For nearly a decade, the professors and governing board of the university had labored to keep the students in check. Yet the mayhem continued unabated. After a decade of trying, the school’s leaders still had not hit on the right formula to tame the wild teenagers in their midst.
Nighttime on the Lawn often remained a scene of drunken revelry. Students blew horns, fired pistols, and sang profane songs. When professors rolled out of their beds and left their pavilions to end the disturbances, more students would pour out of their dormitories, joining in the commotion or hiding those who were involved. A raucous, nocturnal affray that began with a half-dozen students easily mushroomed into a clamorous parade of dozens. Even some of the students began to complain about the constant nightly din.
In September 1833 the Board of Visitors—possibly at the suggestion of Professor Bonnycastle—devised yet another strategy to calm the campus. The Visitors adopted an order stating that whenever there was a “riot, or other serious violation of good order and decorum” on the precincts at night, the faculty chairman could “cause a signal to be given” for all students to return to their rooms and stay there until the morning. The Visitors suggested that the best signal would be the ringing of the Rotunda bell. Students caught outside their rooms after the bell was rung would be subject to any punishment, including expulsion, the faculty deemed appropriate.1 The rule’s intent was clear: students making noise on the Lawn at night would no longer be able to count on their fellow students to swell their ranks. But, as in previous efforts to bring order to the university, school officials ultimately buckled under pressure from students.
Professors did not tell students about this new restraint until November, when it suddenly became a flash point and cause of widespread alarm. During the first week of the month, Bonnycastle received a tip that students were plotting a “nullification” of the Uniform Law. Angry at professors for enforcing the rule so rigorously, some students had posted a notice headlined “Rebellion Rebellion!” on at least one of the school’s pillars, and the notice called for a student meeting to be held in a dancing room to determine how to resist the “tyrannical conduct” of the faculty. Many students had signed their names to the notice.2
Bonnycastle responded by posting the new antiriot law—the one that imposed a curfew at the ringing of the Rotunda bell. Students’ outrage at this latest attempt to curb their behavior caused them to suddenly forget their discontent with the Uniform Law. The antiriot law now became the target of their ire. To plot resistance against the faculty, they agreed to meet in one of the hotels. When Bonnycastle had the hotel doors locked, several smashed a door and entered anyway, letting more than sixty determined students pour in behind them. At the meeting, they resolved that the antiriot curfew was an ex post facto law that they did not need to obey.
The professors, whom Bonnycastle encouraged to stand firm in the face of the growing rebellion, reacted by targeting the students who broke into the hotel, singling three of them out for punishment, possibly dismissal. As usual, their fellow students rallied around to protect them. Douglas Cooper of Mississippi and John Jones of Pennsylvania notified the professors that sixty-eight students had vowed to leave the university if the faculty punished the three. Bonnycastle replied that “such an intention would not alter the course of the Faculty.”3
The lines were drawn. Neither side would back down. At one point in the standoff, Bonnycastle, fearing the students would seize the Rotunda and thwart any attempt to ring the bell and impose curfew, considered a plan to put a bell by his pavilion. But the students met again. They appointed Thomas L. Preston of Washington County, Virginia, who would one day go on to become the university’s rector, as head of a committee to address the professors. Preston told them the three students they had charged with breaking into the hotel were in fact innocent. Preston reiterated the students’ view that they were not obligated to obey the antiriot law, and as for breaking into the hotel, they felt they had a right to meet there whenever they wanted. The students were ready to accept any punishment for their actions, Preston said, “let the consequences be what they may.”4
After Preston and his committee colleagues left, the Reverend William Hammett, a chaplain who had recently been given permission to preach at the university, asked to speak. Hammett said the students were indeed agitated over the new antiriot rule, but most of them probably wanted to retreat from their position, if only they could do so with honor. The chaplain urged the professors not to punish the three students.
As it had before, the faculty backed down. Asserting that the three students they had intended to punish were no more guilty than any of the others, the professors censured the students and wrote letters to their parents but otherwise let the matter drop. They nevertheless informed the students that they would have to get faculty permission before holding any meeting on campus. “We do not conceive,” responded the students in a rare concession, “that we have any right to break open any door in the University of Virginia.”5
The antiriot rule, meanwhile, was almost forgotten. The Rotunda bell was never rung to quiet students, though the following July the Board of Visitors, now led by Cabell, Jefferson’s old legislative ally, applauded the faculty for its course of action in quieting the rebellion. Still, the Visitors ordered the chairman to ring the bell only in the most serious circumstances and to rely upon the aid of the civil authorities when matters got out of hand.
For raucous students, then, nothing had changed. The hellions continued to drink at the local taverns (Keller’s, mostly, according to school records), consorted with prostitutes, beat the hotelkeepers’ slaves, and generally acted like spoiled despots. In one instance, three months after the rebellion over the antiriot law, Bonnycastle was forced to pull a gun on a student who refused to leave his pavilion. The student, John R. Jones, notorious for dueling and drinking, had come into the chairman’s office loud and belligerent, as if looking to provoke Bonnycastle into a fight, the chairman noted in his journal.
Bonnycastle had placed “a stick and a cowhide within reach” before Jones walked in but ultimately could not rid himself of the upset student until he threatened “to shoot him if he did not leave the office.”6 Bonnycastle later explained to his fellow professors that the gun was not loaded. “I used the weapon,” he said, “because it was at hand and afford[ed] the most expeditious means of ridding myself of a boasting and troublesome youth without the scandal of a personal scuffle with him.”7
Avoiding scandal was a requisite of the professors’ work. Just as the Board of Visitors tried to present the university in its best light to the General Assembly and the public, the professors worked hard to keep a lid on students’ misdeeds. In one instance, for example, the school’s janitor was ordered to quietly get rid of the various prostitutes who had taken to showing up at the university on Saturdays. Word of the prostitution, Bonnycastle suggested, “might injure the University.”8 The following month, February 1834, students grew restless over the dismissal of a classmate, sending the chairman an “insolent” resolution.9 Bonnycastle at first refused to alter the punishment. But several weeks later, apparently facing the prospect of more student unrest and the possibility of bad publicity for the school, Bonnycastle agreed to soften the punishment, anticipating that it “would have a beneficial effect upon the majority of students.”10 That same month, a group of students gathered outside Bonnycastle’s pavilion intent on breaking in and beating him. Law professor John A. G. Davis tipped Bonnycastle off to the plan, and the chairman loaded his pistols and waited for them in his study. Though a group of up to ten armed and masked students showed up, they knew that Bonnycastle was waiting for them, so they made no attempt to storm the pavilion. The chairman’s preparedness to use force therefore kept the peace, and word of the intended assault never made it past the official journal.
But not everything that happened at the university could be hidden from the public, and the rebellion that rocked the school in 1836 made headlines across the nation, prompted the dismissal of seventy students, infuriated parents, and forced the school to justify its actions publicly in a “circular,” a letter printed for wide distribution.
The cause of the riot centered on a student military company and the students’ right to keep muskets on the precincts. From the university’s beginning, Jefferson had planned for the students to receive military instruction, and in the earliest days they had formed themselves into companies and drilled. But the professors quickly made participation voluntary, and since the military instructor’s pay came solely from contributions from the students themselves, he had left the university by 1831. The faculty named the proctor—at the time John Carr—as military instructor, hoping that the position would “accustom the students to an obedience to his commands, and [would] give him a control over them that may prove very important in promoting the general discipline of the institution.”11 In practical terms, though, the proctor played no role in the military company, and his title became honorary.
In late 1832, the faculty began allowing the students to run the company themselves, under the conditions that the muskets to be delivered to the military instructor must be surrendered whenever required by the faculty; that the muskets were to be used solely for military exercises; that the students agreed that, while armed, they would never violate any university rules; and that they must never fire the muskets within the precincts without permission from the faculty chairman.
The students agreed and formed themselves into a company called the University Volunteers. They used the one hundred muskets the General Assembly had previously given to the school, returning them after use to the Charlottesville jailer for safekeeping in the local armory. The student soldiers paraded and drilled, fired the muskets, and like the other students, drank and partied. Though the student company professed to be training for combat, its one annual mission seemed to be to escort the student orator chosen to deliver the Fourth of July speech at the Episcopal Church in Charlottesville. The student escorted by the military guard in 1833 was Richard Parker of Norfolk, who in 1859 served as the judge who tried abolitionist John Brown in Charlestown, Virginia. The students that year asked for permission to fire a volley on the Lawn to honor the day and were given the go-ahead. But soon the sound of random musket shots was echoing off the university walls. The angry professors concluded that “unless they behaved better they should be disbanded.”12
The following session, Professor Emmet tried to make good on the threat, but the other professors by then had cooled down. They agreed the military company could remain as long as the students agreed to follow university rules, returned their muskets at the end of the session, and recognized the faculty’s right to dissolve the corps.
But near the beginning of the 1836–1837 session, the agreement began to unravel. In late September or early October of 1836, the company consisted of seventy-two students, and, unlike in previous years, they began to parade and drill with muskets but without the required permission from the faculty. For some reason, the students never bothered to ask for it. Professor Davis, now chairman, finally noticed the military maneuvers after two weeks had passed, and he reiterated the terms under which the students were allowed to act as a military company. The students ignored Davis. Davis called the company’s captain, Thomas H. Morris of Baltimore, to appear before the faculty. Morris did, and he astonished the professors by proclaiming that the military company neither agreed nor disagreed with the terms laid down by the faculty. The University Volunteers, Morris said bluntly, needed neither the university’s sanction nor the professors’ approval: it was, after all, a company of volunteers, and they “did not acknowledge the right of the faculty to proscribe to them terms of organization.”13
After Morris left, the professors instructed Davis to inform the students in writing that they were not a legally recognized military company and that any student caught with a musket who did not immediately give it up would be regarded as violating the rule against keeping firearms in the precincts. The faculty adopted a resolution calling for the immediate removal of the muskets. Davis opposed the measure. He wrote in the chairman’s journal that “considering the nature of students and the principles by which they are usually governed,” the faculty action would likely “array the whole company in opposition to the Faculty, so that we should be compelled to dismiss them all.”14 Davis was uncannily accurate in his prediction.
In light of the faculty’s demands, the company met and adopted their own resolution, making it as defiant as it could possibly be: “Resolved, That the company is not disbanded; that the company will attend and drill as usual, what the faculty may say to the contrary notwithstanding; that every member of the company pledge his honor to stand by his comrades, and that action of the faculty against one shall affect every individual.”15 The company handed a copy of the resolutions to Davis; it was signed by sixty-eight students. (Several members were unable to sign the document because they were under confinement, or “rustication,” at a local tavern for drinking violations.)
This time, the faculty didn’t back down. The professors sent the proctor out with a roster of company names to where the students were on parade. An officer of the company willingly called the roll, and every student on the roster but four was present, with a musket. Before the proctor left to inform the professors, he was given another resolution from the company to pass along to the faculty. A company officer bellowed, “Resolved, That we have our arms and intend to keep them.” He then asked the members to vote “aye” by shouldering their muskets. Every student, all sixty-three in the formation, did.16 No doubt the students felt themselves as noble and besieged as the defenders of the Alamo who had been slaughtered earlier that year by the army of Mexican general Santa Anna. The glorious deaths of William Travis, James Bowie, and Davy Crockett, rapidly becoming the stuff of legend, provided just the right kind of inspiration for the young hotheads at the university.
It was time for the professors to either put up or shut up. Unanimously, they voted to expel the rebellious students. The professors announced their decision at 4:00 p.m. on November 12, a Saturday, touching off two nights of violence that one of the later librarians, John Patton, called “excesses which have been unequalled, and which constitute a very dark page, in the history of the University.”17 In the darkness of the long weekend, students fired shots across the campus, smashed windows, rang the Rotunda bell without ceasing, battered doors, and heaved rocks and sticks at the professors’ pavilions. “Our doors and windows were broken, our persons threatened, our families insulted by a drunken and infuriate mob,” Professor Harrison wrote.18
The professors armed themselves.
“This morning about 6 o’clock, my family were awoke by the throwing of stones against the blinds of the chamber windows, beating with sticks against the front door, and firing muskets before the door,” Davis wrote on Sunday. “During almost the whole day, there was considerable disorder, by firing, ringing the bell etc., in and about the University. Even during religious service, a party were on the Rotunda ringing the bell.”19
Davis would later describe the “outrageous riot” as “a scene of unparalleled disorder and violence.” “The acts committed during the nights of its continuance,” he wrote, “particularly the second, were altogether different in their character from those which have usually distinguished college riots—they were the outrages of an infuriate mob. Our houses were attacked, the doors forced, and the blinds and windows broken. And there is reason to believe that not content with this, they contemplated proceeding to the desperate extremity of entering our houses for the purpose of attempting personal violence.”20
Two members of the Board of Visitors, Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Jefferson’s grandson) and William C. Rives, met with students and told them their persistent hostility was hurting any chance they had of overturning the faculty’s decision. But the students would not be dissuaded. Two of the dismissed members of the military company, Richard Carter of Aldie, Virginia, and Cary Cocke of Bremo, Virginia, told Davis that “far greater outrages would be committed by the dismissed students” unless the executive committee of the Board of Visitors took the appropriate action.21
The professors were carrying pistols “for the defence of themselves and their families,” Davis noted the following Monday, adding that the university buildings were also in “considerable danger.”22 The uncertain outcome of riots was always to be feared in early America, a circumstance that Davis no doubt kept in mind. Just a year earlier, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a mob of several hundred citizens had stormed the city’s gambling houses, seized five gamblers, and summarily executed them. In the end, Davis called for help. He dashed off letters to two justices of the peace and a deputy sheriff imploring them to come to the university’s aid. They did. Armed soldiers were stationed at the Rotunda and throughout the precincts, and a grand jury was hastily convened to begin an investigation. Students began fleeing the university in droves.
A week after the inception of the riot, on November 19, the students gathered at the Rotunda and unanimously passed a resolution that stated the whole misunderstanding should be taken up by the Board of Visitors “or by an enlightened and impartial public opinion.”23 If it turned out that the faculty did indeed have the right to disband the company, the students said, its members would acquiesce. Until then no muskets would be fired at the university.
But the riot had already become a public relations nightmare for the school. Newspapers throughout Virginia and beyond were writing about it. The natural philosophy professor William B. Rogers, who had taken his job the previous year, lamented that “from more than one quarter sentiments of approbation of the conduct of the students have been heard.” Students published a circular letter explaining their version of events, casting themselves as heirs to the Revolutionary fervor that built the nation, and imploring the public to give them the benefit of the doubt. The students begged readers to remember that the professors, like other men, were “as apt from sudden ebullitions of anger to commit acts which in their calmer moments they must regret and would amend but for their egregious pride.” At the same time, the circular concluded, the students were “free and independent men,” with the right “to resist oppression.”24
One student wrote to the New York Star that he and his classmates were “not aware that a single musket was fired” during the rioting and asked, “How then can the Faculty presume to say positively that muskets were fired when they had been informed by some members of the corps directly to the contrary.”25
The students were making headway in their publicity campaign. The Charlottesville Republican, while minimizing the riot as a difference of opinion over university rules, generally approved of the students’ behavior. “This little controversy is the more unpleasant,” according to the newspaper, “because the students have behaved generally with great propriety, both as to discipline and attention to their studies, for this and several previous sessions, and the University never enjoyed such bright prospects.”26 The Fredericksburg Arena downplayed the importance of the riot. And while the newspaper concluded the professors were right to dismiss the students, it also attempted to justify their behavior. The students’ conduct, the newspaper argued, “seems to have been, in the first place, the result of misapprehension of their rights in the premises, and ignorance, or misconstruction, of the University statues.”27
But with the students’ November 19 resolution on the table, Davis sensed that peace with honor was within grasp. He proposed a faculty resolution that would allow the dismissed students to return. Davis’s resolution noted that students, though misguided, might have been sincere in their belief that the military company was not subject to university rule. But a majority of professors refused to go along. Emmet proposed that only those students who disclaimed any participation in the riots should be allowed to return. Knowing that few if any students could return under Emmet’s proposal, Davis amended it, adding that if students could not disclaim participation, they could still reenter if they were willing to make “proper atonement.” The faculty adopted the proposal on November 22.28
Where newspapers had previously condemned the professors for acting too harshly, the faculty now felt the sting from newspapers claiming they had capitulated too easily in readmitting the students. The faculty felt compelled to respond. In a circular titled “Exposition of the Proceedings of the Faculty of the University of Virginia in Relation to the Recent Disturbances” and addressed “To the Public,” Davis sought to justify the school’s first mass dismissal of students and their subsequent readmittance. The issue, he wrote, was not the violence but the disobedience to university rules. With students now willing to acquiesce, he wrote, the matter was behind the university.
School records do not indicate how many of the dismissed students chose to return. Dismissal required Board of Visitors approval, and since the dismissals never made it as far as the board, the faculty chairman did not bother to write down the names of the returning students. Meanwhile, Patton later noted, “a sentiment adverse to the institution became rather general.”29 Whatever reputation the university had earned in the past decade had been tarnished. And while state officials had not gotten involved or threatened to shut down the school in the wake of the riots, the General Assembly would not forget the violence.