Horace Holley: Transylvania University and the Making of Liberal Education in the Early American Republic by James P. Cousins (review)

The American West seldom appears in histories of early-nineteenth-century higher education. The region, characterized by its untamed wilderness and its settlers' rugged independence, has eluded most scholars in the field, including myself, who have focused on more established institutions east of the Appalachians. The subject of this biography, Horace Holley, was, at first, no different. According to James P. Cousins, "Horace, like many of his peers, came to see the world outside New England as a violent, chaotic, and uncivilized place where democracy had been corrupted by vulgar politics and despicable avarice" (p. 6). Holley declined offers to lead Transylvania University in Kentucky twice before accepting the job in 1818. In this lively, interesting biography, the author follows Holley's journey to Transylvania and explores his consequential impact on higher education in Kentucky. Although Cousins situates his work largely in conversation with earlier biographies rather than with southern history or education history, at times he illuminates broader "intellectual trends in the young nation" such as the development of medical education (p. 6).

This well-crafted biography reflects Cousins's expert engagement with institutional records, private manuscript collections, newspapers, and biographies. The book's six chapters follow Holley's life and career from his birth in 1781 to his death at the age of forty-six in 1827. Chapter 6 focuses briefly on the efforts of his wife, Mary Austin Holley, to write, with the assistance of Transylvania professor Charles Caldwell, a memoir about her late husband. The resulting book, A Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev. Horace Holley (Boston, 1828), received mixed reviews due to Horace Holley's politically and religiously divisive career as a liberal Unitarian minister with little interest in "the hard rules and divisive creeds of Christian denominations" (p. 215). This tension seemed to matter little to Holley, who focused on developing Transylvania and establishing its medical school.

Cousins's study of Horace Holley's intellectual formation in chapter 1 is especially noteworthy because it underscores how a microhistorical approach could potentially enrich studies of education. As a child, Holley benefited from his merchant father's substantial wealth. He was educated privately and began his higher education at Williams College before leaving to attend Yale University. There, Holley embraced the classical liberal arts curriculum and developed his compositional and rhetorical skills under the guidance of Timothy Dwight, Yale's president. Cousins's engagement with education is at its finest in this chapter, as he mines manuscript sources pertaining to the Yale curriculum.

While the book's narrative is compelling, Cousins's approach to biography is not as unique as he claims. He writes in the introduction that Holley's "story is best told and most useful when filtered through the methods of the 'biographical turn,'" which Cousins characterizes as "a recent historiographic shift away from uncritical or superficial personal histories" (pp. 4–5). Critical biography, however, is not a recent approach. Consider Drew Gilpin Faust's James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, 1982) or Rhys Isaac's Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York, 2004). Engagement with the methods of works like these and broader intellectual histories of the antebellum South would have produced a far more critical biography.

In terms of critical biography, gender is perhaps the most notable place for development because it is a category of identity that bears significantly on one's experiences with education, politics, and religion. Horace Holley was, after all, in the business of men's higher education—creating an environment in the southern backcountry for nurturing men of letters and restraint. Mary Austin Holley's agency is implied throughout the text but unanalyzed. Although Cousins notes her feelings about moving to Kentucky, her reactions to the area...