William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker

3. Sewanee

42 3. SEWANEE To me, my kinship with immortal things Hath been too clear revealed. —William Alexander Percy, “Sappho in Levkas” In July 1900 Percy boarded a train bound for Tennessee. He was alone; his parents had left for a two-month tour of Europe a few weeks before. His father sent him with a letter of introduction. “His mother and I, of course, feel some solicitude about him, as he has never been away from home alone before,” LeRoy Percy wrote of his son. “If anything should happen to the small chap I shall be some distance away.” He asked a local man to keep an eye on his son and promised he was good for the bank draft should he need any money.1 Some days after Percy left Greenville, he arrived in Cowan, Tennessee, where he switched to a small train called the Mountain Goat that bumped and smoked and groaned a thousand feet up onto the Cumberland Plateau, where it deposited him at the edge of the hamlet of Sewanee, home to the University of the South. One can imagine him standing on the train platform with a trunk full of clothes and a letter from his father, a betrousered fifteen-year-old boy looking out onto a dusty southern town. Tennessee in 1900 may seem to have been an unlikely place and time for a sexual and spiritual awakening, there in the Jim Crow South in the midst of segregation , racial violence, agricultural poverty, and the folks who would put John Scopes on trial. Sewanee was a rural and conservative place. It was in the woods and in the mountains, faraway from any city; students read liturgy every morning in chapel; professors wore robes and tutored in Greek and Latin. These qualities, though—the physical beauty of the world, the constant talk of God, the emphasis on classical learning—opened up new ways of thinking and relating for Will Percy. Episcopal bishops, planters, and educators conceived of the University of the South at the height of the cotton boom in the mid-nineteenth century as a place to educate sons of the southern gentry. They raised over half a mil- Sewanee : 43 lion dollars to establish a university that would be “the Oxford of America.”2 These early leaders articulated the ideals of the school in terms of gender: “Sewanee was founded to make men,” recalled an early Sewanee chancellor. Its founding generation of planters and priests included men like Leonidas L. Polk, Stephen Elliot, and James Otey: “men in every way themselves, who had known ultimate experiences of physical, intellectual, and spiritual manhood in periods of war and peace, they sought the education and development of the whole man.”3 When the war came, the university invested its endowment in Confederate bonds. The money disappeared, but the hopes for the school did not. Sewanee admitted its first class in 1868, and the character and ideals of the school remained much the same when Percy arrived in 1900: it was a school devoted to cultivating physical, intellectual, and spiritual manhood. These three strains composed the larger aim of education at Sewanee, which was to make men whole. As a student editorial exclaimed a few years before Percy’s arrival, no man “feels his manhood unless he is physically, as well as morally and mentally strong.”4 Sports teams—especially football—developed the bodies of men. Compulsory chapel enriched their spirits. And most important for Percy’s story, Sewanee modeled itself on the Oxonian and classical pedagogical traditions in order to cultivate intellectual manhood. The founders of the university believed that Oxford was the most worthy university to emulate, and they did: the structure of Sewanee’s administration, the campus architecture, and the Order of the Gownsmen all harkened back to Oxford. And also like Oxford, Sewanee placed heavy emphasis on the classics. One Sewanee historian wrote of the faculty of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “These men had much Latin and more Greek. They breathed the bracing air of the civilization that was Athens and they kept alive on Sewanee Mountain Socratic wisdom, Platonic idealism, Aristotelian balance.”5 Before we return to Will Percy, standing at the edge of town with his trunk and his letter, we need to understand the contours of the intellectual world he was about to enter. Sewanee’s emphasis on the classics takes on a great deal of significance when placed into a broader context. The cultural conversation...