Edgar Allan Poe was one of the youngest students to arrive on the university precincts in 1826. Like most students he traveled over a series of rough roads and ragged paths; it took twelve hours to ride the sixty miles from Richmond to Charlottesville by horseback. Rough-hewn tree trunks served as footbridges over streams and rivers. The town of Charlottesville, located in the center of the rolling hills and mountains of Albemarle County (with a population of about 9,000 whites and 11,500 black slaves), was a collection of small homes, busy hotels, taverns, a courthouse, and a stone jail. This was the bustling and noisy epicenter of an otherwise sleepy frontier: blacksmiths hammered and wagons trundled through town while gristmills ground corn and wheat. Crowds gathered at the courthouse to watch courtroom dramas unfold. The scream of sawmills split the air, which was filled with smoke and the pungent smell of distilleries and tanneries.
Though he would become an offbeat American icon, celebrated and unique, at Jefferson’s school Poe rapidly became just one of the crowd—drinking and gambling and skirting the rules. Not one to bloody his own knuckles, he witnessed many brawls, sometimes gruesome. The horrific, bare-knuckle battles he saw up close were nearly as brutal as the fiction he would one day pen. He filled letters home with sharp observations of university life, including accounts of his classmates in combat.
“We have had a great many fights up here lately—The faculty expelled Wickliffe last night for general bad conduct,” the seventeen-year-old wrote his foster father on September 21, 1826. He continued,
But more especially for biting one of the student’s arms with whom he was fighting—I saw the whole affair—it took place before my door—Wickliffe was much the stronger but not content with that—after getting the other completely in his power, he began to bite—I saw the arm afterwards—and it was really a serious matter. It was bitten from the shoulder to the elbow—and it is likely that pieces of flesh as large as my hand will be obliged to be cut out. He is from Kentucky—the same one that was in suspension when you were up here some time ago—Give my love to Ma and Miss Nancy.1
Tradition holds that Poe’s room was number 13, located on what was called the Western Range. Jefferson had laid out his campus in four orderly rows of dorms that ran on a north to south axis. One row of twenty-eight student rooms faced the grassy expanse called the Lawn from the west, and a nearly identical row of twenty-six faced the Lawn from the east. A covered walkway ran along the front of the Lawn rooms, supported by rows of stately pillars. Parallel to the row of Lawn rooms were the Range rooms, which faced outward, away from the Lawn. Poe’s room faced a field where today the school’s main libraries are located. Interspersed among the Lawn rooms were ten pavilions where the professors lived. Interspersed among the Range rooms were the six “hotels” where students ate their meals. At the north end of the Lawn stood the grand Rotunda, modeled on Rome’s Pantheon. The Rotunda provided space for the library and lecture halls. Though located at the north end of the precincts, the Rotunda served as the heart and spiritual center of the university. Jefferson had obsessed over the appearance of his university, but despite his intimate familiarity with its layout, he once opened a pavilion door to leave, only to find himself stepping into a closet.2
Overall, the precise, compact design at the heart of the forty-four-acre campus was a manifestation of Jefferson’s intent to create an intimate community where young scholars could live shoulder to shoulder with their professors, insulated from the brutishness of the yeoman’s life. (As usual, though, Jefferson’s critics found cause to complain: “One of the most popular objections to the Institution, I find is the expence added by what is called the ornamental style of the Architecture,” Madison noted in 1823.)3
But there was no escaping the grittiness of the early nineteenth century. The Lawn was a rugged, two-hundred-foot-wide, stony slope of ragged grass and dirt where cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and wild dogs roamed and defecated. The privies, located between the Range and Lawn rooms, stank, especially in the heat of the Charlottesville summers. Crowds of slave children hung about the complex. Dust rose from the nearby road that ran between the school and Charlottesville. The university had more than two hundred hearths: black chimney smoke from the hotels and dorm fireplaces blew across the university, while flies swarmed about the piles of garbage tossed out from the hotel kitchens. The pungent odor of the school’s stables was inescapable. Students and professors alike bathed infrequently, sharing a bathhouse located outside the immediate area of the Lawn. A whipping post for slaves stood ready at the edge of the precincts.
This was the university, raw and unfinished, where Poe arrived on a cold day in February 1826, young, ambitious, and eager to start a new life after a Dickensian childhood. His parents, an alcoholic father and a high-strung young mother, had been traveling actors who often left Poe and his brother with friends. His father drank excessively and eventually abandoned the family. His mother died young of tuberculosis. Poe, only two, was taken in by the Allans, a well-to-do Richmond family. John Allan, a merchant, was an uneducated man who had done well for himself. He was a social climber who understood that an education was a boost up the economic ladder. He saw in Poe a chance to bring a family member into the ranks of scholarship.
Poe came to the university already polished by a brief education in England. He had read widely for his age and had studied French and Latin. In Richmond, he studied more Latin, as well as Greek, and used a tutor to prepare for the university. In Charlottesville, he enrolled in the School of Ancient Languages and the School of Modern Languages. While most students enrolled in three schools, Poe’s foster father, a self-made man, was tight with his money and wanted Poe to learn self-reliance; Poe could only afford to attend two schools. (Students had to pay fifty dollars to attend the lectures of one professor, sixty dollars for two professors, and seventy-five dollars for three.)
While many of his classmates fought, gambled, and drank, indifferent and inattentive to their course work, Poe excelled. He joined the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, where he once argued on the topic “Heat and Cold.” He also sketched highly ornate figures in charcoal on the walls of his dorm room. Once, a classmate with whom Poe had chipped in to buy a copy of Byron’s Poems walked in to find Poe drawing Byron’s image on his ceiling in crayon. The life-size figure was a replica of the book’s engraved frontispiece of Byron. Byron’s image, peering down through the soft candlelight, would have inspired the brooding young man as he lay in bed and fantasized about winning glory as a writer.4 Poe also hiked the wooded hills around Charlottesville and possibly supped with Jefferson at Monticello, where the school’s founder habitually invited students to dine on Sundays. In Professor George Blaettermann’s modern languages courses, Poe could solve difficult translation problems that defeated his peers. Blaettermann took note of the young scholar and occasionally invited him to his pavilion. Poe, Blaettermann said, often showed up, “especially when we had young ladies visiting us.”5 At least one classmate found him to be a loner: “He wore a melancholy face always and even his smile,—for I do not remember ever to have seen him laugh,—seemed to be forced.”6
But Poe’s college life was not a smooth one: he was locked in a battle of wills with his autocratic foster father. Poe demanded more money, but Allan refused. Surrounded by rich young men, Poe turned to gambling—a dismissible offense—possibly as a way to pick their pockets. He also learned to drink hard. “I led a very dissipated life—the college at that period being shamefully dissolute,” Poe later wrote. “Took the first honors, however, and came home greatly in debt.”7 A promissory note signed by Poe on December 14, 1826, shows he owed the Dan S. Mosby Company $41.36. Other reports suggest he owed an astounding gambling debt of $2,000.
As Poe furtively gambled and lost in the dorm rooms—probably at card games such as whist and loo—the routine violence continued. “There have been several fights since you were here,” Poe wrote Allan in May 1826. “One between Turner Dixon and [Robert] Blow from Norfolk excited more interest than any I have seen, for a common fight is so trifling an occurrence that no notice is taken of it—Blow got much the advantage in the scuffle—but Dixon posted him in very indecent terms.” To “post” someone was to accuse an opponent of dishonorable behavior in writing and then to post the note in public. Whatever Dixon wrote in his post outraged Blow’s hometown supporters. “The whole Norfolk party rose in arms,” Poe wrote, “—& nothing was talked off [sic] for a week, but Dixon’s charge & Blow’s explanation—every pillar in the University was white with scratched paper.” Poe went on to describe the escalating fight: “Dixon made a physical attack upon Arthur Smith one of Blow’s Norfolk friends—and a ‘very fine fellow.’ [H]e struck him with a large stone on one side of his head—whereupon Smith drew a pistol (which are all the fashion here) and had it not miss-fire [sic]—would have put an end to the controversy.”8
The incident that Poe chronicled was routine. Violence and drunkenness, for many reasons, were endemic. During the year, student Sterling F. Edmunds of Brunswick County, Virginia, whipped student Charles Peyton of Albemarle County, Virginia, with a cowhide. Edmunds had lost $200 playing all fours, a popular card game, in Peyton’s dorm room. Edmunds accused Peyton of cheating. Later hearing that an affronted Peyton planned to cane him, Edmunds struck first with his whip. In November, two other Virginia students, Turner Dixon (of Dixon vs. Blow notoriety) and Livingston Lindsay, were expelled for trying to fight a duel, a criminal act and the most odious offense a student could commit in the university’s eyes. Two drunken students, William Cross of Albemarle County and William Emmet of New York were reprimanded for trying to waylay a professor’s carriage as he returned to his pavilion from church. The violence became so widespread that a grand jury was convened at the university’s request to end the “disturbances.” As Poe recounted in a letter to his foster father, “The Grand Jury met and put the students in a terrible fright—so much so that the lectures were unattended—and those whose names were up on the Sheriff’s list—traveled off into the woods & mountains—taking their beds and provisions along with them—there were about 50 on the list—so you may suppose the College was very well thinned.”9 The student body, in this second year of the university’s existence, numbered 177, and now 50 of them were fugitives from the law. The beleaguered faculty debated “urging the necessity of a competent police for this university.”10 As William Wertenbaker, the school’s librarian, noted, the university had descended into a state of “insubordination, lawlessness, and riot.”11
In the middle of a year of turmoil and tumult, calamity struck. Jefferson fell gravely ill, just when the university needed his reasoned guidance the most. He was eighty-three years old, far beyond the life expectancy of the time, and his six-foot-two-inch frame was now “bent and emaciated.” The university’s professor of medicine, Robley Dunglison, had become Jefferson’s personal physician shortly after arriving the year before, and he had treated the ex-president’s enlarged prostate, which caused Jefferson to urinate frequently. Now, the problem became more serious: Jefferson ate less and suffered from diarrhea. No longer could he ride his favorite horse, Eagle, along the rugged road that led from Monticello to the university. On June 24, Jefferson wrote Dung-lison a note begging the doctor to come see him. Jefferson, his strength waning, lacked the power to rise from his bed.
Jefferson’s mind, even as he lay dying, was consumed by the potential failure of his university. For a decade, work on the school had enlivened the old man; he had obsessed over the minutest details of its construction, even spying on the hundreds of workmen through a telescope placed atop Monticello. Overseer Edmund Bacon recalled the day that Jefferson himself laid out the very foundations of the school:
An Irishman named Dinsmore and I went along with him. As we passed through Charlottesville, I went to old Davy Isaacs’ store and got a ball of twine, and Dinsmore found some shingles and made some pegs and we all went on to the old field together. Mr. Jefferson looked over the ground some time and then stuck down a peg. He struck the very first peg in that building, and then directed me where to carry the line, and I stuck the second. He carried one end of the line, and I the other, in laying off the foundation of the University. He had a little rule in his pocket that he always carried with him, and with this he measured off the ground and laid off the entire foundation and then set the men at work.12
Professor Tucker marveled at Jefferson’s stamina as the buildings rose and the professors and students arrived:
In getting the university into operation, he seemed to have regained the activity and assiduity of his youth. Every thing was looked into, every thing was ordered by him. He suggested the remedy for every difficulty and made the selection in every choice of expediency. Two or three times a week he rode down to the establishment to give orders to the proctor, and to watch the progress of the work still unfinished. Nor were his old habits of hospitality forgotten. His invitations to the professors and their families were frequent, and every Sunday some four or five of the students dined with him.13
Student Henry Tutwiler had similar recollections of Jefferson as a hardworking octogenarian:
We use to see him afterwards as he passed our room on the eastern Range in his almost daily visits to the University. He was now in his 80-third year, and this ride of eight or ten miles on horseback over a rough mountain-road shows the deep interest with which he watched over this ‘child of his old age,’ and why he preferred the more endearing title of Father to that of Founder. This is also shown in the frequent intercourse which he kept up with the Faculty and students.14
The dying Jefferson now lay on his narrow, canopied bed in the bedroom where he had often sought sanctuary. His bouts of diarrhea had lessened, though he probably suffered from severe dehydration and, according to Dunglison, his “powers were failing.”15
“Until the 2nd and 3rd of July he spoke freely of his approaching death; made all his arrangements with his grandson, Mr. Randolph, in regard to his private affairs, and expressed his anxiety for the prosperity of the University,” Dunglison wrote. Jefferson fell into a stupor on July 2, though he would occasionally regain consciousness. By July 3, his moments awake were few. At seven that evening, Jefferson woke, saw Dunglison, and said: “Ah! Doctor are you still there?” Jefferson’s voice was hoarse and almost inaudible. “Is it the 4th?” Whether or not Jefferson could hear him, Dunglison replied: “It soon will be.”16
Jefferson’s grandson-in-law Nicholas Trist sat at Jefferson’s side at eleven that night and again Jefferson asked: “This is the Fourth?” Trist, knowing Jefferson’s desire to die on the Fourth of July—the fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s birth—ignored the question because he couldn’t bear to tell Jefferson that the Fourth was still an hour away.
But Jefferson immediately inquired again, “This is the Fourth?” Trist, torn by his grandfather-in-law’s suffering, nodded.
“Ah,” Jefferson sighed, “just as I wished.” Jefferson’s strength carried him to the next day. He died at 12:50 p.m. on July 4, 1826. His university was a mere sixteen months old, still an infant. In nearby Charlottesville, cannons boomed. At the courthouse, the bell tolled to signal “that the spirit of the author of the Declaration of Independence had taken its flight from its tenement of clay.”17
Jefferson had directed that his funeral be simple, “without any pomp or ceremony whatever.”18 On July 5, a warm, rainy day, his coffin was carried from Monticello down the mountain to the small family cemetery at its base. About forty mourners arrived to see the coffin resting on narrow planks across the open grave. Among the small group were his university professors, wearing crape on their left arms, and a small contingent of students. Andrew K. Smith, a mourner, recalled seeing Poe, whom he described as “a high minded and honorable young man, though easily persuaded to his wrong.”19 In his eulogy, friend and lawyer William Wirt claimed that Jefferson clasped his hands and said as he died: “Nunc dimittis,” or “Now lettest thou thy servant depart,” quoting Luke 2:29.20 Details of the burial were not made public, but some fifteen hundred people made their way up the mountain to find, to their disappointment, the grave already filled.
Jefferson penned his own epitaph, leaving instructions that his obelisk was to contain “the following inscription and not a word more”:
Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and Father of the University of Virginia.21
The students at his university mourned him, recalling him as a humble man whose charm and empathy put even the most awkward young student at ease. “I well remember the first time I saw Mr. Jefferson,” Tutwiler reminisced. “It was in 1825, in the Proctor’s office, wither I had gone with some students on business. A tall, venerable gentleman, in plain but neat attire, entered the room and, bowing to the students, took his seat quietly in one corner. … I was struck by his plain appearance, and simple, unassuming manners.”22 But despite their admiration of Jefferson and their grief over his death, within several weeks, the students resumed the behavior that would threaten the existence of his university. The drinking and gambling began again, as did a widespread disregard for authority. The students were unconcerned about the consequence of their behavior; many no doubt knew they were destined to lead by birthright. Student Jerman Baker of Richmond was caught trying to explode a bomb made of a quart bottle full of gunpowder outside a dorm room. A mob of students attacked the house of a Mr. Crawford and ripped the clothes off one of his slave girls. Student George Hoffman of New York explained that students assaulted the girl because they assumed “that she was one of the women who had infected the students with disease.” Crawford agreed to pay the students ten dollars as a “compromise,” an act that suggested she was a prostitute in his employ.23 Students broke out their forbidden decks of cards and played games of chance, such as all fours, at two dollars a hand. Poe was one of the suspected gamblers, and professors called him in for questioning.