Sesquicentennial Celebrations
The University of Mississippi began a four-year Sesquicentennial
celebration February 24-25, with Charter Day academic convocations on
the Oxford and Jackson campuses and a legislative reception. The
Mississippi Legislature signed the charter to form the University in
1844, making it the first institution of higher learning in the state.
Four years later, in 1848, the University opened its doors to the
first 80 students. The observance-designed to showcase the
University's academic offerings, research, and service to Mississippi
and the nation-will climax November 6, 1998.
Benno C. Schmidt Jr., former president of Yale University and
currently president and chief executive officer of Whittle
Communications, was keynote speaker at the Charter Day convocation
in February. Historian David Sansing, who taught at the University
from 1968 until his retirement at the end of the 1993 Fall Semester,
presented an address on the early history of the institution. His
remarks, reflecting important aspects of Southern culture, are printed here.
The Founding of the State University
In the opening decades of the 19th century, America's Southern
frontier was a land of unbounded opportunity, and in that time of
plenty, Mississippi was a promised land. Between 1830 and 1840 more
than 8 million acres of good earth were planted in cotton in North
Mississippi. Land prices skyrocketed from $1.25 to $40 an acre. The
state's population soared from 136,000 to nearly 400,000. Said one
writer, "The cotton field whitened the earth and prosperity covered
the land with a golden canopy." During these flush times, Mississippi
established the plantation system, linking its destiny to a cotton
economy based on slave labor. The state also established 34 colleges.
In the early years of the Republic academicians, like entrepreneurs,
were infected with the American ethic of growth and greatness.
College founding in that period has been compared to canal building,
gold mining, and cotton planting. From the 1636 founding of Harvard to
the 1776 founding of the Republic, only nine colleges were established
in America. But from the end of the Revolution to the beginning of the
Rebellion more than 700 colleges were founded. Most were destined to
fail.
Mississippi's first venture in college building came at the
behest of its 26-year-old governor, William Charles Claiborne. Governor
Claiborne believed that education was a function of the state and that
an educated citizenry was essential to the success of American
democracy. "The very preservation of Republican Government in its
genuine purity and energy," he wrote, "depends upon a diffusion of
knowledge among the body of society." In 1802, acting on that belief,
he urged the Mississippi legislature to establish a system of free
schools and a seminary of learning. Although the lawmakers did not
endow a system of free schools, they did establish Jefferson College
in the town of Washington, 6 miles east of Natchez.
Following the founding of Jefferson College came several successful
church schools, including Elizabeth Female Academy, Mississippi
College at Clinton, and Oakland College at Lorman. Then came a
second generation of denominational colleges, some with imposing
names, like the University of Holly Springs. These new institutions
were locked in combat to win the public's favor and the precious few
students who could or cared to attend college in their home state.
Most of the sons and daughters of Mississippi's gentry went abroad or
to the North for their higher learning.
The failure of Jefferson College to win broad public
support, primarily because of its location in the southwest corner of
the state, prompted much discussion about the need for a state
university in a more central location. Such talk was discouraged by
the state's religious leaders who "regarded the encroachment of
scientific discoveries upon sacred mysteries with profound
intolerance" and who were already uneasy about the increasing
secularization of education.
The opposition to a state university that had prevented its
establishment for so many years was finally overcome
by a combination of two circumstances. First, the gradual depletion of
the seminary fund, which had dwindled from over $300,000 to less than
$90,000, convinced many of the state's leaders that the only way to
save what was left was to establish a state university and allocate
the remaining funds to that institution. Second, and more important,
in the late 1830s the Mississippi gentry's deepening sense of urgency
about educating their sons and daughters at home finally prompted them
to support a state university. "Those opposed to us in principle
cannot be trusted with the education of our sons and daughters," said
one state official. "Send your sons to other states," said another, and
"you estrange them from their native land [and] our institutions are
endangered."
In 1840, having at last decided to establish a public
university, the legislature appointed a committee to recommend a site.
After much debate legislators, by a margin of one vote, chose Oxford,
then a tiny hamlet nestled in the verdant hills of North Mississippi,
rather than Mississippi City, a thriving town situated on the state's
coast. The location of the university in a "sylvan exile" was a
conscious choice in keeping with an American tradition of higher
education. Most educators accepted the theory that a country setting
and fine scenery promoted learning and built character. Several years
after he had left the University of Mississippi and had become
president of Columbia University in New York, Frederick Barnard
scorned the notion that learning could not flourish in an urban
environment. That sentiment, he said, would have merit only "if study
were a pursuit to be prosecuted in the open streets."
After Oxford had been selected, the controversy over its location
resurfaced in the legislature. Some lawmakers from South Mississippi
bitterly complained. Horatio Simrall of Wilkinson County, the
southwestern-most county in the state, compared the location of
the University of Mississippi to the northern lights, which, he
conceded, "are the most brilliant known but are not seen or enjoyed by
near one-fourth of the globe." So will it be with the state
university, "this great `northern light' of Mississippi." "The greater
portion of the state," he predicted, "will never derive any benefit
from it." Simrall recommended that the state be divided into
four collegiate districts, each with a college that would receive an
equal portion of the seminary funds. After a lively debate Simrall's
proposal was defeated.
On February 24, 1844, the law chartering the University of
Mississippi was enacted, and as the campus was nearing
completion, the Board of Trustees met and adopted a curriculum.
Included was a course on the "Evidences of Christianity," which
sparked a heated exchange among board members, some of whom objected
to the introduction of a course on religion and the appointment of
ministers to the faculty. Even though the course on Christianity
remained a part of the curriculum, ministerial students were exempt
from tuition, and four of the school's first five presidents were
ministers, the University was still characterized by Mississippi's
evangelical clergy as an "organized infidel institution."
There were over 200 applicants for the four faculty positions, and 17
for the presidency. The leading contender for the president's position
was the Reverend Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, who was then president
of Emory College in Georgia. Reverend Longstreet wasso certain he would be
chosen that he prematurely resigned from his post at Emory. But the
anticlerical faction on the board blocked his selection and engineered
the appointment of George Frederick Holmes, a 28-year-old historian
from William and Mary. Of all the college presidents in antebellum
America only 26 were not ministers. The first president of the
University of Mississippi was one of those 26.
In his inaugural address President Holmes asked the students to
"pledge your honor as gentlemen that you will not violate" the
rules of the college. President Holmes's adoption of an honor
system, a rare innovation in the collegiate system at that time,
proved to be a disastrous experiment. The University's first
class of 80 students was described by one faculty member as
"disorderly and turbulent, idle, uncultivated and ungovernorable."
Of that now legendary class only 47 remained through the
first full session. By July 1849 five were expelled, eight
were suspended, twelve were allowed to withdraw, and eight were absent
from the University, their whereabouts unknown. President Holmes's
inability to maintain student discipline brought scorn to the
University and criticism to the youthful president, and he left in
less than a year. One historian said that Holmes left the University
because he could not "stand the racket."
When Holmes's successor, Augustus Longstreet, arrived in Oxford in
November 1849, he was greeted by 76 students and three faculty
members. Longstreet was a towering presence at the University.
He was a lawyer, a Methodist minister, the author of Georgia
Scenes, and the past president of two Methodist institutions.
He was an extensive landowner and slaveholder and was financially
independent.
Soon after Longstreet came to the university he and
Jacob Thompson initiated plans to establish a law department.
In 1854 Thompson reminded the lawmakers that "we live in a
confederacy of states" and that "political relations of the states
to each other are looked at in somewhat different lights according
to the geographic points of view." Such an appeal would not be
denied, and in the fall of 1854 the University admitted its first
law class.
President Longstreet and his famous son-in-law, L. Q. C. Lamar,
were high-ranking states' rights Democratswhose radical secessionist
rhetoric led Whigs and Unionists to accuse Longstreet of
indoctrinating his students. Longstreet lashed back, accusing the
Whigs of "whisper[ing] the students of my charge into midnight
meetings, and there binding them by oath upon oath" to their
political creed. The spectacle of the president of the state
university trading epithets with politicians was an unseemly sight,
and Longstreet fell out of favor with the board of trustees. On July
16, 1856, he resigned.
It was presumed that the Reverend John Waddel, a faculty member,
would succeed Longstreet. But to his mortification he
was passed over in favor of Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, a
native of Massachusetts, an 1828 graduate of Yale, and an Episcopal
minister. Barnard devoted his considerable energy to the single goal
of making the University of Mississippi one of the major institutions
of higher learning in America. He was tireless in that effort,
comparing himself to "a stick so crooked it could not lie still."
President Barnard broadened and enriched the University's curriculum
by adding physical education and courses in art, science, and
engineering. He also persuaded the legislature to adopt a policy of
annual appropriations, a procedure that was essential for long-range
planning, and he convinced the Board of Trustees to vest the internal
governance of the university in the president and the faculty.
Barnard's modest successes in those areas encouraged him to advance a
much more ambitious proposal. In 1858 he addressed an open letter to
the Board of Trustees and to the public at large. Barnard outlined the
contours of an emerging new world, one of increasing complexity, a
world which required that colleges and universities not only "diffuse
knowledge among men," but by original investigation "add to the
priceless mass." If the University of Mississippi were to meet this
new imperative, it must be radically reorganized.
Barnard's new university would include all the branches of science
and medicine, agriculture, law, classical studies, civil and political
history, and oriental learning. There would be no more task work,
rote, and recitation. Learned professors would lecture, students would become
inquisitive, and an intellectual climate would pervade the library
and the laboratories. His letter was a brilliant defense of pure
science, and time has done it little damage. Barnard's letter stirred
deep resentment in the religious community and among the radical
press. The evangelical clergy renewed their charges that the
University was a "citadel of atheism" and the press branded the
institution "a hotbed of abolitionism."
It is impossible to say what would have been the fate of Barnard's
Universitas Scientarium had the Civil War not intervened.
The only part of his reorganization plan that the board adopted
was to change the title of president to chancellor. Whatever
chances Barnard may have had of implementing his educational
innovations were lost in the widening controversy over slavery
and states' rights. Because Barnard was Northern born, known
to be a unionist, and had the college catalog printed in the North,
Mississippi's secessionists denounced him and cited the University as
"a nursery of Yankeeism." Barnard at last concluded that the
University was "a thing too far above the ruling stupidity of the day
to be a success." He decided to leave Mississippi in 1859 and sought a
position at Yale. But the appointment went to someone else. His last
two years in Mississippi were his "dreadful years," only "poverty," he
wrote, "glued him to Oxford."
On January 9, 1861, Mississippi adopted an Ordinance of Secession
drafted by L. Q. C. Lamar, a mathematics professor at the University.
Soon afterwards the students began withdrawing from the University
and "eagerly pressed to be received into the army." Chancellor
Barnard and President Jefferson Davis pleaded with Governor John
Pettus not to muster the student units into the Confederate military
service. President Davis said sending young boys off to war was like
"grinding the seed corn of the republic." But the excitement of that
time swept the young men away and into the army. The board considered
reorganizing the University as a military academy, but decided not
to and finally closed it.
In the fall of 1861, after the faculty had scattered, the students
had gone off to war, and the campus was deserted, Chancellor
Barnard wrote to the Board of Trustees, "Our university has ceased
to have visible existence. . . .We are inhabitants of a solitude."
After Shiloh many young soldiers, North and South, sought the
shelter of its solitude, and warring armies criss-crossed its campus.
Many feared for the University's future, and some despaired. But
the University of Mississippi was not born "to taste life and pass
away," wrote Frank Keyes on the eve of the Civil War. "It shall
stand from generation to generation."
One war later, and six months after the surrender at Appomattox,
in the fall of '65, 193 students, one chancellor, and three faculty
members returned to the campus, occupied the solitude, and gave back
visible existence to the University of Mississippi. It had endured.
In time, it would prevail.
David Sansing
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