The Militarization of the University of Alabama

On June 4, 1858, the University of Alabama marked an unwelcome milestone: its first student-on-student homicide.¹ According to an account of the incident released by the university to the Independent Monitor, a Tuscaloosa newspaper, the victim, Edward Nabors, was one of several students eating breakfast at a Tuscaloosa boarding house that morning. During the meal, the residents of the boarding house taunted a fellow boarder, a student and Mississippi native named David Herring, about Mississippi's recent debt default, as they had done during the previous days. Afterward, a third resident, Walter Gilkey, confronted Herring outside the house and struck him on the head with a stick. Herring pulled a pistol from his pocket, and seeing this, Nabors attempted to intervene, striking Herrring at least twice. Herring shot Nabors dead. He was promptly arrested and the next day was tried for murder before two justices of the peace.² While student sentiment was strongly in Nabors's favor, the witnesses overwhelmingly agreed that Herring was not the aggressor and was acting only to protect himself.³ Moreover, two of his professors, Andre DeLoffre, who taught modern languages, and Dr. J. W. Mallett, who taught chemistry, testified to his "mild, orderly and gentlemanly" character. The justices of the peace found that Herring acted in self-defense. Having been exonerated, he promptly left town.⁴

The most remarkable thing about Nabors's homicide is that it was the first time in the university's twenty-seven-year existence that one student killed another. Violence was commonplace during the early years of the University of Alabama. Following its establishment in 1831, its early years were blighted by poor attendance and even poorer behavior on the part of its students.⁵ After numerous, futile attempts to curtail the excesses of its student body, the school successfully lobbied the state legislature for permission to establish a military department at the university.⁶ Although mounting political tension with the North motivated legislators' votes, university officials believed that the military system had the potential to transform their pupils from spoiled young men who were "ruined in moral character" into productive citizens, and that it also promised to revitalize an institution of higher education that heretofore had been a failure.⁷

Superficially, the university's faculty and trustees had some success at cultivating an image of an academically prestigious institution. The university's students were drawn from the state's wealthiest families.⁸ Its admission requirements included knowledge of Greek, Latin, mathematics, and geography, and in 1850, the university was permitted to establish a chapter of the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honor society, which, the faculty noted, placed it in company with institutions such as Yale College.⁹ These marks of respectability, however, were a façade that hid the university's instability. Soon after its creation, it was forced to unofficially relax its admissions requirements to ensure an adequate flow of incoming students, and tension quickly rose as unprepared pupils failed to meet their professors' lofty expectations.¹⁰ Few students actually obtained degrees during the university's early years.¹¹ Even the establishment of the school's Phi Beta Kappa chapter was punctuated by an element of insubordination that underscored the lack of discipline on campus.¹² When the faculty received the organization's response to its application, it was shocked to learn that the university already had a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa; perturbed by his colleagues' reluctance to join the organization because of their general suspicion of secret societies, Professor F. A. P. Barnard had secretly submitted a successful application during the previous year.¹³

Any public perception of the university as an academic bastion was undercut by its students' propensity to resort to violence, which was a problem on campus from the school's beginning.¹⁴ Many students arrived on campus armed with pistols, knives, and swords, and they often used them.¹⁵ In an 1834 letter, Lawrence Sellers, who would go on to become a United States and Confederate senator, wrote to his father that a group of students had chased...