★ 6 ★

REGIONAL DIVERGENCE AND SCIENTIFIC ADVANCEMENT, 1840–1860

THE EARLY COLLEGIATE ERA IN THE NORTHEAST

IN 1830 PRESIDENT JEREMIAH DAY INSTITUTED A NEW system of discipline at Yale. Instead of admonitions and fines, students would be assessed marks for missing chapel or recitations or other “improprieties of conduct”: Sixteen marks brought a disciplinary warning and a letter to parents; thirty-two marks meant another letter; and forty-eight marks usually meant suspension for a term. However, twelve marks were forgiven at the end of each term and thirty-two, at the conclusion of the school year. Earlier that year Yale students had rebelled against an increase in the rigor of math recitations, resulting in the expulsion of almost half of the class of 1832. But that proved to be the last of the old-style student rebellions. Riots and riotous behavior persisted, but they were more often directed toward the citizens of New Haven. The new system of marks signaled the end of the old philosophy of submission and control. Instead of trying to control all aspects of their lives, Yale now held students accountable for obeying the college regimen, and they were able to calculate their improprieties.1 Students took advantage of their greater freedom, progressively expanding their college experiences through organized and unorganized activities.

Throughout the Northeast, colleges generally followed this same path, each in its own way and at its own pace. The era of submission and control and student rebellions was superseded by one of expanding collegiate activities—the early collegiate era.² Most college regulations remained on the books, but enforcement became less vigilant. Greater student freedom did not degrade academic performance because classroom demands rose during these years. Sources of turmoil like the dining commons were often abolished, providing another dimension of freedom, and religious observances tended to become more relaxed. Methodists and Baptists, including Francis Wayland at Brown, considered games and amusements to be frivolous, if not wicked, and strongly resisted this trend for some time.

Students’ primary allegiance and reference group continued to be the college class. Class suppers, elections, rituals, and ceremonies marking class milestones became more elaborate and absorbing. The literary societies, which flourished at the beginning of this era, were a partial exception to class organization, as were fraternities, whose subsequent growth undermined the role and influence of the societies. The momentum behind collegiate activities accelerated in the 1840s and 1850s, producing student literary publications, secular musical groups, and more. As students devoted increasing discretionary time to physical activity, games and athletics developed into intramural contests organized by class and, soon, the beginnings of intercollegiate athletic competition. Eventually, the collegiate extracurriculum would spread throughout American higher education, but in the antebellum years its initial manifestations largely served to transform college life in the Northeast.

Eliphalet Nott, the long-serving president of Union College (1804–1866), was among the first to conclude that the draconian approach to student discipline was counterproductive. A turning point occurred in 1809 when the trustees repudiated the most zealous faculty disciplinarian and confided this authority to Nott alone. The president advocated the parental approach, which sought to lead students through moral suasion, and he became the parental figurehead, handling all cases of discipline personally and privately.3 Nott was adamantly opposed to rebellion and vice. But rebellion receded as an issue under a more tolerant regime. To combat vice, he had the New York State legislature pass laws suppressing sources of temptation in Schenectady, in addition to a formidable list of prohibitions in the College Laws. New laws issued in 1821 still forbade all vice or potential temptations but allowed more latitude, including the right to take meals outside. From 1825 to 1827, the first three secret Greek-letter fraternities were founded at Union. Nott was heavily involved in matters far more pressing than student misbehavior—legislation in Albany, manipulations of lottery funds, and promoting his own inventions. He became increasingly tolerant of, or preferred to ignore, student peccadilloes. In 1832 he forbade any student to join a fraternity, but the next year he was talked out of the ban. Union acquired a reputation for admitting students who had been dismissed from other colleges and was nicknamed “Botany Bay” after the original Australian penal colony. Nott personally warned such students that they would be closely watched, but in fact they seem to have been treated no differently. More by circumstance than by design, Union College offered increasing space for extracurricular activities, but Botany Bay was scarcely a model for other colleges to follow.4

Williams College under its amiable president Mark Hopkins (1836–1872) exemplified the transformation of antebellum college life. The year before his arrival, a senior had used his commencement address to refuse his diploma as a protest against the stifling discipline. But in 1842, a graduate wrote, “I love the college grounds, and the college buildings … the faculty and the students and the members of our dear church.” A native of Western Massachusetts and a Williams graduate (1824), Hopkins taught school to fund his own education and acquired an MD before becoming a professor at his alma mater in 1830. He understood and sympathized with the boys and believed that a school master should “know when to see things and when not.” Hopkins found disciplining students distasteful, and the few students he expelled committed audacious transgressions. As long as students attended chapel and class, the college did little to restrain their behavior—nor did it do anything to meet their individual aspirations and interests. Students were on their own to shape their personal development, and their preferences were diverse.⁵

Fraternities were imported to Williams from Union in 1833 and quickly multiplied. Still, until 1848 membership in an antifraternity organization exceeded the Greeks, but afterward fraternity members comprised the largest block of students. The piety that had long characterized Williams slowly ebbed. The college still managed a revival about every 3 years, but fewer than half the students were converted, and the two religious societies had to merge in 1849 to remain viable. Students also promoted intellectual development beyond the college’s cramped classical course. Although the literary societies were losing ground, their libraries provided antebellum students with contemporary literature, including best sellers. After several attempts, the Williams Quarterly in 1853 became a permanent outlet for student writing and was soon joined by additional publications. The most intellectually ambitious effort of students was the Lyceum of Natural History. Although led by faculty, it was a purely voluntary scientific association that nearly one-quarter of students joined. Its enthusiastic members collected and classified specimens, sponsored talks, established a library, erected the Lyceum’s building, and led students on scientific expeditions.6

The emancipated students of the early collegiate era fashioned their own education according to their perceptions of culture and society, and in the process they altered the nature of their colleges. Mark Hopkins considered the college mission to be producing independent and self-disciplined young men, something the classical course alone could scarcely accomplish. Instead, neglect by the college motivated students to apply their skills and ingenuity to organize and manage extracurricular activities. These experiences generated the kind of feelings expressed by the sentimental Williams grad quoted above, which translated into alumni loyalties, financial support, and, before long, active involvement in the affairs of the colleges.⁷

In one significant sign of the changing atmosphere, students began writing about their college experiences. Rather formal depictions of Yale and Williams appeared in the 1840s, and in 1851 a Harvard student informed the world of College Words and Customs in a 300-page glossary. Two Princeton seniors in 1853 composed, for their own amusement, an exuberant and candid account of College As It Is. At the end of the decade, Yale students organized an enormous intercollege periodical in which 28 colleges participated from Bowdoin to Beloit. Originally entitled Undergraduate and then University Quarterly, it published 1,600 pages of essays and news of different campuses in 1860 and 1861. As an officially recognized publication, the essays were rather formal, but campus accounts were more spontaneous. This tradition culminated in 1871 with perhaps the most complete depiction of undergraduate life ever written—Lyman H. Bagg’s 700-page account, Four Years at Yale, by a Graduate of ’69. These writings document how midcentury students in the Northeast experienced college life.⁸

The Princeton writers describe a regime in which classroom assignments were modest and manageable, control was sufficiently authoritarian to challenge students’ rebellious instincts, and free time was available for an abundant social life. The day was still structured around three recitations—at 7 a.m., 11 a.m., and 4 p.m., with the two preceding hours and the previous evening designated for preparation. However, a half-hour was usually sufficient study for those who chose to prepare, and various stratagems were possible for those who did not. At Yale the verb “to skin”—“the idea of deceiving or cheating the faculty”—was, according to Bagg, “the commonest word in the Yale dialect.”9 Latin and Greek seemed to present little difficulty, probably because eastern students were well prepared by this time—in fact, most Princeton students entered as sophomores. Math was a different story, with junior calculus being the most difficult subject in the college course. The Princeton writers complained that math was weighted too heavily in calculating class rank. They also felt that science was shortchanged, being crammed into the senior terms, and that modern languages were taught poorly by unqualified adjunct instructors. In general, collegians respected academic achievement but had nothing except disdain for anyone who tried too hard for a high rank. They never held a low class rank against a person. Students were relentlessly judged by their peers, chiefly on their personal qualities.

Every college memoir describes the college experience in terms of the 4 class years. All academic work was done by class, as were most other meaningful aspects of college life. But class solidarity assumed a larger significance because it was there that individual reputation was established or not. A Williams’ senior wrote in 1859,

The esprit de corps by which classes are united … is full of noble meaning. It is one of the great animating forces of college life, and serves an important purpose, both in stimulating to labor and in restraining from transgression. No man who is not faithful to the honor and interests of his class is fit to be trusted under any circumstances.¹⁰

Indeed, the psychological impact of a student’s progression through the 4 years of the college course was the key to the collegiate experience. Freshmen were expected to run the gauntlet of relentless and ingenious harassment, principally by sophomores, without betraying weakness of character. Both Lyman Bagg and the Princeton writers warned against “newies” coming to college too young, or “green,” because their futile efforts at acceptance (“bumming”) only produced the opposite effect. Sophomores were regarded by themselves and others as the most rowdy class. Brimming with confidence for having survived the freshman year and delighting in the persecution of the new freshmen, they also were the principal perpetrators of pranks and “sprees” against the college authorities. Typical of sophomore mentality, Princeton sophomores published the Nassau Rake to ridicule any and all vulnerable targets. The junior class represented a transition to greater seriousness. Coursework now included lectures, and juniors faced the dreaded higher mathematics that few could comprehend; as Bagg put it, “mathematics and other exact sciences … can not be pounded into a man’s head by any number of repetitions.”11 Juniors ignored underclassmen, being preoccupied with increasingly portentous class activities. In addition, they had to survive junior examinations in order to attain the pinnacle of college life. “Dignity” is the word consistently invoked to describe seniors as they assumed the role of gentlemen for which their college experience had prepared them. Seniors were taught principally through lectures, and they could choose for themselves how much to study. Senior examinations, covering the entire college course, were a hurdle, although no one seemed to fail; but the greatest energy was directed toward senior orations and parts for commencement. As students completed this progressive transformation, they took immense satisfaction from their memories, the bonds formed with classmates, and their personal arrival as educated and polished gentlemen.

The formation of gentlemen had been an implicit outcome of colonial colleges and certainly the aspiration of their students. Later, it reflected a Federalist conception of society. College graduates expected to be natural leaders by virtue of their knowledge of history and philosophy and their public speaking skills. While many aspects of the college experience endured, this notion of the social role of graduates was overshadowed during the first third of the nineteenth century, largely due to the Awakening and the proliferation of country colleges. Its reemergence in Jacksonian America required a reformulation for a wealthier society with an egalitarian political structure. Gentility now characterized the social class that dominated the urban culture and economy but not the polity. Their culture flourished in this private sphere, which encompassed principally voluntary organizations. Student life reflected these conditions in ways that transformed the colleges.

Lyman Bagg and the Princeton authors are most forthcoming about student mores. They regard the college culture as basically democratic, where students succeed or not on the basis of intellectual and social accomplishments. While describing some types that did not partake of “the full glory of student life” (“green” freshmen; “religs,” or pious students at Princeton), their samples are smaller and more homogeneous than they realized. In fact, both memoirs advocated greater homogeneity: Bagg recommended that students first attend a boarding school in order to have a successful career at Yale, and the Princeton authors offered similar advice. By midcentury both schools catered to an increasingly uniform youth culture drawn from the upper reaches of society. For them the content of the college course—the furniture of the mind—was even less consequential than for Jeremiah Day. Bagg was explicit:

The chief value of a college course lies not in the scholarship or absolute knowledge with which it supplies a man, but rather in that intangible thing called culture, or discipline, or mental balance, which only its possessors can appreciate.

This intangible thing was largely the result of “the peculiar life and customs which the students themselves adopt”; however, at Yale it was also a continual test. The ultimate end was “the making of good men,” which involved a continual judgment of “personal character … the thing by which a man stands or falls in college.” For Bagg, a successful career at Yale was an end in itself but also a solid preparation for life.12 This culture and these ideals were fully formed in the student writings of the early collegiate era, but they had begun to crystallize at other northeastern colleges, particularly in the fraternity movement.

College students had long indulged in exclusive clubs with Greek or English names and secret rituals. Phi Beta Kappa was created at William & Mary in 1776, originally as a social society, and many more or less transitory groupings were formally constituted over the next half-century. Kappa Alpha at Union College in 1825 continued these practices but with a difference. By recruiting additional students from other classes and initiating them into the secret rites, the fraternity became an ongoing institution. When Union’s second fraternity, Sigma Phi (f. 1827), chartered a chapter at Hamilton College in 1831, fraternities became an intercollegiate phenomenon. By 1840 they had been introduced to most eastern colleges, and by the Civil War, 22 national fraternities sponsored 299 chapters at 71 colleges, throughout the country.¹³ Greek-letter secret societies obviously struck the fancy of antebellum collegians; they were purely a creation of students for their own satisfaction. Not that all students approved: at Union, Williams, and elsewhere, opponents organized nonsecret societies as hostile alternatives. Presidents initially opposed them as well for being exclusive and secret and introducing divisive competition for college positions. For these same qualities, many students loved them.

The initial motivation for forming fraternities was at bottom a “yearning … for fellowship of kindred souls.” The original fraternities were quite small—essentially organized cliques of men who sought a closer and more enduring bond of friendship. Hence, membership first grew through the formation of additional fraternities and chapters, not by enlarging existing ones. The secrecy, hocus-pocus, exclusivity, and competitive spirit made it all more fun and, perhaps, more psychologically gratifying. The added dimension of intercollegiate brotherhood no doubt exaggerated the presumed significance. Antebellum fraternities usually met in off-campus rented rooms, conducted secret meetings, and engaged in the kind of camaraderie little different from that described in the collegiate memoirs. Fraternity loyalties coexisted with those of class and literary societies, but as they became more firmly entrenched after 1840, they became more disruptive. Fraternities competed with one another to woo new members, and their rivalries often corrupted electioneering for class offices. The resulting kerfuffles could embroil a college for months and in some cases resulted in cancellation of the honors at issue. Fraternities were widely held responsible for the decline and demise of the literary societies. They elicited a deeper sense of loyalty, and their rivalries disrupted society activities. Eliphalet Nott regarded fraternities as an “evil,” but one “inseparable from an assembly of young men.” Mark Hopkins would have preferred to abolish them if it were possible, but every Williams trustee who graduated in the fraternity era had been a member. Princeton rooted out fraternities on two occasions but eventually tolerated their functional equivalent in the ultrasnobbish eating clubs.14

The unspoken reality of fraternities was that they attracted students concerned with worldly success and social status. The tensions these values generated were particularly visible at Williams. Although not necessarily hostile to religion, fraternity members rarely shared the piety that produced revivals and religious conversions. As half of the classes after 1850 joined fraternities, religious values no longer dominated this former bastion of Congregationalism. Evangelical colleges in general recognized the inherent threat of secret secular societies and sought to ban them, but at many colleges, like Williams and Amherst, the students established fraternities before the authorities took notice and could act. Above all, fraternity members cherished the values of worldly success—“good friendship, good looks, good clothes, good family, and good income,” as Williams historian Frederick Rudolph put it.15 Nor were these tastes acquired entirely on campus: they reflected the changing social base of the college.

For the first four decades of its existence, Williams had been a country college that largely served pious youth from humble backgrounds—students like Mark Hopkins. From the start of his presidency in 1836, college enrollment swelled with increasing numbers of students from New York City and the Albany area. After the mid-1840s, they outnumbered students from Massachusetts. Social backgrounds for Williams students are not recorded, but Rudolph reports that the fraternities attracted “the most urbane young men on the campus.” Other evidence suggests a growing association with urban wealth.¹⁶

The first Society of Alumni was organized at Williams in 1821, originally to avert the demise of the college. By Mark Hopkins’s tenure, it actively memorialized college history with statues and plaques meant to foster symbolic identity. Gifts of increasing size and frequency followed as loyal graduates prospered. By 1850, old grads were building summer homes in Williamstown to reconnect with alma mater and its rustic charm. Connections with urban wealth affected attitudes on campus. When Boston philanthropist Amos Lawrence became a benefactor of the college, he and President Hopkins shared a prejudice against “an unbalanced and irresponsible power in the hands of the masses.” Lawrence at one point donated copies for each student of a book of lectures extolling a Christian imperative for work and material success, which the college endorsed by holding Sunday discussion groups.¹⁷ At Williams and other New England schools, the lure of worldly success had a palpable effect on student careers. Ministerial vocations declined, lawyering increased, and the trickle entering commercial pursuits grew larger. For all these tendencies, the 1850s was prelude to more emphatic trends in the postbellum Gilded Age. Finally, in one telling development, students showed growing enthusiasm for gymnastics and athletics—a need for exercise that earlier farmers’ sons had scarcely felt. In 1859 Williams and Amherst played the first intercollegiate “base ball” game. No casual affair, this exhibition was also the first sports weekend, with trainloads of students on reduced fares traveling to Pittsfield for the game, a chess match, and concert.¹⁸

The increasing wealth and social standing of northeastern college students, manifest in student culture and graduate careers, affected the character of the colleges. Generalizations on the social status of students are limited by the small proportion of students attending college (ca. 2 percent), the difficulty of relating such small numbers to specific social groups, and the ambiguity of occupational categories. Instead, a dichotomy is apparent among northeastern students between rural and urban origins.19 How this affected student aspirations can be seen in the culture of the urban upper class. During the antebellum decades, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were dominated socially and economically by remarkably stable groups of very wealthy families. Whereas earlier, “self-made” men occasionally acquired (and lost) fortunes, almost all the antebellum elite had inherited wealth, often across several generations. They still retained active economic interests, seldom in manufacturing but largely in a secure mix of real estate, trade, finance, and insurance. They associated and married largely among themselves. These associations included membership in and support for a panoply of voluntary societies and cultural organizations, including colleges, through which they promoted and controlled nonfinancial interests. Economically such self-dealing worked hugely to their advantage. Through good times and bad, they augmented their wealth and fortified their social positions. The few students who pursued careers in business were likely to come from elite backgrounds.²⁰

According to a contemporary who should know, Charles Astor Bristed (of the Astor clan), membership in New York City’s social elite required “fair natural abilities, add to these the advantages of inherited wealth, a liberal education, and foreign travel.” Hence, by 1850 a college education was an expected accoutrement of these scions of wealth. Many also acquired law degrees, although their large fortunes often “precluded the drudgery of a practice.” Such students were present at Yale and Princeton, where they sometimes attended social functions with local elites. They were more prominent at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, where kinsmen were trustees and where involvement with nearby families generally overshadowed their collegiate experience.²¹ Far more important for the eastern colleges were the multitude of boys who lacked an inheritance and a Grand Tour but hoped to leverage natural abilities and a liberal education into entrée to genteel bourgeois society. The elites of the great cities might be beyond reach, but the smaller cities and larger towns that dotted the region possessed an analogous—and accessible—bourgeoisie that mimicked the fashions and pretentions of the plutocracy. These collegians sought at least the patina of a liberal education but also wanted to learn how to dine, dress, drink, dance, play, and impress social superiors—in short, they wished to acquire the manners of gentlemen. The colleges allowed them to pursue such socialization through the extracurriculum. What had formerly been colleges of the Awakening became, in the early collegiate era, nurseries for grooming gentlemen.

This development occurred earliest and most thoroughly at Harvard under the Brahmin aristocracy. The university was a hub for the networks that controlled the cultural and medical institutions and were closely linked with the city’s financial complex. In 1829, the Brahmins elevated one of their own to the Harvard presidency. Josiah Quincy (1829–1845), who replaced Reverend Kirkland, was the former mayor of Boston and a wealthy and successful businessman, active in banking, insurance, and real estate. With this background he became the “Great Organizer of the University.”22 He was assisted by a succession of wealthy and dedicated businessmen on the Corporation. Brahmin sons increasingly dominated the student body as the college became less hospitable to outsiders. Unitarianism presented one filter, but admissions and cost presented more formidable barriers. Harvard’s entrance requirements were continually raised during the antebellum years, comprising a 3-day exam in the 1850s. By then, three-quarters of students were prepared at local Latin schools or private boarding academies. Harvard tuition rose from $20 in 1820 to $104 in 1860, but the average annual spending by students jumped from $225 to $700. Little wonder that enrollments slumped from 1820 to 1850, provoking public criticism. But Quincy dismissed “numbers in literary institutions” as “by no means an unqualified blessing.”

Harvard students and their families above all sought refinement in the college. Harvard’s numerous social clubs established nuances of social distinction without recourse to fraternities (which were banned in 1859). Harvard, and the Brahmins generally, had close ties with England, and their notions of gentility drew inspiration from Oxbridge. This ideal seemed to include a haughty disdain for the lower classes, but some borrowing was more positive. Harvard embraced the Oxbridge love of sports, particularly boating, cricket, and rugby. In 1852 Harvard crews raced Yale in the first intercollegiate athletic contest. The Oxbridge ideal of a “gentleman and a scholar” was also imbibed by at least some students, who utilized the university’s incomparable resources to pursue learning on their own terms. No doubt the sons of Harvard were gratified when an Englishman in 1862 declared the university an analogue to Oxford and Cambridge: the “University which gives the highest education to be attained by the highest classes in that country.”23

The recruitment pattern at Yale was national compared with Harvard’s regionalism, but social developments were parallel. The Yale student body was fed by the efforts of its far-flung alumni and retained a greater, although diminishing, clerical presence. However, Yale not only spearheaded the early collegiate era, but its student culture seemed to affect its students more profoundly than anywhere else. Its gauntlet of separate secret societies for each class year took form in the 1830s, reflecting an evolving student culture that valued refinement and savoir faire. By the 1840s, more Yale students came from urban backgrounds and undoubtedly were wealthier as well. Clerical careers declined as graduates were drawn to the business world. The best available evidence suggests that this same pattern extended across New England colleges.²⁴ Exceptions existed, like Methodist Wesleyan, but at most of the smaller colleges, and particularly those in or near cities, clerical careers for graduates fell by 50 percent, while a larger proportion of urban students supported the fraternity culture and gravitated toward secular careers. Other factors may have played a role. By the 1840s New England was saturated with ministers; and stiffer admission standards (raised from exceeding leniency) may have discouraged rural prospects. After about 1840, northeastern colleges were increasingly patronized by the sons of professionals seeking material and social success. However, just as was the case at Harvard, such prospective collegians were in limited supply.

College enrollment growth slowed notably in the 1840s, except perhaps in the prosperous South. In New England the number of students actually dropped by 5 percent from 1840 to 1850. Even this figure masks substantial declines at individual colleges—graduates in these years fell by one-quarter at Bowdoin and Brown, more than a third at Dartmouth, one-half at Amherst, and two-thirds at Middlebury.²⁵ Circumstances at each college naturally differed, and governors were often puzzled about the cause. The role and culture of colleges in New England was evolving. Whether an institution was in the forefront, raising admission requirements and cost of attendance like Harvard, or in the rear, clinging to traditional practices and clientele like Middlebury, could affect who and how many might attend. However, college critics blamed declining attendance on the classical course.

Foremost among these critics was Francis Wayland, president of Brown since 1826. Wayland had a knack for articulating the conventional pieties of the age. His textbook on moral philosophy, Elements of Moral Science (1835), was widely adopted and reflected his signature approach of reasoning from metaphysics to everyday affairs to Christian homilies. Utterly lacking Mark Hopkins’s tolerance for human foibles, Wayland tried to make life conform to his own rigid ideals and principles. Characteristically, he killed the Brown medical school upon taking office by insisting that its practicing doctors reside in the dormitories and enforce student discipline. In 1837 he published another successful text, Elements of Political Economy, which inveighed against any and all interference with free markets. Soon afterward, a visit to Oxford and Cambridge set him pondering the deficiencies of American colleges. He applied political economy to higher education in Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States (1842). He was dismayed both by falling enrollments and by the fact that college was underpriced—not covering its cost of production. He attributed these failings to the classical course, and here his observations rang true. The subjects covered in the course had greatly expanded, but the 4 years allotted to cover them remained the same: “instead of learning many things imperfectly, we should learn a smaller number of things well.” Further, “our colleges … are at present scarcely … more than schools for the education of young men for the professions…. [And] while we have been restricting our Collegiate education to one class, its value by that class is less and less appreciated.” Instead, Wayland advocated establishing “courses of lectures on all the subjects … to which men of all classes may resort.”26

The illogic of the colleges obviously weighed on Wayland. In 1849 he abruptly resigned his presidency but then was persuaded to remain. He set forth his terms in a Report to the Corporation of Brown University, subsequently published and widely read.²⁷ Wayland proposed to break the monopoly of the classical course by offering a broad slate of practical subjects that students might choose in various combinations. By offering more freedom, he hoped to attract a new class of students and motivate some traditional students to more serious study. The traditional subjects were still offered, with additions of Application of Chemistry to the Arts, Application of Science to the Arts, and several others that were never organized (teaching, agriculture, law). Most revolutionary was the change in the degree structure: The bachelor of arts (AB) became a 3-year course with variable amounts of Latin, Greek, and modern languages; the bachelor of philosophy (PhB), also 3 years, was awarded for practical subjects and required no classical languages; and the master of arts (AM) was a 4-year degree, similar to the old AB of the classical course but, hopefully, with more independent study. The corporation accepted the New System, provided that a $125,000 endowment could be raised to support it. Enthusiasm surrounding Wayland’s plan, which reflected public discontent with the classical course, was sufficient to meet this goal, and the New System was implemented in 1851.

The New System got off to an auspicious start. Enrollments rose from 174 classical students (1850–1851) to 283 combined (1853–1854), with all the growth accounted for by PhB and nondegree students. The chemistry professor drew more than 300 auditors from the local jewelry industry for lectures on the chemistry of precious metals. But problems were also soon apparent. Wayland was oblivious to the emerging collegiate culture, and his efforts to enforce strict rules in the dormitories provoked a revolt in 1851. In the aftermath, two talented scientists hired to teach the applied curriculum were dismissed for their refusal to enforce the repressive disciplinary regime—and were eagerly hired by the new Yale scientific school. Nor did students use the greater flexibility and freedom of the New System to pursue their studies in greater depth, as Wayland had hoped. Instead they performed the minimum needed to meet quite permissive standards. And, after peaking in 1853, enrollments began to dwindle as well. The number of classical students was less than before the New System, and fewer graduated. The number of PhB students fell as well, and only one in six took a degree. Wayland’s contention that he was supplying “The Education Demanded by the People of the United States”—the title of an 1854 speech—rang hollow. He retired in 1855, beloved, honored, and exhausted.28

Brown’s new president, Barnas Sears, was both a true scholar and a practical administrator. To him fell the delicate task of justifying the scuttling of the New System to the same trustees who had originally approved it. After his first year, he delivered a scathing indictment: “the character & reputation of the University are injuriously affected by the low standard of scholarship required for the degrees of A.M. and A.B.” These low standards are seen as “an open act of underbidding other colleges, & as a scramble for an increased number of students.” As a result, “the best students of preparatory schools … now go elsewhere.” Instead, Brown “is flooded by a class of young men of little solidity or earnestness of character.” Unlike Wayland, Sears understood the gentleman’s college of the early collegiate era. He quickly moved to restore the traditional degree structure, while still offering the applied courses for those who were interested. Sears also relaxed the rigid rules and stringent enforcement of the Wayland era, allowing students the extracurricular freedoms enjoyed elsewhere. An announcement soon followed: “in the order and the course of study, Brown University does not now differ essentially from her sister Colleges of the United States.”29

SECTIONALISM AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE SOUTH

After the death of University of North Carolina president Joseph Caldwell in 1835, Governor David Swain informed a key trustee that he wished to become the next president of the university. Admired by all but the faculty, he was duly elected and served for the remainder of his life (1836–1868).³⁰ The state universities of the South had exceptional political prominence, symbolized by the three former presidents of the United States who served as Visitors to the University of Virginia. By the 1830s, populist hostility toward these “aristocratic” institutions was tempered by a growing identification with the governing class. Many men of wealth and prominence had passed through these institutions, and many more of their sons would do the same. By the 1850s the links between the state universities and the region’s burgeoning upper class would become closer still. The new states of the lower South reflexively adopted this pattern, founding state universities of the same type.

The 1830s also marked a turning point in the dominant attitudes of that governing class on two vital issues—slavery and religion. In the wake of the 1831 Nat Turner Uprising, the Virginia Legislature conducted a lengthy debate over the possibility of abolishing slavery in the Commonwealth. The final resolution took the long-standing Jeffersonian position, recognizing its “great evils” but leaving the remedy to future generations. William & Mary professor and later president Thomas Dew (1836–1846) wrote an influential summary of the debate in which he marshaled economic arguments to reason that emancipation would cause an unacceptable loss of capital. This was probably the last time that the subject of abolishing slavery could be publicly and honestly discussed in the South. Henceforth, the Jeffersonian apologia would be replaced by strident claims that slavery was a “positive good,” justified by the Bible to boot. Dissenters were vilified and ostracized. University leaders like Dew lent prestige, sophistication, and sometimes vehemence to these rationalizations and helped to assure the silence of doubters.31 Religion contributed as well. The Awakening had had a huge impact on the common people of the South, while the upper class perpetuated a genteel version of Enlightenment rationalism, or at least toleration, and distrusted evangelicals in particular. After 1830, the upper class embraced evangelical religion, and the churches became supportive of the social hierarchy. Early in the century the evangelical sects had largely disapproved of slavery. However, in 1844–1845 southern Methodists and Baptists withdrew from their national churches over the issue. Southern Presbyterians were the mainstay of the conservative Old School, which had no quarrel with slavery.³² As the region’s social elite found religion, the denominations founded colleges—nine from Virginia to Georgia in the 1830s alone, with more to come. However, the state universities dominated antebellum higher education in the South, none more so than South Carolina College.

South Carolina College fulfilled the ambitions of its founders to unify the state’s ruling class by imbuing its sons with loyalty to the state and its distinctive culture.³³ The state, in turn, rewarded the college with generous appropriations and sympathetic governance. In 1820 it made a distinguished appointment in Thomas Cooper as professor of chemistry. President Maxcy died soon afterward, and the governors demonstrated a liberality that would later disappear by elevating Cooper, a complete outsider, to the presidency. Cooper possessed an extraordinary range of learning for his day, but he was also an inveterate controversialist. A political exile from his native England because of his revolutionary views, he eventually joined fellow chemist and exile Joseph Priestley in Pennsylvania (1793). While working in both law and chemistry, he managed to be jailed by Federalists under the sedition law and later fired from his Pennsylvania post for political differences. He then concentrated on chemistry, teaching briefly at Dickinson and the University of Pennsylvania, while publishing studies promoting practical applications. Jefferson recruited him for the University of Virginia, in spite of clerical opposition (1819), but he opted instead for the security of South Carolina. Sixty years old when he arrived, Cooper may have been the most erudite man in the state, but he was also a relic of the Revolutionary Enlightenment. However, many of Cooper’s convictions harmonized with those prevailing in his new home. Having a Jeffersonian aversion to federal power, he opposed tariffs and the Missouri Compromise, while championing states’ rights and slavery. In a shuffle of teaching positions, Cooper was allowed to offer perhaps the first American course in political economy (1825), where he professed these doctrines to South Carolina students.

Cooper’s initial years went smoothly. He expanded the faculty and subjects taught, but his basic inclination was to bolster standards. The minimum age was raised to 15, and entrance examinations were stiffened. He also increased recitations in Latin and Greek. Most students actually entered as sophomores or juniors after being prepared by tutors. All these factors kept enrollments modest—fluctuating around one hundred. Student unruliness was as bad as ever, but no worse. In his own course Cooper taught uncompromising doctrines of laissez faire, free trade, justification of slavery, and opposition to federalism, and he soon began sharing these views outside the college. As the controversy over federal tariffs heated up, he ominously advised an 1827 protest meeting, “We shall, before long, be compelled to calculate the value of our union.” This veiled threat was widely publicized, and Cooper became a spokesman for the radical opposition to the hated 1828 tariff. He openly spoke of secession even before John C. Calhoun provoked the nullification crisis (1831–1833) by claiming the right of states to reject federal laws. Cooper ingratiated himself with the governing class of South Carolina, who predominately supported nullification—and, soon, secession.34

Perhaps intoxicated by this success, Cooper in 1829 unleashed his venom against the Presbyterians, who had earlier opposed his appointment. For the next 2 years, a pamphlet war ensued, including Cooper’s derogatory (anonymous) Exposition of the Doctrines of Calvinism (1830). Cooper was either an atheist or a deist, depending on who asked, but he carried a Voltairian hatred for all clergy, whom he characterized as acting solely in their own grasping self-interest. These attacks prompted his religious enemies to unite with his political foes, and they almost succeeded in having the legislature remove him from office. Instead, the matter was referred to the trustees, who tried Cooper on charges that his anti-religious writings had harmed the public standing of the college and that he had possibly indoctrinated students. The trustees delayed a full year before conducting the trial in December 1832. Cooper mustered all his talents as a jurist to mount what Richard Hofstadter called “the most elaborate justification of academic freedom in the ante-bellum period.” Actually, Cooper largely defended his own views by stating that materialism, Deism, and so on, were articulated by many respectable Americans, and the Constitution guaranteed his rights to voice them as well. He struck a modern note in asserting that the teacher’s obligation was to “treat those questions only that are connected with the subject of his lecture, and … treat them fairly and impartially.” According to his students, Cooper had not attacked Christianity in class. The trustees, mostly Cooper supporters, declared that the charges were not proved.35

There is considerable irony in the opinionated president championing academic freedom. He and his cronies on the faculty dogmatically taught the ideology of states’ rights. Different sides of political issues were debated in the literary societies, out of public view, but students received only the South Carolina creed from the faculty. Cooper himself subsequently asserted, “The political doctrines prevalent in this college are decidedly those of the majority of the State. We therefore have few students from the minority.” The distinguished political scientist Francis Lieber found it necessary to conceal his Unitarian religion and repugnance of slavery for the 21 years he was at the college (1835–1855). If Cooper was not alone in planting the seeds of political extremism in South Carolina, he certainly helped to cultivated them. They became a constant in the subsequent antebellum years but shorn of Cooper’s anticlericalism. In fact, the 1830s represented a shift in the religious sentiments of the South Carolina elite. Cooper’s vindication, with its public airing of his anticlerical views, apparently alienated many of them. Enrollments at the college plunged to just 40 in 1834. The trustees concluded that citizens had lost confidence in the college and asked for the resignation of the entire faculty, Cooper included.³⁶

For the rest of the antebellum years, South Carolina College had short-term presidents. The most successful incumbents were prominent planter-politicians whose stature warranted respect from both the polity and the students. Least successful were faculty members elevated to the presidency, who apparently lacked gravitas. Through all, the dominant figure was James H. Thornwell, an 1831 graduate and militant Presbyterian divine, who served as professor of sacred literature and evidence of Christianity, president (1852–1854), and trustee. Thornwell lent a strong Christian presence to the college, even while arguing explicitly that a state university must not be identified with any single denomination. He had studied briefly at Andover and Harvard, departing with a deep aversion to all things Yankee. He referred to abolitionists as “atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, [and] jacobins” while slaveholders were “the friends of order and regulated freedom …. In one word, the world is the battle ground—Christianity and atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.” Curricular conservatism accompanied political extremism. As all other major universities expanded offerings by the 1850s, South Carolina College proudly defended a purely classical course and, in fact, idealized ancient Athens and its slave-based economy as an analogue to embattled South Carolina. The curriculum embellished the state ideology, but culture was the true end of education; and South Carolina College spread its doctrines of slavery and states’ rights throughout the lower South.37

The University of Alabama opened in 1831 under nearly frontier conditions, although Tuscaloosa was then the capital of the state. Northern Baptist Alva Woods struggled ineffectually for 6 difficult years to control woefully underprepared, rebellious students. His replacement was far better suited for this challenge. Basil Manly (1837–1855), minister of the First Baptist Church in Charleston, was an 1821 graduate of South Carolina College. He made notable progress in organizing the college course and stabilizing its operations while enduring student misconduct that was severe even by southern standards. He also conveyed his own extreme version of Southern ideology. Manly was instrumental in leading the Southern Baptist Convention out of the national church, and he perceived before most compatriots that secession was unavoidable if the Southern way of life and its peculiar institution were to be preserved. Manly was a prominent proponent of the position that the Bible-sanctioned slavery. He projected an idealized Christian interpretation of southern society, epitomized in a sermon on “Duties of Masters and Servants.” Christian masters were benevolent stewards of their slaves’ bodies and souls, and slaves in turn would happily fulfill their Christian duty in their proper place in society—better off, in fact, than industrial laborers or native Africans. This dissociation of Christian society as he imagined it and the realities of slavery was typical of the southern mentality and in keeping with the prevailing fixations with honor and external appearance. In Manly’s case, his deep Baptist faith underpinned the fantasy of social harmony. Manly embodied the fusion between evangelical religion and the southern upper class that took place in the 1830s and made the southern ideology a fixture of the universities.38

Manly’s romantic depiction of the South contrasted with his acute grasp of conditions in higher education. In the summer of 1851 he and professor Landon Cabell Garland made a tour to investigate northern colleges at the behest of the Alabama trustees, who had asked what changes might be made “to extend the benefits of the Institution to a greater number of the citizens of the State?” Manly’s subsequent Report on Collegiate Education provided a factual and perceptive interpretation of recent reforms.³⁹ Southern universities, despite their social conservatism, were affected by this reforming spirit for several reasons. The issue of internal improvements assumed increasing significance as manufacturing and railroad construction raced ahead in the North. Although often ambivalent about the implications of such developments, many believed that the South could not persist as a backward, agrarian society. However, advances in higher education also had an impact. Francis Wayland’s widely publicized 1850 Report addressed precisely the issue that the Alabama trustees had raised. Engineering and agricultural chemistry were now being taught at northern colleges, particularly Union, Harvard, and Yale. Moreover, numerous variations on the traditional course of study provided a natural experiment in the organization of higher education.

Manly’s document echoed the Yale Reports of 1828 in endorsing the foundational nature of the classical course. He pointedly showed that where electives were offered, the large majority of students still chose the traditional course. The numerous efforts to attract a wider clientele had not achieved that end. “The ‘partial course,’ which does not lead to a degree, is an acknowledged failure everywhere.” Scientific courses, with little or no ancient languages, were “expedients … too recent and too limited to show the effect on numbers or mental culture.” An elective system, like the University of Virginia’s, required a scale of operation far beyond that of most colleges in order to offer meaningful choice of courses. Nor could lectures substitute for “the faithful personal drill of class examinations” (i.e., recitations). Manly’s Report presented a conservative assessment of the curriculum but one largely justified by contemporary evidence, circa 1850.40 As for Alabama, he recommended establishing a separate scientific course, like Yale’s and Harvard’s. He hoped that entrance requirements could be elevated, and that freshmen studies could be isolated in a separate unit.

Rather than heed Manly’s sensible suggestions, the Alabama trustees did the opposite. In their zeal to open the university more widely, and against faculty opposition, they opted to emulate the Virginia model. Beginning in 1854, students could determine their own “select” course of study from among the college offerings, and the minimum age for admission was lowered to 14. For the next few years the university operated a kind of hybrid system, while Manly was replaced by his former traveling companion, Landon Garland, a proponent of the Virginia model. In 1859 the trustees fully implemented a Virginia-style system that eliminated the college classes and established eight separate departments. Little can be said of this experiment because it lasted a year at most. President Garland, who was traumatized by student misbehavior, considered the existing university a failure that corrupted more students than it benefited. He embarked on another academic fact-finding tour, this time to the Citadel, Virginia Military Institute, and West Point. His recommendation that a military system be adopted was overwhelmingly endorsed by the Alabama legislatures, and the university imposed military discipline and training on all students in September 1860. If the reactions of contemporaries can be believed, which is doubtful, this truncated experiment was a great success.⁴¹

Alabama’s erstwhile model, the University of Virginia, was by 1850 both the largest and most renowned southern university, with enrollments soon exceeding 600 drawn from all over the South. Since its founding, Jefferson’s university had been sui generis, but after 1850 its version of departmental courses began to be considered as an alternative to the fixed classical course. By this time the university had evolved into three divisions: the “schools” (actually departments or chairs) of literature and science, two chairs of law, and four chairs of medicine, similar to the medical schools of the day. Although the university sought to create additional chairs, its students showed little interest in applied subjects. An effort to offer engineering in the 1850s failed, as did an attempt to found a school of agriculture. The single addition of this nature was a position in applied chemistry in 1858. The BA degree adopted in 1848 found few takers; nor did many students persist to earn a master’s degree. Manly calculated that the average student stay was 1.4 years. However, the faculty was highly qualified and the examinations rigorous; a high level of instruction could be had by a rare dedicated scholar. Functioning at once as a finishing school for southern aristocrats and the academic beacon of the South, the university felt no compulsion to reform.42 This was not the case with the oldest universities of the South.

The universities of Georgia and North Carolina made concerted efforts to modernize in the 1850s. Georgia had been led since 1829 by Alonzo Church, a rather rigid Presbyterian minister who had made the school a respectable classical college. By the 1850s, however, the loss of faculty and decline in enrollments prompted the appointment of a faculty-trustee committee to suggest reforms. Its 1855 report envisioned a more comprehensive university with new schools for engineering, agriculture, teacher training, and law. The legislature completely ignored this vision, but it apparently inflamed internal discontents to such an extent that in 1857 the trustees demanded the resignation of the entire faculty. When President Church finally retired in 1859, the trustees implemented as much of the modernization plan as was possible without state assistance, namely, a separate “institute” for the instruction of freshmen and sophomores and a law school. As had been the case throughout its history, the academic ambitions of the university found little or no support among Georgia’s elected politicians.⁴³

North Carolina was the only southern university to implement a practical curriculum. President Swain had advocated internal improvements from his time as governor, but initiatives to establish instruction in engineering and agriculture had faltered. In 1851, it too had sent an informal delegation northward to observe academic and industrial developments. Their subsequent efforts at reform were supported by trustees connected with the state’s railroad industry, which sought home-grown engineers. The School for the Application of Science to the Arts was launched in 1854. Two UNC honors grads were hired as professors of civil engineering and agricultural chemistry. The unique feature of the school was that students entered in their senior year—after previous work in the classical course. This model was an apparent success. Enrollments in the college rose above 400, and 80 to 90 percent of seniors took the scientific course, although few of them subsequently pursued careers in these fields. But science and politics could not be kept apart in the antebellum South. When it became known in 1856 that Benjamin Hedrick, the professor of applied chemistry, favored a free-soil candidate, he was relentlessly harassed. He sealed his fate by trying to defend himself in a letter to a local newspaper. To deflect local criticism, the university solemnly fired him for becoming an “agitator.”44

The southern state universities were in many ways responsive to academic developments occurring in the Northeast. They invested in science and sometimes seemed eager to entice larger numbers of youth to attend. However, they ultimately served the wealthy planters, politicians, and urban professionals who dominated southern society. With that dependence came the obligation, eagerly accepted, to defend the peculiar institution and its many ramifications. That commitment in turn imposed an intellectual intolerance and dishonesty that was at odds with the values of learning and science. The universities had to serve southern society in another important sense. Although they manifested a certain degree of resistance, they had to come to terms with southern students.

The dichotomy between the era of submission and control and the early collegiate era of northern colleges does not fit the South. From the eighteenth century to the Civil War, efforts to achieve student submission to college laws were frustrated, and a consistent degree of control was unattainable. Southern colleges and universities simply had fewer and less effective levers with which to discipline students. Where graduation was not valued, the threat of dismissal or expulsion inspired little fear. Routine punishments became a ritual that concluded with outward expressions of repentance followed by official forgiveness. Southern parents offered little assistance in supporting college discipline—often just the opposite, expecting special treatment due their social status. Moreover, students themselves presented real resistance. To start, they were armed and dangerous; opposing miscreants often meant physical confrontations. They also formed a united front when one of their numbers was, in their biased view, unjustly punished. They had an exaggerated sense of entitlement, which excused crimes or outrages committed against social inferiors. No southern student, for example, ever seems to have been disciplined for harming a slave.⁴⁵

The histories of every southern university are filled with stories of student mayhem, wanton vandalism, and defiance of college authority. In the North, the colleges ultimately prevailed in major student rebellions but not so in the South. A student revolt at Alabama drove president Alva Woods from office. At Virginia, after the militia had to be called in to suppress the armed riot of 1836, students henceforth celebrated each year’s anniversary of that heroic event. It was during the 1840 celebration that professor John Davis was shot to death by a student. Academics could be affected by an implicit student veto over unpopular faculty. Virginia students relentlessly insulted the brilliant mathematics professor James Sylvester for being English and Jewish, forcing his departure after just 6 months (1842). Students also led the attacks on Benjamin Hedrick. In these and other cases, student intolerance was backed by local opinion, which further inhibited any college response.46

Antebellum southern students showed less interest in the more constructive extracurricular activities that increasingly preoccupied northern students.⁴⁷ Literary societies remained vibrant, as students continued to value eloquence and debate. Students generally entered with advanced standing and often departed without graduating, so that class solidarity was diminished. However, the solidarity of the entire student body was correspondingly greater. Southern universities lacked a leavening of pious, preministerial students, creating greater conformity of outlook and behavior. Southern students possessed a good deal more freedom than their northern counterparts given the weakness of college control. They regularly engaged in ostensibly illegal activities like smoking, drinking, gambling, card playing, and worse.⁴⁸ Fraternities emerged later and were weaker in the antebellum era, perhaps because students felt less need for what they could offer. They already indulged in illicit activities, and the social distinctions that fraternities accentuated were overshadowed by social status largely determined by family.

A good portion of northern students looked to their colleges or their classmates to acquire the manners and mantle of a gentleman. In the South, the gentleman’s code of honor was a powerful social norm that students brought with them to college. As adolescents, they still had to refine the details of the code during their collegiate years. Thus, the annals of southern colleges are filled with confrontations with faculty, presidents, townspeople, and fellow students, ostensibly to uphold honor. In fact, personal honor or reputation was of greater value in southern society than a college degree. Hence, students readily accepted expulsion rather than submit to “dishonorable” treatment. Student culture powerfully reinforced the code, usually in opposition to the authority and purpose of the colleges.49

Despite all, Southern colleges and universities educated and graduated large numbers of students, often with distinction. Kemp Battle reported that one third of his classmates at UNC in the 1840s took their studies seriously—probably as good an estimate as any.⁵⁰ Governing or teaching these students was a delicate task. Effective presidents possessed an intuitive sense of how to handle Southern youth with a combination of firmness and toleration. They also had to command respect as gentlemen themselves, something that teachers sometimes found difficult. The universities functioned well enough to serve the purposes of their respective states. Although some were ambitious to accomplish more by the 1850s, populist state legislatures rarely shared those ambitions. This situation arose in part because the state universities did not alone speak for higher education. Different approaches to higher education for different clienteles were offered by different institutions—church colleges and military academies.

Denominational colleges emerged in the Old South in the 1830s through the efforts of Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians. Randolph-Macon (M. 1830) was the pioneer in Virginia, where Hampton-Sydney and Washington were long led but not controlled by Presbyterians. Later in the decade Georgia chartered Oglethorpe (P. 1835), Emory (M. 1836), and Mercer (B. 1837). North Carolina followed with Wake Forest (B. 1838), Davidson (P. 1838), and Greensboro (M. 1839). Virginia then added Emory and Henry (M. 1839) and Richmond (B. 1840). South Carolina delayed until 1850 to charter Erskine (P.), Furman (B.), and Wofford (M. 1851). Later in the decade Episcopalians and Lutherans joined this trend, and a succession of Methodist schools in North Carolina evolved into Trinity College (1859, later Duke University). The surge of foundings in the 1830s reflected the reversal of attitudes toward college education among Baptists and Methodists, while Presbyterians preferred institutions under direct church control.⁵¹ As in the North, southern Baptists and Methodists sought to educate the laity of their churches. Theological training for ministers remained controversial, and most colleges explicitly renounced it; yet recruiting more and better-educated ministers and missionaries was indispensible. Still, the chief motivation was to protect the flock—to provide moral education and keep the faithful away from the state universities or schools of other churches. The clientele they sought to serve came heavily from the rural middle class, sufficiently prosperous to provide sons with a bare-bones collegiate education. Everyone of the 1830s’ colleges adopted the manual labor system to reduce expenses, and in every case it failed miserably. Even so, costs at the church colleges were roughly one-half to three-quarters those of state universities.52

Each of these colleges was sponsored by a regional church organization, and both governors and teachers were likely to be fervently evangelical. The Awakening in the South showed no attenuation in the antebellum years. Some of the colleges opened the school year with a camp meeting revival. Most expected to experience a revival each school year, whether spontaneous or planned. Compared with other colleges, students were subjected to more formal religious activities and strict observance of the Sabbath. The colleges tended to have a good number of sincerely pious and converted students who organized activities such as prayer groups and missionary societies. Still, students as a whole were probably less pious than their parents or the faculty. Perhaps 20 to 30 percent became ministers, but student diaries attest that nearly half of the students were not very religious. Proximity was more important than denomination for many, so that a majority of students might not share the religion of the college. Nor were these colleges immune to disruptive student behavior, although never as violent and destructive as the extremes at state universities.⁵³

The clientele of the church colleges in general were poorly prepared, and colleges regularly spoke of the need to elevate the low standards. One consequence was graduation rates generally below 50 percent. However, coming from middling circumstances, many of these students felt that college was their chance for a successful career as a professional, and they applied themselves accordingly. In contrast to UNC, one student estimated that two-thirds of his Randolph-Macon classmates were serious about their studies. Literary societies assumed an important role as a free space in which students could polish their skills. Church colleges were as adamant in defending slavery as the universities. Presidents James C. Furman of Furman and A. B. Longstreet of Emory had played prominent roles in the schisms of their respective churches. President William A. Smith taught Randolph-Macon juniors a course in “Political Economy and Domestic Slavery” using his own text, The Philosophy and Practice of Slavery. Along with Thomas Dew of William & Mary, these presidents lent respectability to the southern apologia.54

The military academies and institutes of the South straddled the boundary between college and preparatory schooling. The first and foremost exemplar was the Virginia Military Institute established at the state arsenal in Lexington in 1839. Alden Partridge’s proselytizing had advocated such institutions to improve the sad condition of the state militia, but the chief proponent wished to create the West Point of the South. VMI was established on this basis as a 4-year, state-supported military school. Its first 2 years concentrated on math, French, and English; the last two introduced chemistry, advanced collegiate subjects, and engineering. The little military subject matter was confined to the senior year. However, the Institute operated according to military discipline and the chain of command. Cadets squeezed three recitations per day between hours of military drill. Virginia not only supported VMI but also created fifty state scholarships. These state cadets paid about $100 per year, compared to more than $200 for private cadets. In return, state cadets were required to teach in Virginia schools for 2 years following graduation. In 1842, the South Carolina Military Academy was established at the Citadel on this same basis. Elsewhere throughout the South private military schools were formed and soon received state assistance for scholarships or equipment. When the Georgia Military Institute appeared to be failing, the state took it over in 1857. Similarly, the Western Military Institute displaced the University of Nashville. Some 96 military schools or cadet corps were organized in the South prior to 1861. Although many were no more than private secondary schools, others were formed at colleges, like the University of Alabama. Nevertheless, all these states, save Texas, supported military education, while only Virginia and South Carolina provided regular appropriations to colleges.⁵⁵

One appeal of military schools for parents and legislatures was as a solution to the problem of student misconduct. Discipline and hierarchy seemed to take precedence among cadets over the kinds of dissipation and misbehavior that roiled universities. For students, the military schools offered an alternative form of educational opportunity. The schools were largely patronized by the southern middle class, on balance mostly professional families who were less agricultural and less religious than those who looked to church colleges. The military academies promised a practical education and specifically eschewed the ancient languages and the lengthy preparation they required. Almost none of the cadets came from clerical families, and virtually none later became ministers. The military academies represent the southern approach to practical higher education. Of known occupations, 12 percent of cadets became engineers, and 27 percent became teachers. Another quarter became lawyers and doctors. The schools represented opportunities for social advancement in the professional middle class but not the upper class. However, practical education faced the same impediments in the South as elsewhere. The realities of the military schools were that students entered very young, often 12 to 14, and very few graduated. VMI was the outstanding success, graduating 45 percent of its cadets and supplying a large number of the South’s engineers and military instructors. The Citadel graduated only 14 percent, and the others, under 10 percent. Thus, relatively few of the 12,000 antebellum cadets ever reached the third- and fourth-year courses in science and engineering. They all acquired extensive training in military drill, however, and virtually all served as officers in the Confederate Army.56

By 1860 the Southeast had the highest enrollment rates in the country—2.8 percent of 16- to 19-year-old white males, compared with 2.5 in New England and 1.8 nationally.⁵⁷ If the 1,500 cadets in military academies in 1860 are added to the 3,300 college and university students, the South could claim an enrollment rate of 4 percent.⁵⁸ This high rate of enrollment was buoyed by the booming economy of the 1850s, but it also reflected the region’s hierarchical structure of society and schooling. The southeastern state universities, especially the University of Virginia and South Carolina College, catered to the upper class of the region and nurtured an elite culture. The denominational colleges served a largely middle-class population that was more socially, religiously, and geographically homogeneous than their northern counterparts. The military academies, the South’s unique concession to practical higher education, served a mixed group of less prepared, middle-class students. While the first group of students depended on wealth to maintain their social status and universities for cultural finishing, the latter two looked specifically to their schooling as the grounding for future careers. All, nevertheless, strongly supported the social order and an economy predicated on involuntary servitude. Intellectually, the accomplishments of the South are much less impressive. Relatively few of these students earned bachelor’s degrees. Distinguished academics like Francis Lieber and William B. Rogers fled the region in the 1850s. The apologists referred to above only confirm the judgment of Richard Hofstadter: “By the 1850s the South had lost its ability to take realistic stock of social issues. While the absence of freedom in its halls of learning was only one symptom of this loss, it was a token of a severe general intellectual paralysis.”59

DENOMINATIONAL COLLEGES II: PROLI FERATION IN THE UPPER MIDWEST

In 1860, the states of the upper Midwest, stretching from Ohio to Minnesota and Iowa, contained 31 percent of American colleges. They enrolled just 24 percent of students but accounted for 36 percent of enrollment growth in the previous two decades.⁶⁰ Aside from a few state universities, this was a land of denominational colleges. Some had colonized new lands on the real estate frontier, but many more provided education in settled and developed communities for the faithful and locals under the aegis of their respective churches. The hallmark of these 65 to 70 colleges was variety; meaningful generalizations about them are largely negative. The sharp social distinctions that affected higher education in the Northeast and South were considerably muted in the dynamic, egalitarian society of the rural Midwest. The status of gentleman was cultivated by some students within colleges but had a limited currency outside. The dearth of schooling required these colleges to assume responsibility for precollegiate education as well. And, the region lacked leading institutions for others to emulate. The two largest institutions—Oberlin and the University of Michigan—were polar opposites; wealthy families concerned with social status would likely send sons to eastern schools. In fact, most denominational colleges could be located on a continuum that stretched from the traditional classical college to multipurpose, coeducational colleges. Where each would fall was largely determined by circumstances and constituencies—especially by their level of resources and how they were acquired.

The denominational colleges in these decades developed along the lines described in chapter 5. That is, they all offered the classical course, the defining feature of the American college. It was also all that many could offer given the available personnel and financial limitations. However, while newer colleges repeated the tribulations of their predecessors, more mature institutions managed by the 1850s to expand their faculties and offerings. Amidst this rich natural experiment in educational survival, three overlapping tendencies can be distinguished. A few colleges sought to elevate the classical curriculum in emulation of the “best” colleges in the East; most adopted additional educational programs and degrees to serve local constituencies; and a third group molded their offerings to serve close-knit religious communities.

In 1843 the Plan of Union colleges that had been founded in the West by Presbyterians and Congregationalists received some badly needed assistance. The depression had made their financial situations direr than usual, with budgets in deficit and large debts to repay. Their annual sojourns to the eastern money frontier were becoming less lucrative and less welcome. To address this problem, a new organization was created by college supporters of the Benevolent Empire—the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West—better known as SPCTEW, or the Western College Society. The society became a collective fund-raiser chiefly for the Plan of Union colleges, but its intentions were larger than finance. The inspiration was basically evangelical, coming straight out of the Awakening. The founders deplored the “unorganized state of society” in the West, the result of rapid growth and “recent immigration,” especially of Roman Catholics. The Christian society they sought to foster required solid colleges that would educate future ministers in the New England way. SPCTEW’s head was Theron Baldwin, one of the original Yale Band of missionaries to frontier Illinois, who believed “an educated and evangelical ministry constitutes, of God, the great central instrumentality for the evangelization of the west.”⁶¹

Five institutions participated in organizing the Western Society, and they were its first beneficiaries: Illinois, Marietta, Wabash, and Western Reserve colleges and the Lane Theological Seminary. The society hired agents to canvas the churches for donations in given regions of the East. Thus, it looked to the broad base of the faithful rather than philanthropists (who generally gave to specific institutions). In its first year, the society raised $17,000, which was distributed on a pro rata basis, with Western Reserve receiving $6,000 and Lane, more than $1,000. Knox College, founded, like Oberlin, in the Christian perfectionist tradition, requested entrée into this charmed circle in 1844 but was assisted in 1848 only after being examined by a visiting committee. The expectation of support from the Society also encouraged the founding of Beloit College in 1847. The society provided two Lutheran colleges, Heidelberg and Wittenberg, with small awards, but it chiefly aimed support toward the expanding frontier, adding Grinnell College in Iowa and three colleges on the west coast. The society’s contributions were intended to support current budgets. Western Reserve in 1844 had expenses of $8,000 and tuition revenues of just $2,000. Perhaps more typical, Beloit’s grant for 1855 covered 18 percent of its $7,400 budget. The society provided badly needed income for these colleges, especially during the hard times of the 1840s. Western Reserve was essentially bankrupt, and Knox probably was too. The society made the greatest effort to save Western Reserve, which stubbornly maintained a theological department it could not afford. Besides large grants, it assisted with an endowment drive that provided some financial breathing room. However, the next colleges in line for endowment drives, Marietta and Wabash, received little from the society’s overworked donors.62

The resources of the Society gave it a great deal of influence over the colleges, although their leaders shared the same goals. Revivals were regarded as indications of active evangelical fervor. In 1848 the Society reported that six major revivals had occurred at Illinois College, seven at Wabash and Marietta, and more at Knox. The other criteria valued by the society were upholding high standards in the classical course and producing ministerial candidates. In keeping with the New England way, coeducation was frowned upon. Theron Baldwin informed the Knox president, who favored coeducation, “union on the part of males & females as exist at Oberlin … would be an insuperable barrier to the reception of an institution by [the Western Society] Board.” Congregationalist and New School Presbyterians supported only colleges with no direct church affiliation. By the 1850s, however, this was a small universe in the West. Hence, college leaders of both churches sought to stay connected with their denomination’s strength in the East. The colleges provided the Society with detailed annual reports of their finances and operations, and presidents made regular eastern visits. This eastern orientation could cause resentment. A local paper attacked the Wabash president for telling Easterners of the sad state of education in the Mississippi Valley (part of his pitch), accusing him of snobbery and disloyalty to the West.⁶³

The Plan of Union was formally dissolved in 1852 amid a rising spirit of denominational defensiveness and contention that affected all the churches. The Western Society became basically a Congregational organization but did not revise its strategy or mission. It persisted in raising and distributing support until 1874, when it merged with its charitable rival, the American Education Society. The eastern orientation of the society’s wards ultimately worked to their advantage. By maintaining standards and building prestige, they subsequently appealed to a wealthier and better educated clientele that provided a more reliable base of support. However, nearly all western antebellum colleges felt the need to offer additional forms of education for their diverse communities.

The antebellum western colleges all faced the problem of ill-prepared students. From their opening, they were compelled to offer preparatory instruction, which became permanent departments. Years often lapsed before a college charter was sought and college classes begun. The western colleges were inherently “multi-level, multi-purpose” institutions that provided “educational upgrading” where it was sorely needed. Many began or passed through a phase as academies or seminaries, which were general-purpose schools and usually coeducational as well. Marietta College, for example, evolved from an academy into the Marietta Collegiate Institute and Western Teachers’ Seminary (1832–1835) before receiving a college charter. It then completely divested the female department.64 Knox College also separated its Ladies’ Seminary under pressure from the Western Society. Colleges that retained their original academies, however, were able to educate diverse kinds of students and also maintain an important stream of income. At Oberlin, for example, the preparatory and ladies’ departments produced a profit, while the collegiate and theological departments were in deficit.

Several factors shaped the organization of the western colleges. First, by obtaining a college charter, the schools were committed to offering the classical course for the AB degree. The second defining element was the relationship to a church. The Plan of Union colleges, as was just seen, preserved important ties with the eastern base of their churches. For Methodists and Baptists, regional conferences sponsored colleges directly, which then conformed to their conception of college roles. But individuals or groups from those denominations also founded colleges that identified with, but were not formally linked to, those churches. A third factor shaping these colleges was their relationship with the local and/or denominational communities. Sometimes they were one and the same; other times the college community might be defined locally or religiously. David Potts concluded that the Baptist colleges he studied were shaped more by local conditions than the denomination.65 In either case, the educational needs of the populations served by the antebellum western colleges were predominately precollegiate. Hence, the ubiquitous preparatory departments existed, but there was also considerable demand for other kinds of advanced instruction.

After 1850, these three factors interacted to yield a profusion of approaches pursuing multiple purposes. Some more or less traditional colleges differentiated by offering additional degrees and courses.

Illinois College was typical in harboring ambitions of adding professional schools. It never ventured into theology or law, but in 1843 it launched a medical school, the first in Illinois. The school soon attracted thirty-some students, and was apparently part of the college rather than proprietary. The school abruptly terminated in 1848, allegedly because the instructors were paid in promissory notes with an indefinite payment date. In 1852 the college created a bachelor of science course, which was largely the traditional course stripped of Latin and Greek, leaving less than 3 years of study. Like many other such courses, it provided an English-language college degree for a class of young men “believed to be very numerous,” not serious study of science.⁶⁶ Indiana Asbury had similar aspirations to expand into a full university, the capstone of the Methodist educational empire in Indiana. In the 1840s, with approximately fifty college students and three times that number of preparatory, irregular, and scientific students, it explored schemes to establish schools or professorships in law, agriculture, Bible studies, and, finally, medicine. Only the latter succeeded, temporarily, with the 1848 establishment of the Indiana Central Medical College in Indianapolis. Apparently a respectable school, it enrolled 100 students in its 3-year existence, before folding for financial reasons. Asbury did not forsake this goal and did succeed in establishing a law course in the 1850s—again temporarily. In 1859 it upgraded the scientific course to 4 years, although still inferior to the classical course. It considered the possibility of admitting women but was reluctant to take that step until after the Civil War.⁶⁷

In the 1840s and 1850s, midwestern colleges augmented their offerings from a menu of possible courses. A scientific course was adopted almost everywhere, and it was accompanied by the acceptance of irregular students. These approaches fared poorly in the East, where they seemed incompatible with powerful loyalties to college classes, but they suited conditions in the West. Preparation in Latin and Greek was weak, making an English alternative more attractive; and only a minority of students graduated from any course, making partial studies the norm. Later in the century, the bachelor of science courses came to be disdained as “less discipline, less work, less culture, and inferior in contents.” However, antebellum conditions often attracted more such students than the classical course. Since the early science courses contained little science, a 3-year English or modern languages course was sometimes also offered, with similar results. Many colleges offered a teacher’s course as well, since a good number of graduates normally became teachers. What changed in the 1840s was acceptance of a shorter course without classical languages as suitable training. Denison and Oberlin established such courses in the 1840s, and soon many others followed. The ever-present need for teachers could attract substantial enrollments. There was recurrent interest in establishing agricultural courses, centered on teaching agricultural chemistry. However, only a few colleges made short-lived attempts, and only that of the Farmer’s College endured. Initiatives in engineering had even shorter lives. There was an apparent interest in commercial studies, principally bookkeeping, which colleges generally offered as a separate course, much the same as music or art. Catholic Saint Louis University and St. Xavier College in Cincinnati both offered a commercial course to their urban clientele but not to their academic students.68

The most diverse offerings were found in colleges that evolved from academies. This common path of development was facilitated by the overlap between academy and college subjects. In the absence of developed secondary education and ambiguity about the extent of preparation needed for college, academy subjects could approximate those of colleges. Some adopted a halfway posture as a “collegiate institute,” like Marietta or the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram College). Ohio produced three unique exemplars. Freeman Cary, a Miami graduate (1832), aimed to provide practical education “for the industrial pursuits of life.” He founded a successful academy just north of Cincinnati and in 1846 elevated it into Farmer’s College—named for the local farmers who subscribed to the stock offering that bankrolled the venture. It originally offered a 3-year BS course with multiple options in addition to a 3-year preparatory department. The college soon offered a 2-year normal course and commercial instruction and was chartered to offer a 4-year AB. In 1854 it developed and launched what became the most fully developed antebellum agricultural course. Cary himself became an avid promoter as well. In the late 1850s Farmer’s College enrolled more than 300 students, roughly one-quarter in the college course. However, Cary’s strategy of offering practical education to the sons of farmers and mechanics was ultimately its Achilles heel. Most attended for only 1 or 2 years, and about 10 percent took degrees. The college ceased to be financially viable during the war and never recovered afterward.69

Mount Union grew from a seminary to a college (1849–1858), while remaining committed to offering “any person … thorough, illustrative, integral instruction in any needed studies.” It aspired to be a “college for the masses,” offering elective courses and practical subjects. It was particularly attractive for teachers and later added a summer term to accommodate them—anticipating an innovation later credited to the University of Chicago but frowned upon by coeval colleges. Baldwin College, also in northeastern Ohio, followed a similar path to collegiate status (1854). Its diverse studies featured an extensive commercial course that, unlike others, was a permanent offering. At the end of the 1850s, Baldwin enrolled more than 400 students—23 in the college and the rest in preparatory, scientific, German, commercial, and ladies’ departments. Baldwin and Mount Union admitted women from the outset, and Farmer’s, belatedly, as well. Multipurpose colleges generally provided female education, although under different arrangements. In the 1850s a number of them followed Oberlin’s example and practiced full coeducation.⁷⁰

Demand for women’s education in the Midwest probably grew more rapidly than colleges after about 1850. In Evanston, Illinois, for example, newly opened Northwestern University enrolled ten students in 1855, while neighboring Northwestern Female College founded that same year attracted eighty-four students. Multipurpose colleges incorporated women in a variety of ways. They were welcomed into ladies’ courses, teachers’ courses and preparatory departments, even while colleges were reluctant to admit women to the AB course.⁷¹ After 1850, the smaller evangelical churches chartered colleges that were fully coeducational. From Alfred in southwestern New York across the Midwest to Iowa, more than twenty such colleges were begun before 1861 (and more afterward). Most stemmed from coeducational academies or seminaries (an all-purpose term). Coeducation required no debate or new commitment; it was a continuation of existing practices of these denominations. These churches had previously been distrustful of higher education, especially for preachers, and had few college graduates among their followers. But by the 1840s they felt compelled to establish schools to preserve and uplift the community of the faithful. Coeducation mirrored social customs and denominational beliefs. Financially, it lowered the costs of operations and attendance—a virtual necessity for these rural communities, especially the new communities founded on the real estate frontier. Over time, these schools offered college-level material, particularly in their teachers’ course; after 1850 they applied for college charters. The Methodists, in particular, created coeducational institutions for all levels, including 3-year college degrees. In general, most new foundings began with precollege classes.72

In a paradigmatic example, the Seventh Day Baptists in and around Alfred established a school in 1839 especially to train teachers of their faith. Incorporated as an academy in 1843, its principal teacher-training course provided elective subjects for those not planning to teach. In 1852 it began offering the first 2 years of a college course, along with numerous possibilities for partial courses. In 1856 collegiate offerings were extended to 4 years, and the following year Alfred University was chartered. It then offered three 4-year degree courses—ladies’, classical, and scientific—and two 3-year courses—teachers’ and English. The first six graduating classes received sixty-nine teachers’ degrees (forty to women), nineteen ladies’, seven classical, and thirteen scientific degrees.⁷³ Typically, students at such colleges heavily favored the shorter and/or English courses. Similar tales could be told for the Freewill Baptists who founded Hillsdale College (1853) with a prohibition of discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or sex; the United Brethren who founded Otterbein College (1856); the Quakers who established Earlham College (1856); and others.⁷⁴

Variations on this pattern also existed. Antioch College (1853) was founded by “Christians” with financial and moral support from eastern Unitarians. It opened with a freshman class of 4men and 2 women but more than 200 in its preparatory department. Northwestern Christian University (1855: later Butler University) organized by the Disciples of Christ had a similar profile. Philanthropist Amos Lawrence provided funds for the Methodists to establish an eponymous all-male college (1853) in rural Wisconsin. Since this stipulation was impractical for a new, isolated institution needing the support of local Methodists, they concealed the women students from the benefactor. Lawrence University graduated its first class of 4 men and 3 women in 1857, but Amos Lawrence was sent a picture of only the men. As at Lawrence, coeducation was a virtual necessity on the western frontier. All 5 of the Iowa colleges chartered in the 1850s were coeducational, and the State University of Iowa (1855) opened as the first public institution to admit men and women on equal terms. It was more difficult before the Civil War for established male colleges to accept women. Muskingum and Franklin colleges in Ohio, both serving splinter Scotch-Irish Presbyterian churches, committed to admitting women in 1851 and 1857, respectively, but no other male colleges took this step until the next decade.75

Data on 17 antebellum coeducational colleges reveal a paucity of male or female students at the highest level of study and a preference of women for English courses. Around 1860, the average enrollment was 363 students: 59 percent in preparatory departments (one-third women); 19 percent in the ladies’ course, 12 percent in the classical, and 10 percent in the scientific. Men outnumbered women 8 to 1 in the classical course.⁷⁶ This distribution was consistent with multipurpose colleges across the Midwest. Ohio colleges were the most mature by 1860, and they enrolled 1,800 students in collegiate courses and 2,100 below that level. Farther west, the balance tilted further toward preparatory classes. For multipurpose colleges generally, more students enrolled in 3- or 4-year ladies’, teachers’, or scientific courses, based largely on college-level subjects, than took the classical course. Moreover, the basic multipurpose pattern persisted through and beyond the Civil War to the 1880s, including numerous postwar conversions to coeducation.⁷⁷ However, midwestern higher education contained one additional distinction—state commitments to nurture broad-based public universities.

The three original state-sponsored institutions in Ohio and Indiana never transcended the status of denominational colleges in the antebellum era.⁷⁸ However, by the 1850s, the next three public foundings in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa all aspired to become secular universities. Only the University of Michigan progressed toward that goal before the Civil War. The bane of all public universities of this era was legislative interference, usually compounded with fiscal caprice and opposition from denominations favoring their own colleges. The latter factor was particularly acute in the Midwest, given the proliferation of denominational colleges. Michigan was unique in minimizing these conditions, at least for a time. An influx of Yankee settlers via the Erie Canal brought a population comparatively supportive of education. A fledgling college was attempted at Detroit in 1817. The legacy of this gambit was to implant the Napoleonic notion that a public university should be responsible for all levels of education. State responsibility for education was also inspired by the Prussian model and embodied in the Michigan Constitution of 1835. A state university governed by a Board of Regents was established in Ann Arbor, with “university branches” supposedly providing secondary education at six towns. Private academies and colleges were not welcome. The University of Michigan opened a traditional literary course in 1841 with intentions of adding departments for medicine and law. Michigan quickly grew into a thriving traditional college, a rare example of centralization rather than fragmentation in American higher education. It was strongly Christian, although nonsectarian, and managed to organize a well-attended medical department by the end of the decade. In the absence of a president, the Regents exerted heavy and disruptive influence. Michigan’s new constitution in 1851 gave the Regents, now popularly elected, full control of the university and also created a president. After several candidates declined the position, the new Regents chose Henry Tappan as the university’s first president.79

Tappan was nurtured in reform-minded pockets of American higher education. A graduate of Union College (1825) and Auburn Theological Seminary (1827), he became professor of philosophy in 1832 at the new University of the City of New York, which had been founded with great fanfare to expand the traditional college course.⁸⁰ Fired in 1838 for protesting as that experiment foundered, Tappan wrote and traveled extensively in Europe. His University Education (1851) issued a challenge to the American status quo. Tappan disparaged the existing classical course as mere preparation for advanced study, equivalent to German Gymnasia, and he dismissed Wayland’s approach to practical studies, although not his critique of the colleges. Instead, Tappan argued, “The establishment of Universities … alone can reform our educational system.” By Universities he meant,

Cyclopaedias of education: where, in libraries, cabinets, apparatus, and professors, provision is made for studying every branch of knowledge in full, for carrying forward all scientific investigation; where study may be extended without limit; where the mind may be cultivated … in the lofty enthusiasm of growing knowledge and ripening scholarship…. [68]

This university ideal was based on Tappan’s observations of universities in Paris and the German states. He offered a plausible plan of how an American university might be launched for a mere $450,000 and concluded that New York City was the only locale with the human and financial resources to do this. Instead, in 1852 he inherited a midwestern college, albeit one least encumbered with fossilized practices. His inaugural discourse addressed precisely this challenge.81

Tappan realistically proposed to build upon the existing college toward the university ideal. He identified highly ambitious goals: to hire distinguished scholars for new professorships, to augment the library and all scientific apparatus, to displace recitations with lectures, to invite graduates to return for further studies, and to cultivate a separate course in science—and he soon accomplished them all. He rapidly assembled by far the most competent faculty in the region. Andrew Dickson White revolutionized the teaching of history, and Henry Simmons Frieze became a distinguished Latinist and philologist (later, acting president). He bolstered the sciences by hiring a physicist and civil engineer. The university created bachelor’s degree courses in science and, later, engineering based on these augmented scientific studies, not a watered-down English course. Tappan raised money for an observatory and hired astronomer Franz Brünnow, a Berlin PhD. From his time in Germany, Tappan acquired the belief that university professors should engage in research and scholarship, and he did all he could to instill this in Ann Arbor. Adopting another European practice, he moved students out of the dormitory to room and board in the town. At the end of the decade, the university opened a law department that attracted ninety initial students, and he created the first earned master’s degrees—a step toward the university ideal of graduate education. In his first 5 years, university enrollments more than doubled to 460, with the entire increase in the literary department. The Board of Regents, whose terms all ended in 1857, gave him a vote of confidence, “believing that his views of a proper University Education are liberal, progressive, and adapted to the present age.”82

The new set of regents felt quite differently; several opposed Tappan for personal and political reasons and sought to shift control of the university to their own hands. Although popular with students, Tappan’s European manners alienated some locals and probably exacerbated the usual town-gown tensions. Although an ordained minister, he tried to be religiously neutral by attending each Ann Arbor church in turn but ended by alienating all of them. He flouted the growing temperance movement as well—although scarcely alone: Ann Arbor sported six breweries and forty-nine saloons. In 1863 a new slate of regents was elected, but before relinquishing office the outgoing regents conspired together and abruptly fired Tappan. They tied the hands of their successors by electing as president Erastus Haven, a pious Methodist and former Michigan professor. Haven was resented by Tappan admirers, both contemporaries and historians. However, he was an able administrator and sustained the momentum of university development, adding degree courses in mining engineering and pharmacy. After the war, Michigan became the largest university in the country, with more than 1,200 students—two-thirds from outside the state. Tappan had predicted in his inaugural that development of a true university “would enable it to attract students from the surrounding, and even from more distant states … but only the quality of the education” could accomplish this.⁸³

Unlike Michigan, the universities created in Wisconsin and Iowa felt constant political pressure to expand downward from the traditional college—to offer “practical” subjects and provide the broadest possible access. The University of Wisconsin was born in 1849 with the appointment of John H. Lathrop as Chancellor and President of the Board of Regents. A graduate of Yale who had previously presided over the University of Missouri, his grandiose rhetoric mirrored the exalted expectations for higher education in the new state, but his gaze was on pleasing his patrons, not the realities of his institution. The first college class was organized in 1850, and faculty were slowly added to reach a full complement of five professors in 1856, one of whom also instructed in the normal department. Despite the modest resources, Lathrop announced a succession of measures to provide more practical instruction: departments of science applied to the arts and engineering were announced, and a proprietary commercial college was attached (temporarily) to the university. The university could scarcely teach all these subjects but admitted students to study any subjects they chose. Discontent with the university provoked the intervention of the legislature, which chiefly valued wider access and greater practicality. Two years of discord produced a reorganization of the university into six departments of engineering, natural science, philosophy, philology, polity, and a projected department of agriculture—and the resignation of Lathrop. Despite a decade of political machinations and timid leadership, the University of Wisconsin emerged at this juncture as essentially a multipurpose college. In 1865 (before a more meaningful reorganization), it enrolled 331 students: 41 in regular college classes, 110 in the preparatory department, 80 in the normal department, and 100 special students.84

The distance between aspirations and attainments was wider at the State University of Iowa. It opened in 1855 with a plan for nine departments, five in philosophy and four in science. This so-called departmental system, loosely modeled after the University of Virginia, gained currency in the 1850s. Its purported advantage was to avoid the rigidities of the traditional “class system” and to accommodate students with uneven preparation. Iowa students could study any subjects they wished for a short degree (BPhil, BSc) or a longer one (BA) or none at all. The university also included preparatory and normal departments. However, with four professors, the university actually offered only four standard subjects. Little matter; 105 of the 124 students were in the preparatory and normal departments. In 1858 lack of students and funds led to the closing of the college departments. For 2 years, the university operated as a normal school, before the college was reopened in 1860. Like Wisconsin, a postwar reorganization was required before progress toward a true university could begin.⁸⁵

The halting development of these two universities was typical of fledgling multipurpose colleges. They appear disappointing only in relation to grand expectations as state universities and unrealistic demands from elected politicians. In contrast, the accomplishments of Henry Tappan appear all the more impressive. He possessed a deep understanding of higher education in Europe and the United States, which he used to formulate and implement a vision for moving toward the university ideal. As a result, the University of Michigan was the only institution of higher education in the West that made academic quality its foremost value. But Tappan was not entirely alone. By 1850 aspirations for greater quality and advancement were becoming goals within the inchoate community of American science.

SCIENCE AND THE ANTEBELLUM COLLEGE

Science assumed three guises in antebellum America. First, it had enormous cultural popularity for purposes of self-improvement and the enlightenment of common citizens. Second, science had been associated with useful knowledge since the Enlightenment—especially the belief that scientific knowledge could make ordinary workers more useful and productive in their labors. Third, and most problematic, was professional science dedicated to the advancement of knowledge, for this required cultivation of specialized fields of study, communication among active investigators, and replication of expertise through advanced study and training. For contemporaries, there were no clear distinctions among these spheres, and early practitioners typically participated in them all. However, by the 1840s, separate developments brought each of these facets of American science to a crucial juncture in relation to higher education.

Nineteenth-century Americans held generally favorable views toward science, regarding it as a manifestation of progress, a form of entertainment, compensation for deficient education, and a hallmark of civic virtue. One-fifth of the popular lectures of the Lyceum movement that blossomed in the 1830s addressed scientific topics. Many well-known scientists relished the podium and gave lectures to support their inquiries and themselves. Benjamin Silliman and Amos Eaton together delivered some 3,000 lectures outside their classrooms. The Lowell Lectures by celebrated Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz attracted an overflow crowd of more than 5,000. Ohio astronomer Ormsby Mitchel translated his lecturing skill into a successful campaign that raised funds for the Cincinnati Observatory (1845). A decade later Henry Tappan mobilized the civic pride of Detroiters to fund the Michigan observatory. Every town of any size had a scientific society that enlisted upstanding citizens with some interest and variable degrees of knowledge of science. Popular science had to be considerably diluted for public consumption, but the effort was justified by the resources it garnered, not to mention good will. However, scientists who came of age after 1830 tended to be more comfortable in laboratories than lecture halls, and their chief locus was most likely to be the classroom.86

Since Newton, science had occupied a secure place in the American college curriculum, an inherent part of liberal arts culture. Natural philosophy, or physics, was taught to the higher classes, accompanied by demonstrations using philosophical apparatus, and astronomy was a continual preoccupation. The eighteenth-century revolution in chemistry was assimilated into the colleges with some difficulty but became a fixture by the 1820s. Until then, colleges could readily add subjects in the effort to fill out and offer a 4-year course. In that decade or shortly thereafter, all the northeastern colleges stabilized their courses with a generous amount of science. A typical faculty of seven would include a professor of mathematics, who might also teach astronomy and optics; a professor of natural philosophy; and one of chemistry, including mineralogy and geology. By 1850, a typical faculty of nine included four professors of mathematics and science. However, the change was more than incremental; it represented a transformation of the teaching and role of science in the colleges.87

Science, then and since, possesses an inherent dynamic of cumulative advancement that any institution of higher learning had to accommodate. In the 1830s and 1840s, colleges hired more qualified science teachers, paid them more, purchased the apparatus they required, and permitted greater specialization in their subjects. These were gradual, piecemeal steps, but underlying them was an increasing respect for scientific expertise. Individuals distinguished themselves by studying with one of the few renowned professors, by publishing papers with scientific societies, or through supplemental studies in Europe. A new generation spread their learning by publishing up-to-date textbooks that advanced instruction of these subjects across colleges. Science subjects were taught to juniors and seniors chiefly through lectures, which required greater knowledge than recitations. They also required props—equipment, supplies, and collections—not just for demonstrations but to further the teachers’ learning as well. Considering the desperate finances of most colleges, it was remarkable that they found funds to purchase materials for chemical laboratories, apparatus for physics, mineral cabinets for geology, and—before long—collections of specimens for natural history. Most remarkable were the exertions to fund observatories. North Carolina mounted a telescope in 1831, and the coeval Yale telescope was the first to detect the return of Halley’s Comet in 1835. Still better observatories were constructed in the 1830s at Williams and Western Reserve colleges and West Point. The country’s largest telescopes were built in Cincinnati (initially linked with the college, 1845), Harvard (1847), and the Naval Observatory (1846). In the 1850s the United State boasted twenty-five astronomical observatories, most connected with colleges.88

Still, chemistry was the subject that led the transformation of academic science or, rather, chemistry and its applications to mineralogy and geology. Initial professors of chemistry were supported by medical schools, and the first college chairs optimistically included applications to the arts in their titles. Bowdoin professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, Parker Cleaveland, turned to chemistry to study minerals, publishing the first volume on mineralogy in 1816. By that date, Benjamin Silliman’s teaching and research had also taken the same direction. His American Journal of Science and the Arts from 1818 published especially on mineralogy, geology, and natural history; Yale, defender of the classical languages, became the foremost locus of American science. Chemistry and its associated fields took off in the years 1825 to 1835 with the influx of a new generation of scientists. Their careers were enhanced by participation in state geological surveys. Among the most eminent, Edward Hitchcock had studied with Silliman while earning a divinity degree from Yale. He then spent his entire career at Amherst teaching science, serving as president (1845–1854), and leading the Massachusetts geological survey. Henry Darwin Rogers taught geology at the University of Pennsylvania for a decade while leading the geological surveys of New Jersey and Pennsylvania; his brother William taught at the University of Virginia and led that state’s survey. One historian estimated that “most chemistry (etc.) professors prior to 1860” worked on state surveys or as consultants.⁸⁹

The importance of this work earned it a rightful place in the college course. The same was true of the life sciences, which as latecomers grew out of developments in geology and natural history, primarily after 1840. Until 1850, these subjects were wedged into the classical course during the junior and senior years. Given three terms per year, geology, mineralogy, and natural history could be accorded a term or less of recitations from now-plentiful textbooks. In 1840, one course review found biological subjects receiving 2 to 3 weeks of study. When college critics complained of superficiality, they were not exaggerating. No room remained in the classical course for additional subjects—hence, the turmoil over curricular issues that ensued from that date.⁹⁰ However, the problem was not simply one of accommodating the proliferation of science; the loudest demands were for useful knowledge.

The ideal of Useful Knowledge was dear to the American Enlightenment, where it seemed that self-educated individuals like Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse could advance science, just as scientific knowledge could make farmers and artisans more productive.91 This doctrine persisted as conventional wisdom in the nineteenth century and, in fact, grew more compelling as the pace of technological change quickened. The difficulty was finding an educational formula that could join the progress of theoretical science with applications to the practical arts. The frustration was not for want of trying. The two great areas of application were agriculture on one side and civil engineering or the mechanical arts on the other. The two principal educational strategies were through the agency of the colleges or other types of institution.

Noncollege alternatives emerged in the 1820s. Mechanics institutes were formed in many cities to provide lectures, libraries, and fellowship for artisans. Of hundreds of such initiatives, the Franklin Institute of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts (f. 1824) was the most elaborate—establishing classes, a journal, and a museum, as well as conducting research. It was also the only such creation to endure. In 1823 the Gardiner Lyceum opened in Maine, offering a 3-year course in which year 2 was devoted to practical applications in engineering or agriculture. It closed in 1832 after its state appropriation was discontinued. This same era saw Amos Eaton’s tireless efforts to unite science and practical arts in his Rensselaer school.⁹² West Point still set the standard for engineering education, producing not only graduates who became practicing engineers but science leaders like Alexander Dallas Bache (1825), great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin. However, after 1840 the Academy’s increased emphasis on military training diminished its contribution to engineering. Although colleges were eager to duplicate the West Point formula, the numerous initiatives to hire engineering instructors and offer an engineering alternative in the 1830s were all short lived. But the clamor for useful knowledge grew through the next decade.⁹³

By the 1840s the railroad boom in the United States was in full swing, and the scarcity of civil engineers was increasingly felt. Realization of the need for scientific expertise in agriculture was heightened by the appearance in 1840 of a volume by Justus von Liebig, professor at the University of Giessen: Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology. Liebig summarized previous findings and identified the key roles of nitrogen and minerals in plants. He opened a whole new field for the application of chemistry, promising the key to effective fertilizers and potential remedies for the problem of worn-out soils.94 Agricultural chemistry thus became a necessary addition to useful knowledge, one that rested on sophisticated understanding of organic chemistry. It became paired with civil engineering as subjects that many thought colleges ought to teach, but the challenge was how.

Francis Wayland’s advocacy of agricultural chemistry and engineering in the 1850 Report to the Brown Corporation was scarcely original in light of practices already adopted at Union, Yale, and Harvard. However, it was read throughout the country and, together with his critique of the classical course, galvanized support for introducing useful knowledge in the colleges. Reactions varied according to the institutional possibilities in each of the three regions of higher education. In the South, as just seen, most state universities made gestures in this direction in the 1850s, but only the University of North Carolina succeeded in establishing a specific course of study with dedicated faculty. The multipurpose colleges of the Midwest might include some agriculture or engineering in the BS course, but these superficial treatments did little to build professional competence. Only the University of Michigan established engineering upon a scientific foundation in its BS course—and was precluded from adding agriculture by the chartering of the Michigan College of Agriculture in 1855.

In the Northeast, the most significant departures were the formation of separate schools of science at Yale and Harvard, which will be considered below. Elsewhere, engineering and agriculture tended to develop separately. In 1845 Eliphalet Nott resigned as president of the struggling Rensselaer Institute and appointed a European-trained professor of engineering at Union. This first college course in civil engineering could be taken as either part of a 4-year bachelor’s or a 2-year diploma. In nearby Troy, instead of expiring, Rensselaer was rehabilitated by its new head, Benjamin Greene. He instituted a 3-year engineering course on the plan of the École Polytechnique, and the school was reborn as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1851). It soon inspired a host of polytechnic imitators in eastern cities offering 2- or 3-year bachelor of engineering courses.⁹⁵ Engineering in various guises, but usually as a diploma course, was offered in the 1850s at Brown, Pennsylvania, and New York universities, among others, but found few takers. Union and RPI accounted for nearly two-thirds of civilian engineers graduated before 1865, all in civil engineering.96

Agriculture established only a toehold in the East before the Civil War. The Pennsylvania State Agricultural Society chartered the Farmer’s High School (now Penn State University) in 1855 and managed to begin classes in 1859. The Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) had a similar origin and opened 2 years earlier. Clearly, by the 1850s widespread expectations and institutional backing existed for the higher study and teaching of useful knowledge. What American science needed was institutions to support its advancement.

The United States in the first half of the nineteenth century was a provincial outpost of the world of science, and American scientists knew it. They also were aware of the principal means of improving that situation. Interaction and communication among scientists required the internal organization of science and its specialties, as European models demonstrated. Educational institutions obviously had an important role to play, although European models could scarcely be replicated. But there was always the alternative of studying directly at European centers of learning. Benjamin Silliman embarked on the first of these paths when he launched his journal in 1818 to render “service not only to science and the arts, but to the reputation of the country.” “In every enlightened country,” he reminded readers, “the labors and discoveries [of natural science are] communicated to the world through the medium of Scientific Journals.” He also implied that North America presented unique opportunities for the descriptive sciences of mineralogy and geology. Looking back a generation later (1847), Silliman was gratified that the journal was fulfilling its original purposes, facilitating the growth of American science: “The cultivators of science … were then few—now they are numerous”; “societies and associations … for the cultivation of natural history have been instituted in many of our cities and towns”; “and our discoveries—illustrated by treasures of facts drawn from this country—are eagerly sought for and published abroad.”⁹⁷ But American science still had a long way to go.

The scientific activity that Silliman celebrated was chiefly located in the Northeast. The country at that time had thirty-two scientific societies, and a triangle drawn from the vicinity of Boston to Albany to Philadelphia would encompass twenty-five of them. Boston was the most vibrant center of science, followed by Philadelphia, New York, and New Haven. Scientists very far removed from this imaginary triangle suffered from isolation—a lack of informed colleagues, recent literature, and the appurtenances of scientific work. By 1860, scientific societies had begun to appear in the West as well—Cleveland, Cincinnati, Saint Louis, and Chicago. While all of them served science by supporting libraries and collections, they were largely dominated by amateur members, and at this juncture belonged more with popular than professional science.98

The first true professional organization was the American Association of Geologists and Naturalists, created in 1840 to bring together the leaders of state geological surveys. Membership was limited to persons “devoted to Geological research with scientific views and objects.” Its annual meetings were led by patriarchal figures, Edward Hitchcock and Benjamin Silliman, but the association was soon dominated by younger scientists with specialized training. Isolated college science professors especially found the meetings “of precious value,” providing a forum for sharing research findings and clarifying issues. However, both geologists and related scientists yearned for a more encompassing organization, and at the 1847 meeting they voted to become the American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS]. Inspired in part by the British forerunner (f. 1831), the AAAS was a hybrid of popular and professional science. Linked organizationally with local science societies and basically open to all interested parties, it enrolled more than 2,000 members at various times before the war, and its rotating meetings prompted gala local celebrations. But direction of the association was in the hands of the country’s most distinguished scientists. The AAAS represented a coming of age for American science, but it also reflected dismal conditions in the colleges.⁹⁹

The number of college professors of math and science had grown from around 60 in 1828 to more than 300 in 1850. Moreover, an analysis of the most productive scientists found that 41 of 56 had held college posts. However, except for those at Harvard or Yale, the leaders of the AAAS had largely abandoned college teaching. Bache found work with the Franklin Institute more absorbing and soon abandoned his professorship at the University of Pennsylvania; Joseph Henry left Princeton to head the Smithsonian Institution; Henry Darwin Rogers also left Pennsylvania for Boston, and later brother William departed the University of Virginia to join him. In his 1851 presidential address to the AAAS, surveying the state of American science, Bache discounted the contributions of college professors. Given the weakness of the colleges, most were overworked, were professionally isolated, and lacked the time or equipment for research. He called instead for a superior organization for the scientific elite.100 At that same Albany meeting, such an organization appeared to be a real possibility. Earlier that year the New York state legislature had chartered the University of Albany. The university trustees had high hopes for this paper creation, seconded by the AAAS leaders. Bache saw “a great and growing demand in our country for something higher than college instruction; and one great University, if fairly set in motion, would thrive.” Bache’s colleagues—“the leading scientific men of this country”—supported this notion and at least contemplated moving to Albany “to make one very brilliant institution.” For the next year, these same men offered a succession of speeches and testimonials intended to convince the New York legislators to fund a graduate university of science. When the legislature declined, the vision of financial largesse disappeared and so did the leading scientific men. The University of Albany chimera, the same year as the appearance of Tappan’s University Education, signaled a realization of the need for an American equivalent of a European university, along with the hopes of the scientific elite that this could be achieved with a single dramatic creation. During the campaign, one writer dismissed the scientific schools recently established at Yale and Harvard as capable of offering little “more than a mere commencement of … education in many of the sciences.” But at this juncture they were the best that American higher education could offer.¹⁰¹

In the 1840s Yale and Harvard were the outstanding centers for American science. Silliman had led the initial dominance of Yale with his contributions to chemistry and geology, his Journal, and the resident graduates he attracted. His son and namesake remained in New Haven and also became an active scientist. When joined in 1836 by former student, James Dwight Dana, Yale was the undisputed leader of American chemistry and geology. At Harvard, the presence of Benjamin Pierce, the country’s most celebrated mathematician and astronomer, soon gave it precedence in the physical sciences. When Asa Gray was appointed professor of natural history in 1842, Harvard established itself in this field as well. It also possessed chairs in chemistry and “the application of science to the useful arts” but had difficulty making distinguished appointments in those fields. Nearly one-third of the leaders of the AAAS attended one or the other institution.¹⁰² Both institutions independently and virtually simultaneously resolved to expand and elevate their teaching in this area. Vague plans crystallized into concrete steps in 1846 and institutional commitments the following year. Interestingly, both linked the wish to offer formal instruction beyond the baccalaureate level with plans to teach practical applications of science. But, despite similar origins, the two scientific schools followed divergent paths.

In 1846 the Yale Corporation appointed John Pitkin Norton, a Silliman protégé who had studied agricultural chemistry in Europe, professor in that field, and Benjamin Silliman Jr., professor of practical chemistry, a subject he had been teaching informally. The new professors were to teach “graduates and others not members of the undergraduate classes,” and these unpaid positions were to have no claim on college funds. The next year, to regularize this situation, the Corporation created a fourth professional school—the Department of Philosophy and the Arts. The new department opened with eleven courses—Yale professors offering advanced study in their specialties, including Greek and Sanskrit, and Norton and Silliman Jr. teaching eleven students in the “school of applied chemistry.” Although a handful of students followed the graduate courses, the applied offerings drew increasing numbers. In 1852, after Norton’s untimely death, the two defectors from Wayland’s experiment at Brown became the new professors of civil engineering and agricultural chemistry, bringing their students with them. From this point the “Yale Scientific School” (1854) continued to develop as a vigorous teaching institution. At the end of the decade, the gifts of industrialist Joseph Sheffield finally put the school on a sound financial basis, and the name was changed to the Sheffield Scientific School. The school then offered a common first year of studies, followed by seven special 2-year courses, leading to a bachelor’s of philosophy degree. Graduate studies were not forgotten. In 1861 the Department of Philosophy and the Arts awarded the first American PhDs to three students for work in philosophy, philology, and physics.103

When Edward Everett was elected president of Harvard in 1845 he envisioned establishing advanced university studies of the kind he had known as a student at Göttingen. He had Benjamin Pierce draw up a preliminary plan and called in his 1846 inaugural address for the creation of a “School of Theoretical and Practical Science.” After due consultation, the Corporation announced the “Scientific School” the next year. As at Yale, the students were to be graduates or otherwise qualified and were not subject to college discipline. Unlike Yale, the Harvard school would be taught by regular Harvard professors, and, contrary to Everett’s wishes, graduate teaching in nonscientific subjects would not be included. At this point, the industrialist Abbott Lawrence offered a $50,000 donation with strings attached: he wanted the school to train “engineers or chemists, or … men of science, applying their attainments to practical purposes.” Specifically, he envisioned courses in engineering, mining, metallurgy, and “manufacture of machinery”; and his gift provided partial support for professorships in engineering, chemistry, and geology. The entire project was then altered by the possibility of hiring Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist and scientific superstar who was on an extended visit to the United States. Both Everett and Lawrence subordinated their previous visions in a successful effort to crown the Lawrence Scientific School with this spectacular hire. Agassiz brought enormous prestige, but his overbearing presence also dominated the direction of the new school. Totally dedicated to research, he had little interest in classroom teaching and insisted on establishing a museum where he and his students could perform hands-on research. The Lawrence Scientific School largely conformed to Agassiz’s image.

Lawrence’s restricted gifts did not save the school from chronic underfunding. It lacked the resources to expand the faculty or provide adequately for their scientific needs. It operated as a group of uncoordinated departments, each admitting and graduating students, instructing them or not as professors saw fit. There was no entrance examination and no common curriculum. Enrollment averaged about fifty students—less than one-third of the anticipated level. Just 20 percent were college graduates, and many of the rest were clearly unqualified. More than half of students matriculated for 1 year or less, and fewer than one-quarter bothered to obtain a BS degree. Still, this being Harvard, some students had illustrious careers, and the scientific achievements of Pierce, Gray, and others were a credit as well—but not Agassiz. In 1860 he finally opened his museum, just as Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) exposed the error of many of his theories. Scientifically, the Lawrence School was a disappointment, like its most famous professor. It failed to point the way toward graduate education, as Everett had wished, or educate practitioners, as Lawrence had hoped. Rather, in the opinion of Charles W. Eliot, who had tried to impose a common curriculum at Lawrence, the 3-year course at Sheffield provided the most effective model for undergraduate scientific education.104

By the 1850s, the American scientific community had come of age and connected with wider currents of international (European) science. However, scientists were frustrated that America had so little to contribute, outside, perhaps, of geology. They seemed to agree that the best hope for embedding advanced learning and scholarship would be a single American university that could bring together the few leading men of science. They failed to perceive at this juncture that the scientific prowess of German universities derived from their numbers—that institutional competition elevated standards of attainment. Instead, the compulsive desire for knowledge and scientific careers drove increasing numbers of Americans to those same German universities. An earlier generation of scientists had sought access to European learning at Edinburgh, Paris, or London, but by the 1840s this traffic increasingly sought out German professors. Would-be agricultural chemists flocked to Giessen to study with Liebig; The Royal School of Mines in Freiburg became the haven for American mining engineers. In the 1850s more than 300 Americans studied at the three largest German universities, and many more would follow.105 In 1860 it was not yet evident to the leaders of the AAAS or the governors of colleges that American universities would be needed to bring the country abreast of international science.

★ ★ ★

In the two decades before the Civil War, the major crosscurrents of American higher education emerged with enhanced clarity. And the contradictions among these purposes were clearly exposed. The predominant value of culture in a college education had been cogently argued in the 1828 Yale Reports. In these years, the connection between curriculum and content was occasionally questioned but not challenged in practice. Instead, the experience of college assumed precedence over content in the formation of culture. This was evident in the rise of the extracurriculum in the Northeast, in the pervasive and binding social norms of southern universities, and especially in the rise of fraternities. The inexorable expansion of knowledge, epitomized by but not limited to the natural sciences, put a different kind of pressure on the classical curriculum. A liberal education required acquaintance with up-to-date scientific knowledge, but the advancement and proliferation of scientific fields made this increasingly problematic. For cultural purposes, the superficial coverage of even the strongest colleges would suffice, but it was manifestly inadequate to prepare for careers in applied fields or participate in the advancement of science. With the need for scientific practitioners so obvious, why did attempts to offer such instruction draw so few students? Many of those who sought careers in such fields lacked the educational and cultural preparation needed for college studies; and those who acquired such preparation in the classical languages chiefly sought bourgeois respectability in the professions. This dilemma handicapped attempts to provide applied courses of studies in all three regions of the country and would do so for another generation. Even the multipurpose colleges of the West, with a broader palette of offerings, promised a passport to the fluid livelihoods of the emerging market economy, not preparation for specific careers.

The colleges of this era are universally accused of ossification, but this was far from the case. As they attempted to adapt to changing conditions, they were successful in meeting only one of the three challenges—the formation of what is now called cultural capital. Ironically, students themselves were responsible in large measure for creating the vehicles for this process, but the college implicitly understood and acquiesced in this role. Attempts to prepare students for careers in the commercial economy or for participation in the advancement of science achieved only partial and fleeting success: antebellum higher education found no institutional solutions for these challenges. Instead, thousands of individuals found their own solutions in the interstices of these institutions by surviving in one of the new engineering courses, by independent study with active scientists, or by studying at European universities. American higher education had not yet assumed its modern forms. Instead, it evolved a set of premodern institutions that were adapted to the conditions of the mid-nineteenth century.

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1 Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 168–69, 216–17; [Lyman H. Bagg] Four Years at Yale, by a Graduate of ’69 (New Haven: Chatfield, 1871), 568–78, quote p. 575.

2 Roger L. Geiger, “Introduction: New Themes in the History of Nineteenth-Century Colleges,” in Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 1–36.

3 Nott’s parental approach mirrors that of Timothy Dwight in some respects (chapter 4); however, the two men were antagonists, and Nott’s practice of this approach was far more casual, given his numerous other activities.

4 Wayne Somers, Encyclopedia of Union College History (Schenectady: Union College Press, 2003), 120–21, 304–6, 512–13, 529–31; Codman Hislop, Eliphalet Nott, 129–32, 389–90. Yale reverted to submission and control after Dwight’s death in 1817.

5 Frederick Rudolph, Mark Hopkins and the Log: Williams College, 1836–1872 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 19–85, quote p. 59.

6 Ibid., 101–32, 144–55.

7 Ibid., 85, 201–14.

8 Discussed in Roger L. Geiger and Julie Ann Bubolz, “College As It Was in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in American College in the Nineteenth Century, 80–90; the Princeton memoir was not published until 1996: James Buchanan Henry and Christian Schaarff, College As It Is, or, the Collegian’s Manual in 1853, J. Jefferson Looney, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Libraries, 1996); Bagg was paid by publisher Charles H. Chatfield to write Four Years at Yale, Yale University Archives, Lyman H. Bagg Papers, box 3. The following draws upon these three works.

9 Bagg, Four Years, 620.

10 [S. Washington Gladden], “College Life in America,” The Williams Quarterly, VI, 3 (February, 1859): 193–97, quote p. 197.

11 Bagg, Four Years, 696.

12 Bagg, Four Years, 702, 703, 691.

13 Somers, Union College, 304–8; Craig L. Torbenson, College Fraternities and Sororities: A Historical Geography, 1776–1989, PhD Diss., University of Oklahoma, 1992; Nicholas L. Syrett, The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 26.

14 Somers, Union College; Rudolph, Mark Hopkins; Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 228–29, 146–49. For a litany of objections to fraternities, prompted in part by the 1873 death of a Cornell student in an initiation ceremony: H. L. Kellogg, ed., College Secret Societies: Their Customs, Character, and the Efforts for Their Suppression (Chicago: 1874).

15 Rudolph, Mark Hopkins, 114.

16 The “hearth” of fraternities in the Midwest was Miami University, which had a similar mix of urbane students from nearby Cincinnati and pious rural students: Torbenson, College Fraternities; Walter Havinghurst, The Miami Years, 1809–1959 (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1958), 90–102.

17 James Hamilton, Life in Earnest. Six Lectures on Christian Activity and Ardor (New York, 1851 [1845]); Rudolph, Mark Hopkins, 178.

18 Rudolph, Mark Hopkins, quotes pp. 108, 184; Graduate careers from Bailey B. Burritt, Professional Distribution of College and University Graduates, U.S. Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1912, No. 19.

19 Colin B. Burke, American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View (New York: New York University Press, 1982).

20 Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power before the Civil War (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1973); Burke, Collegiate Populations, 135.

21 Ibid., 154, 56. For the experience of a wealthy student, for example: William Lawrence (Harvard ’71), Memories of a Happy Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926).

22 The following draws upon Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Boston and the Harvard Upper Class, 1800–1870 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), 45 et passim.

23 Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 253; Story, Forging of an Aristocracy, 133.

24 Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 11–150.

25 Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 57. Graduates numbers based on 5-year totals, from Burritt, Professional Distribution; also, Claude M. Fuess, Amherst: The Story of a New England College (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935),124; Walter C. Bronson, A History of Brown University, 1764–1914 (Providence, 1914), 258.

26 William J. Barber, ed., Economists and Higher Learning in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 72–94; Francis Wayland, Thoughts on the Present Collegiate System in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1842]), 80–108, 152–55; Morison considered this “a tract probably productive of more mischief than any other in the history of American education … [it] gave the politicians a high-class stick with which to beat the colleges”: Three Centuries of Harvard, 286.

27 Francis Wayland, Report to the Corporation of Brown University, on Changes in the System of Collegiate Education, Read March 28, 1850 (Providence, RI, 1850), in Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, eds., American Higher Education: A Documentary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), II, 478–87; for an account of the New System, Bronson, History of Brown, 258–326.

28 Bronson, History of Brown, 300–16; Francis Wayland and H. L. Wayland, A Memoir of the Life and Labor of Francis Wayland, D.D., LL.D., Late President of Brown University, 2 vol. (New York, 1867), II, 102–5.

29 Bronson, History of Brown, 321–23.

30 William D. Snyder, Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 54–55; Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. I (Raleigh: 1907), 423–26.

31 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought? The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 475–82; Susan H. Godson et al., The College of William & Mary: A History, 2 vol. (Williamsburg: College of William & Mary, 1993), 247–49; Dew wrote an extensive history of the world for his classes which rationalized slavery and southern society: Denise Ann Riley, Masters of the Blue Room: An Investigation of the Relationship between the Environment and the Ideology of the Faculty of the College of William & Mary, 1836–1846, PhD Diss., Ohio State University, 1997.

32 Sidney Ahlstrom, The Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 658–69.

33 The following draws on Daniel Walker Hollis, South Carolina College (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), 74–211; and Michael Sugrue, “ ‘We Desire Our Future Rulers to Be Educated Men’: South Carolina College, the Defense of Slavery, and the Development of Secessionist Politics,” in American College in the Nineteenth Century, 91–114.

34 Hollis, South Carolina College, 97–118; Michael Sugrue, “We Desire”; Howe, What Has God Wrought, 395–410.

35 Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996 [1955]), 264–69; Dr. Cooper’s Defense before the Board of Trustees, from the Columbia Times and Gazette (December 14, 1832), in Hofstadter and Wilson, eds., American Higher Education, I, 396–417.

36 Hollis, South Carolina College, 116. Cooper resigned the presidency in 1833 but continued to teach chemistry; Sugrue makes the strongest case for Cooper’s malign influence on secessionist politics: “We Desire.”

37 Hollis, South Carolina College, 164–65; David W. Bratt, Southern Souls and State Schools: Religion and Public Higher Education in the Southeast, 1776–1900, PhD Diss., Yale University, 1999, 124–33; Sugrue, “We Desire”; Wayne K. Durrill, “The Power of Ancient Words: Classical Teaching and Social Change at South Carolina College, 1804–1860,” Journal of Southern History, 65, 3 (August 1999): 469–98.

38 Stephen Tomlinson and Kevin Windham, “Northern Piety and Southern Honor: Alva Woods and the Problem of Discipline at the University of Alabama, 1831–1837,” Perspectives on the History of Higher Education, 25 (2006): 1–42. A. James Fuller, Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

39 Basil Manly, Report on Collegiate Instruction Made to the Trustees of the University of Alabama, July, 1852 (Tuskaloosa [sic.], 1852), 5.

40 Ibid., passim. Manly regards Wayland’s reforms at Brown as “a gratifying exception” (p. 43); however, their subsequent failure would have buttressed his case.

41 James B. Sellers, History of the University of Alabama, vol. I, 1818–1902 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1953), 150–56, 258–63. Garland later attempted to emulate the Virginia model as founding president of Vanderbilt University in 1875: Paul K. Conkin, Gone with the Ivy: A Biography of Vanderbilt University (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 39–46.

42 Philip A. Bruce, History of the University of Virginia, 1819–1919, 5 vol. (New York: Macmillan, 1921), III, 1–15, 27–52; Manly, Report, 28–29.

43 Thomas G. Dyer, The University of Georgia: A Bicentennial History, 1785–1985 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 82–98.

44 Thomas Kevin B. Cherry, “Bringing Science to the South: the School for the Application of Science to the Arts of the University of North Carolina,” History of Higher Education Annual, 14 (1994): 73–99; Snider, Light on the Hill, 64–66; Battle, North Carolina, 654–57.

45 Robert F. Pace, Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004).

46 Tomlinson and Windham, “Northern Piety”; Bruce, University of Virginia, III, 111–31; A. J. Angulo, “William Barton Rogers and the Southern Sieve: Revisiting Science, Slavery, and Higher Learning in the Old South,” History of Education Quarterly, 45, 1 (Spring 2005): 18–37.

47 For the following, see Bruce, University of Virginia, II & III; Hollis, South Carolina College; Dyer, University of Georgia, 46–70; Sellers, University of Alabama.

48 Timothy J. Williams, “Confronting a ‘Wilderness of Sin’: Student Writing, Sex, and Manhood in the Antebellum South,” Perspectives on the History of Higher Education, 27 (2008): 1–31.

49 Pace, Halls of Honor, 82–97; Sugrue, “We Desire.”

50 Kemp Plumer Battle, Memories of an Old-Time Tar Heel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945), 80: Battle, a faculty son and 1849 graduate, is considered the second founder of the university for his postwar presidency.

51 President Philip Lindsley of the University of Nashville blamed the proliferation of denominational colleges for the decline of his institution—an unaffiliated college that sought to uphold fairly high standards. After some initial success, Nashville declined after 1840, largely from lack of support, and ceased operations in the early 1850s: Paul K. Conkin, Peabody College: From a Frontier Academy to the Frontiers of Teaching and Learning (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 24–88.

52 Albea Godbold, The Church College of the Old South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1944), 3–77. For the southern middle class: Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chapter 8.

53 Godbold, Church College, 78–144, 196–97; James Edward Scanlon, Randolph-Macon College: A Southern History, 1825–1967 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 58–92.

54 Godbold, Church College, 78–93; Scanlon, Randolph-Macon, 69–84.

55 Rod Andrew Jr., Long Gray Lines: The Southern Military School Tradition, 1839–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 8–25; Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Bruce Allardice, “West Points of the Confederacy: Southern Military Schools and the Confederate Army,” Civil War History, 43, 4 (1997): 310–31.

56 Green, Military Education, 151–81, 265–72; Allardice, “West Points,” 317–26.

57 Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 54–83: I have converted Burke’s 6-year cohorts to 4-year cohorts, which still overestimates average time in college. The percentage of males receiving some college could have been somewhat higher.

58 Estimate from Allardice, “West Points,” 322: Southeastern enrollments in 1860 can be roughly estimated as 1,400 in state universities, 1,900 in denominational colleges, and 1,500 in military schools; cf. Burke, American Collegiate Populations.

59 Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom, 259; Angulo, “William Barton Rogers”; Paul Finkelman, “Lieber, Slavery, and the Problem of Free thought in Antebellum South Carolina,” in Charles R. Mack and Henry H. Lesesne, eds., Francis Lieber and the Culture of the Mind (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 11–22. Robert V. Bruce offers a judgment like Hofstadter’s regarding the incomprehension of science in Southern culture: The Launching of Modern American Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 61–62.

60 Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 19, 57.

61 James Findlay, “The SPCTEW and Western Colleges: Religion and Higher Education in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” History of Education Quarterly, 17, 1 (Spring 1977): 31–62, quotes pp. 53n, 36.

62 Ibid., 57; Daniel T. Johnson, Puritan Power in Illinois: Higher Education Prior to 1870, PhD Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974, 62–76; C. H. Cramer, Case Western Reserve: A History of the University, 1826–1976 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 27–45.

63 Johnson, Puritan Power, 75; Findlay, “SPCTEW”; James Insley Osborne and Theodore Gregory Gronert, Wabash: The First Hundred Years, 1832–1932 (Crawfordsville, IN.: Banta, 1932), 66; Doris Malkmus, “Small Towns, Small Sects, and Coeducation in Midwestern Colleges, 1853–1861,” History of Higher Education Annual, 22 (2002): 33–66, quote p. 47.

64 Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 38; Arthur G. Beach, A Pioneer College: The Story of Marietta (Private printing, 1935), 27–52.

65 David B. Potts, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism,” History of Education Quarterly, 11 (1971): 363–80.

66 Charles E. Frank, Pioneer’s Progress: Illinois College, 1829–1979 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 35–36, 55–56.

67 George B. Manhart, DePauw through the Years, 2 vol. (Greencastle, IN: DePauw University, 1962), I, 40–60.

68 Roger L. Geiger, “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850–1890,” in American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century, 127–52; Charles A. Dominick, Ohio’s Antebellum Colleges, PhD Diss., University of Michigan, 1987, 221–51.quote, 238.

69 Julianna Chaszar, “Leading and Losing in the Agricultural Education Movement: Freeman G. Cary and Farmer’s College, 1846–1886,” History of Higher Education Annual, 18 (1998): 25–46; Dominick, Ohio’s Antebellum Colleges, 238.

70 Dominick, Ohio’s Antebellum Colleges, 227; Geiger, “Multipurpose Colleges.”

71 Harold F. Williamson and Payson S. Wild, Northwestern University: A History, 1850–1975 (Evanston: Northwestern University: 1976), 23–24. The adoption of coeducation by radical Oberlin in 1837 may have discouraged, rather than encouraged, other colleges to do the same, which would account for the hiatus until coeducation found supporters in the 1850s.

72 Malkmus, “Small Towns.”

73 Kathryn M. Kerns, Antebellum Higher Education for Women in Western New York State, PhD Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993; Susan Rumsey Strong, Thought Knows No Sex: Women’s Rights at Alfred University (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008). Because a “bachelor’s degree” seemed inappropriate for women, they were given an equivalent laureate’s degree; 3-year courses awarded bachelor’s/laureate’s of philosophy.

74 Malkmus, “Small Towns,” esp. 55–63.

75 Dominick, Ohio’s Antebellum Colleges, 229, Malkmus, “Small Towns,” 43–48; Erving E. Beauregard, Old Franklin, the Eternal Touch: A History of Franklin College, New Athens, Ohio (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 74: Franklin had considered admitting women in the 1830s but rejected it in an acrimonious dispute.

76 Malkmus, “Small Towns,” 64–65.

77 Dominick, Ohio’s Antebellum Colleges, 221; Geiger, “Multipurpose Colleges”: in 1890 one-third of enrollments at Ohio colleges were collegiate (146).

78 Ohio University suspended collegiate operations (1845–1848), and Miami University closed temporarily in 1873. Thomas D. Clark, Indiana University: Midwestern Pioneer. Volume I/The Early Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 49–98.

79 Howard H. Peckham, The Making of the University of Michigan, 1817–1992, edited and updated by Margaret L. Steneck and Nicholas H. Steneck (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994), 1–34. The 1850 Michigan Constitution prohibited the chartering of denominational colleges, but this was rescinded in 1855.

80 The ambitions of the University of the City of New York (now New York University) to initiate scientific and graduate education were undermined through maladministration without proving or disproving their feasibility: Richard J. Storr, The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 33–43.

81 Henry P. Tappan, University Education (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1851]), 68 et passim; Tappen, “A Discourse Delivered by Henry P. Tappan at Ann Arbor, Mich., on the Occasion of His Inauguration as Chancellor of the University of Michigan, December 21, 1852.” Tappan continued to advocate the American university in New York while at Michigan: Storr, Beginnings, 82–93.

82 Peckham, University of Michigan, 35–58, quote p. 43.

83 Ibid., 51–67; Tappan, “Discourse,” 46.

84 Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin: A History, 1848–1925, 2 vol. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), I, 70–119, 185.

85 L. F. Parker, History of Education in Iowa, U.S. Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information, 1893–1896, #17, 79–89.

86 Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 115–34; Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, The Formation of the American Scientific Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 1–24.

87 Stanley M. Guralnick, Science and the Ante-Bellum American College (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1975), 18–46, 116.

88 Ibid., 85–90 et passim.

89 Ibid., 107n.

90 Ibid., 94–118.

91 Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), xv, 21; Roger L. Geiger, “The Rise and Fall of Useful Knowledge,” in American College in the Nineteenth Century, 153–68.

92 Kett, Pursuit, 110–25; Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute, 1824–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Julius A. Stratton and Loretta H. Mannix, Mind and Hand: The Birth of MIT (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 39–45: Alden Partridge’s early efforts at Norwich belong with this group.

93 Bruce, Launching, 160–62; Terry S. Reynolds, “The Education of Engineers in America before the Morrill Act of 1862,” History of Education Quarterly 32, 4 (Winter 1992): 459–82.

94 Margaret W. Rossiter, The Emergence of Agricultural Science: Justus Liebig and the Americans, 1840–1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 3–46.

95 Amos Eaton died in 1842: Codman Hislop, Eliphalet Nott (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 429–32; V. Ennis Pilcher, Early Science and the First Century of Physics at Union College, 1795–1895 (Schenectady: Union College, 1994), 48–49. Reynolds, “Education of Engineers,” 466–75. Polytechnic College of Pennsylvania (1853), Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (1855): Geiger, “Useful Knowledge,” 156–59.

96 Thomas N. Bonner, “The Beginnings of Engineering Education in the United States: The Curious Role of Eliphalet Nott,” New York History (Jan. 1988): 35–54.

97 Benjamin Silliman, “Preface,” American Journal of Science and the Arts, 50 (1845): iii–xviii.

98 Bruce, Launching, 31–36.

99 Ibid., 251–65; Kohlstedt, Formation, 59–99.

100 Guralnik, Science, 142; George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 27; Bruce, Launching, 136–38; Alexander Dallas Bache, “Address,” AAAS, Proceedings, V (1851): xli–lx; Axel Jansen, Alexander Dallas Bache: Building an American Nation through Science and Education in the Nineteenth Century (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011).

101 Storr, Beginnings of Graduate Education, 68–74.

102 Kohlstedt, Formation, 211. Chemistry professor John Webster is notorious for the macabre murder of Dr. George Parkman, for which he was hanged in 1851: Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Knopf, 1991).

103 Kelley, Yale, 182–89; Yale College, First Annual Report of the Board of Visitors of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College (New Haven, 1866).

104 Richard Yanikoski, Edward Everett and the Advancement of Higher Education and Adult Learning in Ante-Bellum Massachusetts, PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 1987, 185–234; Stratton and Maddox, Mind and Hand, 113–38; Charles W. Eliot, “The New Education,” Atlantic Monthly, XXIII (Feb.–Mar. 1869); 202–10, 365–66.

105 Rossiter, Emergence of Agricultural Science; Bruce, Launching, 160; Daniels, American Science, 31; Robert McCaughey, “The Transformation of American Academic Life: Harvard University 1821–1892,” Perspectives in American History, VIII (1974): 239–332, esp. 264–65; Anja Werner, The Transatlantic World of Higher Education: Americans at German Universities, 1776–1914 (New York: Berghahn, 2013).