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CHAPTER 1 FOUNDING THE UNIVERSITY 1802-1844 The day that witnesses the completion of this magnificent temple of learning will bethe dawning of a new day in the history of letters. GOVERNOR ALBERT GALLATIN BROWN, 1848 e was not even old enough to vote when he built his log cabin in the land of the Longtown. Thomas Dudley Isom, perhaps the first white settler in Lafayette County and one of the founders of Oxford, was only nineteen years old when he came to work in his uncle's trading post among the Chickasaws who lived in a hundred villages scattered across northeast Mississippi called the Longtown. Isom had not come to trade with the Chickasaws, who were being removed to Oklahoma, but with the white settlers who would soon appear by the thousands to clear the land, grow cotton, build towns and cities and found a university. When the Chickasaw nation ceded its tribal lands to the United States in 1832 and moved to Oklahoma, Mississippi entered a long period of unprecedented prosperity. At a banquet in Natchez celebrating the Chickasaw Cession, Robert J. Walker, the future secretary of the treasury under President Andrew Jackson, proclaimed, "Already the feet of thousands press upon the borders of this new purchase to pitch their tents in the wilderness. Kentucky's coming, Tennessee's coming, Alabama's coming, and they're coming to join the joyous crowds of Mississippians." Walker's words "echoed the wild enthusiasm of a citizenry" on the brink of a land boom "the likes of which the Mississippi valley had not seen since the 'Mississippi Bubble' ofJohn Law" a hundred years earlier. During the "flush times" of the 18305, a small army of speculators besieged the federal land office in the town of Pontotoc, where millions of acres of public domain were sold in forty-acre plots, for fifty dollars a plot, on credit. Land prices skyrocketed from $1.25 to $40 an acre, Mississippi 's population soared from 136,000 in 1830 to 400,000 in 1840, and twenty-six new counties were created in north Mississippi. In his recH 4 • F O U N D I N G THE U N I V E R S I T Y ollection of those heady days,Joseph Baldwin wrote, an "unexampled prosperity seemed to cover the land with a golden canopy [and} where yesterday the wilderness darkened the earth with her wild forests, today the cotton plantation whitened the earth Money is scarce, but credit is plenty, and he who has no money can do as much as he who has." One of the twenty-six counties created from the Indian Cessions was Lafayette, named in honor of Marquis de Lafayette who fought alongside George Washington in the American Revolution. Like Isom, Lafayette was only nineteen when he landed on America's golden shores. When the board of supervisors was considering a name for the county seat in 1836, young Thomas Isom suggested Oxford, hoping the name might give the town an edge in persuading the legislature to locate the state university there, something the lawmakers had been talking about for the last thirty years or so. One of the arguments against founding a state university was that there were already several colleges in Mississippi. In those early days of the American republic, academicians, like entrepreneurs , were infected with the ethic of growth and greatness. The idea of one national university in the country's capital where "the youth of all the states" would be molded into a composite American was just that, an idea, doomed from the beginning. In this broad land, devotion to place and the doctrine of local control would make America a "culture with many capitals" and a country with many colleges. From the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the founding of the Republic in 1776, only nine colleges were established in America. From the end of the Revolution to the beginning of the Civil War, more than seven hundred colleges were founded, one about every forty-five days. Most of them eventually failed. Mississippi's first venture in college building came in 1802 on the recommendation of its twenty-six-year-old governor, William Charles Cole Claiborne. Governor Claiborne was a member of Congress from Tennessee when the 1800 presidential election between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr was thrown into the House of Representatives. Jefferson and Burr tied in the electoral college. After several weeks of acrimonious debate, often amidst the talk of...

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