: “a straggling little hamlet stretching along the public highway, with no prospect of revival or enlargement.” Their primary “object of interest” was their new home, a “huge pile of brick and mortar” called Franklin College.1 Franklin College was an early manifestation of today’s University of Georgia. Its collegiate beginnings dated from a 1785 act of Georgian legislators who donated land to the trustees for the founding of a “public seat of learning.” To the Waddel twins, the college possessed a “grand and solemn appearance” that provided a great contrast to the nearby log cabins and “grog shops” of early Athens. To many settlers in the region, this contrast between “grand” and “grog” went unnoticed. The main problem that the Waddels confronted in 1819 was that few Athenians took notice of the educational structure in their midst. No one in Athens seemed to care that there was a college in town. A former president of the college complained that the “great concern” among “the people” was “to raise cotton, buy slaves &c.” Frustrated in his attempts to attract any friends or funding for Franklin College, he concluded there was “little thought” among most Georgian settlers for “virtue and knowledge .” Most settlers were focused on “constantly moving off” to the west, ignoring Athens and its “public seat of learning” in order to pursue their individual interests elsewhere.2 Three “An Elegant Sufficiency” Building the College World 84 • collegiate repuBlic Along with college families across the republic, the Waddels tried to correct this growing national habit of bypassing what they viewed as the true definition of virtue: self-sacrifice for the common good. In the new college world, college families designed their communities, their buildings , and their very selves with this educational goal in mind. They needed to attract the interest of Americans distracted by the opportunities the new country presented. Once they recaptured the interest of striving settlers heading south and west, the Waddels hoped, their “business of instruction ” would direct these individuals toward more-virtuous goals than cultivating cotton, slave trading, and creating private fortunes. With the country rapidly expanding by territory and population, the old Revolutionary definition of virtue had seen many “innovations,” and college families hoped to refocus what they saw as a dilapidated, divided society on the “true” meaning of this foundational ideal. The Waddels arrived in Athens at a time when Americans were busy rearranging their society based on a new set of highly gendered values. In the fields of commerce and politics, for example, within market exchanges and legislative halls the new “virtues” of aggression, competition, and personal ambition were specifically assigned to men and celebrated as the sure route to success. In these male-dominated professions, earlier standards of virtue that called for self-sacrifice and the common good had been devalued and virtually abandoned. Seeing themselves as guardians of the youthful male mind, college families objected to the characterization of aggressive competition among men as a virtue, and they focused their greatest efforts and strongest criticism on the very areas where these new values were promoted and celebrated. By the 1820s, college families had set their sights on local, male-dominated gathering places such as public taverns, post offices, and even the public street. They viewed such places as full of corruption, confusion, and disorder—all of them in need of the influence of “true” virtue. College families hoped to inculcate their own ideals into their communities and regions, thereby reminding inhabitants of the necessity of classical virtue. They hoped to offer their world as a blueprint for how the wider world should look, demonstrating to their fellow Americans an odd, yet fascinating model of virtue in action. As they moved around their communities, on and off campus, college families were determined to show how classical virtue could be made to fit easily into American society. It all depended on the design.3 Building the college World • 85 In contrast to the competition and personal ambition that characterized the masculinized worlds of commerce and politics, there were still...