Professors, who had anticipated that most of their work would take place within the confines of a classroom, were now forced to capture miscreants, judge their guilt, and mete out punishment. With students refusing to form a court to punish each other, the task of school discipline fell to the professors and, more particularly, to Faculty Chairman George Tucker. The task required steely determination—or, as Cabell once grumbled, steel of another sort: “I am particularly anxious to be informed on the best mode of governing a large mass of students without the use of the bayonet.”1
The professors numbered eight in 1826, the school’s second year. They were a motley collection of eccentric and brilliant personalities. To understand them is to understand how the school and students were shaped in these crucial years. These were the men Jefferson had chosen to guide the school to preeminence.
One of the two Americans on the faculty at the university’s inception was John Patton Emmet, not yet twenty-nine years old when the school opened its doors to students. He was best known to students for the menagerie of wild animals he kept in his pavilion. Born in Ireland on April 8, 1796, Emmet was the son of Thomas Emmet, a ringleader in the Irish rebellion of 1798 who was sent to prison in Scotland. After his father’s release, John Emmet moved with his family to New York in 1804. Emmet attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he also became assistant professor of mathematics until his health weakened in 1817.
After spending a year in Naples, Italy, recovering, Emmet returned to America and in 1822 earned a medical degree from the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons. He practiced in Charleston, South Carolina, where he delivered a series of lectures on chemistry that became so popular he caught the attention of the University of Virginia founders. He arrived in Charlottesville to assume the post of chemistry professor as a perfect bachelor and populated his house with snakes, a white owl, and a tame bear that freely roamed the house and garden. But after he married Professor George Tucker’s niece, Mary Byrd Tucker of Bermuda, the snakes were banished, the owl set free, and the bear put on a dinner plate. A grand experimenter, Emmet ran tests on everything from raising silkworms to curing hams. Cornelia Randolph, Jefferson’s granddaughter, seemed fascinated with him when she wrote, in her folksy, precise manner, to her sister Ellen Randolph Coolidge: “Dr. Emmet is an irishman complete, warm in his likings & dislikes; fiery, & so impetuous even in lecturing that his students complain his words are too rapid for their apprehension; they cannot follow him quick enough; to which he answers, they must catch his instruction as it goes, he cannot wait for any man’s understanding, in conversation his words tumble out heels over head so that he is continually making bulls & blunders and to crown all has much of the brogue when he becomes animated.”2
Tucker, the other American and known to his colleagues as a most wretched novelist, was a native of Bermuda and a member of the U.S. Congress when Jefferson tapped him to be his professor of moral philosophy. He was the first to feel the burden of the former president’s lax attitude toward discipline. With his other innovations in higher education, Jefferson had made no room for a president at his university, instead setting up a system in which members of the faculty would each year elect from among themselves a chairman who would serve as chief administrator of all school business outside the classroom. Jefferson thought a president would be a barrier to intimacy among students and professors. And, of course, presidents of other universities were typically religious leaders, and Jefferson saw no advantage in putting a churchman in charge of his secular school. The chairman was to serve a term of one year before passing the title on to the next professor. On April 12, 1825, the professors held their first faculty meeting and, in Tucker’s absence, elected him chairman. They felt that, as an American, he might have a better understanding of the students. Also, Tucker was fifty years old, by far the eldest professor.
Tucker had served under Bermuda’s chief barrister before moving to Williamsburg, Virginia, to study law at the College of William and Mary. Though a lawyer and a politician by trade—he served as a state legislator before moving on to Congress—Tucker also harbored lifelong literary ambitions, which became the impetus for weighty socioeconomic tomes and mediocre novels. One of his nonfiction works was titled Theory of Money and Banks, and when students saw him riding by on his horse, they occasionally proclaimed, “Yonder goes dear old Tucker on Money and Banks.”3 As for Tucker’s fiction, Dunglison was so appalled by it that when he began editing the university’s first magazine, the Museum, and Tucker offered to write short stories for it, Dunglison wrote a note of complaint to Cabell, the Board of Visitors member.
Like most of the professors, Tucker endured a rocky relationship with the students. Once, students besieged his pavilion (on the southern end of the Western Lawn) and smashed bottles against the front wall after listening at the door of a faculty meeting and hearing Tucker argue for maximum punishment for some young offenders. “Mr. Tucker is not much liked they say,” gossipy Cornelia Randolph wrote in August 1825. “His eccentricity of character does not please and in his capacity of professor he is still less thought of, at least by students.” Tucker’s personality—he was quick with a joke, fond of racy conversation, and employed a veritable arsenal of anecdotes—also grated on Blaettermann, professor of modern languages. “Professor Blaettermann, what is the meaning of rigmarole?” Tucker asked him once. “I don’t know whether I can give you the exact meaning of the word,” Blaettermann replied humorlessly, “but if one will go to hear one or two of your lectures, he will have a good idea of its meaning.”4
George Long was one of the European professors the public was aghast to find Jefferson had hired. Jefferson had sent his friend Francis Gilmer to England to recruit professors, and when news reached the United States that Jefferson’s new university had solicited Europeans, newspaper critics railed. “Mr. Jefferson might as well have said that his taverns and dormitories should not be built with American bricks and have sent to Europe for them as to import a group of Professors,” blustered the Boston Courier. “Mr. Gilmer could have fully discharged his mission, with half the trouble and expense, by a short trip to New England.” The Philadelphia Gazette appended: “Or, we may be permitted to add, by a still shorter trip to Philadelphia.… This sending of a Commission to Europe, to engage professors for a new University, is we think one of the greatest insults the American people have received.”5
Long was the first lecturer to arrive at the university. After sailing from England to New York, the professor of ancient languages took stagecoaches south and into Virginia, along the way meeting what would prove to be a lifelong love: American cornbread. When he showed up at the university, still under construction, in December 1824, he found it “was without inhabitants and looked like a deserted city.”6
Long, whom the students called Colonel and apparently liked despite a certain sarcastic tone in the classroom, initially took his meals at one of the university hotels, the one run by a Mrs. Gray. There, the handsome but short professor wooed Harriet Selden, the widow of an Arkansas judge killed in a duel not long before. The courtship prompted students to compose a poem, which they recited within hearing of the amorous couple: “Harriet wants but little here below/But wants that little Long.”7
A mere twenty-four years old when classes began, Long astonished Jefferson with his youth when he visited Monticello for the first time, according to a scrap of dialogue left to posterity.
“Are you the new professor of ancient languages?” Jefferson asked as he came out to greet his guest.
“I am, sir,” Long answered.
“You are very young.”
“I shall grow older, sir.”
Jefferson smiled, and after an evening of conversation with Long, the former president was writing letters praising him to his acquaintances.8
The second European to arrive was Blaettermann, a cranky, brusque German in his early forties who had joined Napoleon Bonaparte’s army before it marched on Moscow. Blaettermann claimed he only survived starvation in the pell-mell flight from Russia by strapping chocolate cakes to his body with strips of cloth. Born in 1782 in Langensalza, Germany, Blaettermann was destined to be a brilliant linguist, though not a very pleasant one. He studied at sundry European schools, including Leipzig and Heidelberg; taught Latin, French, German, and Italian; and spoke Spanish as well. After moving to London, he met and married Elizabeth Charlotte Dean, herself a gifted linguist who had served as governess to the children of the British governor of Gibraltar—an impressive background that would not prevent Blaettermann from publicly horsewhipping her later at Jefferson’s university.
Alone among the university’s first professors, Blaettermann had asked for the job before being solicited. He wrote Jefferson a letter (in French) in 1819, shortly after hearing about Jefferson’s plans for the school, pitching himself as the ideal candidate for the modern languages professorship. Jefferson checked with his friend George Ticknor, the Harvard professor who was very soon to bring Jefferson’s educational innovations to Cambridge, and after Ticknor replied that he had heard Blaettermann highly praised, Jefferson hired him.
Once at the university, Blaettermann proved a poor teacher, arousing the ire of his students, who at various times assaulted him, pelted him with lead shot, besieged his house, and petitioned to have him dismissed. Enrollment in the modern languages classes plummeted—though in fairness to Blaettermann, he was trying to teach an entire Spanish class with only three textbooks to share—and many students hired tutors to teach them languages. Cornelia Randolph, usually an astute observer, offered her scarcely believable impression that Blaettermann was popular with his students, but her views may have been colored by the fact that the professor was giving her famous grandfather private lessons in the Anglo-Saxon tongue. But Cornelia pulled no punches when it came to Blaettermann’s wife: “As we become better acquainted with all of the professors & their wives we like them better with the exception of Mrs. Blatterman [sic] who from all accounts is a vulgar virago; indeed, she is one to whom you may apply the whole of Richard’s description of his mistress’s maid without speaking more harshly than she deserves
‘There’s not such a b——in King George’s dominion
She’s peevish, she’s thievish, she’s ugly, she’s old
And a liar, and a fool & a slut & a scold.’”
Cornelia concluded her attack by noting, “Not one word is there here too much, for if she does not steal it is probably because she has no occasion to do so.” Cornelia elsewhere noted of the couple, “The Blattermans [sic] are too low to relish any but vulgar society & are scarcely on speaking terms with the professors & their wives & daughters.”9
The remaining three European professors, Long’s fellow Englishmen, arrived in America together. Natural philosophy professor Charles Bonnycastle, mathematics professor Thomas Key, and professor of medicine Robley Dunglison had sailed on an “old log” of a ship named the Competitor and promptly found themselves swept up in one of the most violent storms to roil the Atlantic waters off the southern English coast in decades. After a months-long trip, they arrived at Charlottesville in March 1825, much to Jefferson’s relief, but too late to begin classes in February as he had intended.
Bonnycastle, twenty-nine years old, was the son of the renowned mathematician John Bonnycastle and was educated at the Royal Military Academy of Woolwich. Almost morbidly shy, he was known on at least one occasion to have leapt a fence in Charlottesville and walked through the mud to avoid having to talk to passing students. The ever-observant Cornelia Randolph concluded that “he is a nervous man & queer tempered and does not as other people do.”10 Another woman, a Mrs. Beirne, who lived within the precincts in the school’s early days, simply described Bonnycastle as “amiable, gentlemanlike and charming in his manners.”11
A bachelor when he arrived in Charlottesville, Bonnycastle put aside his shyness and began courting the ladies almost immediately, and with success: he married a young American woman and had several children. One of his students wrote that Bonnycastle was often so deep in thought that he would not notice when his children would play and cavort around him.
Thomas Key, twenty-six years old when he arrived, had earned a master of arts degree at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he came to know Long. Little is known of Key’s tenure at the University of Virginia—beyond the fact that he once kicked Blaettermann during a contentious faculty meeting—because he became the first professor to quit. He cited the local climate’s unsuitability to his health as the reason for leaving, though others suspected that the constant student unrest hastened his departure. Cornelia Randolph described him as “much beloved” and a “good hearted man,” “tho odd tempered.”12 After Key’s resignation, however, Cornelia’s brother-in-law, Joseph Coolidge, wrote of him that “he is one of those Englishmen who have succeeded in making their nation hated in every part of the known world!”13
The third English professor to sail to America aboard the Competitor, the twenty-six-year-old Dunglison, never suffered from Cornelia’s acid pen. “We are more & more pleased with Dr. Dunglison both as a man & a physician,” she wrote, adding moreover that he was “certainly” a great doctor.14 Dunglison was born in Keswick, England, on January 4, 1798, and received his medical degree in London in 1819. A “benevolent, public-spirited character,” he was known for his charitable works and in later years for promoting raised-letter books for the blind.15
He became great friends with Jefferson and Madison, characterizing Jefferson as the more imaginative of the two and Madison as exercising better judgment. Dunglison frequently dined with Madison. “In my latest visits to him,” he recalled, “when confined to the bed or sofa in the next room, he would invite me to take his place at table; and call out, that if I did not pass the wine more freely, he would ‘cashier’ me!”16 He was a prodigious writer, and some of his works became widely popular. His major triumph was his book titled Human Physiology, which became pivotal in the history of American medical science. Conceived as a textbook for his students at the University of Virginia, it was dedicated to Madison.
Finally, John Tayloe Lomax would become the eighth professor, arriving in time for the school’s second year. He was hired as the university’s first professor of law. Born in Port Tobago, Virginia, he studied at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, graduating at the age of sixteen. He was practicing law in Fredericksburg, Virginia, when he was recruited by Jefferson to take one of the school’s most sensitive posts—the chair of the law department. Jefferson felt that only an American could teach American law. Lomax’s skills at cross-examining miscreant students would later serve him well when he became a Virginia circuit judge. Unlike the other professors, Lomax appears to have had pleasant relations with students.17
While these professors formed the front line in teaching and disciplining students, the members of the Board of Visitors were the bosses. And they were also well-known leaders in Virginia: Madison, Cabell, Johnson, Breckenridge, and Cocke. To their ranks the governor had added former president James Monroe. Just as Madison had been President Jefferson’s secretary of state, Monroe had served Madison in the same capacity. And like his fellow Virginians, he had revolutionary credentials: he had crossed the Delaware River with Washington and been wounded by the Hessians at the battle of Trenton. During the War of 1812, it was Monroe who served as President Madison’s scout, riding out to determine how close the approaching British were to the capital. And just three years before joining the Board of Visitors, Monroe had enunciated what is now known as the Monroe Doctrine. In retirement, he had pledged to help Madison strengthen Jefferson’s university.
Following two years of violence, the Visitors were sick of student unrest and eager to suppress lawbreakers. They showed no restraint in imposing a plethora of new, harsher, and sometimes petty rules. The Visitors met in October 1826—less than three months after Jefferson’s death—and began a weeklong orgy of rule writing. First they elected Madison to replace Jefferson as the new rector. Then they started their rule making with the library. Previously, students had stolen some library books and damaged others; now they would have to pay ten cents a day for late books and pay for any damage to the library or its books and suffer punishment. Previously, students had given sanctuary to and supported their expelled classmates. Now the board required students to ostracize suspended and dismissed classmates. Previously, students had boarded in questionable neighborhoods free from professors’ surveillance. Now students who boarded outside the precincts would be required to tell the proctor where they lived. Students could no longer choose dorm rooms or at which “hotel” they would eat. Hotelkeepers were now prohibited from serving students “luxurious” food. In its toughest action, the Visitors voted to ask the legislature to establish a bona fide court at the university with the power to compel testimony and arrest and punish students. The Visitors also asked for power to jail students who broke university regulations. They wanted school rules to be treated as state law.
The Visitors hoped these new rules would mollify the professors. As noted in the minutes of their meeting, “The Visitors are the more encouraged in this hope, from the circumstance that they are now endeavoring to introduce some radical changes into the government of the University, which may secure more order than has heretofore prevailed, & may relieve the professors from some of their more irksome duties. The ensuing winter will probably ascertain how far their efforts at reform will be crowned with success.”18
As the first tumultuous year was ending, Jefferson had implored students to show real honor and end their misbehavior. He had asked that the rules in place be enforced and had enacted new but relatively mild rules. Now, as a second rowdy year was coming to a close, the Visitors were going a step further, clamping down, issuing tougher rules, and threatening imprisonment. Clearly the university was not working. The troublesome students, self-absorbed and remarkably cruel, appeared impossible to control. The Visitors were gambling that the new rules would act as a needed yoke. The students would learn, and Jefferson’s university would succeed. “The Youth of the Country cannot learn too early to respect the laws,” the Visitors concluded.19
Poe, whose gambling was never discovered by professors, left the university in December 1826, dead broke but better educated. He would never return. His classmates had proven to be better gamblers. Like most students of the day, he spent only one year at the school. He never received a certificate because he skipped final exams. He enrolled in and subsequently left the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which Jefferson had established as president in 1802. While Poe would go on to fame as a writer of tales of horror, the university in Charlottesville would continue to gain notoriety for its wickedness. The Visitors forged even more fanatical rules. The students responded with rot, riot, and rebellion. Jefferson’s dream of a community of self-governing scholars was over.