On March 19, 1839, Professor Gessner Harrison, a mild-mannered scholar generally liked by the young men who attended his classes at the University of Virginia, strolled out of his lecture hall in the school’s stately Rotunda unaware that two students had come looking for him. They were both angry. And armed. William Binford and Thomas Russell had been ordered off the university grounds a month earlier for “gross violations” of school rules. Binford, from outside Richmond, had been suspended until the end of the session. Russell, a Yorktown native, had been dismissed altogether. Harrison, serving as the chairman of the faculty despite his youth, had ordered the two out of the university with the cutting remark that they had disgraced themselves. Now the two had returned on this winter day to avenge this slight to their honor.
They caught up to the professor of Latin and Greek not far from his classroom. Immediately, the two young men demanded that Harrison retract his statement (a standard request among gentlemen looking to satisfy their sense of wounded honor). Harrison, a native of Harrisonburg, Virginia, who was intimately familiar with the gentry’s code of conduct and the ease with which young gentlemen could be offended, declined, stating, according to one student’s account, “that when he took a stand it was very hard to move him.”1 The powerfully built Binford then asked the professor if he would fight back if struck. A crowd of up to a hundred students had by now gathered around to watch. When Harrison replied that his religious views prevented him from exchanging blows, an enraged Binford seized him by the collar, shook him, and called him a coward. Suddenly, Russell pulled out a horsewhip—its leather hard enough to sting a horse’s hide and rip a man’s flesh—and slashed Harrison several times as Binford held him. The crowd of students, who had done nothing up to now to defend their professor, were roused to action. Horsewhipping itself was a violent though acceptable form of insult under the gentleman’s code of honor, but whipping someone who was being pinned down was far beyond the limits of gentlemanly conduct. The students freed Harrison from his attackers.
But, once loose from Binford’s grip, the humiliated professor told the two men they had again disgraced themselves. Infuriated, the two renewed the horsewhipping. “Neither of them pretended that I had done him any injury,” Harrison wrote later that day, his handwriting steady despite the beating, in the journal he kept as part of his duties as faculty chairman.2
Satisfied that they had punished Harrison sufficiently, Binford and Russell released him, mounted their horses, and galloped off down the Lynchburg road, “giving out that they were going to Mississippi.”3 After witnessing the assault on their professor, the other students made no move to capture them. But university officials rushed to obtain a warrant for their arrest and handed it to the local sheriff, and the school’s proctor promised him a one-hundred-dollar reward if he could capture the fugitives before they left Albemarle County, the rolling countryside that surrounded the fledgling university.
Harrison justified the expense as necessary, given the “assassinlike character of the outrage.”4 Binford and Russell, though, outraced their pursuers and escaped to Nelson County, southwest of Albemarle and beyond the local sheriff’s jurisdiction. Unluckily for the fugitives, they owed money to a member of the sheriff’s posse, a tailor. He refused to let the two men get away without paying their debts. Continuing the pursuit, the tailor caught up to them at the Nelson County courthouse and had their horses and baggage seized. The two men straggled back to Charlottesville on foot and lay low but bolted anew when the university obtained a second warrant for their arrest. The sheriff was nowhere to be found, so the school turned to a shopkeeper named Bailey for help. Though a merchant, Bailey had once been a constable, and the university reiterated its willingness to pay a one-hundred-dollar reward. So Bailey assembled his own posse and set out in pursuit. He caught up with the two students in Fluvanna County, east of Albemarle on the road to Richmond. The desperadoes did not submit without a fight, and during the shootout Russell was “dangerously wounded” by a shot from one of the posse members. Binford was brought to the jail in Charlottesville.5
By now, though, student sentiment had turned. Where before they had seen Harrison as the victim of an ungentlemanly act, they now saw Binford and Russell as two classmates being unfairly hounded by a repressive authority. A mob of up to 150 students, the greater part of the student body, gathered around the jail and threatened to break in and rescue their classmate, “all seemingly ready to commit acts of great extravagance,” Harrison noted in his journal.
Harrison and the proctor went to the courthouse to attend Binford’s trial (the wheels of justice turned considerably faster in the nineteenth century), only to find a local Baptist preacher, the Reverend Tinsley, pleading for leniency. Tinsley said Binford had expressed great and sincere regret. As the mob of students continued to threaten a violent breakout unless Binford was freed, Harrison consulted with “a number of respectable gentlemen of Charlottesville,” who told him university officials should simply drop the charges. No one, the gentlemen advised, would think that the threatening mob of students had intimidated the university into capitulating. “Finding it a question of great doubt whether the University would be benefitted by prosecuting the matter further, and considering the danger that it might rather be injured by such a course, the prosecution under the warrant was dropped after Binford had made a written apology, and a promise had been given by the students gathered in Charlottesville, to disperse quietly,” Harrison wrote in the journal. This course, he added, “seemed under the circumstances altogether preferable.”
The mob of students, though, did not disperse quietly despite their promise. Some of them attacked Bailey’s shop, doing as much damage as they could. Tired at last of the student unrest, the citizens of Charlottesville picked up their pistols and rifles and forcibly drove the students back to their dormitories. Binford was released, and Russell disappeared.
At the university, the students quieted down, at least for the moment. But soon, violence would erupt once more, as it had so many times in the fifteen years since the university’s founding. And this time, as people wondered out loud if Thomas Jefferson’s university was worth the bother, a professor would lie dead.