12

“His Only Motive Was to Have a Little Fun”

The Board of Visitors, stung by the humiliating publicity surrounding the 1836 riot, met in August 1837 to reiterate that any student military company would be under faculty control. Furthermore, the board asserted, a military company could be “abolished at the pleasure of the Faculty” at any time. The board didn’t stop there. In a sweeping new round of rule writing, the board sought to extend its control over the most picayune aspects of college life. The board forbade the students from bringing horses, hacks, or carriages onto the precincts; barred all student orations; and refused to pay any bills due to merchants who sold liquor. The board also berated university officials: the proctor was ordered to report all offenses he had seen, even those at which professors were present; the hotelkeepers were told to stop raising hogs in the precincts; and the professors were ordered to strictly enforce the Uniform Law.¹

The need to write these rules must have been exasperating, if not infuriating, for board members, some of whom had been on the board since the school’s inception. Board members such as Madison, Cabell, Johnson, and Cocke had failed for more than a decade in their efforts to find the formula that would bring order out of chaos. They had tightened and loosened regulations, then tightened and loosened them again. But the students’ sense of honor, combined with their code of silence, their sense of entitlement, and the natural exuberance of youth, undermined the board’s efforts. Nothing the board did seemed to work.

In 1830 the Visitors had adopted a rule requiring punishment of not only offenders but any student who aided and abetted them. The following year the board demanded that the chairman tell them every year about every single student offense, the name of the person who reported the offense, and the punishment meted out. In 1832, they ordered the students to inform on each other. That same year, the board ordered the students to testify when summoned by the grand jury, forbade them from assembling in the library in the Rotunda, and in a move that gave professors wider authority, allowed them to refuse a student entry the following year if the student’s continued presence was deemed to be an “injury” to the institution. In 1833, they passed the riot curfew. The next year, angry at students’ disappearance from the school during Christmas, the board insisted the professors continue lecturing, with or without them in the classroom—Jefferson’s rule against a vacation during Christmastime must be kept. The same year, they threatened to dismiss any student who insulted a hotelkeeper. In 1835, increasingly alarmed at the number of students packing pistols, the board passed a law that even possessing a firearm could lead to expulsion. In 1836, they scolded professors for allowing students to go home at Christmastime and tiredly told them yet again to enforce the Uniform Law.

But the board’s rule-writing resolve was frequently followed by remorse. In 1830, for instance, the board told professors to be bold in stopping offenses but cautioned them to respect the students’ status as gentlemen. In 1832, the board failed to follow through on plans to gain state approval for its own court. In 1833, board members repealed the act requiring students to testify against each other and also advised the chairman to be less stringent in enforcing rules. In 1834, they abandoned the riot curfew law and softened the Uniform Law to allow students to wear nonuniform vests and pantaloons—though only within the bounds of the precincts.

While the board vacillated, the professors labored in the trenches, fighting their daily war against many students’ academic apathy, disregard for rules, idiotic drunkenness, and everyday violence. Where was Jefferson’s vision of faculty and students relating to each other as fathers and sons? It had evaporated. Professors found themselves acting—sometimes fearfully—as police, judge, and jury.

With the school now in its thirteenth year, many of the students of 1837 were acting as wildly as the students of the first year. They preferred whiskey to William Shakespeare, fighting to philosophy, cards to chemistry, and a dapper appearance to the drab dress code.

That damned dress code.

Despite their vaunted sense of honor, students intent on displaying their shiny boots, bright buckles, and the expensive cut of their clothing had no qualms about contemptuously tossing aside the uniform. Professors easily dismissed as lies the excuses students offered. For example, student C. H. Drew of Richmond claimed he had “purchased his pantaloons in a dark room” and thought they were within regulations.² A. C. Leigh of Amelia County, Virginia, averred that the merchant who sold him his pantaloons assured him they met university standards. Walter Nangle of Richmond said his uniform was “burnt by the carelessness of a servant.”³ Leroy Anderson of Alabama, charged with failing to wear his uniform vest outdoors, claimed he “walked out accidently.”⁴

Though students chafed at the uniform, it was an important part of the Board of Visitors’ campaign to deflate criticism that Jefferson’s school was for the rich, extravagant, and indolent. Students who wasted their money on finery struck the public as fops. Public support and the money it meant were critical to the existence of the young university. The General Assembly held the same view. In late 1837, the legislative Committee of Schools and Colleges concluded that the state’s five hundred university and college students had a collective debt of $100,000 (about $1.8 million today, or $3,600 per student). Legislators blamed students’ frivolity. “A common subject of complaint in regard to our university and colleges is, that only the sons of the rich can be educated at them; that their expensiveness shuts them against all others,” according to the committee report. “It cannot be denied that there is too much foundation for this complaint, and that the utility of these institutions is greatly limited and confined by this cause. But it will be apparent to any who will take the trouble to inquire, that the expensiveness complained of chiefly consists in the excess of expenditure beyond the necessary and proper expenses; which excess originating in credit can only be restrained by the suppression of that.”⁵

Parents, who considered payment of debt a matter of honor, just as their sons supposedly did, were forced to pay off merchants. Students, knowing their fathers were bound by honor to pay creditors, felt free to run up debts. In its 1837–1838 session, the General Assembly made it illegal to give credit to any student in the state.

But the professors’ pain in dealing with the violations of the Uniform Law paled in comparison to the unrelentingly sodden behavior of the liquor-loving students. Students continued to drink whiskey, juleps, wine with soda, champagne, and brandy. They drank in the dorm rooms, they drank on the road to and from town, and they drank in the taverns surrounding the university. Even when caught with a bottle in hand, the students were masters of the ready excuse. The bottle by their bedside had appeared mysteriously, the bottle in their pocket belonged to another, or some bizarre circumstance—a sudden drenching from rain or onset of illness—had compelled them to take a quaff of liquor. Nathaniel Burwell of Millwood, Virginia, accused of being stone drunk, explained that he had to drink a “bottle of spirits” to stay alive after falling through the ice of Maury’s Pond while skating. The bottle, he added, belonged to another student who had asked him to carry it in his pocket, “which was a large one.”⁶ William Horner of Warrenton, Virginia, accused of drinking in his dorm, said the claret accidentally appeared in his room and was not his. However, since it was there, he figured he might as well drink it. T. A. Wilson of Georgia said he awoke to find a julep in his room and so “drank of it.”⁷ One student accused of taking part in a drunken revelry in a carriage was asked point-blank if he had been drinking. According to the school records, he replied that that was an unfair question.⁸ Punishing students was difficult; students rarely implicated themselves and never their classmates.

Often the drunkenness begat violence. In April 1837, three students went into Charlottesville—one armed with a pistol he claimed to have borrowed for protection against town ruffians—got drunk at Keller’s Tavern, and then returned to the room of John Baldwin of Staunton, Virginia, bringing liquor and the pistol with them. One of the drunken students, James Chapman of Orange Courthouse, Virginia, pulled the pistol. John Sheppard of Henrico County, Virginia, feeling himself in danger, attempted to wrest it from his drunken friend. But the gun went off, shooting F. W. Gilmer of Albemarle. Horner, who was in the room, told Faculty Chairman Davis that Chapman had “intended to shoot at the door.”⁹ Chapman was dismissed. Baldwin, who spent another year at the school, eventually became a member of the Board of Visitors, a legislator, and a colonel in the Confederate army. Gilmer survived his wound to become a physician at the University of Pennsylvania. Later that month, a drunken student was suspended after trying to smash his way into the house of a local “colored” woman; other students pushed a “drunken vagabond” into a room where professors were meeting.¹⁰

But students didn’t need booze to misbehave or brawl. In December of 1837, William Whiting and Richard Jones tangled in a fight involving a shovel, a knife, and a chair. Whiting, of Cumberland County, Virginia, said the bigger Jones grabbed a shovel and used it to knock him down. Whiting pulled his knife. Jones stepped back but fell over a chair, which he then picked up to smash Whiting on the head. Whiting recovered, forcing Jones on his back, and during the tussle he said he accidently stabbed Jones. Jones, however, told the proctor that Whiting had stabbed him in the back. Whiting was scolded and told to turn over his knife. Three months later, an almost identical fight erupted. In March 1838, Alston Wright of Richmond stabbed another student who attacked him with a chair. Wright also escaped with an admonishment.¹¹

Those were isolated examples of violence. However, one month later, violence on a much broader scale engulfed the university yet again. The riot was the fifth suffered by the university since its inception fourteen years earlier. The cause this time was Jefferson’s birthday. Students wanted to have a Friday night ball on April 13 to celebrate the birthday of their school’s founder, dead now a dozen years. Professors were leery of what might happen, given the students’ behavior at a ball held the previous month. During the festivities, a student had nearly drunk himself “within an ace of perishing.” “Both his physicians despaired of him for some hours,” Professor Rogers noted.¹² The faculty refused to allow students to revel on Jefferson’s birthday. Students responded in their preferred manner—with a riot. They lit up the Lawn with candles, donned masks, and loaded their pistols. Rogers felt they had singled him out for abuse because they somehow had learned of his adamant opposition to the party. “On the birthday night, tar-barrels were burned on the Lawn, the belfry broken open and the bell rung nearly all night,” Rogers wrote to his brother Robert six days later. “Numerous students in disguise, with firearms, paraded the Lawn, assailed the doors and windows of some of the professors known to be unfriendly to the ball, and more particularly my own. At the same time the most insulting ribaldry was used, and their violence was such that neither I nor those in the house considered their persons safe. Accordingly we prepared ourselves with firearms.”¹³

The next day, the professors met to discuss the riot. In the middle of the discussion, a student walked in and threatened Harrison, now the chairman of the faculty. The faculty took no action, hoping that student anger would fade. But the next night, April 15, the university experienced “another and worse scene of violence.”¹⁴

“The dastards made a deliberate and almost silent attack upon my house, scarcely molesting anyone else,” Rogers confided to his brother. “They broke in my front door, stoned my house on all sides, and for half-an-hour one of them amused themselves by breaking the glass of my back windows. The night was dark, and he skulked behind the wall, and it was impossible to watch or he would have been inevitably shot.” Rogers blamed the code of silence for allowing this kind of behavior to continue. Though he would end up staying at the university until 1853, the violence prompted Rogers to tell his brother that he was ready to quit.¹⁵ The university, he concluded, would not survive unless dramatic changes were made. Most students, he told his brother, abhorred the behavior of the miscreants, “but here is the evil,—their reprobation is not active, and it is only by being so that the institution can be saved. Our police is worthless; two or three rowdies can with impunity stone our dwellings, destroy our property, peril our lives, and take from us that quiet without which the situation is unworthy of a man of science.”¹⁶

Following the by-now standard investigative procedure in which professors interrogated students and students refused to answer, a single student, Charles Hardwick of Georgia, was dismissed. Two others were suspended for a month for drinking on April 13, with the faculty lamenting that they could not link the two to the riot. But the riot of April 1838 was over, and once again students, with the exception of Hardwick, had escaped major punishment.

Despite years of shooting and knifing each other, of biting each other and swinging cudgels, canes, and chairs at each other, not a single student had been killed. And despite years of whizzing bullets, gunpowder bombs, and flying sticks and stones, and despite threats that prompted them to pull their own pistols, none of the professors had perished. That would soon change.