In 1827—the school’s third year—professors and school leaders continued their efforts to control the students. Exasperated and oblivious to how students would react, the Board of Visitors imposed the “Uniform Law” that gave students another cause to rebel. Madison, now the rector, was the sole member of the board to oppose the measure, preferring instead that students wear a simple black gown as was done at Oxford and other European schools.
Meanwhile, so desperate was the school for more money to operate that Madison and the other Visitors agreed to borrow $20,000 from a private citizen. Madison had long felt that the state was too cheap when it came to supporting the university. “The hardheartedness of the Legislature towards what ought to be the favorite offspring of the State, is as reproachful as deplorable,” he had complained to Jefferson in February 1826.1 The legislature had done little to change his opinion since then.
Meanwhile, many students continued their wicked ways. They turned their dorm rooms into gaming establishments and whorehouses and the university into a vast saloon. Professor Key finally made good on his 1825 threat to resign, claiming the Piedmont climate was unhealthy. However, those who knew him thought the immaturity of the students drove him away. Jefferson’s grandson-in-law Joseph Coolidge noted that the students’ wild behavior made it extremely difficult to recruit professors. “There is not a man in America, who was competent to the place, who would accept it,” he wrote to a brother-in-law.2
To outsiders, though, university officials kept up the pretense that the precincts were a sea of tranquility. “Our University is doing, tho’ not as well as we [could] wish, as well as could be reasonably expected,” Madison wrote to his old friend the marquis de Lafayette in February 1828. “An early laxity of discipline, had occasioned irregularities in the habits of the students which were rendering the Institution unpopular. To this evil an effectual remedy has been applied.”3
Daily life at the university was a mishmash of tension and tomfoolery, scholarship and sin. In the spring of 1827, school leaders became alarmed at reports that prostitutes, some from as far away as Staunton and Lexington, were plying their ancient trade in Jefferson’s hallowed school. Professors interrogated students, though the code of silence initially stymied the investigation. But professors eventually discovered the situation was worse than they had first thought.
Teenage student J. T. Wormeley of Fredericksburg, Virginia, confessed to keeping “a woman of pleasure” in his room. Wormeley said he tried to be “as private as he could be” with the prostitute, but other eager students had swarmed his room. She offered her services to those students when Wormeley accommodatingly stepped out.4
Wormeley also confessed to escorting two prostitutes from Charlottesville “by moon light.” One remained in his room for two nights and one day. The two businesswomen had sex for money with at least twenty-six students under the noses of professors, hotelkeepers, and administrators. One of the prostitutes had even leapt out a dorm window when a professor unexpectedly dropped by.5 Seeking to minimize his guilt, Wormeley claimed that prostitutes had been working at the university long before he sought their services.
While students tried to keep their gaming and whoring quiet inside the rooms, outside on the Lawn, the sound of whizzing bullets, bleating horns, and loud profanity echoed off the columns. A John Patten complained that a half dozen students, cursing all the while, beat and threw eggs at his doors, broke windows, smashed blinds, and shot up his house with pistols.
The professors tried in vain to channel the students’ energy into extracurricular academics. For students willing to give speeches and write essays to commemorate Washington’s birthday and the Fourth of July, professors drew up a list of approved topics. Among them were “The Life and character of Washington,” “The character of the North American Indian,” “The Principles of Grecian and Roman Colonization compared with those of Great Britain and her North American Colonies,” and “Causes of the growth and prosperity of Virginia.” In all, fourteen topics were posted on the Rotunda doors, which served as the school’s bulletin board.
Professors also sent a chiding letter to the parents of students begging them to stop indulging their children with so much money. Students squandered their pocket cash on lavish clothes, on personal servants, and on sumptuous carryout meals from local taverns. Such profligacy reinforced the image of the school as a posh resort for students from prosperous families.
The students spent so freely that they ran up enormous debts with local merchants, professors complained to parents. The university, which had enemies aplenty, did not need the animus of local tradespeople as well. Professors in April 1828 urged parents to forbid their sons from borrowing and took matters into their own hands by barring students from carrying a debt of more than five dollars.
Intent on increasing surveillance, the professors created a scheme in which each of them was assigned a section of the campus to monitor students. That same month, the Board of Visitors authorized the proctor, the administrator charged with enforcing the growing number of rules, to fine students to reimburse hotelkeepers for the furniture the students periodically destroyed.
Madison wanted the public to know of the school’s new tough policies. To that end, an anonymous writer to the pro-Jefferson newspaper, the Richmond Enquirer, described student life as an improbable paradise where students meekly accepted the new reign of law and order. The writer said he’d been doubtful that the sudden change from Jefferson’s antipathy to discipline to the new board’s embrace of restrictions would succeed. But after observing the students, he wrote, the university “is now in a fair way to become the proud ornament of our State.”
“In its commencement, its police regulations were based upon too favorable an estimate of the moral virtues and studious habits of Southern Youth,” wrote the correspondent, who signed himself “Plebeian.” This new, stricter school, he claimed, would fulfill Jefferson’s dream of excellence and overcome the “prejudices of ignorance and the hostility of its rivals.”
I am disposed to attribute this circumstance to the new regulations by which idleness and dissipation have been almost entirely driven away. The exclusion from such an institution, of the young men, who rely more upon their fortune and family for distinction, than upon intellectual and moral worth; and who will neither study themselves nor permit others to do so, is not to be neglected. … The severity of some of the regulations is a little complained of as inconvenient; but acquiesced in by the young men from a sense of their advantage. The law which requires of each student, the surrender of all his available funds into the hands of the Proctor, to be paid out upon orders or drafts, operates as a powerful check upon the extravagance and indiscretion of youth. If parents would only cooperate with the spirit and intention of the regulation its advantages would be great.6
The obviously biased letter, as if written by a spin doctor in the university’s employ, glossed over the steady flouting of the rules.
Meanwhile, board members continued with the ordinary business of the school. Robert Patterson was given Bonnycastle’s job as professor of natural philosophy (Bonnycastle had taken Key’s job as math professor). George Long became the second professor to resign. He accepted a job as Greek professor at the much more orderly and prestigious London University. Gessner Harrison from Harrisonburg, Virginia, became the first student to serve as a professor, taking Long’s job. Harrison, a prodigy in ancient languages, was among the students who actually took their studies seriously, who preferred education over excess. Harrison and his brother, Edward, are the only two students known to have declined Jefferson’s invitation to Sunday dinner at Monticello. The two wrote Jefferson that their father asked that they not indulge in entertainment on the Sabbath. Jefferson, touched by their filial piety, invited the brothers to a weekday dinner instead.
While the professors jockeyed for jobs, they looked for ways to tame the university and its expenses. When they discovered the school could no longer afford to subscribe to scientific journals, the professors agreed to pay for the critical subscriptions themselves. Meanwhile, students caroused. Their main, unrepentant diversion, day and night, weekday and weekend, was drinking alcohol to excess. They drank wine, peach brandy, “a stiff julep,” spiked punch, champagne, whiskey, and brandy mixed with honey—anything to get what the students called “corned,” or intoxicated.
The professors were no match for the furtive students, though they tried. In October 1828, they ordered the proctor to search out a “secret” barroom supposedly operating in the basement of a local tavern. Days later, the proctor nabbed several students at the bar, among them Thomas Turner of Fredericksburg. Interrogated by the faculty chairman, Turner averred that he couldn’t recall saying “that he did not care what kind of drink it was, provided it was strong.” Professors reprimanded him.7
Robert Wilkinson of New Orleans did not fare as well. For holding a “drinking party” in his room, he was dismissed.8 However, after his fellow students pledged to keep him sober, the faculty relented and readmitted him.
While students partied with abandon, a new threat to the university’s future swept into Charlottesville—disease. In August, the servants of Professor Dunglison became sick. Professor Emmet also reported that all of his servants were ill, noting that a great number of people seemed to be sick that season. Dunglison’s wife had fled to Mary Randolph’s house with her two “pretty children,” leaving the doctor to deal with the emerging crisis, which Randolph diagnosed as measles, an illness that could then be deadly.9
Mary Randolph, one of Jefferson’s granddaughters, wrote in August 1828 that the sickness had prevailed through the neighborhood all summer and had “generally been followed by dysentery & has terminated fatally in a great many cases. The mortality from this cause alone has been much greater than usual & as these things are always exaggerated by report … Charlottesville & its vicinity are considered by people not more than twenty or thirty miles distant, as the abodes of fever & disease & to be avoided as you would a pestilence.”10
So deadly was the disease that travelers feared to pass through Charlottesville, according to Randolph, who noted that “there have been three deaths among the students at the University & these three have been magnified to such an extent, that it is thought the interest of the institution will be seriously affected thereby.”11 Had anyone been interested in checking on the health of the university, though, they would have found no record of the deaths in the official minutes, an omission that protected the school from criticism. Madison’s annual report to the General Assembly on the state of the university, required by law, also failed to note that three students had died. (Though records are scarce, two of the students felled by measles in 1828 were apparently brothers, Patrick and William Aylett of King William County, Virginia. Another student, James Briggs of Jerusalem, Virginia, had died of measles the year before.)
However, as troublesome as measles were, worse was yet to come. A “nervous fever” arrived in the cold of winter in the waning days of 1828. And while it ravaged the university, surrounding neighborhoods remained unscathed. More than a dozen students took to their beds, stricken, and many others fled the precincts in terror.
The faculty determined that “an Epidemick had prevailed in the University since Christmas,”12 though the chairman of the faculty didn’t formally report its presence until a month later. Professor Dunglison told his fellow professors on January 22, 1829, that “a fever was prevalent among the students which might possibly be contagious.” The professor identified the malady—also known as nervous fever—as typhoid.13
The diagnosis chilled the learned men. They knew nothing of how to cure the disease, which could be as fatal as malaria, smallpox, or yellow fever. The professors also apparently feared the fever could strike a fatal blow to the university itself, whose many virulent critics argued it had been built on an unhealthy site and should be shuttered. The university’s supporters mourned the epidemic as a “public calamity” and feared the school would be “doomed by this visitation to sink into neglect.”14 The school—with a mere 131 students in its fourth year—had been trying to recruit more scholars, mailing out flyers to the capitals of all the southern states. Typhoid or rumors of typhoid would undercut that effort. And if news of the outbreak reached Richmond, where the General Assembly was in session, university officials could expect inquiries or, worse, criticism.
At the January 23 faculty meeting, a professor read off the names of those already infected: Aylett, Wilkinson, Morgan, Caperton, Haskins, Hubbard, Bentley, William Hunter, Robert Hunter, Trueheart, Brown, McLelland, Garrett, Carr, and Dangerfield—a total of fifteen students. By the beginning of March 1829, at least six students would be dead, according to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson. The mortality rate, Randolph wrote, was nearly equal to that of the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia. Among the dead students were Laban Hoyle of North Carolina and William Hunter of Buckingham County, Virginia.
While keeping fellow professors abreast of the seriousness of the situation, Dunglison publicly declared that all was well. On the doors of the Rotunda, a note was posted stating that “Erroneous Impressions having gone abroad regarding the opinion of the Chairman on the existing state of salubrity of the University—the Students are informed that the Chairman sees no ground for alarm and they may rely, that should any cause arise, they or their guardians or both shall receive the earliest intimations of it.” Though some students “called for leave to quit the university,” they were told “there was no cause for alarm and that their request was discountenanced.” Meanwhile, several of the hotelkeepers abandoned their posts.15
The ill students sweated and suffered with sustained fevers as high as 105 degrees. Some suffered bloody noses. Some found red “rose” spots—as with measles—on their chests and bellies, while their stomachs roiled with nausea. All suffered with general aches and pains, lethargy, and diarrhea. As the fever increased, the patients fell into a delirium, causing an agitation that gave the disease its nickname of nervous fever.
Overall, 10 percent of those stricken with typhoid in the nineteenth century died. Its cause—a bacillus named salmonella typhi—would not be known until well into the twentieth century, when researchers recognized that the disease is transmitted by food or water contaminated with feces or urine. Barnyards near a spring, cattle grazing and excreting in a pasture near a water source, or even flies that had swarmed privies or manure piles could spread the disease. The disease could also easily spread through unwashed hands when a person ill with typhoid prepared food—especially raw vegetables.
The shaken faculty responded to the typhoid threat by turning one of the university’s vacant hotels into a hospital. They also instructed the proctor to “procure sufficient attendance upon” the sick students and hoped that the fever would disappear as mysteriously as it had appeared.16 A little more than two weeks later, however, Dunglison reported that the fever still lurked in the precincts, noting that “two new cases of fever had recently broken out, one of which was of a most aggravated character, and that it was probably infectious, if Typhus Fever ever is so, and that moreover, some of the other cases had assumed a character by no means favorable.”17
The already sick students were getting sicker, and more students were coming down with the fever. By early February, more than a third of the student body, forty-four students, had abandoned their studies and the school. The disease continued to claim victims, some described as being extremely sick, including a “recent case … more malignant in its appearance than any former case.”18 The fever’s spread finally panicked the students. By late February 1829, twenty-one were listed as overcome with typhoid, and sixty-two students had fled the precincts or told the chairman they were leaving “under apprehensions which the Faculty cannot deem groundless.”19
Word of the illness, meanwhile, had spread across the country. Josiah Quincy, the new president of Harvard, was interested in Jefferson’s elective system and was on his way to Charlottesville when he heard of the typhoid outbreak. He turned around, contenting himself to write a letter to Madison in which he requested details of the innovative university’s inner workings.
As students streamed away from the university, Dunglison worried that some of the “worst” students had left “under the pretence of sickness or the fear of being sick” and were spreading “an alarm throughout the Country highly calculated to injure the institution.”20 Still, despite what a temporary closure might mean for the university’s reputation and enrollment, the professors saw no alternative than to shut the university down. They granted the remaining students leave to withdraw “for the purpose of avoiding the danger to which they may possibly be exposed by continuing in the university.” The faculty suspended classes until March 1.21
Some students, however, had nowhere to go. Professors continued to informally teach them, while the proctor inspected the buildings and grounds in a blind attempt to eradicate the cause of the fever. Some suspected the disease emanated from the Anatomical Theatre, where students learned to dissect corpses. The facility, a large brick building that stood just west of the Rotunda, consisted of a spacious, airy dissecting room, a lecture hall, and an “Anatomical Museum.”
Dunglison ordered the proctor to “remove every cause, if there be any, which can tend to produce disease; and for greater salubrity that he cause all the dormitories & Hotels to be thoroughly cleansed and whitewashed.”22 The massive cleaning effort couldn’t hurt, but it wouldn’t help either. In the early nineteenth century, the existence of germs was still unknown. Most medical doctors clung to a theory promoted by the “miasma” school, which taught that diseases came from bad air, atmospherics, or the vapors that rose from filth. They believed that emanations from marshes or any foulness could mix with the air and cause illness. Dunglison, the school’s professor of medicine, who admitted his ignorance, nonetheless described the university’s location as extraordinarily healthy. During his years at the school, he noted, “I never saw a case of intermittent, which could be presumed to have originated there.”23 “Intermittent” was Dunglison’s word for malaria or ague.
In March, the Richmond Enquirer finally told its readers about the typhoid outbreak. The Enquirer, the mouthpiece of the Republican party under the editorship of the Jeffersonian apostle Thomas Ritchie, printed an article that defended university officials’ handling of the crisis and lashed out at those who said the school’s location was inherently unhealthy: “Is there any thing in the location of the University to which the existing malady is justly ascribable? … Nothing could be more felicitious than the location.”24
Further down in the same article, William Wertenbaker, secretary to the university’s Board of Visitors, put the number afflicted at twenty students plus seven others affiliated with the university. Of that total, Wertenbaker acknowledged, four had died. Everything, he assured readers, had been done to find the cause of the epidemic that had singled out the university. Still, he said, the faculty’s “researches have been fruitless; they cannot discover the slightest evidence of any local origin, and their confidence in the general salubrity of the place continues undiminished.”25
Eventually the epidemic subsided, and school life returned to normal. “There is very little sickness now within The precincts,” proctor Arthur Spicer Brockenbrough wrote to board member Cocke on March 18, 1829.26 To the full Board of Visitors, he offered a theory on the cause of the typhoid outbreak, blaming the way Jefferson designed the dormitories: “Very few of those young men (if any) have been accustomed to sleeping in rooms with the out door opening immediately upon them, which being thrown open early (by day light) of a cold morning, after having a hot fire the preceeding night, on their being exposed to the external air it is reasonable to suppose they would take cold—and consequently be more liable to take any infectious disease.” He also proposed an improvement to Jefferson’s design—adding a floor to the hotels to use as a hospital for ailing students.27
However, critics seized on the death and suffering to castigate the school for its irreligion. An Episcopal minister invited to preach at the university shortly after the epidemic suggested that the typhoid was God’s retribution.