I am so sure of the future approbation of posterity, and of the inestimable effect we shall have produced in the elevation of our country by what we have done, as that I cannot repent of the part I have borne in co-operation with my colleagues.
—JEFFERSON TO CABELL, Feb. 7, 1826
Student promises to stay sober and out of trouble once again proved empty. The year 1843 opened with a brawl between roughneck townies and students at a cheap, popular whorehouse located on the road between the university and the town. Students Addison White of Abingdon, Virginia, and John Wooten of North Carolina claimed they were defending themselves against ruffians who were trying to oust them from the bordello. The two were also accused of giving a “free negro a most cruel and unmerciful flogging.” They both denied having anything to do with beating the free black man. White said he heard the man’s “shrieks and went up and begged the person whipping him to desist.”1
Other students were scolded for drinking, playing cards, resisting authority, and general carousing. While they pursued their pleasures with limitless energy, they were lazy students. Page after page of university records lists the names of students who failed to attend classes, made halfhearted attempts to complete assignments, or didn’t bother to complete them at all. The long list of indolent scholars was a veritable blue book of the gentry. Many students had not come to Jefferson’s university for an education but to polish their aristocratic credentials.
Their rank as gentlemen did not stop them from scuffling on the floor. In May, student Felix Gorman of Mississippi pulled his pistols on Samuel Oldham of Tennessee. Oldham, his sense of honor somehow offended by Gorman, had posted a threatening note on the Rotunda door. Gorman, expecting Oldham to make good on his threats, fetched his pistols from a lady friend who kept them for him. (Gorman would check in with her every few weeks to make sure his pistols were not rusting.) Securing the pistols had been a wise decision; two hours later Oldham arrived in Gorman’s room, backed up by a gang of friends. All of them were armed with clubs. Oldham demanded “satisfaction,” prompting Gorman to seize his own club, rush at Oldham, and knock him down with one swing. Oldham’s friends rushed Gorman with their own clubs. Gorman then pulled his pistols and threatened “to shoot anyone who might assault him.”2
Gorman was dismissed, but students were undeterred by punishment. That same month, student S. Dexter Otey of Lynchburg, Virginia, stabbed student Joseph B. Clements of Charlottesville during a scuffle. Otey was expelled.
The next year was no better. Students attacked houses in Charlottesville, broke windows, and staggered up and down the road, some in a state of “helpless intoxication.”3
In October 1844, several students committed a “violent outrage” by attacking a house on the road between school and town. Students hurled stones into the house, “breaking the window glass, sash and blinds, and endangering lives of the occupants.” The prime suspect, student James Galt Jr. of Fluvanna County, when confronted merely replied, “Well if I broke the window I can pay for it.” He escaped with a reprimand.4
The end of 1844 brought the hammer blow that university officials had always feared. On December 22, the state House of Delegates, which had patiently stood by year after year as students ran amok at the University of Virginia, directed a committee to investigate “the past history and present condition of the school.” Specifically, the Committee on Schools and Colleges was told to find out once and for all if the General Assembly should continue to give the university its annual $15,000.5 The news struck the academic community like a bolt of lightning.
“My neighbors think and talk of nothing but the possible results of legislation upon our endowment,” wrote Professor Rogers, now faculty chairman, to his brother Henry. Rogers professed confidence that the university would emerge from the threat of the investigation—and from the threat of the loss of state money—but his brother sensed that Rogers was “not at ease” about the matter.6
Indeed, Rogers had reason to be uneasy: the committee’s investigation held devastating possibilities. The student body continued to number fewer than two hundred, which meant that income from student fees and room and board were low. The school still had debts totaling more than $17,000 and annual expenses of more than $21,000. Repair costs were also beginning to mount. Jefferson’s buildings were now two decades old, and the wear and tear was becoming too pervasive to ignore. The school was now spending nearly $3,000 a year to shore up stone walls, whitewash buildings, repair columns and roofs, and clean out pumps. There were carpenters to hire, as well as blacksmiths, painters, locksmiths, and bricklayers. The university needed the state’s $15,000 desperately.
Cabell and the Board of Visitors, along with Rogers and the other eight professors, viewed the legislature’s action not only as a possibly fatal attack but as further proof of Virginia’s cheapskate attitude toward its public university. They pointed out that the universities in Louisiana and Alabama were getting the same amounts or more from their state treasuries, yet they had nowhere near the reputation for scholarship as the University of Virginia. Officials argued that Jefferson’s school offered the same quality education as Harvard, but Harvard did so with an annual income of $60,000, four times what Jefferson’s school was receiving. Surely state legislators realized they were getting a big bang for their buck.
Friends of the university chimed in with their ideas on how to improve public perception of the school. One Staunton resident, William R. Johnson, suggested in a letter to Rogers that the University of Virginia should take control of the Virginia Military Institute. The Lexington institute, just five years old, was already popular and known statewide for the discipline of its cadets and its sense of frugality. Its reputation, in short, was the exact opposite of the university’s. If the university gobbled up the institute, Johnson wrote, the university would enjoy some of the newer school’s popularity:
This seems to me desirable when I consider some of the sources of the prejudices against the University, her real or apparent want of discipline and economy, or when I look only at the frequent abuse which has been of late unjustly heaped upon her, and the strong feeling of hostility manifested in the present Legislature. … Some change in the organization of the University, if not its total destruction, seems to be meditated by its enemies, on the ground or the pretext of its expense and disorder; the military system seems to be the favorite of the day.7
To this letter Rogers responded that he and the other professors unanimously felt the university’s disciplinary woes could be solved by the establishment of a campus police force (which, incidentally, would require an increase in state funding, not a decrease or elimination). Rogers also suggested that the University of Virginia’s unruly students were probably no worse than students at other leading institutions, and the professors were “still strongly hopeful of steady and increased success, notwithstanding the ungenerous enmity of those who, from prejudice or ignorance, are laboring for our overthrow.”8
Though Rogers’s response to Johnson was polite and short, the House of Delegates committee demanded more detailed answers. Legislators wanted to know why they should continue to pay for a school widely perceived as a place where rich boys went to drink and raise hell and terrorize the peaceful community of Charlottesville. To Rogers, as faculty chairman, fell the task of responding.
In a fourteen-page report, Rogers defended the school by completely ignoring its disciplinary problems. Instead, he focused on its attainments. While the university had not yet lived up to its promise, Rogers conceded, it had dramatically improved the state’s scientific and literary training. And it had done so using unique methods, he noted: its system of elective courses was still unusual in American higher education, and its use of classroom lectures to accompany textbooks was still a further peculiarity. The university, said the chairman, was proving every day that the two educational innovations were superior to the way all other American universities and colleges ran. Rogers, in short, was reminding legislators that the university was a bold experiment in education, conceived by Jefferson, but funded by a farsighted legislature.
Next, Rogers defended the school against allegations that professors were paid too extravagantly. The school’s professors, he noted, averaged an annual salary of $2,350 in 1844, a sum in line with the pay of professors at Princeton, West Point, and the Universities of Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Considering the amount of teaching that went on at the University of Virginia, Rogers concluded, the state’s annual outlay of $15,000 “cannot fail to be regarded as but a very moderate contribution.”9 The House of Delegates accepted Rogers’s report.
But, as if on cue, students again rioted. The 1845 riots had no roots in any student grievances, such as the Uniform Law or the earlier faculty crackdown on the military company, but sprang from students’ unfettered sense of mischief. The timing could not have been worse.
In late 1844, a group of students had banded together to form a “musical” band known as the Calathumpians. Their express purpose was to create mayhem across the Lawn, or, as one of the group’s members said, to engage in “fun—and frolic and childish folly.” Tooting horns, beating drums, and torturing other instruments, the group paraded up and down the precincts in the darkness, denying classmates and professors sleep.10
Weeks passed, and the group became rowdier. The Calathumpian band, which some of the better students had now left, according to early accounts, began to plot to bring the school year to an early close. In February 1845 they found a cause to set their plot in motion. That day, three students were suspended for disorderly conduct at one of the hotels. That night, the band members organized a protest parade. But instead of blowing horns and banging drums, they donned masks and attacked the hotel and the home of chairman Rogers with sticks and stones, breaking down a door and smashing windows. The faculty ordered the proctor, Willis Woodley, to get the names of the miscreants so they could be turned over to a grand jury.
The determination to go straight to the civil authorities calmed the precincts, but only briefly. The Calathumpians reassembled to hurl stones against the parlor window of a professor’s pavilion while ladies were in the room. Then, on April 2, one member of the roving band startled the wife of the chemistry professor, Robert Rogers—chairman Rogers’s brother, who had arrived in 1842—by rapping on the window. Professor Rogers was out at the time, but when he returned, he found his wife still shaken. When he heard the band returning, he quickly stepped outside his pavilion and hid behind a pillar. As one of the students stepped toward his front door, Rogers leapt out, picked up the student, and carried him inside. When the other students threatened to intervene, Rogers warned them that he was armed and would shoot. They left.
But the nightly disturbances only grew worse. On April 14 the students hurled stones and wood against the doors of the pavilions, smashed the blinds, and shattered the windows. The professors’ wives and children were now in a state of terror. Two days later students—and possibly some students who had already been dismissed—rode up and down the arcades firing pistols. The Lawn became a racetrack, as one student and a former student raced horses—stolen from the proctor’s stable—while other students wagered ice creams and money. The following three nights brought no respite. Students once again attacked the pavilions, hurling stones at windows where the glass had already been shattered. “It was said that, on the following morning, several of the houses had the aspect of having been bombarded by a mob,” the historian Bruce noted.11 The Rotunda did not escape the students’ violence: two of its doors were battered open, and many of its windows lay in shards.
Professors appealed to the students, but in vain. They then looked to the better students to help calm the passions of their classmates, or possibly to identify them, but their pleas met with indifference: ring-leaders of the riots had threatened to beat any student who worked to stop the mayhem. The professors imposed a lockdown—prohibiting students from leaving the precincts. On April 19, the faculty abruptly shut down the school, locking classrooms and suspending lectures. Professor Tucker, meanwhile, fearful for the safety of his two sons, H. Tudor and St. George, pleaded for permission to send the boys to Richmond. His fellow professors refused.
On Sunday, April 20, two days after seeking the advice of the Board of Visitors executive committee, the professors decided they had suffered enough: they agreed to call in the civil magistrates and the county sheriff to put down the disorder. The move was a measure of last resort, partly because professors considered it an admission that they themselves couldn’t stop the student misbehavior, and partly because the General Assembly would surely learn of the unrest once civil authorities got involved.
The students caught wind of the coming intervention, held a mass meeting, and swore to each other that no one would testify. Still, the following day local magistrates arrived on the precincts, and an armed guard was placed around the Rotunda. “We have so large an admixture this year of cowardly rowdies amongst us that some signal demonstration of the proper mode of dealing with them cannot help being salutary, and it will be useful for them to learn that we are prepared to punish their insults on the spot,” chairman Rogers had written two weeks earlier. Now he and the other professors were ready to make good on the threat.12
The proctor summoned twenty students to appear before the magistrates. Many of the students, though, simply vanished. In the afternoon, seventy of them, alarmed at the possibility that the militia would be called in, gathered at the university to debate their course of action. They disbanded after pledging to end the disruptions. But they were too late. Albemarle County high sheriff Benjamin Ficklin marched a force of two hundred armed men onto the Lawn, turning the precincts into occupied territory.
As they had before in similar circumstances, the students claimed to be outraged. They gathered again that night to pass a resolution that expressed bafflement that the faculty would not accept their pledge to restore peace. Calling in the militia, the students said, was an affront to their honor. Abruptly, about 125 students withdrew from the university (initial enrollment in 1844 had been only 194). Cabell, realizing that the university was in a “critical & perilous situation,”13 hastily summoned the Board of Visitors, and on April 23 it endorsed the faculty’s response. The students were in revolt, the officials refused to back down, and the university was at a standstill.
Classes resumed on April 25, but word of the rioting had spread across Virginia. What, the public was now asking, was wrong at the University of Virginia? Why was it constantly in turmoil? Why should we continue to pay for it? “The animosity to the University which lurked chronically in many minds because of political or religious prejudices, seized upon the notorious course of events there as a weapon for blackening its prospects beyond recovering,” Bruce noted, summing up the storm of negative publicity that washed over the school.14
For the rest of the year, the fate of the university hung in the balance. Supporters defended it, opponents thrashed it, legislators debated it, and the common people wondered how it would all turn out. Stoking the heated discussion were the newspapers. “Public rumour and the newspaper have already spread far and wide the reports of our riots,” lamented chairman Rogers. He added: “The annals of college disturbances could hardly furnish another narrative as disgraceful to the character of the youth of the country as the history of this would be.”15
A war of words erupted between the Richmond Enquirer, the bastion of Republican thinking, and the Richmond Whig, a steady opponent of the university since its inception. The debate over the university’s future became a scrum between rival editors. On April 29, the day Rogers complained about the publicity, the Whig published a front-page account of the riots, which the writer described as “a sad and most disgraceful affair.” “Most of the Students,” the article stated, “have left; the Faculty, it is understood, will resign; and for the present the College appears to be broken up.” The Whig claimed five hundred militiamen were now in charge of the university.16 The Whig followed up the incendiary article on May 2, when it published a student’s account of the “disturbances.”17
The Enquirer responded on May 6 by publishing the faculty’s version of events, penned by Rogers. In his letter, Rogers contended that calling out the militia was the only way to stop the riots, and he noted that the Board of Visitors in its April 23 meeting had resolved to take the same steps if there were future riots. The Enquirer prefaced the article with its own commentary that essentially ignored the riots as yesterday’s news: “We see nothing in the recent unfortunate disorders to prove a radical and permanent injury to the College, and we invoke all its friends, whether parents or students, to suffer not their ardor to be dampened, but to rally with new energy to the support of an Institution that has shed the light of education over Virginia, and has given proofs of its important benefits in many of her distinguished sons; now in the State and National Councils.”18
But critics were not to be dissuaded by the Enquirer’s gilded words. Three days later the Whig published a piece in which it said the students were no doubt “in the wrong” but nevertheless criticized the professors for overreacting. The proper response, the Whig’s editor opined, would have been to ignore the weeks and months of nightly disturbances until the students grew tired and gave up.19 The newspaper kept up the criticism on May 16, arguing that the professors’ use of military force “could only be the act of Philosophers, unskilled in the ways of the world, and ignorant of the arts by which to govern men.”20
The Charlottesville Jeffersonian, a newspaper whose allegiances were never in doubt, accused the Whig of “vandalism,” describing its attacks on the university and the professors as a deliberate attempt to pull the school apart brick by brick:
The Richmond Whig seems determined to destroy the University if it can either by withholding the annual appropriation of $15,000, which the state gives this institution, or by building up another College or University in Richmond, or by both.
Far better would it be for the State to appropriate $20,000 a year, and then the fees to the professors might be abolished, and the indigent and needy youth educate themselves at a very trifling expense;—and in this way a host of teachers might spring up in all parts of the State; and instead of 200 students 600 would begin attendance on the Lectures.21
At this point the Enquirer weighed in with more opinions. A May 30 article signed by “A Friend to the University” blamed the low attendance on the high cost of enrollment, which the writer in turn blamed on the exorbitant salaries of the professors. On June 3, an Enquirer piece laid the blame at the feet of the legislature: had the General Assembly only adopted Jefferson’s plan years ago to fund public schools, more young boys would eventually have found their way to the University of Virginia. The Morgantown Mountaineer, meanwhile, speaking on behalf of the state’s western residents, simply dismissed the university’s value altogether, calling its reckless students “emphatically the worthless sons of rich Eastern Virginia aristocrats, who rejoice in the prostration of Western Virginia.”22
In June, the Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser began in earnest a campaign to create a university in Richmond, a move that would, in effect, kill Jefferson’s school, since the legislature could only afford to support one. To create enthusiasm for its plan, the newspaper boasted that a university in Richmond would only cost half as much to operate, assured Richmond parents that their sons would remain under their watchful eyes, and urged landowners to donate land for the school. “But our emphatic appeal is to the poor men of Richmond: Which among us does not desire to educate his son thoroughly?” the newspaper asked before launching into an attack on Jefferson’s school. “The University —erected by the People at an expense of hundreds of thousands, and sustained since its commencement at the cost of additional hundreds of thousands—the University is inaccessible to us: Other Institutions are scarcely less beyond our reach. With a University at our door, we could completely educate our sons at a cost within the limits of our means.”23
The paper followed up with an article that suggested “too much money has been wasted upon” the University of Virginia. The writer closed by arguing that the state’s annual payment to the university should be reduced.24
Other newspapers across the state joined in the debate, and many of them urged the university’s friends and alumni to be more energetic in its defense. Cabell and the other Visitors asked Tucker, respected statewide for the sharpness of his legal mind, to draft a petition to the General Assembly to set up a court near the university. Tucker’s health was waning, though, and the Visitors didn’t pursue the idea. The Visitors also asked Cabell to persuade the legislature to forbid dismissed students from staying within five miles of the university, but that plan likewise went nowhere. The board even toyed with the idea of establishing a president over the university—a move that would have pained Jefferson—but the idea evaporated along with the other schemes.
However, the board did make several clever moves to shore up the school’s tenuous position. Aware that many Virginians still viewed it as a haven for the dissolute rich, the board proposed a plan in which one poor student from every senatorial district in the state would receive a free university education—as long as the General Assembly paid for his board. If the General Assembly was truly concerned about the state’s poor, it now had an opportunity to remedy the problem.
The board also proposed the creation of a history and English department. The move was purely offensive. At a time when state legislators were contemplating a cut in funding, Cabell moved to squeeze them for more.
In a final and far-reaching move, the board made two critical new hires. Both George Tucker and Henry St. George Tucker, who between them had seen years of student recklessness, had submitted their resignations. Now, the board quickly filled their slots with two men known as pillars of moral rectitude, men whose religion and reputations were widely esteemed.
John B. Minor was tapped to become law professor, a position he would hold for fifty years, earning him the distinction of signing more law diplomas than anyone in the country’s history. Born in 1813 in Louisa County, Virginia, Minor began life with a reputation as a weakling. To improve his health, he began walking. At one point he walked through the states of Ohio and New York. His regimen worked: his stamina became legendary. He entered the University of Virginia as a student in 1831 and stayed for three years. He later married Professor Davis’s daughter. An Episcopalian, he considered his religion the “master-chord in his life.”25 He taught Sunday school to slaves and a Bible class to students. One of the university’s prominent academic buildings bears his name today.
To fill the moral philosophy post vacated by George Tucker, the board chose William Holmes McGuffey, a balding, bespectacled scholar of philosophy already known for putting together the phenomenally successful series of textbooks known today as the McGuffey Readers. Born in 1800 in Pennsylvania, McGuffey was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1829. A teetotaler, he believed in temperance and the moral righteousness of Christianity, and he loved to teach children. With the hiring of McGuffey and Minor, the board had instantly crafted a more pious public image for the school, just when it needed it most.
The board was not alone in the effort to save the university. The school’s alumni came to its defense as well. Meeting in the Rotunda on July 3 and 4, the former students chose seven of the society’s most prominent members to carry out a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign with Cabell. Cabell, as rector, would present the university’s case before the General Assembly. Meanwhile, the seven alumni would draft their own statement on behalf of the school.
The seven alumni—all Virginians—were an argument themselves for the worth of the university; their lives and careers were proof of its benefit to the state. History records them as Franklin Minor, a state legislator from Albemarle; Willis Bocock, a state legislator from Buckingham; Jefferson’s grandson George Wythe Randolph, a navy man who would later become the Confederacy’s secretary of war; William Frazier, a state legislator from Augusta County; Egbert Watson, an Albemarle judge; John B. Young, a prosecutor from Henrico County; and William C. Carrington, a Charlottesville lawyer. These men did not just have friends in high places—they lived and moved in high places themselves.
The document they drafted argued forcefully for the continued financial support of the university, while attacking head-on the common criticisms against the school: its godlessness, the extravagance of its student expenses, professor salaries, and the scandalous behavior of its students. The committee of seven also appealed to their fellow Virginians’ sense of posterity: “Let not the well matured work of JEFFERSON, and MADISON, and MONROE, and CABELL, and JOHNSON, be pulled to pieces in a moment, at the thoughtless bidding of irresponsible anonymous writers and reckless reformers.”26 In a state proud of its rich history, these were powerful words.
But the alumni’s main line of attack was to argue that the school was no more expensive than any other school in the nation and the money it received from Virginia paled in comparison to state funding of other schools such as Harvard. The university cost the state $15,000 annually, amounting to only 1.25 cents per Virginia resident. The availability of the university meant Virginia’s sons could stay in the state to obtain an education. The alumni calculated that 2,338 students had attended lectures at the university since its opening and had spent $422,800—money that would have in theory gone outside the state if the university had never been built.
Factoring in money that out-of-state students brought to the school, the alumni estimated that the university had generated $1.3 million for the state—double the sum spent on the school and nearly $30 million in today’s money.
“What other great work in which Virginia has invested her funds, has yielded her a richer harvest of fruits? and this without estimating the important benefits of education and science it has disseminated throughout our limits, and which have blessed all classes of citizens, rich and poor, high and low, in giving us more skilful and better informed positions, lawyers, farmers, schoolmasters, divines, judges and law-makers,” the alumni wrote.27
As for the chronic complaint that only the rich could afford to attend the university, the alumni argued that an average student would need only $332 for one school year. The alumni said the sum was trifling and considered “the clamor in the country in regard to the great expense necessary to students at the university to be groundless. … If young men spend more than this, parents and guardians must blame them, and not lay the extravagance of their sons and wards at the door of the university. … Young men will wear clothes and spend pocket money to suit their tastes and conditions in life, at whatever school, college or university they may be sent to or indeed even at home.”28
Were professors paid too much? To that constant question, the alumni responded that an average professor earned less than $2,400—not even as much as South Carolina paid its professors. In addition, professors at other colleges were assisted by tutors who lightened their workload.
The churches’ distrust of Jefferson’s religious views had continued. Now the alumni moved to counter that animosity by contending that the perceptions of the university as a godless institution were “wholly unfounded.”29 The alumni noted that a chapel had been built next to the Rotunda within the last several years. Furthermore, the university invited chaplains of all the denominations to preach in the precincts on a rotating basis. The students, professors, and staff chipped in $500 to $800 a year to pay the chaplains’ salaries. Students and professors also paid for Sunday school and the support of a Bible society. Though Jefferson gave religion no formal place in the university, it flourished nonetheless. “To all outward appearance, religion is as much respected and as liberally supported at the university as elsewhere, and this without the disadvantage of even the semblance of sectarian influence.”30
After tackling religion, the alumni addressed the issue that had roiled the state for the past three months and sharpened the threat to the university’s existence—the April riots. The alumni boldly asserted that the riots weren’t so bad and happened all the time at other colleges and were part of the inexplicable fabric of college life. In addition, the alumni charged that the General Assembly and the people of Virginia were overreacting; riots at schools in other states never threatened their existence: “It is owing simply to the fact, that the communities in which they are situated, the whole body of the people, instead of pouncing upon the college, and threatening to tear it down, (as if disappointed that the rioters had left their work unfinished) had uniformly extended to the authorities a generous confidence; have come forward to aid and not to embarrass them; and instead of giving a willing ear to the complaints of the rioters, and the disaffected, have leaned to the side of law, order and authority, against insubordination and rebellion.”31
Why, then, should the University of Virginia’s future be at stake? “When will Virginians learn to cherish their own institutions, to extend a like generous confidence to their constituted authorities, and to come up to their aid and support in all their difficulties?”32
The alumni had made their argument. Cabell would now make his own pitch to save the university he had cofounded with Jefferson. In his annual report to the General Assembly, Cabell carefully echoed the alumni’s talking points and at times blamed the legislature for its lack of support. Cabell said the riots were not proof of any “inherent defect” in the university but were largely caused by students who had been dismissed.33 The General Assembly, he suggested, should have granted the university the power to keep dismissed students at a distance from the school. He said the university’s graduates had become teachers and ministers throughout the state; the university was cheap compared to the cost of Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary; and it had become the state’s premier school of higher education. Cabell also pleaded for continued state support; unlike other, religious-affiliated colleges, such as Harvard and William and Mary, the University of Virginia could not rely on the private donations of religious benefactors. State support was critical.
In January 1846, the General Assembly—where the Whig party had lost power to the Democrats the year before—sent a team of legislators to investigate the school and get a firsthand look at what exactly was going on. The visit followed more months of student unrest. Though professors and townspeople had long grown tired of student misbehavior, the students burned a tar barrel on the Lawn and resumed their nightly parades with horns and bells. That month the investigating committee sent the faculty a letter requesting their testimony on the affairs of the university. Professor Edward Courtenay, now the chairman of the faculty, rushed off to see Cabell. After conferring with the rector and other board members, he wrote a note to the investigators saying faculty members would be happy to testify in writing or in person. Courtenay personally met with the investigators to assure them of the faculty’s full cooperation.
Students, however, were much less cooperative. To the horror of school officials, the students appeared eager to draw the investigators’ attention to their disregard for authority. They stole a second tar barrel from the basement of the proctor’s office and set it ablaze on the Lawn—scorching a hideous black streak into the spacious expanse. Acrid black smoke billowed into the air throughout the night as students set off firecrackers, fired their pistols, and “made other discordant noise.” As the board members housed within the precincts tried to sleep, students lit up another tar barrel at midnight. Students with blackened faces and wearing “blanket caps” created a “scene of great riot and noise.”34
The next morning, Cabell, Courtenay, and Professor Harrison traveled to Charlottesville to testify before the investigators about the April riots. That night, students resumed their noisy antics on the Lawn. Then, as if to send a loud and defiant message to the General Assembly, students marched off to the house where the investigators were staying. The following day, January 23, the investigators wrapped up their hearings with testimony from members of the Board of Visitors and a statement from Courtenay.
In the end, despite the students’ antics, the General Assembly was swayed by the answers they received from visitors and professors, by the testimony of the university’s distinguished alumni, and by the machinations of Cabell. The investigators concluded that funding should continue. The university was an ornament to the state and, despite years of turmoil, was serving a noble purpose, the committee said in its report. The school’s terrible reputation, established in its early years under Jefferson’s lax disciplinary system, was no longer deserved—despite the latest riot. The university had improved, but the public’s perception had not, the General Assembly stated. “During this experimental stage of its career, it is well known that habits of dissipation and extravagance, with other offensive irregularities, prevailed among the students to a lamentable extent,” according to the report. “The unfavourable impression thus occasioned in the public mind, far outlasting any reasonable cause in the government of the university, has continued, though with greatly diminished force to obstruct its advancement even to the present day.” The report conveniently ignored years of violence, riots, and the murder of a professor.35
Still, the critics had been defeated. The allies of the university had won. The war was over. The university had survived several riots, years of student stupidity and violence, the enmity of the religious establishment, the animosity of Jefferson’s political opponents, disease, bad publicity, and the vacillating governance of its own Board of Visitors.
Jefferson had created an institution too unique to destroy. Cabell, the ultimate Jefferson disciple, had spent his health and life to keep it alive. “We have had a most interesting session,” Cabell wrote his wife after the investigating committee left Charlottesville. “Had I not assembled the Board of Visitors, the days of the University would probably have been numbered. At one time I was greatly alarmed. But I am much relieved, as the Committee seemed to be most favorable impressed by the examinations which they made.”36
Indeed they were.