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capter 2 On Campus antebellum soutern college students and teir environment In July 1845, fifteen-year-old John Jacob Scherer, accompanied by his father, left home for the Virginia Collegiate Institute. Before his departure, Jacob’s mother gave him “several dollars in little pieces of silver money.” After sixty miles of the trip, Jacob’s father turned back, severing the last tie to the safety of home and childhood. For Jacob, this journey was a grand adventure, but it did not mean that he would develop into an adult immediately. In fact, shortly after he arrived at the institute, he accidentally broke a glass inkstand and received a severe reprimand. In his own words, his reaction was less than “adult”: “I went out behind the building and wept, and longed and longed for mother.”1 Antebellum southern college students were on a journey throughout their college careers. They searched for growth and respect within the adult world of the Old South. The road on which they traveled, however , was not straight and easy. They met many challenges from their very environment. The way they reacted to this environment reflected how far down the path to adulthood they had gone. For many, the first difficulties in their journey came on their way to college. In the summer of 1837, for instance, University of North Carolina student T. R. Caldwell stayed the night in Salisbury, North Carolina , on his way to Chapel Hill. In the watch pocket of his waistcoat, Caldwell’s father had placed several folded bills to cover expenses. Upon his arrival at Chapel Hill, Caldwell discovered that a thief had replaced the bills with folded paper during his stay at Salisbury.2 Other University of North Carolina students faced more hazardous obstructions on their journeys. In 1853, several students hired wagons in Raleigh to take them to Chapel Hill on roads described as “almost im34 passable.” When they got to within eight miles of the university, all of the wagons got mired in the mud. Several walked on that night, or hired the horses to ride. One of the unfortunate travelers, however, had become too ill to continue on, so he and a friend approached the nearest house and asked to stay the night. They gained entrance, but not without initial resistance. According to the ill student, “the old Lady of the house hesitated for a while and said that she had determined not to let any of the students stay there, but she said she ‘sposed’ she would have to let me stay, so I went to bed immediately and soon entirely recovered, and then got up and dressed and went down and chatted with the old lady a while.”3 George Penn faced similar travel difficulties during his 1841 trip to Washington College in Virginia. Having planned to travel by stagecoach , Penn was disappointed to find that the route had been discontinued because of poor road conditions. He soon learned, however, that there was a regular mail run to Lexington using a horse cart, so he purchased a berth on the cart. When he finally arrived at college, he complained that the ride had been the most uncomfortable of his life—so much so that he asserted, “every bone in me was either broke or dislocated .”4 For other students, however, the trip to college brought amusement. Upon arriving at the University of Virginia in 1846, for instance, two Alabama students spent their first night on the outskirts of town in a private home, sharing a room with two other students. After such a long trip, the Alabamians were exhausted and went to bed immediately. They found that they could not go to sleep easily because, as one of the Alabama boys wrote, they were “intently watching one of the other fellows who was walking about the room looking very much disturbed and as if he wished to do something without knowing how to get at it.” He continued , “After pacing backwards and forwards two or three times what does the fellow do but come whack down on his knees and go to praying! just as if he was not at the University! God! I gave Tom a pinch or two and we like to have died—as soon as he got up we made some observation and then both roared out.”5 Like these Alabama students, many discovered that the college environment did not always meet their expectations. Many southern...

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