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“ON INTIMATE AND FRIENDLY TERMS:” A REGIONAL COMPARISON OF
GENDER, SPACE AND COMMUNITY IN ANTEBELLUM HIGHER EDUCATION

By

Mary Clingerman

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
History

2009

ABSTRACT

“ON INTIMATE AND FRIENDLY TERMSz” A REGIONAL COMPARISON OF
GENDER, SPACE AND COMMUNITY IN ANTEBELLUM HIGHER EDUCATION

By
Mary Clingerman

Under the umbrella of the “old-time college,” the nineteenth-century American
college has been both romanticized as a nostalgic symbol of simpler times and
rambunctious, but honorable students, derogated as a stagnant, backwards institution
irrelevant to mainstream society, and most recently resurrected as dynamic, multipurpose
intellectual institutions serving diverse socioeconomic interests. In each case, the typical
college community has been imagined as strikingly void of racial and gender dynamics
because it served to propagate the status quo. However, my research indicates that they
were carefully constructed communities, composed of a range of individuals. including
faculty families, servants, and/or slaves. Using a comparative analysis of two urban
institutions, Columbia College (NY) and South Carolina College (SC), the evidence
reveals that institutions organized spaces and peoples in an intimate landscape ripe with
conﬂict. Although they maintained different residential schemas, members of both
communities employed similar campus spaces to create various social, intellectual, and
professional networks. The combination of host cities’ urban landscape (vice districts,
slave traders, theaters, and residential neighborhoods) with the colleges’ internal
structures (dormitories, homes, and green spaces) produced social relations of the college
community as they moved from the external world to the college campus. These spaces

held the power to render private moments public, support a variety of networks, and

shape student behavior, but community members were not without agency, particularly
students who refashioned spaces for their own means. Servants and slaves seamlessly
blended into physical locations through the performance of daily, mundane tasks. Within
both of these elite, exclusive educational communities, it was these drudge workers, the
lowest members of community hierarchy, who stabilized race, gender, and class relations.
Within similar paternalistic structures, these institutions sought “intimate and
friendly” relations among faculty and students reﬂected a common idiom rooted in shared
understandings of masculinity and friendship. A reconsideration of student culture
demonstrates that both groups of students were not entirely passive actors by illustrating
how students consciously used the city as a backdrop for experimenting with
understandings of gender, race, and class. The city became an important arena in which
students understood, ordered, and shaped their identity in intimate collusion. The social
milieu contributed to the methods in which faculty interacted with individuals outside of
the college as well. A case study of Francis Lieber, the German émigré scholar, during
his tenure at South Carolina College (1832-1856) places him in the middle of a
transatlantic pattern of intimate single- and mixed-sex friendships. Like relationships
occurring among faculty and students, his friendships transcended the regional and local
circumstances that shaped other components of the antebellum college experience.
Outside of formal instruction, these two institutions created intimate communities and
learning environments through the organization and socialization of diverse spaces and

peoples rooted in regional assessments of appropriate race, gender, and class relations.

Copyright by
MARY CLIN GERMAN
2009

For Steve and Evelyn Clingerman

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER 1
“BENEATH THOSE RUGGED ELMS:” INTIMATE LANDSCAPES AND THE
COLLEGE FAMILY ............................................................................... 28

CHAPTER TWO
HUMAN LANDSCAPE: SERVANTS, SLAVES, AND THE EXTENDED COLLEGE
COMMUNITY ...................................................................................... 65

CHAPTER THREE
THE WORK OF EDUCATION: MASCULINITY AND FRIENDSHIP AMONG
FACULTY AND STUDENTS .................................................................. 106

CHAPTER FOUR
RECONSIDERIN G TOWN AND GOWN: GENDER AND STUDENT CULTURE IN
NEW YORK AND COLUMBIA ............................................................... 140

CHAPTER FIVE
“THE ECONOMY OF F RIENDSHIP:” GENDER, INTELLECTUALISM, AND
FRANCIS LIEBER ................................................................................ l 76

CONCLUSION
THE MEMORY OF FRANCIS LIEBER AND THE SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF
ANTEBELLUM HIGHER EDUCATION ..................................................... 214

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 220

 

INTRODUCTION

 

“On Intimate and Friendly Terms:” A Regional Comparison of Gender, Space, and
Community in Antebellum Higher Education

On December 31, 1834, Columbia College in New York City paid $1.25 to Lewis
Dugan, the college janitor, for the labor of a woman who spent the day cleaning James
Renwick’s lecture room.l Although the woman’s identity is unknown, it is clear that the
janitor arranged the labor for her. The direct payment to Dugan, who lived in the
basement of the College building with his family, could indicate that the woman may
have been member of his household—wife, daughter, or servant. In an alternative
scenario, Dugan hired one of the city’s many servant women from outside of the campus
and then paid her, perhaps even keeping a portion for himself. We may never know the
woman’s identity or the conditions of this day of work, but she would have walked across
the campus green, an area often teeming with students (even in the winter and at night) to
reach the main college building containing classrooms, the library, the chapel, and the
janitor’s residence. Although the city was ﬁlled with working-class women, this female
laborer would have garnered attention as she moved through this intellectual space
usually reserved for elite white men.

As this woman namelessly and temporarily worked for Columbia College, slave
men and women considered property of South Carolina College also performed mundane
tasks essential to the daily operation of the institution, such as cleaning classrooms,
student apartments, and laboratories. In one case “Jack” became the inadvertent victim of

a student prank while sweeping out the chapel. Upon hearing the bray of donkey tied to

 

' Receipt. December 31 1834. Columbia College Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia
University.

the pulpit by the students, Jack supposedly ran shouting that the devil was in the chapel.2
Like the woman above, only fragmented remnants of his life remain in the college
documents, but nevertheless expose the diversity of the antebellum college community.
Entrenched in two different regionally shaped labor systems and operating outside of the
formal curriculum, both sets of workers interacted with faculty, students, and other
laborers and thus, contributed to the social and cultural functions of antebellum higher
education.

This dissertation, “0n Intimate and Friendly Terms: ” A Regional Comparison of
Gender, Space and Community in Antebellum Higher Education, examines the social and
cultural dynamics of two urban college communities—Columbia College (NY) and South
Carolina College—in antebellum America. Between 1830-1861 American higher
education experienced unprecedented growth and diversiﬁcation in the number of
institutions, curriculum, students, and support. Despite these transformations and the
plethora of educational options threatening marketplace dominance, the elite institutions,
like Harvard and Yale Colleges, maintained their long-standing status as the only truly
national institutions of higher learning. Columbia University and South Carolina College,
by contrast, served as the reigning institutions of their respective communities though
each entered the 18308 facing important junctures in their history. While Manhattan’s
Columbia College faced new competition from New York University (which offered a
utilitarian curriculum), South Carolina College emerged from an extensive and intensely
divisive crisis rooted in one professor’s intellectual challenge to the state dominance of

Presbyterianism. Rather than adopting utilitarian reforms or permitting academic freedom

 

2 Edwin Green, The History of the University of South Carolina (Columbia: The State Company, 1916),
244.

of thought, each institution sought to reafﬁrm their position as the dominant institution of
their surrounding communities—the city of New York and the state of South Carolina
respectively. Feeble attempts at reform and expansion not withstanding, these institutions
conveyed their dominance through continued conﬁdence in classical education and
paternalistic postures over the next thirty years.

As my study demonstrates, the precise and purposeful physical and emotional
construction of college communities displayed a common idiom of education. The
comparison of the community dynamics of these schools through an examination of the
immediate and extended members of that community, of where and how they interacted
with one another, and of the permeability of college boundaries enriches our
understanding of the diversity of their respective college communities. This analysis of
community dynamics pays particularly close attention to issues of inclusion and
exclusion, dominance and power, class differences, and gender ideals to uncover a
transregional culture of education rooted in intimacy and emotion. Spatial organization
and usage, the lived experience of faculty families and of manual laborers, the tenor of
faculty-student relationships and of student culture, and faculty friendships outside of the
college together reveal a ﬂourishing culture of education shaped within the divergent
mores of free and slave society. Columbia College and South Carolina College created
intimate learning communities through the organization and socialization of diverse
spaces and peoples rooted in regional assessments of appropriate race, gender, and class

relations.

The nineteenth-century “old time” American college has been romanticized as a
nostalgic symbol of idyllic times and the home of rambunctious, yet honorable students.
In the traditionalist vision of the college, historians denigrated it as a stagnant, backwards
institution irrelevant to mainstream society. Utilizing the university reformers of the later
part of the nineteenth century and ofﬁcial college records as their main body of evidence,
Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, Frederick Rudolph, and Lawrence Veysey led
early scholars of American higher education. They interpreted the antebellum “old-time
college” as a hindrance to the arrival of the modern research university.3 In claiming that
antebellum colleges were in fact complete “failures” due to the outdated curriculum,
outmoded pedagogical theory, weak leadership, and socioeconomic exclusivity, this
generation of education historians created an insidious and prolonged legacy. Institutional
histories, including those of the colleges in this study, have contributed to the persistence
of this myth as these works are frequently organized according to college founding,
presidential regimes, and campus grth due to the reliance upon top-down primary

SOllI'CGS.4

 

3 Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, The Development of A cademic Freedom in the United States
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1955). See also: Frederick Rudolph, The American College and
University: A History (New York: Knopf, I962). Lawrence Veysey, The Emergence of the American
University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). Robert T. Blackburn and Clifton F. Conrad, “The
New Revisionists and the History of U. 8. Higher Education” Higher Education 15 (1986): 21 1-230.

4 The table of contents for David Walker Hollis’ two-volume work on the University of South Carolina
reveals seven of fourteen chapters devoted to presidents, three to the origins and construction of the
college, and three with thematic arrangements (Civil War, oratory culture, and the place of the College
within the state).Daniel Walker Hollis. University of South Carolina. Volume 1: South Carolina College.
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951). John Howard Van Amringe’s History of early
Columbia contained ﬁﬁeen chapters in which ten centered on presidents, two on foundation and building,
one on curriculum, one landing the greatness of alumni, and one on college life. The Board of Trustees of
the Columbia University. A History of Columbia University, 1754-1904 published in Commemoration of
the One Hundred and F iftieth Anniversary of the Founding of King's college (New York: The Columbia
University Press, 1904). Van Amringe penned “Book One” of this monograph and the Trustees
acknowledge this in the Acknowledgements and Table of Contents. This was a widespread phenomenon
other examples include: Walter Cochrane Bronson’s History of Brown University (1914), Wilfred Byron
Shaw’s A Short History of the University of Michigan (1934), and James Benson Sellers, The History of the
University of A labama (1953). This top-down method of organization continues to be utilized today as the

The desire to render American higher education universally available, to diversify
the student body, and to grapple with lingering student activism created a climate of
change in the 19603 and 1970s that profoundly shaped the revisionist approach to the
college.5 Launching a two-pronged attack at the mythical old-time college, these
revisionist scholars asked questions about class and regionalism. Through studies of
student culture as well as cultural and economic relationships between colleges and their
host towns, these scholars, including David Potts and David Allmendinger, found that
many colleges were more egalitarian than the traditionalists proposed.6 Other historians,
such as Wayne Urban and James Findlay pointed to the exceptionalism of southern and
frontier colleges during the antebellum period.7 These scholars collectively made
tremendous strides in breaking down the myth of the “old-time college” by pointing to
socioeconomic diversity among student bodies, regional variations, and the inﬂuence of
localism on collegiate structure and purpose. Chiseling away at the totems of the
traditionalist legacy, these historians have identiﬁed two additional images of the
antebellum college propagated by traditionalists. In the ﬁrst image, the college offered
strict instruction on an outdated classical curriculum in an effort to cultivate future
leaders. The second image centers on a disorganized and disjointed community composed

of feckless and uninspired professors, unruly students, and weak presidents unable to

 

2005 History of Eastern Kentucky by William E. Ellis demonstrates by use of administration to structure
the university’s narrative.

5 On the struggles of American higher education in the 19705, see Chapter 8 “Coming of Age in America:
Higher Education as a Troubled Giant, I970-2000” in John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher
Education (2004).

6 David Potts, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century” History of Education Quarterly V. II n. 4
(Winter 1971): 363-380. David Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life
in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975).

7 Wayne J. Urban, “History of Education: Southern Exposure” History of Education Quarterly v. 21. n. 2
(Summer 1981): 131-145. James Findlay, “Western Colleges, i830-1870: Education Institution in
Transition” History of Higher Education Annual 2: 35-64. See also: Jurgen Herbst “Diversiﬁcation in
American Higher Education” in Konrad Jarausch, ed. The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860-1930
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 196-206.

adequately cope with the ﬁnancial and sectarian difﬁculties. This dissertation extends
these efforts to reconceptualize the nineteenth-century American college by exploring the
college as a careﬁilly constructed environment composed of multiple cultural landscapes.

Literature focusing on women’s education in the nineteenth century contributed to
the rapidly growing sub-ﬁeld of women’s history, but it concurrently reshaped the
landscape of American educational history. For example, the expansion of women’s
educational opportunities in the post-Revolutionary era and the early republic were
framed as a part of “Republican Motherhood.”8 The proliferation of normal schools,
female academies, and the rise of the Seven Sisters further pointed to the diversity of
institutions of higher education available during the nineteenth century. Historians further
argued that women’s higher education was just as intellectually rigorous as men’s by
comparing curricula and performance at male and female colleges. These scholars asked
questions about how education shaped young women’s actions as mothers, daughters,
wives, as well as reformers and writers.9 Taking cues from these scholars and the broader
disciplinary shift to new social history, education historians began to use gender as a
method of understanding the social dynamics of the “old-time college.”

Leading this shift in intellectual orientation, Helen Horowitz’s 1987 monograph

Campus Life identifying competing student cultures remains the authority on social and

 

8 Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in the New Republic (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980). See also: Mary Beth Norton, Liberty ’3 Daughters: The
Revolutionary Experience of Women, 1750-1800. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman ’5
World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

9 Examples of such scholarship include: David Allmendinger, “Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the
Need for Life-Planning, 1837-1850” History of Education Quarterly v.19 n.3 ( 1979): 27-46. Jeanne
Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margoles, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s
Rights and Woman’s Sphere (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Elizabeth Seymour
Eschbach, The Higher Education of Women in America and England (New York: Garland, 1993). Christie
Ann Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the
Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

cultural relationships of the typical antebellum college. Utilizing the same top-down
evidence of the traditionalists, she argued that there were three competing student
cultures: college men, outsiders, and rebels. She explained that the college men were
precursors of modern fraternity boys drawn from the wealthy, while the outsiders
translated roughly to “nerds” who coming from the lower class were more appreciative of
their educational opportunities. The rebels, composed of women and religious and ethnic
minorities, were not important in regard to student culture until the late nineteenth
century. Although she identiﬁed important differences among students, she perpetuated a
vital pillar of the mythical “old-time college” as she characterized the relationship
between the students and faculty as continuously contentious. In her interpretation,
students acting as “typical” boys generally viewed faculty members as “arbitrary and
unreasonable” authority ﬁgures and resisted any familiarity between themselves and the
faculty. In this narrative, boys rebelled out of typically childish masculinities and it was
not until the late nineteenth-century that faculty and students ﬁnally entered into cordial
relationships. '0

Subsequently turning their attention to students, scholars asked questions about
the sexual and masculine components of the homosocial culture that Horowitz described.
Martin Duberman, for instance, drew attention to the emotionally charged, physical
relationship between two South Carolina College students in the mid-18203. This

relationship ﬂourished in the privacy of homosocial spaces afﬁliated with the college,

 

‘0 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth
Century to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

particularly in the dormitory.ll Additionally, E. Anthony Rotundo, Kim Townsend, Anya
Jabour have each argued that the college was an arena for the practice and inculcation of
masculinity during the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. '2

Complementing these historiographical developments, other scholars sought to
completely replace the mythical old-time college and revisionist images with community
studies. Pointing to the middling status of faculty members, the ﬂexibility of curricula,
and heightened attention to regional differences these scholars have identiﬁed a multi-
purpose college for faculty, students, promoters, and critics.'3 Noting the remnants of the
traditionalist legacy, Roger Geiger and his colleagues take pains to illustrate the dynamic,
diverse nature of the American college. '4 Revitalizing the revisionist campaign to
dismantle the traditionalist legacy, these scholars pointed to the plurality of colleges,
diversity within them, and their relevance to national and local trends. In utilizing a

broader array of archival resources and using a more diverse base of schools (beyond the

 

” Martin Duberman, “‘Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and
the Politics of Evidence” in Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, eds. Hidden from History:
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: NAL Books, 1989), 153-168.

'2 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformation in Masculinity from the Revolution to the
Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). See Chapter 3, “Boy Culture” in particular for his argument
of intense homosocial youth friendships at colleges as practice for heterosexual romantic relationships (i.e.
marriage) later in life. Kim Townsend notes that Harvard University played a critical role in the
transnational dissemination of a masculine model rooted in athletics, war, and a “strenuous distaste for
coeds and women’s suffrage” from 1869-1909. Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and
Others (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). Similar to Smith-Rosenberg’s “female world of love and ritual,”
Jabour identiﬁed a male world of companionship rooted in the collegiate experience. Anya Jabour, “Male
Friendship and Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and his Friends” Journal of the
Early Republic 20 (Spring 2000): 83-11 1. See also the most recent work of Lorri Glover, Southern Sons:
Becoming Men in the New Nation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

'3 Bruce Leslie, “When Professors Had Servants: Prestige, Pay, and Professionalization, 1860-1917”
History of Higher Education Annual v.10 (1990): 19-30. George Marsden, The Soul of the American
University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994). Wayne K. Durrill, “The Power of Ancient Words: Classical Teaching and Social Change at South
Carolina College, 1804—1860” The Journal of Social History v. 65 n. 3 (August 1999): 469-498. Julie
Reuben, The Making of a Modern University: Intellectual Transformations and the Marginalization of
Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

" Roger Geiger, The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press,
2000).

often utilized Yale and Harvard), these scholars have begun to offer community studies
of education rather than institutional studies.

This comparative analysis of northern and southern college communities pays
particular attention to the social and cultural manifestations of region, particularly in the
articulation of race, gender, and class identity. A broad array of historians have addressed
the varied role of household and family in the formation of class, race, and gender. Mary
Ryan identiﬁed collective strategies employed by family members to battle the shifting
market economy and project images of gentility in Oneida, New York. Recently,
Jonathan Wells and Frank Byme made similar observations among different facets of a
southern middle class. Christopher Clark has also recently traced social change utilizing
the household as a lens of analysis to identify social relationships within families and
households, among elites and non-elites, and regional nuances. These scholars have noted
many social and cultural manifestations and expressions, including the practice and
ideology of private and public spheres, emotional regimes, whiteness, citizenship, and
masculinities and femininities. I 5

My examination of those who lived and worked in the constructed educational
communities of South Carolina College and Columbia College pushes beyond the work
of these social, cultural, and education historians by drawing from the work of cultural
geographers, particularly Raymond Williams and Peter Jackson. My analysis relies upon

the premise that culture and social order are spatially constituted. Reaching beyond Carl

 

'5 Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle
Class, 1800-186] (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Frank J. Byme, Becoming
Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006).
Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War (Chicago: Ivan
R. Dee, 2006).

Sauer and the Berkeley school method of viewing landscape as a simple physical
expression of a uniﬁed culture, these scholars contend that there are a plurality of cultures
and meanings which are spatially constituted and contested. Moreover, this spatial
contestation of the cultural landscape deﬁne's exclusion and inclusion, affectation and
alienation. That is who is allowed in; as opposed to who is not; how the bonds of
affection are tied in ways intended to alienate those not included. '6 Using this materialist
approach draws attention to how the built environment shaped the social and cultural
relations of these two college communities. It also allows for a multiplicity of
“landscapes” to exist simultaneously, including the physical, emotional (affective)
terrain, and the cultural landscapes of the college.17 For my purposes, the terms “physical
landscape” or “built space” refers to material and spatial forms that contributed to the
reproduction or transgression of gender, race, and class identities occurring within the

campus boundaries. Space and social and cultural conditions are reciprocally constitutive,

but context determines the exact nature of the reciprocity and the types of landscapes

 

’6 Carl Sauer and his Berkeley School dominated the ﬁeld of cultural geography through the mid-19705. He
argued that the same physical environment generated different cultural landscapes due to different cultural
processes in each area, but employed a problematic supra-organic approach that emphasized the agency of
culture rather than individuals. Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: A n Introduction to Cultural Geography
(London: Unwick Hyman Limited, 1989), 10-23. See also: . See also David Atkinson, Peter Jackson, David
Sibley, and Neil Washboume, Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2005), esp. Don Mitchell, “Landscape.” There is a rich literature on Sauer, “Sauerology,” and the
landscape tradition, key works include: J. N. Entrikin “Carl 0. Sauer: Philosopher in spite of himself”
Geographical Review v. 74 n. 4 (October 1984): 387-408. J. J. Parsons, “The Later Sauer Years” Annals of
the Association of American Geographers v. 69 n. 1 (March 1979): 9-15. Michael Williams, “‘The apple of
my eye:’ Carl Sauer and historical geography” Journal of Historical geography v. 9 n. 1 (January 1983): l-
28.

'7 Jackson, Maps of Meaning, 177-179. Some of the most inﬂuential historians employing this approach
include, Christine Stansell (City of Women), David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public
Spaces in Antebellum New York), Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Resistance in
the Plantation South (2004), and Anthony Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South.
These works collectively identify the multiplicity of uses that public and private spaces served and
simultaneously engendered the everyday, mundane activities with multiple levels of meaning.

10

produced (cultural, gendered, emotional, etc.). '8 Analyzing the late twentieth-century
college campus, M. Perry Chapman similarly concluded that the built environment
idealizes collective values and expresses a commitment to inculcating those values. '9

As the ﬁrst regional comparison of the social dynamics of the entire college
community (including faculty wives and children, manual laborers as well as students
and professors), my work reveals a common culture of education rooted in the physical
landscape. The institutions set parameters for the educational environment using
deﬁnitions of paternalism and household conveyed in the physical landscape. But
examining these institutions through their cultural geography reveals how individual
community members were equipped with a sense of agency through which they
cultivated an intimate and emotional society. These spatially constructed communities
provided an arena for members to either reproduce or transgress the social order afﬁliated
with their host communities through a multitude of physical, social, and cultural
landscapes.

The faculty lay at the heart of this transregional culture of education. The
traditionalists portrayed the faculty as ineffectual instructors lacking autonomy, social
status, and intellectual authority. Some scholars diffused an alternative version of
professors as romantic ﬁgures, but still largely removed from the main currents of
American life.20 Utilizing faculty pay and census records, Bruce Leslie challenged these

two images by demonstrating that faculty in the latter half of the nineteenth century were

 

'8 Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth’s deﬁnition of “built space” shaped my deﬁnition and use. See:
Darling and Whitworth, eds., Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870-1950 (Burlington:
Ashgate Publishing, 2007).

‘9 M. Perry Chapman. American Places: In Search of a Twenty-first Century Campus (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger Publishers, 2006), xxxi-xxxii. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 1991).

2° Rudolph, American College. See chapter 8 “Academic Balance of Power” in particular 157-161.

11

quite afﬂuent and lived among the elite of their surrounding community.21 Wayne K.
Durrill and Michael Sugrue have illustrated that faculty members cultivated a sense of
purposefulness and freedom by extracting lessons ﬁom the classical curricula suitable for
growing southern nationalism in the late antebellum period. In piecemeal fashion, other
recent works have presented professors as vibrant, intellectual contributors to their local
communities. Most recently, J. M. Opal has rightly observed that the “deﬁning facet of
collegiate life [was the] interaction between and among students and faculty.” Analyzing
Amherst College from 1850-1880, he argued that a sizable social gap between students
and faculty increased. Revivals and evangelism had previously bound students and
faculty together explosively (but uniﬁed nonetheless), however as revivals disappeared
tensions decreased. 22 By juxtaposing the two images of antebellum faculty with the
reality of their positions, these scholars have contributed to a dismantling of this aspect of
the traditionalist legacy. Woven through these intellectual transitions remains the
insidious notion that chaotic disturbances, particularly emphasizing the continuously
erupting tensions between faculty and students, characterized the college experience.

By comprehensively exploring the campus community dynamics, this dissertation
ﬁnds that the college campus was not rife with violence; rather, the faculty and students
actively sought to peacefully coexist in an intimate and diverse community. Moreover,

this study points to the role of the extended college community, including faculty wives,

 

2' Bruce Leslie “When Professors Had Servants: Prestige, Pay, and Professionalization, I860-1917”
History of Higher Education Annual (1990): 19-30.

22 Wayne K. Durrill, “The Power of Ancient Words: Classical Teaching and Social Change at South
Carolina College, 1804-1860” The Journal of Southern History v. 65 n. 3 (August 1999): 469-498. Michael
Sugrue, “‘We Desired Our Future Rulers to be Educated Men:’ South Carolina College, the Defense of
Slavery, and the Development of Secessionist Politics” in Roger Geiger, The American College in the
Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000): 46-79. J. M. Opal, “The Making of the
Victorian Campus: Teacher and Student at Victorian Amherst College, 1850-1880” History of Education
Quarterly 42 (3): 342-357.

12

children, servants and slaves, and visitors, in the construction of an emotional landscape
conducive to the social and cultural functions of education, such as the inculcation of
values, mores, and behaviors. The urban communities housing Columbia College and
South Carolina College facilitated movement between the collegiate world and the larger
community. In emphasizing mobility, the cities and their inhabitants also became active
participants in social functions of antebellum education. This study demonstrates the
complex ways in which the antebellum college afforded its community members avenues
for transgressing and reproducing the prescribed social order either safely within the
conﬁnes of campus or outside in the danger of the host cities.

Juxtaposing these institutions sheds light on how region shaped (or in some instances
transcended) educational communities and cultures. Ushering in a new era of research in
education history, this work is one of the ﬁrst regional comparisons of antebellum higher
education. Columbia College, South Carolina College and their respective host
communities (New York, NY and Columbia, SC) facilitate an understanding of the

American college as it was experienced by those who lived and worked in it.

The two institutions under scrutiny in this dissertation have marked differences. The
ﬁrst pertains to their foundations and subsequent relations to the state. Established in
1754 with a royal charter of King George II of England, King’s College reﬂected the
Anglican power of the community. Six acres donated by Trinity Church for the campus
were accompanied by the stipulations that the presiding ofﬁcer always be a member of
the Anglican church and religious services for the college would follow Anglican

liturgical forms. Although the college was ofﬁcially non-denominational, through their

13

land grant the Anglicans effectively shaped the college afﬁliation. Through the
Revolution, those afﬁliated with King’s College remained essentially loyalist until the
last possible moment. In the wake of the war, the College was twice re-chartered (1784
and 1787) and renamed Columbia College. The 1787 charter allowed for minimal state
funding, but it remained essentially a private institution. For instance, none of the 24
members of the self-perpetuating Board of Trustees were permitted to be state
ofﬁceholders.23 Columbia College distanced itself from the state of New York as much as
possible and fostered close relations with the merchant elite throughout the nineteenth I
century increasingly ﬁnanced itself with lucrative rents derived from extensive land
holdings in Manhattan.

Like Columbia College, South Carolina College also had roots in the pre-
Revolutionary era as the colonial assembly supported a proposal in 1740 to organize a
college for the colony. The proposed college was referred to a committee of twelve who
composed a comprehensive school bill, organized a Board of Trustees, and identiﬁed a
five-man faculty body. This proposal was lost in the fall out of a power struggle between
Lieutenant Governor William Bull and the general assembly and then further delayed by
the Revolutionary War and sectional conﬂicts. Although thirty years passed, the idea of a
state college remained at the forefront of the state leadership, particularly Charles C.
Pickney and Thomas Smith who had been members of the original twelve-person
committee. With its 1801 charter, the legislature established the South Carolina College
and solidiﬁed an intimate relation between the College and government. Symbolizing this

relationship, the campus was placed within viewing distance of the capital building.

 

2" Robert A. McCaughey. Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York,
1754-2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 21-57.

14

Furthermore, the Board of Trustees was composed of prominent members of the
Federalist and Republican parties as well as three Presbyterian ministers.24
As an essentially state supported school, the political—and planter—elite cultivated
an intimacy with South Carolina College very different from Columbia College’s long-
standing relationship with the merchant elite of New York City. The implications of this
were that the state asserted a level of authority and entitlement to the College in South
Carolina that was absent in New York. It also additionally contributed to differing
ﬁnancial trajectories. As Columbia College owned much of the land on Manhattan Island
(most notably the area that later became Central Park), their ﬁnancial success was
directly tied to the success of their land rents and sales (as the city grew and their
property exponentially increased in value), but South Carolina College’s ﬁscal outlook
was tied to the state’s budget, which remained relatively healthy throughout the
antebellum period. The nature of their foundations contributed to divergent loyalties.
South Carolina College identiﬁed itself most immediately with the state and continuously

sought to politically and socially unify the state, while Columbia College served most

immediately the city.

The urban ethos of the cities hosting these colleges produced unique relationships
between the college community and the city and its inhabitants. The City of New York
was increasingly shaped by its vital role in the global economy and the urban landscape
reﬂected its important national functions. Throughout the nineteenth century, New York
was the largest city in the country with a population that had reached 515,547 by mid-

century. Throughout the period of this study, the city operated as a critical seaport. The

 

2’ Hollis, University of South Carolina, 1-23.

15

construction and expansion of railroads, canals, banks, insurance companies, a stock
market, communication technologies, merchandising, entertaining, merchandising, and
commercial networks expanded New York’s commercial outreach. This substantial
growth spawned a powerful lobby of landowners, speculators, developers, bankers, and
politicians as well as allowed for the success of two universities, two libraries, a vibrant
theater district, and a plethora of department stores, coffeehouses, ofﬁces,
boardinghouses. As the nation’s manufacturing center, this “multicultural metropolis”
employed massive numbers of laborers (nearly 1 in 15 manufacturing employees in the
United States worked in Manhattan). Massive numbers of immigrants provided the labor
power for the city’s economic and industrial growth, but they also increased demand for
housing, food, entertainment, and clothing.25

As a result of this commercial development New York became known as the “ﬁlthiest
urban center in the United States” in spite of numerous bureaucratic and reform efforts to
ameliorate the physical and moral problems of the city. Individuals seeking to ameliorate
the social by-products of urban growth, including prostitution, gambling, drinking, and
poverty were drawn primarily from the upper class and middle classes. Composed of the
upper ten-thousand, these elites displayed their status in an appropriate manner, such as
mansions, carriages, and exclusive entertainment. Contemporaries argued that the
“upperten” fell into two groups: 1. the intense evangelicals 2. the hedonistic. The middle
class of New York was diversely composed of professionals, upper rank artisans, and

clerical workers. The growing immigrant population formed the base of workers in the

 

2’ Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999). See also: Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). Francois Well, The City of New York translated by Jody
Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 56.

16

city and frequently lived and worked according to ethnic divisions. Racial, ethnic, and
class tensions ran high as geographical spaces operated as identifying markers.

The Columbia College Park Place campus sat on three acres of land before the
extension of Robinson Street bisected it and decreased its size. Boardered by Murray
Street on the north and Barclay on the south, it was located in a fashionable district
composed of residential and commercial buildings, including the afﬂuent Niblo’s Garden,
3 restaurant frequented by students, their families, and professors for formal and informal
college gatherings. A few blocks to the east lay West Broadway which running
southward, operated as the “axis of respectable society.” 26 The campus was not
exclusively contained within an upscale district as pockets of industry, decay, and
“danger” encroached upon the school. The campus was also within walking distance of
the Bowery, Five Points, and theater district. New York City was constantly changing
and the campus provided a steady reference point for city dwellers alike. The burgeoning
city placed an ever-increasing amount of pressure upon the campus. Faculty and students
alike complained of the audible disturbances produced by the railroads, cartmen, and
construction surrounding the campus. As the upper and middle classes migrated north
past Park Place, the College campus followed and in 1857 it relocated to a temporary
campus at 49th Street, trying to distinguishing itself from the dentists, stores, boarding
houses, and warehouses.27 Columbia College’s geographical placement within the urban
landscape announced its afﬁliation and loyalty to the commercial upper and middle

classes of New York.

 

2" Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 634-647, 667-703. See also: Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New
York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003).

27 McCaughey, Stand Columbia, 104- 1 05.

17

South Carolina College housed in Columbia, the capital city of South Carolina, was
rooted in a different urban ethos. Antebellum South Carolina was a primarily rural
society and by 1860, Columbia was one of only ﬁve towns in the state with populations
above 1,500. New York boasted a population of 813, 669 in 1860 while at the same time,
Columbia’s population numbered 8,052. The City of New York was a city ofan entirely
different scale and scope than that of Columbia, SC, but it is important to note that
Columbia was the largest inland city in the Carolinas. Columbia did not have a black
majority population although Richland County in which it was situated did.28

As a center of government, the residents were often involved, interested, and moved
by national and state issues. In addition to being the political axis of the state drawing
together upcountry and lowcountry elites, Columbia maintained a major cotton market
for the state and region and supported three railroad lines, three banks, two insurance
companies, and several industrial manufacturers.29 Complementing these ﬁnancial and
economic developments was a vivid intellectual, art, and entertainment culture similar to
the cultural venues of New York City. For example, the Athenaeum located a few blocks
from the college campus, was a central library used by the social and political elites of
the city and state where they could “meet, talk, and listen to lectures.” On special
occasions it was opened up to the broader public, but most frequently the college hall or
one of many auditoriums in the business district (to the west of the campus) were used for

such large gatherings.30

 

28 Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998).
Columbia was substantially smaller than Charleston which maintained a population of approximately
40,000 in 1860.

29 John Hammond Moore, Columbia and Richland County: A South Carolina Community, 1740-1990
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 145-146.

30 Moore, Columbia, 150-151.

18

Nothing shaped South Carolina, including Columbia, more than slavery as it was the
key factor in innumerable political, economic, and social decisions. Some Columbia slave
holders sought to improveconditions for enslaved men and women by encouraging
religious life among them. Most of Columbia’s churches had sections (usually the
gallery) reserved for blacks and some churches, such as the Baptist Church were
composed primarily of blacks (as opposed to the Presbyterian Church that refused to
accept blacks unless they were property of white parishioners). Historian Frederic
Bancroft categorized Columbia as a center of human trade and identiﬁed a particular area
of the city afﬁliated with slave traders and known as a slave market.31 Slaves were highly
regulated by all white citizens in antebellum Columbia as they were prohibited from
gathering in groups of ﬁve or more, trading with whites without their masters’
permission, and being on the streets after the nine o’clock closing market bell. Despite
these regulations and the potential for all whites to be informers, no series of rules could
completely control the chaos of urban life as slaves could (and would) gather in homes,
churches, secret grog shops and associate with free blacks.32 Slavery and political culture
signiﬁcantly shaped the character of this often overlooked southern city and this created a
unique background for understanding the College, particularly in contrast with the

commercial conditions underscoring New York’s Columbia College.

 

3 ' Frederic Bancroﬂ, Slave Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J .H. F urst Company, 1931).

32 Moore, Columbia, 118-128. Often referred to as the quintessential “slave society,” South Carolina
provides a key base for understanding how the slave system shaped the social and cultural components of
higher education. See: William Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 Reprint
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Lacy Ford, The Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South
Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 Reprint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). See also: Mark
Michael Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War,
and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). See
especially, his discussion of an uncompleted monument to slavery outside of the capital building in
Columbia representing the centrality of the slave system to South Carolinian society in chapter 2
“Espousing Slavery.”

19

The key players -- trustees, professors and their families, students, and manual
laborers -- in the carefully constructed college communities reﬂected the conditions of
their broader societies. The Board of Trustees operated on the periphery of the
antebellum college community. Although they were not a consistent, daily presence on
the college campus, the trustees held absolute authority on the college campus. They
designed the paternalistic structure of the college through the creation of rules and
regulations, approval of funding requests, and declaration of ﬁnal judgments in issues of
student punishment. At Columbia College, the trustees elected their own making this self-
perpetuating group heavily drawn from wealthy Episcopalian alumni. From 1815-1857,
46% of Trustees graduated from Columbia and 67% were Episcopalian. 45% of the
Board of Trustees declared a legal occupation, 25% claimed the ministry, and 6%
identiﬁed themselves as businessmen.33 Even though only a small minority claimed a
background in business, the men on the Board of Trustees of Columbia College were
among the most powerful men of the city. For example, Peter Augustus Jay, the eldest
son of the ﬁrst chief justice of the United States, cam from a family of merchant elites
who resided in a well-known mansion on lower Broadway. Others afﬁliated with the
merchant elite included Philip Hone (mayor of New York, who owned a proﬁtable
auction business), Benjamin Treadwell Onderdonk (Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of
New York), Samuel Bulkley Ruggles (married into the merchant elite Rathbone family

and became a leader in real estate), Hamilton Fish (Governor of New York, Secretary of

 

3" See the appendices to McCaughey, Stand Columbia. Located at:
http:/lbeatlbarnard.columbiaedufstand columbia‘ahtml

 

20

State), and Martin Zabriskie (prospered in real estate ventures). 34 Throughout the
antebellum era, the Board of Trustees of Columbia College contributed in solidifying the
institution’s connection to the city’s elite.

South Carolina College’s Board of Trustees similarly linked the institution to the elite
and were the ultimate authority in all college matters, but rather than being entirely
elected like Columbia, they were “partly elective and partly ex-oﬂicio.” Twenty members
were elected and the other members consisted of the governor, lieutenant governor,
president of the senate, speaker of the house, the judges of the court of appeals, circuit
judges of the court of law, and Chancellors. This political inﬂuence over College was
embodied in the role of the governor as Chairman of the Board. 35 Elected members of the
Board included the most prominent and powerful social and political men of the state,
including R. F. W. Allston (2 plantations, winner of rice culture prize at Paris Exposition
1855 and 1856), Abram Blanding (investor, innovator, industrialist), Robert W. Barnwell,
(planter), Christian P. Bookter (author of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, planter,
Congressman), James Chestnut Jr. (planter, congressman), Franklin H. Elmore (planter,
Congressman), John H. Means (planter), and David L. Wardlaw (judge, slaveholder).36
These few men are representative of the political background and the elite socioeconomic
background of the members of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College during

the antebellum period.

 

3’ Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 372, 531, 559, 564, 573-574, 577-579, 584, 791.

3’ Edwin L. Green, A History of the University of South Carolina (Columbia: The State Company, 1916),
210-214.

36 Green, University of South Carolina, 440-450. Some of the Trustees, including R. F. W. Allston, James
Chestnut Jr., Wade Hampton, Jr., James Henry Hammond, Richard I. Manning, and John I. Middleton,
were some of the most powerﬁrl slaveholders in the South. See: William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters
of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2003).

21

The nature of elite societies in which the colleges were embedded, thus, differed
immensely: the New York commercial elite and the South Carolinian political and
planter elite. But, it is important to note that both Boards drew heavily from the elite
groups around them and that, these men formed and directed the overarching paternalistic
structures of the colleges. Even though the respective Boards exerted a significant
amount of power over their colleges, it is my contention that the faculty held the most
authority in determining the characters and natures of the collegiate experiences because
they worked and, in the case of South Carolina, lived on the campus and interacted with
students on a daily basis. The traditionalist image of the antebellum college presented
professors as having very little social status and choosing their occupation out of sheer
necessity. The college professors of this study could be characterized as middle class.
Their material life, including the use of servants and ownership of slaves, mark a number
of professors as solidly middle class. The personal manuscripts of professors and their
family members offer evidence that servants lived in the households of New York faculty
and South Carolina faculty members owned slaves. For example, Francis Lieber owned a
few slaves during his nearly twenty-year tenure at South Carolina College as did his
colleagues Matthew Williams and Thomas Twiss. At Columbia College the families of
William Alexander Duer and Henry James Anderson each maintained a servant in their

7
homes.3

 

’7 Michael O’Brien, “A Sort of Cosmopolitan Dog: Francis Lieber in the South” The Southern Review 25
(April 1989): 308-322. For Brumby and Williams, the Francis Lieber Collection at the Huntington Library
provides this background. Speciﬁcally refer to: Francis Lieber to his wife, Matilda Lieber. l & 2 Jun 1845.
Francis Lieber Collection. Henry E. Huntington Library. For Columbia, see: Henry James Anderson Family
Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University. Mrs. W. A. Duer. A diary of passing
events which may occur during the year 1838. William Alexander Duer Family Papers. Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

22

In addition to this material marker of middle-class existence, the attitudes and
behaviors of the professors and their families similarly reﬂect their social status. At
Columbia College, John McVickar was an active member in the Society for Promoting
Religion and Learning in New York, Robert Vermilye was a pastor of a Presbyterian
Church in German Valley, New Jersey, and Charles Davies was an ardent supporter of
free public education. Francis Lieber, a professor at both Columbia College and South
Carolina College, was nationally recognized supporter of prison reform and worked
closely with Dorothea Dix. Other professors were small slaveholders, such as Joseph
LeConte who held only a few. South Carolina professors also participated in reform
efforts. For instance, Rev. William Capers founded the Asbury Mission to the Lower
Creek Tribes. The professors of South Carolina carried a larger number of elite men
among their ranks, including Episcopal Bishop Stephen Elliot, Episcopal deacon Robert
Henry, and Unionist legal mind James Pettigru—some of these men were large
slaveholders, such as Maximilian LaBorde who possessed over 100 enslaved men and
women. Ultimately, many professors of Columbia College and South Carolina College
came from a different socioeconomic background than elite Trustees and students.

At both institutions, the student body was drawn from the upper classes of the
surrounding communities, although some students from the lower sorts received
scholarships. Columbia historian Robert McCaughey argues that throughout the “era of
the common man,” the College “remained a bastion of class privilege catering to the
city’s tiny reservoir of property holders and professionals, capitalists and creditors.”
Columbia also charged the highest tuition in the country at ninety dollars a year.38

Michael Sugrue, Edwin L. Green, and David Walker Hollis have proven that the South

 

’8 McCaughey, Stand Columbia. 81.

23

Carolina College served a student body drawn from the planter elite and served as “the
most important institutional mechanism for selecting South Carolina’s political elite.”39
The students and trustees were drawn from groups sitting at the top of the socioeconomic

hierarchy of power in American society, but within the college campus it was the faculty

who exerted the most power in shaping the educational environment.

Each chapter of this dissertation begins with attention to the landscape because it
revealed the community’s values, dictated relationships, and structured race, gender, and
class dynamics for the larger purpose of assessing the inﬂuence of region on antebellum
higher education. This dissertation is recursively arranged by revisiting key issues of the
antebellum college as they build on top of one another. For example, the initial
examination of campus form, domestic domain, and familial relations in chapter 1
provides a framework for understanding the physical presence of servants and slaves to
the college, particularly in the inculcation of social values. This dissertation draws a ﬁrm
connection between the minutia of mundane happenings to the broader social and cultural
functions of education revealing that the antebellum college experience was one ﬁrmly
rooted in intimate constructions of race, gender, and class. Regional inﬂuences meant that
these constructions manifested differently, but nevertheless reveal an underlying culture
of education.

Chapter 1: “Beneath those Rugged Elms: " Intimate Landscapes, Student Domain,
and the College Family highlights the powerful role of space in prescribing and
subverting interpersonal relationships within the campus community. Columbia and

South Carolina organized their spaces and people in an intimate landscape ripe with

 

’9 Sugrue, “‘We Desired Our Future Rulers to Be Educated Men.”’ 91-1 14.

24

intense emotional networks shaped by race, gender, and class. South Carolina College
was an enclosed residential institution and Columbia College was an open, commuter
school. Despite their different residential schemas and regional variations, these elite
institutions used analogous campus spaces to create social and intellectual networks
among faculty, students, families, and city dwellers. The urban landscape (vice districts,
slave traders posts, theaters, and residential neighborhoods) combined with the colleges’
internal structures (dormitories, homes, and green spaces) to shape how and where
community members interacted with one another. Although these spaces held the
profound power to render private moments public and shape community behavior,
individuals, particularly students, exerted autonomy to refashion campus spaces for their
own means.

The contribution of manual laborers and how they augmented the collegiate
community forms the center of Chapter 2 titled Human Landscapes: Servants, Slaves,
and the Extended Campus Community. Almost completely overlooked in historical
treatments of education, I argue that servants and slaves constituted a human landscape
by blending seamlessly into the background through the performance of daily, mundane
tasks. Servants acted as symbolic gatekeepers who granted access to the college
community at Columbia, while South Carolina’s servants and slaves served to re-create a
household unit on the college campus. Within these elite, exclusive educational
communities, it was these drudge workers, the lowest members of community hierarchy,
who reiﬁed race, gender, and class relations. At the same time, they exerted individual
autonomy and carved out a distinct kinship network and created deﬁned communities of

their own within the college campus. Focusing on the manual laborers of higher

25

education exposes the diversity and complexity of the constructed collegiate community
in antebellum America.

Chapter 3: The Work of Education: F acuity-Student Dynamics at the “Old-time
College” examines faculty autonomy through the construction and maintenance of
relationships with students. Institutional frameworks fostered paternalistic relations
between faculty and students, but individual professors pursued intimate relationships
rooted in the language and images of friendship. Faculty members worked within a basic
authoritarian, hierarchical structure that demanded that they intellectually and morally
guide, protect, and discipline students. In performing the “work of education.” faculty
and students pursued and developed intimate relationships. North and South alike, faculty
and students moved their instructional relationship beyond the classroom to develop
friendships, drawing speciﬁcally from Aristotelian images of perfect and lesser
friendships and regional understandings of appropriate masculinities.

The urban landscape operated as an extension of the college community and a
vital element of college experience for students. In Chapter 4: Reconsidering Town and
Gown: Student Culture at Columbia and South Carolina Colleges, I argue that students
consciously utilized the city as a backdrop for experimenting with understandings of
gender, race, and class. Outside of their campuses, students interacted with city dwellers
and wandered through vice districts, commercial areas, and residential neighborhoods.
Out of the reach of their guardians, these two cities offered an important arena and sense
of anonymity for students to understand, order, and shape their identity in intimate

collusion. In opposition to earlier scholarship, I argue that town and gown relations

26

experienced moments of chaos and antagonism within a larger relatively harmonious
existence. I

The social milieu also contributed to the methods in which faculty interacted with
individuals outside of the college as well. The ﬁnal chapter, “The Economy of
Friendship: ” Francis Lieber, Gender, and Intellectual Discourse, is a case study of
Francis Lieber, the German émigré scholar, during his tenure at South Carolina College
(1832-1856). At the center of a transatlantic pattern of intimate single- and mixed-sex
friendships, he circumvented the realities of Southern affective life through emotional
and intellectually-based relationships with northern men and women. Lieber makes it
clear that intimate relations between faculty and academics outside of the college grounds
were less dependent upon the local setting.

Finally, this project pushes beyond the formalities of education—beyond
classrooms, recitations, and disciplinary problems—to examine the intimate and
ubiquitous nature of antebellum higher education. Using personal manuscript documents,
such as letters and diaries, I give voice to those who lived and worked on campus and in
doing so I reveal how the informal work of education imparted domestic ideology, gender
roles, and racial and ethnic hierarchies and engendered emotional landscapes and
understandings of friendship in doing so. As much as the formal instruction itself, thus,
the informal social ﬁmctions of higher education permitted those who lived and worked

in the collegiate community opportunities to replicate and transgress the social order.

27

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

“Beneath those Rugged Elms:” Intimate Landscapes and the College Family

In May of 1851, James H. Thomwell, a professor at South Carolina College,
performed pastoral duties for the Glebe Street Church in Charleston. Writing to his wife,
who remained at the Columbia campus, he informed her that earlier in the day while he
strolled through the city, he had a chance meeting with a student from the College. The
student informed him that his son, Gillespie, had fallen from the six-foot high wall
enclosing the campus, but the doctor assured Mrs. Thomwell that he was unharmed.
Providing further comfort, the student also claimed that “he had seen him, as usual,
playing in the campus, the aftemoon of the accident.”‘

In relaying this encounter to his wife, Thomwell highlights two important
components of mid—nineteenth century college communities that education historians
have often overlooked. First, the physical space of the college campus signiﬁcantly
shaped the relationships that occurred within its boundaries. Classrooms, libraries,
dormitories, faculty homes, servant quarters, and common green spaces dictated where,
when, and how community members should interact. The unintended consequence of
these structures was the autonomous construction of relationships that both subverted and
conformed to the communities’ model. Second, South Carolina College faculty
frequently lived on campus grounds with their wives and children whose presence

immediately altered spaces and interactions. Faculty families shifted the dynamics within

what historians have primarily understood as homosocial space by including women and

 

' James Henley Thomwell to his wife, Nancy Thomwell. May 24, 1851. Charleston, SC. Letter located in:
BM. Palmer, ed. The Life and Letters of James Henley Thomwell, D. 0., LL. 0., Ex-President of the South
Carolina C ollege, Late Professor of Theology in the Theological Seminary at Columbia South Carolina.
Richmond, Va: Whittet and Shepperson (1875): 348-349.

28

children. Comparing the college communities of South Carolina College and Columbia
College reveals that the combination of the built campus space and regional
understandings of household and family created intimate educational environments. As
Gillespie Thomwell demonstrates, southern faculty families played an indispensible role
in constructing an intimate educational environment drawing students, faculty, and
families together into a cohesive community. The campus of South Carolina College
facilitated the re-creation of a family and household, while the New York campus
fostered a student-centered collegiate world revealing the existence of two different types
of educational environments available in antebellum America.

As spatially planned communities, these two antebellum institutions were not
intended to be entirely closed off from the larger public. Although the physical
boundaries were rigidly monitored, the nineteenth-century college was comprised of an
array of individuals beyond the faculty and students. The presence of women, children,
servants, slaves, day laborers, trustees, janitors, etc. at any given time throughout the
college year created a semi-public space. Most importantly, the placement of the faculty
households, either on- or off-campus, continually thrust the personal, emotional, private
realm of the home under the gaze of others. In an effort to normalize family structures
and knowledge of intimate relations by providing family and household models for
students to contemplate, the college effectively rendered the private sphere public. This
institutional function was directly fashioned by the geography and cultural landscape in
which each school was embedded.

Scholars have sought to dismantle the traditionalist image propagated by late

nineteenth-century university reformers of the “old-time college” as a stagnant,

29

unpopular obstacle to modern universities, devoid of faculty and student autonomy, for
over thirty years. Drawing from social history backgrounds, education historians have
highlighted the intellectual dynamism and ﬂexibility of the nineteenth-century college by
pointing to the role of the college in national and regional intellectual and political trends.
Despite these changes, scholars continue to portray the campus as a homosocial
community composed white male students, faculty, and occasionally Trustees.2 Using an
analysis of the physical landscape of the college and its immediate surroundings, this
chapter recasts the overarching image of the college community by using the household
as a lens of analysis. This analysis illustrates that faculty families played an important
role in the construction of the educational environment and additionally identiﬁes arenas
and manifestations of student and faculty autonomy.

There remains little doubt that the nineteenth-century college campuses were
carefully constructed and rigidly governed communities. Trustees and professors spent
much time constructing and enforcing regulations for student behavior, determining
acceptable faculty roles outside of the college, and policing the boundaries between town

and gown.3 Margaret Sumner has recently drawn attention to the deliberate construction

 

2 Wayne K. Durrill, “The Power of Ancient Words: Classical Teaching and Social Change at South
Carolina College, 1804-1860” The Journal of Southern History Vol. 65, No. 3 (Aug 1999): 469-498. Julie
Reuben. The Making of a Modern University: Intellectual Transformations and the Marginalization of
Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Michael Sugrue, “‘We Desired Our Future Rulers to
Be Educated Men’: South Carolina College, the Defense of Slavery, and the Development of Secessionist
Politics” in Roger Geiger, ed. The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2000): 91-114. Roger Geiger with Julie Ann Bubolz “College As It Was in the Nineteenth
Centnury” in Geiger, ed. The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 80-90. J. M. Opal, “The Making
of the Victorian Campus: Teacher and Student at Victorian Amherst College, 1850-1880” History of
Education Quarterly 42 (3): 342-357.

3 Nineteenth-century faculty members spent quite a bit of time sorting out disciplinary problems and
consulting with administrators on issues of discipline. See the J.M. Opal “Making of the Victorian
Campus” essay mentioned above for examples of the perpetual vision of faculty members as
disciplinarians. On approved faculty activity off-campus, see John D. Burton, “Philanthropy and the
Origins of Educational Cooperation: Harvard College, the Hopkins Trust, and the Cambridge Grammar
School” History of Education Quarterly Vol. 37 No. 2 (Summer 1997): 141-161. There are a number of

30

of educational communities in her study of post-Revolutionary college families,
particularly how they used buildings, spaces, and themselves to refashion the relation
between the public and private sphere through the ideals of the new republic and virtue.4
Sumner’s study proves signiﬁcant because it draws attention to the vigilance with which
educational communities were constructed and maintained, particularly through the use
of familial virtue in the New Republic. Although she meticulously analyzes the role of
collegiate families in disseminating and modeling the virtuous goals of the New
Republic, she fails to sufﬁciently address the way that families contributed to the
educational setting and emotional landscape of the college. Other scholars addressing the
issue of intimacy within the nineteenth-century American college have argued that close
relations among students were a leading contributor to the chaos of student unrest.
However, these types of analyses continue to build from the assumption that only faculty
and students inhabited the campus and they were only ones subject to intimate relations.5
Many institutional studies, such as Edwin Green’s A History of the University of
South Carolina, Daniel Walker Hollis’s University of South Carolina, and Robert
McCaughey’s Stand, Columbia, recognize the importance of the campus. However, their
treatments tend to be chronological tracings of building construction with emphasis on
the modernization of building structures, professional colleges, the size of the library, or
namesakes for buildings. The college campus was (and continues to be) a carefully

constructed arena designed to facilitate learning and execute goals and as such, it should

 

good studies on institutional methods of coping with student behavioral problems, including: Bruce Leslie,
Gentlemen and Scholars: College and Community in the “Age of the University, ” 1865-1917 and Leon
Jackson, “The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth-Century Harvard”
in Geiger, ed. The American College in the Nineteenth Century.

’ Margaret Sumner. “Reason, Revelation, and Romance: The Social and Intellectual Construction of Early
American College Communities, 1782-1860” Ph.D. Dissertation. Rutgers University. 2006.

5 J. M. Opal refers to this as “combustible intimacy.” See, Opal, “Making of the Victorian Campus,” 344.

31

be analyzed as critically as any other historical factor. Choices about the placement of the
chapel, design of open spaces, and positioning of dorms, faculty residence, and other
quarters created emotional and intimate landscapes at both Columbia College and South
Carolina College.

The placement of these colleges within their surrounding urban environments
combined with their internal spaces to shape two different types of community dynamics.
Until 1857, Columbia’s campus was located in lower Manhattan surrounded by middle-
and upper-class residential neighborhoods, several blocks away from the Theater District
of lower Broadway and the Five Points. This Park Place campus was situated on three
(later shrunk to two) acres and contained only one building, the College Hall used for
president and faculty residences and course instruction. When the college moved to 49th
Street and Madison Avenue (the present site of City Hall), it moved into the four-block
site that had previously housed the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf
and Dumb. This placed the campus further north of the residential districts from which
many of Columbia’s students and trustees commuted. Some faculty grumbled about this
move to the less spacious building, others remained in Columbia owned-buildings
throughout the city, and from this point onward, the trustees held their meetings off-
campus, refusing to make the trip north.6 Both campuses of mid-nineteenth century
Columbia College placed the institution, trustees, students, and faculty alike amidst the
chaos and rapid growth of New York City. At Park Place, members of the college

community frequently crossed paths with the diverse groups of the city, including

 

6 Robert A. McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York,
I 754-2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 104, 133-134. Appendix D referring to the
campuses and buildings is located online at: http://bcatl.barnard.columbia.edulstand_columbiax’dhtml.

 

32

laborers, craftsmen, Bowery B’hoys and G’hals, and immigrants.7 The sounds of the city,
particularly the noise produced by railroads, omnibuses, and cartmen, provided the
college community with a constant reminder of their physical and socioeconomic
position in an urban landscape.

As the city grew over the nineteenth century, the movements and sounds of the
city changed and the campus moved, but the daily routine of the College offered a sense
of consistency. Columbia’s students, mostly residents of the city, commuted to campus
and navigated the chaos of the city on daily basis. These afﬂuent students arrived at
campus by nine o’clock in the morning for chapel services and announcements. They
immediately commenced their course work for the day, which consisted of four one-hour
back-to-back course periods. These classes would be over by 1:30 and parents knew to
expect their sons home by 2:00 in the afternoon. All classes were held in College Hall
and each professor was assigned a particular part of the building to meet his needs.
Students returned in the evening for extracurricular activities, such as one of the
College’s two literary societies, held in the main campus building. Students only attended
campus on Saturdays for oration practice or for disciplinary meetings. Ultimately, they
were on campus for less than twenty-four hours per week.8 As they navigated the city to
reach the campus students oscillated between the paternalistic reaches of their parents and
teachers, affording them a level of autonomy unprecedented among antebellum colleges.

This sense of agency would embolden them to make their own emotional and physical

 

7 Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York to I 898 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 473-508. Ferdinand Longchamp, Asmodeus, or, Legends of New York being a
complete expose of the mysteries, vices and doings, as exhibited by the fashionable circles of New York
(New York: Longchamp and company, 1848).

3 McCaughey, Stand, Columbia, 107.

33

spaces on and off campus, but it also made it more challenging for professors and their
families to intimately associate with the students.

The Park Place campus was organized on a square with the U-Shaped College
Hall opening up to a lush green space ﬁlled with trees, open spaces, and walking paths.9
The 49th Street campus contained a similarly functioning College Hall, but this was
situated on the corner of Madison Avenue and 50th Street in addition to the President’s
Mansion on the opposite comer (49th and Fourth Avenue). This parcel of land also came
with several smaller shacks, including one across from the president’s mansion used as a
boiler room. It differed from the earlier campus in that it lacked a larger College Green
and saw the addition of a dormitory in 1879.

While Columbia College grappled with the chaos of being positioned in the
largest city in the country, South Carolina College had its own challenges being located
in the capital city of South Carolina: Columbia. Chosen as the capital because it provided
central locale for upcountry and lowcountry gentry to meet for government business, the
college symbolized an opportunity for bridging the political, cultural, and social gap
between the two through the “friendships of young men.” With this purpose in mind, the
College was located two blocks east of the State House and a quarter of a mile southeast
of the court house.10 Columbia was not the state’s largest city, but it was the largest
“inland town in the two Carolinas” and relatively prosperous. Leaving campus, faculty

and students alike would head to the legislature to witness the oratorical skills of their

 

9 Map of New York City, 1825-1850 pointing to the location of Columbia College. Burrows and Wallace,
Gotham, 474. Photograph of the Park Place Campus taken in 1853 from the southwest comer by Victor
Prevost located in McCaughey, Stand, Columbia, Figure 2.5. Original located in Columbiana Collection at
the Columbia University Archives.

’0 John Morrill Bryan, An Architectural History of the South Carolina C ollege, 1801-1855, Forward by
Paul F. Norton, (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 3, 9, and 29.

34

state’s great men, such John C. Calhoun, Hugh Legaré, and William J. Grayson. In
addition to being the political center of the state, Columbia was also a railroad center with
three lines linking the city to Charleston, Greenville, and Charlotte.

The city also played an active role in the slave trade as Columbia was a juncture
for traders moving their commerce from the Carolinas to the Gulf Coast states. Asking a
group of Columbia blacks in 1902, if they remembered slaves being sold in the city,
Frederic Bancroft reported that they replied, “Did—dey sell ‘em? Dey sol’ ‘em jess like
yo’ see ‘em drive er hogs. ..’er like dey sell chickens er tu’keys!” Less than ﬁve blocks
from the College was the home of Charles Logan, an Irish-bom slave-trader, who kept a
small jail in the back of his home where he kept blacks for a period of time before they
were sold. This area near Logan’s home was identiﬁed by Bancroft as a small “slave
market.”ll Like Columbia College in New York, faculty and students alike could walk
six blocks from campus to visit a rich business district teeming with shops, hotels, public
market, and city jail. Even closer to the college, adjacent to Logan’s house, was an area
called “Hell’s Half Acre” or the “Holy Land.” Notoriously known as the toughest part of
the city, this neighborhood contained houses of ill-repute, bars, boarding houses, and
railroad depots. '2

The South Carolina College campus, unlike Columbia’s, steadily developed from
its original horseshoe since its groundbreaking in January of 1805. Signifying his role as
the head of the college, the president’s mansion lay at the head of the horseshoe looking

straight through the middle of the campus. At right angles from this structure lay two

 

” Frederic Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South, (Baltimore, 1931), 240. John Hammond Moore,
Columbia and Richland County: A South Carolina Community, 1740-1990 (Columbia, SC: University of
South Carolina Press, 1993), 1 19. See also the street map of Columbia located on the back cover.

'2 Moore, Columbia and Richland County, 141.

35

College buildings, Rutledge (on the South) and DeSassure (on the North) Halls. These
buildings were constructed as mirror images of each other; each building was 160 feet in
length and placed 320 feet apart with an open lawn in between. These three-story
buildings boasted a central section designed for use as the “Chapel, Library,
Philosophical Chamber, Recitations Rooms, etc.” and the wings contained twelve student
mansion rooms with twenty-four bedrooms. '3 Unlike Columbia’s students, South
Carolina’s students lived on campus and were prohibited from leaving except with
express permission of the president. Next to these buildings, extending this line of
buildings on the north side, was the Steward’s Hall. With room set aside for seniors, this
structure contained several dining rooms over which one or two professors would
preside. '4

Next to the Steward’s Hall and directly across the College Green from the
Steward’s Hall lay the three-story double tenement buildings for faculty housing. The
basement story contained a “study, breakfast-parlour, and a gentlemans[’] private room.”
The ﬁrst ﬂoor included a “hall, a front parlor, a back parlor, and a chamber, a staircase in
the hall to lead to the third story” and later included “large sliding doors between the two
parlors and ﬁre-places” as well as doors leading to a piazza. The top ﬂoor contained “a
bedroom, a nursery, a chamber, and a small dressing or bathing room, and a piazza in the
rear” with a trap door leading to a garret.l5 Lastly, as shown in a painting by T. Ulor

depicting the College in 1827, the campus also housed an unnamed building differing

 

’3 Bryan, Architectural History, 42-43.

'4 Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina, Vol. 1 South Carolina College (Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 1951), 66. Bryan, Architectural History, 55.

'5 This tenement plan was implemented in 1854 with a new faculty building and additions and repairs made
to the older ones, which contained three less rooms. Bryan, 109-1 1 1. Original housed at the South
Caroliniana Library of the University of South Carolina.

36

dramatically from the rest of the brick buildings of campus because it was constructed of
wooden slats or logs. This building did not sit along horseshoe with the other buildings,
thus signifying its removal from the college’s ofﬁcial purposes. Much smaller than the
other buildings, and sitting behind the faculty residence, it is possible that this building
housed enslaved persons belonging to the institution, president, or faculty. In 1833,
Thomas Cooper, President of the College, took the initiative to build a “comfortable
wooden building of 4 rooms for the accommodation of servants” for the personal expense
of $320. Again, in 1836 the College erected a 13-foot by 26-foot wooden building for the
housing of the “college servants.”16 The fact that this building was not included on
campus maps or in the ofﬁcial architectural history of the institution, and referred to only
in a ﬂeeting moment of the faculty meeting, reﬂects the forgotten nature of this aspect of
the history of higher education.

Both colleges esteemed the classical curriculum and drew from similar models of
education, but the differing landscapes of Columbia College and South Carolina College
fostered the creation of two distinct educational environments.17 Students and faculty
moved on and off campus with ease and while traversing the city, the chaotic sounds of
New York served as a constant reminder to members of the college of their location near
residential, entertainment, and vice districts. Students, faculty, and trustees had the ability
to slip anonymously into throngs of city dwellers. Although the chaos of the city echoed

across the campus grounds, the college would ideally provide a refuge from the dangers

 

'6 T. Ulor, The South Carolina College, watercolor, c. 1827, South Caroliniana Library at the University of
South Carolina. See also: Minutes of the Board of Trustees of the South Carolina College. December 5,
1833. South Caroliniana Library. Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. February 3, 1836.
South Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina.

'7 M. Perry Chapman, American Places: In Search of the Twenty-first Century Campus (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 2006), 5.

37

of the city. But void of separate buildings for a library or faculty homes, the college
community paled in the liveliness of the city. By living off campus and returning
elsewhere in the city to families and ﬁiends, the college atmosphere lacked the intimacy
found at South Carolina College. Both New York and Columbia offered their
communities opportunities to spend money on consumer goods, entertainment, and
transportation. But, unlike Columbia College, South Carolina College created an intimate
community that did more than simply try to enforce the policy of in loco parentis, but
rather attempted to replicate the creation of a family, particularly through faculty wives,
children, servants, and slaves.

The addition of “others” into the campus community forces historians to
reconﬁgure what the college valued and considered important, but the physical contours
and markers of campus similarly convey a sense of institutional identity. The campuses
of both Columbia College and South Carolina College contained an open green space.
Located in front of the college building at Columbia, this space offered respite from the
city and the academic work of the college. South Carolina’s green was enclosed by two
rows of buildings, including dormitories, classrooms, faculty homes, chapel, and library,
arranged in a horseshoe. In contrast with Columbia’s green, South Carolina’s provided
opportunities for a different type of intimacy—an intimacy associated with the extension
of a family and household. The way in which these two institutions utilized the college
green offers a window onto the varied role of the extended community at the nineteenth-
century college campus.

At Columbia College, the campus contained an “abundance of grass and

numerous lofty trees rich in foliage” situated in front of the college building and opening

38

up to the city. '8 The campus occupied an entire city block, but it was bounded by
neighborhood residents who erected fences and railings which effectively demarcated the
campus grounds from their own. Prior to moving into 2 College Hall on campus,
Professor James Renwick and his family were among the residents requesting permission
to construct these barriers. Although an iron railing could not prevent individuals from
crossing into this private space, his request reﬂected a desire to deﬁne the type of
relationships he wanted with students by symbolically differentiating his home from his
place of work.19 According to John Brinckerhoff Jackson, boundaries, such as this one,
would physically divide the space, associating it more intimately with his residence home
and thereby revealing the types of personal relationships desired. 20 Moreover, as
Columbia moved to its mid-town campus and the student body increased in number, the
Trustees began to request that professors live off-campus in order that their residences
within the college building could be “converted into class and lecture rooms.”2| Echoing
the antebellum trend of separating the private life of family from the public life of the
head of household’s workplace, this further cemented the separation of family from the
coHege.

The force of the landscape and institutional changes in housing arrangements

made it increasingly difﬁcult for Columbia’s urban students to create close friendships

 

'8 Mary King Van Rensselar. Reminiscences of the Duer family. c. 1913. Duer Family Papers. Rare Book
and Manuscript Library.

'9 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. May 7, 1834. University Archives. Columbia
University.

20 John B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986),
149-150. This physical marking offered a spatial representation for the middle-class luxury of
public/private divisions. Jackson, Maps of Meaning, 177. For spatial analogies, see also: Carl E. Schorske,
F in-de-siécle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980). On constructing walls and
other barriers see: J. B. Jackson “A New Kind of Space” Landscape v. 18 n. 1 (Winter 1969): 33-35.

2' Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. February 6, 1860. University Archives. Rare
Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

39

with one another in the same way as most Victorian collegians. Among others, Helen
Horowitz and Anthony Rotundo have indicated that these student friendships commonly
developed through the private space of dormitories or letter-writing. Columbia students
did not share residential spaces or frequently write letters to one another as most lived in
the city rather than scattered throughout the state or country as at other institutions.22
Compelled to construct student domains elsewhere, they often turned to creating and
maintaining intimate friendships in alternative spaces on and off campus. While on
campus, this most frequently occurred in particular spaces, especially the green. This
space was central to the college: all students had to pass through this area to reach the
college building, and it provided a view to the city streets. The college green operated as
an arena for a variety of relationship-building activities, such as gossiping, walking,
studying, visiting, and playing sports.

The college green offered an arena for students to construct relationships with one
another in larger groups or one-on-one. One particularly revealing poem composed by the
class of 1855 memorialized the importance of the college green to student cultures.
“Beneath those rugged elms” of the college green and under “that oak tree’s shade,”
students “collected round in noisy gabling groups.” The authors also added that the
“students stand or crowd about the stoops” of the college building teeming out onto the
green.23 With these words, the student authors paint an idyllic image of students lounging

on various parts of the green, sharing stories and gossiping. Closing the poem, the

 

22 Anthony Rotundo, “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern
United States, 1800-1900” Journal of Social History Vol. 23 No. 1 (Autumn, 1989): 1-25. Helen Leﬂtowitz
Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the end of the Eighteenth Century to the Present
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

23 C olumbiana: A bagatelle by the students of Columbia College. Not by the faculty. 1855. New York
Historical Society.

40

students mourn the end of this period of their lives and observe that after graduation,
these days would be missed. Members of the other classes would no longer ﬁnd the
author “near his fav’rite [sic] tree. . .nor at the oak.” Even after college hours, some
students returned to campus to gather on the green. George Templeton Strong recorded in
his diary on November 5, 1836 that he went “up to the college green to meet Chittenden,”
a classmate, “for a[n] A. E. Q. investigation.”24 For Strong, the college ground offered
more than a vague place for gathering with friends as this space had a particular purpose
and meaning---the question of his membership into one of school’s secret societies. Long
a source of building intimate bonds, the secret societies were forbidden at Columbia, but
members met unofﬁcially on the college green.

For individual students, such as Christodoulus Evangeles, arriving to campus
prior to morning chapel services provided an opportunity spend one-on-one time with his
friends. On July 3, 1836, he met his ﬁiend “Jackson” on the green and together they
discussed his unnamed “love.” On another occasion, he met his friend “John Graham”
right on the college green, right next to the gate leading to Church Street and while
chatting there, the two students saw Julia Post walking to school. Evangeles quickly left
campus to escort her to school at Mrs. O’Kills down the block.25 On another occasion,
while taking several “walks around the green” he discussed “his love” with another

classmate, Alfred Cooke, who informed him that “all goes well with her.”26 Even though

 

2" George Templeton Strong. Diary. November 5, 1836. Manuscript Division. New York Public Library.

25 Christodoulus Leonidas Militidaes Evangeles. Diary. Vol. 2 (1834-1838). July 3, 1836 and June 18,
1836. Manuscript Collections. New York Historical Society. Mrs. O’Kills school wasjust a few blocks
away and was subject to much posturing by the students. On April 18, 1836, Evangeles recorded that he
wore his silk gown (for the annual exhibition) out in the city intending to “make a ﬁgure before the young
ladies of Mrs. O’Kill’s school.” He further recorded that “”1 always take the privilege of making some love
expressions to them with my hands and countenance.”

2" Christodoulus Leonidas Militidaes Evangeles. Diary. Vol. 2 (1834-1838). June 29, 1835. Manuscript
Collections. New York Historical Society.

41

the discussion of women and love interests was a favorite topic among young men,
Rotundo has pointed out that only close friends revealed their romantic interests and
feelings.27 For Evangeles, the college green offered a safe space in which he could reveal
his romantic feelings and express his emotional vulnerability to only his most intimate
friends. While walking around the green and sharing their innermost feelings, they
evaded evade the ears of others and further illustrated how they utilized that public space
for private, intimate moments. This mobility also meant that students could spread
themselves throughout the green to all reaches of the college property and different
students could use the green for a variety of activities. Students were able to claim their
own niches across this open space as every student found “his own den home” on the
green.28

Although Columbia prohibited athletics on the college green, the students often
took advantage of the open space to engage in games. Some groups played “marbles,
balls, and beans,” while others participated in more manly pursuits, such as football and
boxing.29 In May of 1837, Strong reported that the students “had our foot ball on the
Green today” and as they were just beginning to “enjoy some good sport with it” the
president walked over to them and forbid them from doing so. Although student sport at
this time was an informal version of the modern sports that would emerge later in the

century, they still displayed physical prowess and bravery while building camaraderie

among the players. After being admonished by the president for the athletics. the students

 

27 Rotundo, “Romantic Friendship,” 3.

2’ Christodoulus Leonidas Militidaes Evangeles. Diary. Vol. 2 (1834-1838). October 17, 1835. Manuscript
Collections. New York Historical Society.

29 C olumbiana: A bagatelle by the students of Columbia College. Not by thefaculty. 1855. New York
Historical Society.

42

continued to utilize the green for the construction of intimate bonds by discussing a
“general feeling of rebellion and contumaciousness.”3O

Students also engaged in bare-knuckle ﬁghting on the green, the main sport of the
underground bachelor culture of New York City. This sport was particularly taboo
because it was primarily afﬁliated with working class youth—not the upper-crust young
men attending Columbia.31 Strong described an occasion in which “two pugnacious
Freshmen engaged in a duel... The way they pulled hair and cuffed ears was a caution.
Really, really, I did not imagine that any such sanguinary young heroes were to be found
in old Columbia. . 3’32 The shared experience of observing this masculine display of skill
and strength combined with the forbidden nature of this sport to foster a student culture
of violence, masculinity, and closeness upon the college green. The green, at Columbia,
was utilized primarily as student-centered space because it provided a rare opportunity
for these non-residential students to engage in a variety of activities ranging from
intimate conversations between friends to the violent, manliness of bare-knuckle boxing.

At South Carolina College, students engaged in the most “intimate contact” with
those students with whom they had “daily associations” within their fratemity or housing.
Students spent most of their time in these two places outside of the combined
approximate 5 hours spent in the classroom or chapel daily. The sheer magnitude of this
time spent together made these moments particularly ripe for the development of

relationships. For example in May of 1853, one student recorded that after dinner he

“talked [at] bedtime with Harris,” while on another occasion, he wrote, “went to Daniel’s

 

30 George Templeton Strong. Diary. May 23, 1837. Manuscript Division. New York Public Library.

3 ' Elliott Gom, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckled Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1986).

32 George Templeton Strong. Diary. June 13, 1837. Manuscript Division. New York Public Library.

43

room and looked out and heard some music.”3 In these two cases among many others,
these interactions occurred in the dormitories, but like Columbia College moments of
student solidarity also took place on the college green as well. Edward Keller recorded in
his diary that “after breakfast I sat under the tree and talked [for] about one hour to some
students” and on another occasion he “sat outside under the tree all the afternoon
talking.”34 The moments that fostered intimacy at Columbia, such as walking, talking,
and sharing feelings with one another, did not take place on the green at South Carolina
College, but rather occurred during walks “towards rocky Branch” or in the woods when
“pick[ing] some wild shrubs” off of campus property.35 Like the Columbia students who
lurked around the gate of the college green to catch a glimpse of the young ladies
attending a nearby school, the South Carolina students similarly took advantage of
opportunities to interact with local women of similar status. However, since the College
and ladies’ school were both somewhat removed from the city of Columbia, the nexus of
this activity was neither the green, nor the college. The students evaded the watchful eyes
of the faculty to hire horses and carriages for the purpose of leaving the town and
disturbing the evening activities of the Female Institute.36 South Carolina College
students participated in many of the same intimacy building activities as the Columbia
College, but they occurred in different locations due to the landscape of the campus and

location in reference to the city.

 

3’ Robert Henry. Report to the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. May 7, 1845. Robert Henry
Papers. Extract from the Proceedings of the Faculty. February 22, 1836. Thomas S. Twiss Papers. South
Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina. Edward Henry Keller. Diary. May 2, 1853 and May 3,
1853. South Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina.

3’ Edward Henry Kellers. Diary. April 29, 1853 and May 1, 1853. Edward Henry Kellers Papers. South
Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina.

35 Edward Henry Kellers. Diary. April 12, 1853 and April 16, 1853. Edward Henry Kellers Papers. South
Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina.

36 Minutes of the Faculty of the South Carolina College. April 6, 1836. South Caroliniana Library.
University of South Carolina.

44

The green space was utilized for the creation of student domain under the cover of
darkness. Students would “annoy” professors after dark through the “sport” of
“riding. . .horses and blowing of horns”, bringing tar barrels to campus for bonﬁres, or
serenading faculty and their families. In one case townspeople visiting College faculty
were also subject to student wrath after dark. On March 6, 1833 Alexander Herbmont, “a
gentleman of high standing and respectability,” complained of being “ﬁred at from the
North College and of indecent language having been made use of [in] the presence of his
wife.”37 South Carolina’s students were infamous for “black riding” in which they “hired
horses or mules and disguising themselves generally with black robes rode around the
campus bearing torches and making [the] night hideous with noise.”38

Unlike Columbia College, the college yard of South Carolina College played a
less substantial role in the creation of student domain, particularly after the six-foot high
wall constructed around the campus in 1835. This wall aimed to prevent student
“intercourse with the town” which occurred “at all times night and day,” but this only
referred to students crossing over the wall (and line demarcated by it) into the city.39
While students naturally found ways to continue pursuing their vices in the city, the
construction of the wall reﬂected the insularity sought by the institution. The students
were given limited access to college green, assigned speciﬁc study hours, and were
subject to regulations prohibiting use of the green for sport, lounging, etc. One series of

regulations from the 18503 prohibited students from “all lounging under trees, or

 

37 Article 6. The New York Times. July 20, 1860. Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina
College. March 6, 1833. South Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina.

33 Subject File, Discipline and Civil War. University Archives. South Caroliniana Library. University of
South Carolina.

39 Report of Dr. Thomas Cooper to the Board of Trustees. Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South
Carolina College. November 28, 1832. South Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina. Minutes
of the Faculty of South Carolina College. January 16, 1837. South Caroliniana Library. University of South
Carolina.

45

collecting in groups about the campus, or before the entries, or any of the college steps,
for the purpose of amusement or conversation.”40

The differing function of the college green at these two institutions contributed to
construction of an intimate collegiate landscape. South Carolina constructed a family
friendly green that they could gaze upon from most of the windows of the college
buildings (recitation/lecture rooms, dorms, chapel, philosophical rooms, etc.), but
Columbia’s green was a student-oriented space which could be unfriendly to wives and
children. Columbia College’s green did not take on a domestic character because their
students did not require exposure to familial models as they returned home to their own
families, who would ideally perform this task themselves. Unlike Columbia College,
South Carolina College believed that the students were “members of the same family”
drawn together through a “common place of education, to which her children can resort
and walk, arm in arm through the hallowed season of youth.”‘“ The idea of recreating a
family and household unit within the campus generated different educational atmospheres
and varied understandings of community relations.

Outside and inside of the campus boundaries, professors’ wives formed female
networks that further highlight the differing institutional perspective on the role of family
in the collegiate experience. New York and South Carolina offered two different ideals of
family structure. In New York, the family ideal was signiﬁcantly shaped by the Victorian

cult of true womanhood in which the wife shaped the home as refuge from the

increasingly chaotic public realm where the man worked to support his family. A sense of

 

’0 Edwin Luther Green. A History of the University of South Carolina (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1916), 234.

4' Memorial of the Alumni Association of the South Carolina College to the General Assembly of South
Carolina in Behalf of the South Carolina College. no date. Legislative Papers. South Carolina Department
of Archives and History. Underline is original emphasis.

46

privacy accompanied this image of the family and home as both were secluded from the
public sphere. At the same time that the household was, in most cases, detached from the
Columbia students’ educational experience, in South Carolina the family and household
regulation formed an important part of the South Carolina College campus. The student
body drew heavily from the planter class as most students came from slave-holding

' families and regions of the state where the slave population out numbered the white
population.42 The household operated as a “social unit” ordering relations between the
male head and his dependents, such as between faculty and dependents, various
households on campus, and the households and students. Southern households were
larger and more varied in composition than northern households. Understandings of
household dynamics shaped the understanding of appropriate relations within the college
campus, including a sense of hierarchical order always tempered by the benevolent
paternalism and dominance of the male head.43 In applying this to the college order,
Thomas Cooper captured the essence as he wrote to the Trustees. Drawing from the idea
that the households within campus were intimately tied to broader campus relations, he
argued that faculty required more authority in dealing with students. He argued that the
comforts of the faculty “depend[ed] upon the good discipline of the college more than on
any other circumstances whatever” and requested that they be granted more authority in
dealing with student disciplinary problems.44 Faculty families were sensitive to the ebb

and ﬂow of the college, but in South Carolina the family had a more profound inﬂuence

 

’2 Hollis, University of South Carolina, see the map located between pages 244-245.

’3 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 67-68 and 100-101. Although she focuses on
yeomen, Stephanie McCurry also points to the paternalism of southern households in her book Masters of
Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South
Carolina Low Country (1995).

’4 Thomas Cooper to the Board of Trustees. Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College.
November 27, 1833. South Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina.

47

on the nature and character of the institution by linking together the public and the private
realm.

In New York City, faculty wives gathered in their off-campus homes for visiting.
In January of 1838, Mrs. Hannah Denning Duer, wife of Columbia College’s president,
recorded in her diary that she “called on Mrs. Renwick,” Professor James Renwick’s
wife, Margaret Brevoort Renwick.45 She frequently distinguished between visits that
were female oriented and those that also included the male professors. For example, on
another occasion she reported that “Mr. and Mrs. Renwick here in the evening.”46 In a
similar entry she recorded that her twenty-three year old daughter, Ellen, visited Mrs.
Anthon and Mrs. McVickar, both wives of Columbia professors, “to show them Mrs.
Jamison’s [sic] picture and costumes of Fanny Butler.” Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson was
an Irish-bom author of travel, art, and literature books as well as an ardent supporter of
women’s rights and women authors and Fanny Kemble Butler was a well-known British
actress popular among young women who imitated her hair style and costumes.
Literature and theater were not the only cultural issues that drew faculty wives together as
Hamilton Fish wrote to Francis Lieber informing him that if “Mrs. Lieber desire[s] to see
the work” of Thomas Crawford, Mrs. Fish would be available on Wednesday for the
“acceptance of friends.”47

Even in deaths of family members, groups of people offering sympathy were

composed of faculty families, neighbors, and the well-to-do. In 1862, when one of the

 

’5 Mrs. Hannah Maria Denning Duer. A Diary of Passing Events. January 22, 1838. Duer Family Papers.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

46 Mrs. Hannah Maria Denning Duer. A Diary of Passing Events. February 15, 1839. Duer Family Papers.
Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. Columbia University.

’7 Hamilton Fish to Francis Lieber. February 13, 1860. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington

Library.

48

Liebers’ sons died ﬁghting for the Confederate army and another fought for the Union,
Matilda Lieber wrote to her husband that “The Kings have been here almost daily,
Drislers, Mrs. Joy, Allan, Lucy Clarita, Labot and many others—all of our neighbors,
there has been great sympathy.”48 This mix of visitors offering comfort was composed of
college-related friends, the Kings, Drislers, and Mrs. Joy, but the rest drew from
geographical and social proximity. These ladies formed a network of sociability, but it
did not center around the institution or its faculty, but rather they were drawn together
through association with the social, cultural, and political leaders of New York. Through
their husbands’ work, the college provided an opportunity to construct a network of
female friends, but this network was not contingent upon the college community or
experience.

The parties hosted by Philip Hone, a long-standing trustee of Columbia College
(1824-1851), wealthy merchant, and founder of the Mercantile Library Association,
similarly illustrate that these networks crossed socioeconomic boundaries. He and his
wife frequently hosted dinners with guests often including professors and their wives,
such as Mr. and Mrs. Duer, Mr. and Mrs. McVickar, Mr. and Mrs. Renwick, and Mr. and
Mrs. King.49 As a member of the upper ten-thousand elites, when Hone invited members
of the faculty and their wives into his home the college constructed a professional
network that crossed economic divisions as well as social and cultural ones.

Some of the wives of Columbia’s faculty applied their nurturing, feminine roles
outside of the home, as did many other middling and upper-class women during this

period. More signiﬁcantly, those women who engaged with reform work did so in

 

’8 Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber. May 2, 1862. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.
’9 Bayard Tuckerrnan, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1889), v.1, 23, 131,143-144, and 192.

49

isolation from each other. For example, Hannah Duer recorded that on February 7 and
April 3, 1838 she “went to see Susan at the asylum, who has a daughter ten days old.” In
this case, it is very likely that Mrs. Duer had gone to the Asylum for Lying-Iii Women,
which was a refuge for pregnant women lacking the necessary to support birth.50 The
Duer family status as one of the ranking Knickerbocker families makes it unlikely that
she was at the Asylum to visit a friend and the familiarity of Duer’s reference to “Susan”
suggests that she was visiting and offering support to one of her servants. On another
occasion she wrote that upon “having met children sitting in the street,” she “visited a
poor family” on Washington Street near the open-market, a mere three blocks west of the
College.5 ' This area near the waterfront was known as a location where children of the
urban poor engaged in “street scavenging” looking for trash and junk that they could later
pawn or take home to their family. Although Mrs. Duer did not record her motivation for
entering into this area, she did enter into the realm of reform interests independent of
other faculty wives. This work continued through the Civil War period, even as many
faculty homes were threatened by the Draft Riots. Francis Lieber wrote to General Henry
Wager Halleck, that his home at 48 East 34th Street, a fashionable neighborhood, was
“situated between the worst points of the riotous days.” But in spite of the threat posed by
the riots, his wife Matilda ventured out daily for work with the “Sanitary Committee.”52

These wives’ ability to successfully steer their social and reform activities outside

of their husbands’ place of work was facilitated by the fact that many lived outside of the

 

’0 Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1987), 70-71.

5' Mrs. Hannah Maria Denning Duer. A Diary of Passing Events. February 7, 1838. April 3, 1838. Duer
Family Papers. Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. Columbia University. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike
Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 740.

52 Francis Lieber to Henry Wager Halleck. July 25, 1863. Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner. February 2,
1864. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

50

campus, particularly after it moved to its mid-town location. The Lieber residence on
East 34th Street was far enough away from campus that he took an omnibus to campus or
walked nearly twenty blocks. With this distance, it is not surprising that faculty wives did
not immediately identify with one another. Outside of the emotional disruption, wives
accepted separations from their husbands due to their careers. For example, Henry
Anderson, professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Columbia lived away from his
wife and child, who resided in New Jersey until they moved to the city in the 18403. Even
though they both lamented the distance between them, it was Professor Anderson who
commuted. On one occasion in 1833, Mrs. Anderson wrote to her husband, “Why I
cannot tell but I did expect you on Friday last. You had not then said that college business
would prevent your coming” and in another instance, “My disappointment was indeed
severe in not seeing you on Saturday last.”53 Although the Andersons were an extreme
case, their geographical separation illustrates the separation of the faculty’s place of work
and the faculty domestic realm.

The lack of faculty wives to provide a domestic and intimate feel for the campus
contributed to the tone of the educational landscape and permitted the emergence of a
student-centered campus. However, the case of Mrs. Renwick, wife of James Renwick,
Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy and Chemistry, was an exception that
proves the rule. Renwick and his family were one of the few families that lived on
campus; the professor, his wife, and three sons resided at 2 College Hall.54 Living on

campus, Mrs. Renwick exhibited nurturing, motherly behavior toward students that was

 

5’ Frances Anderson to Henry James Anderson. June 15, 1833. June 23, 1833. Henry James Anderson
Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

5" James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds. Appletons ’ Cyclopaadia of American Biography (New York: D.
Appleton and Company, 1887), vol. 5, 222-223.

51

more aligned with the dynamics of South Carolina’s campus. Charles Freeman, son of
Professor Henry Anderson, wrote home to his mother, “I must not forget to tell you how
kind Mrs. Renwick has been to me. ..She made me take all my meals with her.” He
continued to say that because she was “so devoted a mama to her own children, she can
act the part of an excellent one, to everybody.”55 The location of homes on campus
facilitated faculty wives’ ability to extend their ideal domestic roles to the educational
experience and create a sense of intimacy often afﬁliated with the home environment.
Even though faculty wives limited contact with the campus as an extension of
their domestic roles, they did enter into the campus arena for ofﬁcial and formal college
functions, such as commencements and exhibitions. In this capacity, they operated
similarly to the members of the wider public who attended these events—as an audience
for the young male students to demonstrate their ﬂourishing, masculine oratorical skills.
In the midst of a busy day for Mrs. Duer in which she “rose at six o’clock,” greeted
“Anna Bridgen [who] arrived before 8 o’clock this morning,” and informed of “the birth
of our ﬁrst grand child,” she also noted that she attended commencement at the College.56
The following year, she similarly noted “Commencement day.”57 Commencement and
exhibitions were an important part of the city’s public life. Newspapers announced and
reported on the faculty and student speakers, decor, and parties. The New Times reported

in March of 1855 the galleries of the Exhibition Hall on Columbia College’s campus

were “ﬁlled with ladies” for the Semi-Annual Commencement while the students and

 

5’ Charles B. Freeman to his mother Frances Anderson. July '15, 1840. Henry James Anderson Papers. Rare
Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

56 Mrs. Hannah Maria Denning Duer. A Diary of Passing Events. October 2, 1838. Duer Family Papers.
Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. Columbia University.

57 Mrs. Hannah Maria Denning Duet. A Diary of Passing Events. October 5, 1839. Duer Family Papers.
Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. Columbia University.

52

faculty sat below as a “grave and imposing” sight.58 Not only does the term “ladies”
denote that these were women of equal social status to the wealthy men and their sons
who attended the institution, but more signiﬁcantly they were perched above in one
single area in which they could view this exclusively male performance. Moreover, the
female attendance at this jubilant intellectual event was a key component in a successful
commencement ceremony. According to the Times, “the lady ﬁ'iends and admirers of
these consumers of the midnight oil turned out or rather turned in with great force to do
them honor. The eye was ﬁlled with a vision of fair faces, the ear with the whizzing of a
thousand fans, and the olfactories [sic] were delectated with the odors of as many
bouquets.”59 The ladies were signiﬁcant to this particular moment in the educational
experience, but only as observers who gave credence to the intellectual and manly
capabilities of the students and faculty. This did not contribute to an intimate or domestic
environment on campus and furthermore, this occurred on other campuses as well,
including the South Carolina College campus.

The faculty wives and family members of South CarolinaCollege’s faculty
resided on campus, which facilitated the recreation of a family unit on campus. The
faculty wives and families also visited one another, but unlike Columbia’s ladies these
women convened in their campus homes. Since faculty members shared buildings which
were divided into two family apartments, daily visits among families were not unusual.
Matilda Lieber recorded in July of 1841 that Professor Henry and his wife “came out to

see me a minute” and on other occasions Dr. Maximillian LaBorde and his family

 

5‘ The New York Times. March 6, 1855.
5" The New York Times. June 28, 1866.

53

stopped in to visit her.60 Due to the distance between homes in the rural south and
idealization of the public and private spheres among Victorians in the Northeast, visiting
was often a formal activity initiated by prior notice.6| However, visiting patterns on
campus contained a more spontaneous nature as faculty families lived right next door to
each other, presenting possibilities for exchanging pleasantries on their adjoining piazzas
or in their front yard. Seeing Matilda Lieber on her piazza, Louisa McCord stopped for a
“momentary chat.”62 Visiting within the home frequently operated as a key component in
the creation and maintenance of female networks, on campus visiting and calling was not
exclusively female terrain. Male colleagues contributed to the development of relations
outside of the faculty rooms and meetings and created a network and community with
members of the other households on campus. Francis Lieber wrote to his wife that when
he saw Professor Hooper on campus he inquired whether “a letter from Mrs. Lieber” had
arrived yet. Lieber also informed his wife that “Preston is very familiar with me. I always
now call him Preston and he me Lieber.”63

Visiting, particularly when either the husband or the wife was absent, illustrates
the sense of support that the adult, white members of this community offered to one
another. While she was visiting the North, Matilda Lieber received a note from Ellen
LaBorde, wife of Professor Maxamillian LaBorde, stating that upon checking up on her
husband, she found him ﬂustered because he could not locate “the bill of lading” and

when she looked around she found it “on the ﬂoor between the right side of the desk and

 

6° Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber. July 9 and 14 1841. September 1 l, 1841. July 20, 1847. Francis Lieber
Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

6' Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986). Nancy Cott, The Bands of Womanhood: ‘Women ’s Sphere ' in New
England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

62 Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber, August 5, 1841. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.
63 FL to his wife, Matilda Lieber. 21 & 29 Feb 1844. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

54

the door.” While stopping in to see how Lieber was getting along without his wife to care
for him reﬂects a level of friendly intimacy, their closeness is further evidenced in the
fact that Mrs. LaBorde wrote to Mrs. Lieber within the text of a letter composed by
Lieber to wife. 64 The private nature of letters between this husband and wife were
suddenly rendered more public by the appearance of her note on top of his. In his wife’s
continued absence, another neighbor brought Lieber a cherry pie and tarts on several
different occasions.65 Their positions later reversed when Lieber went North for the
summer of 1853, he wrote to Matilda inquiring, “have the LaBorde’s not yet come to see
you?” And, Lieber encouraged his wife to take advantage of their next door neighbor, Dr.
Ellet, if she required help with taking the ashes out to the stable, looking for the halter of
his old horse, having Fuller buy fodder, corn, and pine leaves, and ordering the
construction of a wagon.66 Much of the work interconnecting the families and households
of South Carolina College together was performed by faculty wives and fostered by the
geographic form of the campus.

Visiting did not simply operate as a mode of offering support or providing
comfort for the white men and women of this community, but it also permitted women to
form a network of women with whom they could exchange services. Moments of illness
reveal the way in which faculty wives extended their nurturing domestic roles beyond
their own household to the campus household. Writing to Dorothea Dix, Francis Lieber

explained that his wife was extremely busy and was “most of the time out of the house at

 

6" Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. February 21 and 29, 1844. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington
Library. Underline is original emphasis.

6’ Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. May 28, 1845. June 1 and 2, 1845. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E.
Huntington Library.

66 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. August 15, 1853. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

55

the LaBorde’s where a little girl was expected to die in convulsions.”67 During the
summer of 1841 while her husband was in New York City, Matilda Lieber left her slaves
alone while she spent time in Lexington, South Carolina. Mrs. Hooper, wife of William
Hooper (professor of Roman Literature), wrote to Mrs. Lieber informing her that her
slave, Elsy, was “free from fever.” Less than a week later, she wrote again to say that
although Elsy had been improving, “she grew much worse, bowel complaint added to her
high fever.” In spite of the efforts of Mrs. Hooper and the physician she called, the Lieber
slave died. Moreover, Mrs. Lieber assured her husband that she left the house under the
watchful eyes of Mrs. Hooper and “the servants next door.” 68 Faculty wives further
contributed to recreating a family on the College campus by additionally caring for
students who fell ill. In 1848, Pierpont Bishop, a student of South Carolina College,
contracted a “tedious and wasting illness from typhus fever” and died one month before
graduation. However, before he died it was well-known throughout campus that he was
“tenderly nursed, as though he had been a brother” by Thomwell’s wife.69 As faculty
wives cared for the children, servants, and students of this enclosed community, they
consistently provided students with the positive, maternal model of behavior while
separated from their families.

Special occasions, such as holidays and parties, also brought faculty husbands and

wives together. On Christmas Day 1835, Stephen Elliot and his wife requested that

 

(’7 Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix. October 14, 1852. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.
6’ Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber. August 22, 1841. August 28, 1841. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry
Huntington Library.

69 James Henley Thomwell to Martin P. Crawford. April 27, 1848. Located in B. M. Palmer. ed. The Life
and Letters of James Henley Thomwell, D. D., LLD., Ex-President of the South Carolina College at
Columbia, South Carolina (Richmond: Whittet and Shepperson, 1875), 320.

56

Francis Lieberjoin them for a holiday dinner.7O Notable guests also were considered
special occasions which drew together the faculty families in their campus homes. In
1847, Daniel Webster conducted a tour of the South to garner support for opposition to
the Mexican war. When he stopped in Columbia, Matilda Lieber planned a party in honor
of his visit. Similarly, John C. Calhoun recollected that Professor Nott and his wife
planned a gathering in their campus home for the “leading nulliﬁers” in 1835. These
parties proved more than simple social gatherings as they constructed a foundation for an
exchange of services and support, fostering positive faculty relations outside of the
classroom, or modeling domestic life for students. When faculty wives planned, hosted,
and attended parties in their campus homes with the state and nation’s political and social
elite, it further solidiﬁed the institution’s ties with these leaders. Immediately prior to
being sworn in as Governor of the state, James Henry Hammond attended a dinner party
hosted by the Professor Lieber and his wife. Also in attendance were Professor Elliot and
his wife, the recently married planter and former president of the State Bank David J.
McCord and Louisa McCord, wealthy planter and United States senator, judge, state
legislator William DeSaussure, and the well-know Charlestonian painter James
DeVeaux.71 These types of gatherings effectively converted the intimate domestic
space—the realm of faculty wives—into a key arena for cementing the relationship
between the College and the political, social, and cultural leaders of the State. While
these social functions did not directly involve the students, the campus landscape enabled

students to gaze upon or even listen to the parties as they occurred. This modeled for

 

70 Stephen Elliot to Francis Lieber. December 25, 1835. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington
Papers.

7' Carol Bleser, ed. Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 26.

57

students a view of their socioeconomic and political futures as well as offered insight to
appropriate domestic relations. Moreover, the household—a private space—transformed
into a semi-public space as politicians, colleagues, and ﬁiends arrived for parties,
subjected them to student observation and thus, provided an entirely different level of
education occurring outside of the classroom.

Faculty wives additionally played an important role in conducting college politics
by operating as conduits of information for their husbands. Matilda Lieber passed onto
her husband when he was in New York that a number of individuals inquired with her
“several times whether Bamwell intends to resign” the presidency. Continuing, she
informed him that upon her visit to Lexington, SC, William Campbell Preston was not
favored for the vacancy because he was perceived as “selling himself.” Lieber later used
this information when the presidency again opened up stating that a group of upcountry
elites favored him to ﬁll the position but, “I am utterly and absolutely passive. I do not
move a ﬁnger. I might easily write to some Trustees, but I fold my hands.”72 In other
cases he asked his wife to pass messages along to them while away for long periods of
time, writing to her “please remember me kindly to [Preston] and LaBorde.”73 While the
content of these messages proved to be of no pressing merit, it demonstrates that wives
were employed by their husbands to keep campus networks alive in their absence.
Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, wife of William Ellet the Professor of Chemistry, shared
gossip with her husband, but also passed it along to other professors, trustees, and notable

persons. Both the Ellets and Francis Lieber were in New York during the summer of

 

72 Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber. September 20, 1841. Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix. February 5, 1855.
Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.
73 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. September 1 and 4, 1853. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington

Library.

58

1841. Upon passing on the street, Mrs. Ellet informed him that she heard the Columbia
townspeople “vehemently” discussing the “cruelty and tyranny” of leaving his wife and
family behind. Although she suggested that the Columbians depicted him of abandoning
his home and dependents, Lieber, ever thick-skinned to such cracks about his
masculinity, sarcastically requested his wife to provide him with a “certiﬁcate” of
permission.74 While the Liebers and Ellets were not close friends, these gossiping
exchanges reveal that faculty wives not only passed judgment about appropriate behavior,
but also permitted the domestic realm of the college to be drawn out into the public realm
of a crowded New York City street. Moreover, prior to departing Columbia, “Mrs. Ellet
and her friend” made a very similar comment to Mrs. Lieber alluding to her husband’s
desertion further drawing attention to the role of gossip and judgment in regulating
domestic life on the college campus.75 Although the ladies’ gossip did not reshape the
Liebers’ behavior, it does illustrate how domestic life within the college campus was a
public space open to the judgment of others. This gossiping took place in the summer and
there were no students on campus, but the College’s ties to the political, economic, and
social elite of the state ensured that campus and its representatives reﬂected upon the
state and its leaders.

The domestic relationships of faculty and desire to normalize could also be
interpreted as an effort to model proper husband-wife relations. The campus and town
community disapproval of male professors leaving their dependents and families behind
reveals the expectation that they were to remain a complete unit. The College authorities

similarly anticipated and support faculty members in their role as heads of household.

 

7’ Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieberr. August 24, 1841. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.
7’ Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber. September 4, 1841. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington

Library.

59

Writing to the Board of Trustees in November of 1838, Thomas Twiss referred them to
the resignation he tendered earlier in the year. He cited as his primary cause for leaving
his South Carolina the separation “from my family and disappointed from time to time in
bringing them on, by events over which I had no control.” The Trustees validated the
importance of family and concurred that this was an adequate reason for leaving his
position as Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy by approving his
resignation. However, by November, Twiss’ family resided with him in his campus home
and he requested that the Trustees permit him to retract his resignation stating that his
“service would promote its [the College] welfare.”76 In approving Twiss’s request, it
becomes evident that not only were faculty wives invested in regulating the domestic
realm of the college, but that the faculty and the institution similarly desired the family
unit on the campus.

During this 18508, New York City ﬂourished and the area surrounding the Park
Place students fell prey to the “seductive pleasures” and their attention “divert[ed] . . .from
higher obj ects.”77 This placed a unique strain on faculty and generated increased concern
for their children. Professor Renwick, and his wife and three sons, lived on the Columbia
College campus throughout this period. In 1854, two years shy of the College’s move to
the mid-town campus, he wrote the Board of Trustees an impassioned letter regarding the
occupants of a house which shared a border with the campus, near his apartment in the
College Building. He was particularly concerned with “the practice among the

occupants. . .of pistol ﬁring in the vacant ground adjouming my premises. This has been

 

7" Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. May 9, 1838. November 28, 1838. See also
Thomas Twiss to the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. November 28, 1838. Thomas Twiss
Papers. South Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina.

77 A Letter to the trustees of Columbia College ﬁ'om A Citizen (New York: Thomas N. Stanford, 637 B-
way) 1856. New York Historical Society.

60

habitual since their occupation.” What resounded with Renwick was the fact that he
found his children “watching them from an upper window ﬁring against the fence a wall
only 12 feet from the house so that any stray shot would certainly have hit the house.” 78
The campus landscape, lack of a strong faculty wives network, and the dangers of the city
combined to prevent the development of a family friendly environment.

In 1913, Mary King Van Rensselaer recalled that when she was a young girl she
would visit the seven daughters of President Duer at his house on the Columbia campus.
Although prohibited from doing so, she admitted that, she would play outside
occasionally with the Duer girls on the campus grounds. What resonated most in her
memory was that this “large family of daughters” caused the home to be “likened to the
county jail.” This was not because it was “ﬁlled with misdoers [sic],” rather, she
playfully asked, “Why? Can anyone guess?” President Duer sought to keep his daughters
away from the young men attending the college.79 George Templeton Strong addresses
student familiarity with professors’ families. On May 23, 1838 Strong recorded in his
diary that President Duer’s daughter was “gittin ’ married to George T. Wilson, our next-
neighbor!”80 Student familiarity with faculty children was more likely to be rooted in
neighborhood relations rather than college relations. More signiﬁcantly, the failure to
reproduce complete family structures on campus produced a different kind of intimate
environment than the one that emerged at South Carolina.

At South Carolina College, though, children played on the campus green and

piazzas. In addition to positioning faculty members as ideal models of fathers and heads

 

7’ John McVickar to Charles King. April 10, 1854. Columbia College Collection. Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. Columbia University. Emphasis in original.

79 Mary King Van Rensselaer. Reminiscences of the Duer Family. 1913. Duer Family Papers. Rare Book
and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

8° George Templeton Strong. Diary. May 23, 1838. Manuscript Division. New York Public Library.

61

of families, their presence also created an atmosphere with an air of intimacy. In daily
observations and coming to know faculty children by name, the college campus recreated
a household environment, provided an appropriate behavioral model, and subtly sought to
elicit virtuous conduct from the students. Children like Gillespie Thomwell regularly
played on campus (and had accidents there) and were a common sight for the students.
The children themselves also enjoyed playing on campus and felt comfortable roaming
around the campus. Falling ill in February 1852, fourteen-year old Norman Lieber wrote
to his older brother Hamilton, that he was required to stay inside, “I can not go in the
yard. . .I want to get out, so I don’t know what to do.” And, in case his feelings about
being prohibited from leaving the house were unclear, he clariﬁed, “I hate it.”8' Writing
to Anna Ticknor, Professor Lieber described “three sweet little girls” who came “with a
little boy and a servant” and called to him: “Dr. Lieber, Dr. Lieber here are ﬂowers.”
These children “picked some straggling violets” for him and brought them to his library
for him.82 Children’s familiarity with the other professors and with students signiﬁes a
warm and inviting community that further modeled domestic life for the students of
South Carolina College.

In addition to simply providing an environment hospitable and enjoyable for
children, the campus also provided unique educational opportunities for them. In 1864,
Emma LeConte, daughter of Professor Joseph LeConte, recorded in her diary that even

though “It is hard to study in the present state of affairs. .. I have only tried to read

again.” More signiﬁcantly, she “could not very well study Physics and Latin while father

 

8' Guido Norman Lieber to Hamilton Lieber. February 5, 1852. Columbia, SC. Francis Lieber Papers.
South Caroliniana Library.

82 Francis Lieber to Anna (Eliot) Ticknor. June 13, 1853. Columbia, SC. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E.
Huntington Library.

62

is away, but I might ﬁnish Comc Sections and review some mathematics.” The war
disrupted her education as it existed within the College. LeConte’s entry reveals that her
father also was her teacher---providing assistance and guidance for her as she studied
Physics and Latin. While the sciences, such as natural theology and evidences of
Christianity were important parts of southern female academies, physics was generally
not included and many of these same institutions favored the study of modern languages,
including French, German, and Italian, over Latin and Greek.” Embedded within this
constructed educational community, Emma LeConte took advantage of the environment
and her father’s knowledge and belief that “female education must be more informal than
that for males because woman’s mind is ‘more susceptible of indirect teaching and less

”-184

susceptible of didactic [sic] teaching. Lieber similarly noted that William Campbell
Preston gathered “four boys every Saturday to make them speak and ‘hold forth’ on
sundry great subjects,” such as Socrates and Robert Emmet.85 Learning oration from the
skilled and revered former senator, provided these youths with a model teacher.
Likewise, Lieber additionally offered instruction to children outside of his regular college
and literary duties. “Yesterday,” he wrote to his wife, “the little girl came for her German
lesson and when I corrected some things she had written (and done very well) she
blushed all over.” By providing a residential arrangement on-campus for faculty and

family members, educational exchange among faculty and children of their colleagues

created a unique network of bonds among them. Faculty members opened the private,

 

8’ Christine Anne Famham, The Education of the Southern Belle (New York: New York University Press,
1994), 25-26.

8" Lester D. Stephens, Joseph LeConte: Gentle Prophet of Evolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press),
66.

85 Emma LeConte, A Journal Kept by Emma Florence LeC onte from December 31, 1864 to August 6, 1865
and Containing a Detailed Account of the Burning of Columbia by One who was an eyewitness (Transcript
prepared by the Historical Records Survey of the Works Progress Administration, May, 1938), 13-14.
Documenting the American South.

63

domestic space of their homes to other members of this constructed community. Living
on campus offered the children of faculty, male and female alike, unique educational
opportunities and contributed to the creation of a familial environment.

The campus landscapes and city settings shaped the multifaceted ways in which
individuals and groups interacted with one another at Columbia College and South
Carolina College. The unique character of these college greens encompasses the most
signiﬁcant differences between these two institutions, as one was rooted in student
domain and the other deﬁned by the presence of families. South Carolina College sought
to recreate a household unit by drawing together and maintaining networks of families
and simultaneously provided models of appropriate domestic life for the students. The
interconnected network of families drew the privacy of the home into the semi-public
space of the campus. Columbia, as a commuter college, did not offer similar familial
models and fostered, to a certain extent, an impersonal campus dominated by student
culture. These two different campuses shaped by their geographic location and physical
space, hosted distinct types of interactions tied to familial and household intimacy.

In many nineteenth-century households, the immediate family was accompanied
by other individuals, particularly individuals performing manual labor tasks. These
additions to the household unit further ordered societal relations and the college

dynamics, as will be explored in the following chapter.

64

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

Human Landscapes: Servants, Slaves, and the Extended Campus Community

The built environment dictated the manner in which members of the college
community interacted with one another, but the human landscape, composed of
individuals who seamlessly melded into the background, further deﬁned the social
dynamics.l Like the intellectual workers and their families, free and bonded laborers
shaped the collegiate community and contributed to the informal educational experience.
These drudge workers replicated and challenged dominant social and cultural race,
gender, and class relations by autonomously creating moments and spaces for other
community members to afﬁrm their identity. As such, these laborers created avenues for
students and faculty to articulate their race, gender, and class positions. The comparison
of workers of a northeastern college with southern college reveals that the approach to
campus residence and regional understandings of the household unit shaped their
experience at and position within the college. Bound and free laborers contributed to their
particular environments through mundane tasks that drew the entire community together.
Although both institutions demonstrated a fundamental need for laborers, the varying
social milieus and residential structures produced different human landscapes and
education environments. In New York, servants operated as gatekeepers who regulated .
access to the college community and its members, while South Carolina’s servants and

slaves extended the practice of re-creating a household unit on the college campus.

 

' Members of the landscape tradition of cultural geography have used this term “human landscape” to refer
to human-built landscape (material structures), I use this to refer to a different type of landscape, one
composed of people themselves.

65

The latest generation of education historians has drawn attention to the vibrant
nature of the nineteenth-century American college, but many of these scholars have failed
to address the entirety of the campus community. These carefully planned communities
always included slaves and/or servants depending upon time and space. Most recently,
scholars have directly incorporated slavery into historical treatments of antebellum higher
education. In his essay, “‘We Desired Our Future Rulers to be Educated Men,”’ Michael
Sugrue elucidates South Carolina College’s ideological commitment to slavery and
proves that proslavery arguments were carefully inculcated through the curriculum at
South Carolina College. Terry Meyers’ recent work highlights a different approach to
education and slavery. He describes the College of William and Mary’s tenuous relation
to slavery in ideological and material practices as an avenue for assessing restitution.2
This scholarship successfully argues that institutions of higher education sustained and
aided the development of slavery, but does not offer any evidence of how the presence of
slaves contributed to the educational atmosphere or faculty and student experience.
Research, such as that of Meyers and Alfred Brophy, is speciﬁcally rooted in modern
institutions’ internal investigations of their connections to slavery and concomitant
apologies for this heritage. Because this literature has been driven by the Optimistic

search for restitution, similar serious treatment of the free men and women employed by

northern college communities does not exist.

 

2 Michael Sugrue, “‘We Desired Our Future Rulers to be Educated Men’: South Carolina College, the
Defense of Slavery, and the Development of Secessionist Politics” in Roger Geiger, ed. The Nineteenth-
Century American College (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 91-1 14. Terry L. Meyers, “A
First Look at the Worst” William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal (Spring 2008): 1 141-1 168. Alfred L.
Brophy, “Considereing William and Mary’s History with Slavery: The Case of President Thomas Roderick
Dew,” William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal (Spring 2008): 1091-1139. Sophia Li, “Colleges Confront
their ties to Slavery” Brown Daily Herald. February 27, 2008. Ira Berlin has also recently offered a course
at the University of Maryland entitled: “Knowing Our History: African-American Slavery in the University
of Maryland.”

66

Likewise servants and janitors of educational institutions have also been largely
neglected although some scholars have utilized examples involving servants and staff of
educational institutions to illustrate broader trends in the history of education, such as
nineteenth-century professors’ middle-class status or teachers’ negotiation of school
politics. Labor scholars and architectural historians have similarly addressed janitors and
custodial workers at educational institutions within larger treatments of unionization,
labor racketeering, and urban architectural history. Discussions of nineteenth-century
janitorial workers in educational settings portray them as ineffectual individuals
manipulated by reformers as part of a wider attempt to curb spending and institute
reforms.3 Like slaves, servants and staff have been ignored as valuable members of the
constructed college community. Free and bonded men and women performed crucial
tasks for day-to-day campus life, but more signiﬁcantly they diversiﬁed the college
community and stabilized the dynamics of their respective college communities.

These groups of free and bonded men and women have been largely neglected in
the literature for two main reasons. Contemporaries marginalized their appearance in
records or found their presence too mundane to note. In this same regard, elites and
institutions left more records behind than those existing on the bottom of the
socioeconomic and political hierarchy. Additionally, scholars have failed to ask questions
about the contributions of these men and women to the educational landscape. By reading
documents, such as trustee records and faculty letters and diaries, against the grain, this

chapter adds another layer of understanding to the social dynamics of the antebellum

 

3 Eric Amesen, Encyclopedia of United States Labor and Working-Class History (New York: CRC Press,
2006). Neil Harris, Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999). David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1974).

67

college community. The different types of manual laborers employed by the colleges
reﬂected signiﬁcant regional differences (free versus enslaved laborers) and as a result,
this chapter demonstrates the pervasive role of region in constructed intimate educational
environments.

In the history of higher education, many more scholars have addressed the
socioeconomic diversity of nineteenth-century higher education than the racial diversity
of the antebellum college. Some historians approached the issue by drawing attention to
poorer students who attended elite institutions to prepare for the ministry, while others
point to the drive for more utilitarian curriculum as an effort to portray antebellum higher
education as more democratic than the traditionalists thought.4 Like treatments of slavery
at southern colleges, historians have similarly neglected to consider the role of laboring
peoples in conveying the institutions’ values and social relations. Utilizing the household
as a unit of analysis, it is evident that the servants of Columbia College and servants and
slaves of South Carolina College made contributions to the tone and atmosphere of the
educational experience.

The nineteenth-century household was a social unit that varied immensely
according to region and socioeconomic background. Beginning in the 18305, many places
in the urban Northeast experienced a separation of the workplace from the home as

increasing numbers of individuals hired for work resided or at least took their meals in

 

" Natalie Naylor, “Raising a Learned Ministry: The American Education Society, 1815-1860” History of
Education Quarterly 24 (1984): 479-497. David B. Potts, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century:
From Localism to Denominationalism” History of Education Quarterly 11 (1971): 363-380. Earle D. Ross,
Democracy ’3 College: The Land-Grant Movement in the Formative Stages (Ames: Iowa State College
Press, 1942). Bruce W. Leslie. Gentleman and Scholars: Colleges and Community in the Age of the
University, 1865-1917 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). David Allmendinger,
Paupers and Scholars (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974). Geiger, ed. The American College (2000).

68

separate boarding houses, but this was not true for many domestic servants.5 Continuing
to reside in the homes of their employers, domestic servants took on increasingly
important role in deﬁning the status of the Victorian lady. While the ideal Victorian
husband would leave the home and traverse the city to another location for work, the
ideal wife remained at home to supervise servants or receive visitors. The Victorian lady
entered into the public realm to visit with other women or engage in moral reform or
religious activities. But, it was the presence of servants to whom she could direct to take
care of the home and provide the leisure time for service activities that designated her as
a “true woman.”6

For the faculty families of Columbia College in New York City, the divisions
between home/work and public/private meant that a husband’s college duties frequently
took place outside of the home. This carried with it an understanding that the faculty’s
domestic servants remained in the home, but the College itself—the work place—
required its own servants to maintain and care for the buildings on the campus.
Accompanying the intellectual work of the faculty, the College needed laborers to carry
out its daily operations. The campus was a carefully constructed community and the
existence of these men and women contributed a pervasive sense of difference (class,
race, and gender) to the community. Although some servants arrived to work on campus
daily, a janitor, along with his “hired boy” and family, lived on campus grounds and
together they formed an indispensable part of this community.

The southern household similarly constituted a social unit that included family

members and dependents, but differed immensely from the northern household due to the

 

5 Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War (Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 170-171.
6 Stansell, City of Women, 159.

69

presence of bondsmen and women. These individuals were viewed as property and
represented ﬁnancial investments, but they were “regarded as members of the household
of their master” whether that master was the president, a faculty member, or the College
itself.7 The campus was an incredibly intricate system of relations complicated further by
the ownership of slaves. Like the domestics of the urban north, slaves designated and
delineated status within the household unit of the constructed campus community.

The servants of Columbia College and the enslaved individuals of South Carolina
College formed a silent, although contributing, group of the college community. Yet, they
also served as consistent reminders to students and faculty of their position within the
College and broader society. Although Columbia concerned itself less with the
replication of a household unit than South Carolina, both institutions exuded paternalism
in regard to their laborers. The presence of a janitor at Columbia College offers one
example of how an employee was instrumental in the creation of a complex hierarchy
within the college community. Throughout the nineteenth century, the College hired a
janitor whose duties included caring for the buildings and grounds. In prose form, the
members of the class of 1855, recalled that, “Oft did the grass to ‘Stephen’s’ sickle yield”
and “how ﬂew the dust before his broom’s quick stroke.”8 The ladies of the city
employed domestic servants to care for their private, domestic space and the college
similarly hired a janitor to care for the sacred, intimate spaces of college, such as the

library, classrooms and chapel.9 More signiﬁcantly, as the servants marked the ladies as

 

7 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 95.

8 Anonymous. C olumbiana: A Bagatelle by the students of Columbia College. Not by the faculty. 1855.
New York Historical Society.

9 Thomas Dungan, janitor of Columbia College, to the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. April 5,
1831. Columbia College Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

70

members of the bourgeoisie, the janitor deﬁned the higher status of other members of the
community—faculty and students—by performing manual labor tasks considered
inappropriate for those who engaged in intellectual work. The fact that his duties
explicitly included the performance of “such services as may be required by the ofﬁcers
of the college having employment in that building” not only placed him at the will of the
faculty, but also ﬁrrther differentiated him from the faculty. '0 It additionally clariﬁed and
ensured an understanding his position in the college community was inequitable to those
who performed the more signiﬁcant intellectual work.

The janitors “services” could include odd jobs such as “seal[ing] each individual
diploma,” reporting students who were “dilatory or neglect” in returning to the lecture
room from chapel, and presiding over the Library operations. H These tasks brought him
into daily contact with the students, particularly as he intervened to prevent them from
causing trouble. His roving presence on campus as he moved from classrooms and the
chapel to various comers of college green furnished him with a comprehensive view of
campus activities. As a result, the faculty and trustees relied upon the testimony of the
janitor in assessing student misbehaviors and rendering their judgments.

The day after an episode of vandalism to the Chapel in the College Hall, Stephen
Weeks composed a report for the Board of Trustees in which he testiﬁed as to whom he
saw gathered on the College Green the night of the incident. '2 In other cases, the janitor

operated as an intermediary between the faculty and the students. While coping with the

 

1° Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. May 2, 1859. University Archives. Columbiana
Library.

" Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. October 1, 1860. University Archives.
Columbiana Library. Board of Trustees of Columbia College. Statutes of Columbia College as Revised and
Passed by the Board of Trustees July, 1843 to which is preﬁxed an Historical Sketch of the College (New
York, 1843), 27.

'2 Stephen Roe Weeks to the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. March 26, 1849. Columbia College
Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

71

case of vandalism mentioned above, one of the students acknowledged in a letter to the
College president, Nathanial Fish Moore, that the Philolexian Literary Society “had
received a verbal message” from him “through the janitor of the college.” George
Templeton Strong similarly noted in his diary that after failing to attend chapel in the
morning, he “received an invitation from Dugan to visit his majesty [the president] in the
course of the 1” hour.”13 In the former case, the janitor disrupted Professor Anthon’s
Latin class to beckon Strong for the President. A vital member of the college community,
the janitor at Columbia College interacted with students regularly in mundane ways, such
as passing in the College Hall, but he also operated as a go-between for the faculty.
Although his daily duties may have escaped notice in many regards, it is clear that the
faculty and students recognized the authority of his position as a conduit of information.
The janitor’s primary duty was to care for the buildings and grounds under his domain
and, as such, attending to student behaviors on campus, particularly in cases of
vandalism, was a natural extension of his duties. This expanded sphere of duties
conferred him with power over elite youth and gave him the agency to challenge
hierarchical order of society within the campus environment.

Among the sundry duties of the janitor, the trustees incorporated the role of
“assistant librarian.” The faculty had unofﬁcially employed the janitor in this capacity for
two years, but moved to have it legitimized by the trustees in 1849. A committee of
faculty members testiﬁed that the janitor was “occupied as Assistant Librarian with much

zeal and ability, in a manner very advantageous to the College.” In 1837, the librarian’s

 

'3 Henry John Vemor to N.F. Moore. 24 Mar 1849. Columbia College Collection. Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. Columbia University. George Templeton Strong, Diary, May 26, 1836. Manuscript
Division. New York Public Library. Emphasis in original.

72

main task was to open the library “twice a week from half past one o’clock to 3 o’clock
pm.” for which he received 8300. The faculty argued that in return for this payment, they
expected the librarian to “devote to it more time than this.” They felt that the salary
and the work performed were incongruent. They further argued that since the janitor lived
“within the precincts of the college” and could “render it available whenever there is
occasion,” even at an “earlier hour than it would be opened by the librarian.” The faculty
included this within the janitor’s duties because he lived on campus and they could pay
him less—approximately $200 less.

The faculty committee further defended their assignment of the librarian’s tasks to
the janitor arguing that his “acquaintance with the students and the authority which his
ofﬁce as janitor give him with them, have, no doubt, greatly contributed to that
perfect order and decorum in the library.” Ideally, the janitor’s daily interactions with the
students—on the green, in the buildings, and in the library—would foster a sense of
personal intimacy. The faculty hoped this would provide him with an emotional authority
rooted in their quotidian communications unrelated to intellectual exchange or social
status. At the same time, the faculty believed that this would elevate his position on
campus and perhaps also cut down on student disorder. They argued that taking on the
duties of the librarian would ultimately “render him more efﬁcient and useful in his
proper ofﬁce as Janitor.”l4

However, the faculty reasoning for this proposition was ﬁrndamentally ﬂawed in

two ways. First, they assumed that the janitor’s daily contact with students were on

essentially ﬁiendly terms and thus, would provide him with more authority in the library.

 

'4 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. October 29, 1849. University Archives.
Columbiana Library.

73

Second, because the students would see him in the library—a place where he would
perform less of his normal manual task—his status would be undoubtedly heightened and
provide the janitor with a sense of socioeconomic mobility within the community. The
faculty thus assumed that the daily familiarity between the janitor and students could
produce an intimacy of recognition and cordiality and by extension also authority and
student esteem. Because the janitor lacked the authority to punish or reprimand students
and because he was from a lower socioeconomic status, this strategy failed. The janitor’s
work was fundamentally different from that of the intellectual work afﬁliated with the
college and thus distinguished him from the faculty and students.

The trustees and faculty members may have seen the janitor as an essential link in
their chain of authority over the students, but the students did not necessarily see the
legitimacy in his disciplinary reports to the faculty. As a student, George Templeton
Strong observed that upon arriving at College in the morning, a group of freshmen
“posted themselves near the chapel gallery door and commenced a racket. Two benches
kicked down stairs—hats, books, shot and slates with a variety of other [items] ﬂying in
every direction.” Following this commotion, Strong noted that the janitor, Mr. Dugan,
approached them and said “‘less noise gentlemen,’ but in two minutes more the hubbub
was recommenced.” Escalating the noise, “thirty boys with vigorous lungs, screaming
in chorus is no joke and when some of the sophomores joined the noise was
‘prodigious.”’ Again, Dugan entered the area to the same effect as before, but
subsequently followed by the “noise of something advancing up stairs like distant thunder

and the Preses [President] himself makes his appearance like a porpoise in a gale of

74

wind.” Upon his arrival, President Duer had shaken the boys to their core, elicited
obedience, and left them “in a state of considerable bother” '5
The boys’ had feigned compliance by initially appearing to take Dugan’s request
to quiet down seriously, but then resumed their disorder when he left their immediate
proximity. But, the students submitted completely to the President. These divergent
reactions illustrate student understandings of these men’s position within the college’s
community. The janitor’s harsh words and presence elicited a brief cessation of yelling,
but it was the President’s footsteps that announced the impending danger of real
authority. He had the authorization to punish them and he did so drawing them before the
Board of the Faculty for punishment the following Saturday.’6 Similarly, the class of
1855 depicted the janitor as “sneaking upon the green” and stated that, “The spying

’9 6‘

Weeks is oft seen lurking nigh.”l7 These words, “sneaking, spying,” and “lurking”
present the image of furtive man acting unlawfully. Continuing, they noted his “uncouth
hat and shapeless garments” incisively drawing attention to the physical markers of his
class and position within the college community and society. The faculty appreciated the
janitor’s role as a gatekeeper between themselves and the students, but students viewed
his actions as incompatible with his position. The students, seeing themselves as
members of the elite sector of New York society and entitled to roam around the green,

interpreted the janitor’s actions not as a natural extension of his duties, but as a

transgression of his lower social position.

 

': Strong, Diary, November 5, 1835. New York Public Library.

1 .

Ibrd.

'7 Anonymous. Columbiana: A Bagatelle by the students of Columbia College. Not by the faculty. 1855.
New York Historical Society.

75

The janitor’s tasks prove more signiﬁcant than perhaps his policing and grounds
keeping duties initially suggest. The students’ triﬂing verses described Weeks’s pleasure
in driving “beggars from the ﬁeld.”18 The janitor did not simply care for buildings, but
effectively operated as a gatekeeper to the college by regulating the physical boundary
between the college and the city. In attending to this boundary, the janitor made decisions
about who could enter the community and protected the campus from outsiders. Weeks’s
“jocund” in protecting campus from outsiders reveals his position of autonomy and
agency. In this moment, he symbolically swept those he perceived as unworthy from the
front steps of the college. In 1860, the janitor of the new Columbia Law School,
Oscanyan, reported to George Templeton Strong, a Trustee, that he turned away “sixty or
seventy people” from Curtis Noyes’ ﬁrst lecture due to want of space.'9 The nineteenth-
century college marked men as members of the elite class and only members of this class
of people could enter this space for intellectual work or for visitation, but it was the
janitor, positioned lower on the social hierarchy, who determined entrance into this
exclusive space. Whatever the reason (due to social unacceptability or want of space), it
was the lower class members of the constructed educational community who regulated its
exclusivity.

In addition to the janitor, Columbia College also retained several servants with
unspeciﬁed duties. From Trustees reports and faculty papers, it is clear that the College
hired at least two distinct types of servants: a more general “college servant” (also
referred to as the president’s servant) and a laboratory servant. The duties of the former

included tasks common to many of the city’s domestic servants, such as cleaning, making

 

18 -

lbrd.
'9 George Templeton Strong to Samuel Ruggles. February 1 l, 1860. Columbia College Collection. Rare
Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

76

ﬁres, and various tasks inside of the College building, but the latter’s responsibilities
were particular to the Chemistry laboratory, including “making the ﬁres and cleaning the
laboratory and apparatus.”20 The value of the lab servant was reﬂected in the pay he
received, $200 per year, but also the fact that his position and salary were considered
vital to the success of instruction in the sciences. Professor of Chemistry, Richard Sears
McCulloh, argued in 1858 that he required a “yearly appropriation of one thousand
dollars. . .to defray the work of his department,” which encompassed “the necessary
supplies off the Laboratory, including. . .the wages of a servant.” Although McCulloh
desired the speciﬁcity of a “lab servant,” the Trustees responded that “the labour of an
ordinary servant will sufﬁce?“
Conﬂict arose among faculty members over the issue of commanding the labor of
servants within the campus community. President F. A. P. Barnard complained to trustee
Gouvemeur Morris Ogden that, “among the many things which my friend the professor
of chemistry has done to astonish me, none is more surprising than his presuming to
engage a servant in the employment of the president, as the servant in his department.”22
The divisions of labor and hierarchy were clear to President Barnard: the college servant
fell under his authority and he, alone, held legitimate power over the servant’s labor. He
further expressed annoyance at this confusion when he stated that “several times within

the last month I have wanted to send Francis out,” but the janitor could not spare him

because “he had so much to do?“ The president had the authority to determine how,

 

2° Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. January 4, 1858. University Archives.
Columbiana Library.
2' Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. January 4, 1858. University Archives.
Columbiana Library.
22 F. A. P. Barnard to Gouvenor Morris Ogden. January 4, 1866. Gouvemeur Ogden Morris Papers. Rare
200k and Manuscript Library Columbia University.

Ibid. '

77

where, and by whom labor was performed within the campus grounds and in this conﬂict
he articulated a hierarchical order to commanding labor. Only he had the authority to give
the college servant, Francis, permission to assist Weeks with his tasks, but it was his
“friend,” who upset him by assuming he had the authority to direct the servant’s labor—
he acted outside of his sphere of authority. He clearly stated, “the laboratory servant
should not be the college servant.” In his mind, these were two different tasks requiring
two different servants. The president also discerned that the College had exclusive rights
to the labor of the college servant; he could not simultaneously perform tasks in another’s
home, even if it was one of the trustees. Writing to Ogden again, he claimed that Francis,
“has no right to enter into any service” when his time “belongs to the college.” He
chastised Ogden for paying the servant stating, “if you have paid Francis, you have done
wrong.” He reasoned that, “had you applied to me in the emergency I might have
consented to permit him temporarily to help you but not to receive money for it?24 The
college servants should not be paid additional funds because they have already received a
predetermined wage for their services—the college owned their labor and the president
commanded it. These day servants lived off campus and commuted to work, as a result
they remained relatively anonymous and replaceable. Nevertheless, these laborers
provided a means for articulating the power structure of college community and
structuring interactions between faculty members and trustees. Furthermore, their
presence on campus replicated ideal socioeconomic relations with the upper classes

performing intellectual labor and commanding the manual labor of those below them.

 

2" F. A. P. Barnard to Gouvemeur Morris Ogden. January 31, 1867. Gouvemeur Ogden Morris Papers.
Rare Book and Manuscript Library Columbia University.

78

Unlike the college servants who did not reside on campus grounds, the janitor
used the presence of his family and residence to successfully appeal to the faculty and
trustees as a masculine head of household which enabled him to maintain a sense of
independence. In 1836, the trustees and faculty recognized that they could save money
and extract constant labor from the janitor if he lived on the campus grounds and as a
result constructed a residence for him. President Duer explained that, the new “erection
of a dwelling for the janitor” was more “convenient for him [the janitor]? but it also
beneﬁted the College. The janitor, according to Duer “now enjoys a most comfortable
residence, placed exactly where it should be, and at an expense to the College of about
sixty dollars per annum less than was paid for his former distant lodgings.”25 In 1844, the
Trustees removed him from the basement of the College building and ordered “a lodge
for the janitor be built at once, according to the plan previously proposed, on the South
side of the College green, opposite the East wing of the College; provided that a
satisfactory contract shall be obtained for the completion thereof at an expense not
exceeding $1500.”26

Relocating his residence and drawing the janitor into the carefully constructed
community brought with it a new responsibility for the College because he was
accompanied by his entire household. For example, in 1850 the janitor Stephen Weeks
resided on campus grounds with his wife, two girls (ages nine and six), and an Irish

servant woman (age twenty ﬁve).27 Even though Columbia College was a non-residential

 

2’ Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. May 30, 1836. University Archives. Columbiana
Library.

2" Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. July 3, 1844. University Archives. Columbiana
Library.

27 U. S. Bureau of the Census. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850: Schedule 1. Washington, DC:
National Archives and Records Administration, 1850. Third Ward, New York County, New York, p. 435,
Dwellings 666-668. Located through www.ancestry.com. The 1840 census similarly illustrates that the

79

institution that eschewed the replication of a household unit, it thus hosted this household
within its borders. This shifted relations between the institution and its employee by
compelling them to recognize the status of the janitor outside of his immediate
employment. In 183 8, Columbia’s janitor, Thomas Dugan, requested the trustees increase
his compensation. He broached the subject with great caution, acknowledging his
position in relation to them and the impropriety of what he was about to ask them. “With
many apologizes for trespassing on the time and attention of your honorable body,” he
began, “I feel myself under the disagreeable necessity of soliciting an increase of
compensation.” He argued that the “salary at present. . .is altogether inadequate to meet
the current expenses of my family.” To effectively fulﬁll his role as the supporter of
dependents he required “such an increase” as to “meet the exigencies of the case.” The
janitor continued to frame his requests in this manner. Additionally addressing problems
with his residence, he argued that “the unhealthy nature of my present residence has
involved me in new expenditures from which I hardly know how I shall be able to

extricate myself.”28

Approving this modiﬁcation in the janitor’s salary, the Trustees
increased his salary by sixty dollars per year. In doing so, they signaled approval of his

position as a man and a head of household with a series of responsibilities to his

dependents.29

 

janitor resided on campus with seven other dependents, including at least one servant (three children under
ten years old, Stephen and his wife Cynthia, one unknown female, and one unknown male). U. S. Census
Bureau, Seventh Census of the United States, 1840. Schedule 1. Washington, D. C.: National Archives and
Records Administration, 1840. Third Ward, District of New York, State of New York, p. 136.

28Thomas Dugan to the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. December 3, 1838. Columbia College
Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University. Emphasis 1n original.

29Approval recorded at the January 7,1839 meeting of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College.

Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. January 7, 1839. University Archives. Columbiana
Library,

80

Less than three years later, a new janitor entered a similar plea. Writing to the
College ofﬁcials, he called their attention to “the state of the rooms occupied by the
janitor as a dwelling” because their “great dampness render[ed] them unﬁt for use.” He
argued that the “sleeping rooms [are] very injurious to health.” He explained that “the
illness he endured last summer [and] the illness of his family” were triggered “by the cold
and humid state of his room.” “Everything,” he stated was “subject to ﬁle—w,”
including “the carpets on the ﬂoors, dresses hanging in rooms, and even clothing
contained in trunks” all of which subjected him to “great loss and inconvenience.” Weeks
ended his petition with a reminder that he was responsible for the lives of others. “Health
' is the greatest blessing man can enjoy” and as such, “he begs the honorable
trustees. . .take the case in their kind consideration” because “he considers that the health
of himself and his family are at stake.” Three months later, Weeks again presented
himself as a head of household stating, “I ﬁnd my present salary barely sufﬁcient to meet
the necessary expenses of my family.”30 With the relocation of the janitor and his family
to the campus grounds Columbia College was repeatedly compelled to recognize the men
ﬁlling this occupation in a personal and intimate manner.

Even in death, the College afﬁrmed his private, masculine role as the head of
household. In the wake of the janitor’s death in January of 1864, the Trustees resolved to
“pay to the widow of the late assistant janitor the salary due him up to the time of his
death.” Passing the wages onto his widow, they recognized the legitimacy of his role and
the dependants who relied upon him. However, the Trustees further entrusted to the wife

the duty of “procuring the proper discharge of the duties of the office” in exchange for

 

’0 Stephen Weeks to the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. Minutes of the Board of Trustees of
Columbia College. September 6, 1841. University Archives. Columbiana Library. Emphasis in original.

81

“the same rate of compensation.”31 It is unclear how she ensured that the duties were
performed, but they evidently assumed she knew how to complete the tasks of her
husband’s job. The trustees also reached out the widows of professors by extending
salary and permitting families to remain in college-owned residences after their death, but
in these cases they did not anticipate that the widows could fulﬁll or obtain someone to
fulﬁll the husband’s task.32 Seen in the widow’s ability to ensure the job continued to be
successfully completed, the College janitor’s work brought a level of familiarity to the
campus, but it also brought the College into the janitor’s private family life.

Afﬁrrning the janitor’s position as an adult male, although of a different station,
entwined the janitor’s masculine—and private—identity to his work place, while at the
same time, diversiﬁed the college community by providing a consistent presence of
“others” within this elite intellectual and socioeconomic space. In May of 1836, President
Duer attested that the janitor, Stephen Weeks, was “a man equal certainly to a much
higher station than he holds, but yet who never seems to think himself above his place.”
With this backhanded complement, the President praised Weeks for acknowledging that
he belonged to a lower socioeconomic position than others within the college
community.33

Through the jobs they performed both janitors and servants were constant
reminders of sharp socioeconomic differences that existed between them and the upper-

classes who engaged in intellectual work. The janitor’s residence on the campus grounds,

 

3’ Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. January 1 1, 1864. University Archives.
Columbiana Library.

32 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. June 16, 1860. University Archives. Columbiana
Library.

33 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. October 1, 1849. University Archives.
Columbiana Library.

82

however, that physically transformed the landscape, enabled him to carve out an identity
independent of his occupational status and reﬂective his status as male head of
household. Contrary to traditionalist and even some revisionist arguments, the antebellum
college was not a homogenous collective of elite white men. Rather, the administrators,
faculty, and students of this northeastern college patemalistically provided for other
employees while using their presence to delineate their own status. Although Columbia
did not seek out to re-create a household unit with their campus, it is clear that it

sustained households nevertheless.

Trustee and faculty discussions of servants at Columbia College often centered on
conﬂicts over the ownership and right to labor, but South Carolina College differed in
that the lines of ownership of labor and person were clearly deﬁned by the institution of
slavery. Historians have often assumed the presence of slaves on antebellum southern
college campuses, but have failed to analyze their signiﬁcance to the learning
community. Thus, an entire group of people has remained invisible to our understanding
of the college community. This silence is not merely due to scholarly neglect for although
slaves provided indispensable contributions to the educational landscape which we are
only just beginning to understand, contemporaries found their presence quite
unremarkable. In a letter to his wife, one professor exempliﬁes this idea as he remarked
about, Henry, a slave he owned: “Every now and then I wholly forget his presence at
dinner and express some thought or feeling aloud.”34 Careful attention to ﬁnancial

records, faculty papers, and student manuscripts, however, reveals that enslaved people

 

3’ FL to his wife, Matilda Lieber. 1 & 2 Jun 1845. Columbia, SC. L1 4832. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E.
Huntington Library.

83

reinforced the College desire to re-create a household unit. At South Carolina College,
the institution and its faculty owned and hired out slaves.

South Carolina College established a ratio of sixteen students for each slave on
the campus grounds.35 With this ratio, the institution ensured that all of the students’
personal needs were sufﬁciently met, such as all of the beds made or rooms swept out.
Although the student body ﬂuctuated between 1830 and 1860, it was consistently over
one hundred and at times close to two hundred, which meant that there was a minimum
of 5 to 10 slaves working solely for the College. If each full-time faculty member
residing on campus at one time also owned or employed at least one slave (although
some had more), this contributed an additional ﬁve to seven slaves for a total of
anywhere from 10 to 17 slaves at any one time. Race, as the most visible marker of
difference, provided a constant reminder of position within the household unit of the
college and the larger social hierarchy. Within the constructed college community, the
presence of black bodies contributed to the replication of class and race relations within
the enclosed college community. Some scholars of American slavery have argued that
“one of the many miraculous things a slave could do was to make a household white” and
essentially, the presence of slaves on the college campus did the same thing---these
enslaved individuals recapitulated racial differences.36

The institution did not always have its own slaves; records indicate that it
purchased its ﬁrst slave, Jack, for $900 in the early national period. In 1833, the secretary

of the Board of Trustees indicates the sale of one male slave for $800 and ownership of

 

’5 Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. June 2, 1860. University Archives. South Caroliniana
Library.

36 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2001 ), 90. See also James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New
York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998).

84

two other male slaves.37 Other ﬁnancial records over the course of the antebellum period
indicate that the College hired out slaves to perform tasks in the Commons, laboratory,
students’ apartments, and College rooms. The hiring out of slaves would have been
common in the city of Columbia as one scholar estimates that 31 percent of urban slaves
were hired out.38 The faculty also owned and hired out—Francis Lieber owned slaves and
this has been the focus of several scholarly endeavors. His colleague Richard Trapier
Brumby hired slaves to work in his laboratory and the College President James Henley
Thomwell hired out for his domestic servants.39 The students of South Carolina College
were drawn primarily from districts boasting a larger slave population than white
population. Horry District, a coastal district which had a smaller slave population than
white population, sent no students to the College. Richland District, host of the capital
city and the college, replicated many students’ home districts with a slave population that
“greatly exceed[ed]” the white population, even if Columbia itself did not.40

The male and female slaves on the college campus, as on plantations, farms, and
cities throughout the South, performed a great diversity of tasks that brought them into
contact with trustees, faculty, faculty families, students, and one another. Trustees were
not daily visitors to the campus, but these men were the collective owners of all campus

property, including enslaved persons. In prefacing a report to the Board of Trustees

 

’7 Report of the Secretary of the Board of Trustees. Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina
College. November 29, 1833.University Archives. South Caroliniana Library.

33 Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 109-1 10.

39 The most compelling work on Francis Lieber’s relationship to slavery is Michael O’Brien, “A Sort of
Cosmopolitan Dog: Francis Lieber in the South” The Southern Review 25 (April 1989): 308-322. For
Brumby’s hiring out refer to: Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College, November 28,
1855. University Archives South Caroliniana Library. For Thomwell see: F. H. Elmore to Margaret Du
Bose. December 28, 1852. James Henley Thomwell Papers. South Caroliniana Library.

4° Hollis, University of South Carolina, Vol. 1, 263. See the map Hollis provides. It contains a breakdown
of students’ home districts and black/white population in between pages 244-245. Edgar, South Carolina,
289.

85

regarding the laborers on campus, the Secretary stated in passing that, “the Negro man,
Henry” was “the property of the Trustees,” in addition to two other men, Jim Blue and
Jim Rufﬁn.“ Some of the hired out slaves on campus came directly from Trustees. The
ﬁnancial records for the year of 1855 note that forty-ﬁve dollars was twice paid to
Trustee, David J. McCord for servant hire and Robert W. Gibbes, also a Trustee, was
paid forty-ﬁve dollars and seventy dollars the same year.42 The Trustees played an
integral role in populating the slave community of south Carolina College as they were
not only the collective owners of some, but also individually hired out their own human
property to the College. The Trustees—as members of the governing board of the
College—were invested in inculcating slavery as institution vital to southern society, but
more signiﬁcantly, they were personally, ﬁscally invested in retaining slavery at the
college because they directly proﬁted from it.

As the College grew over the antebellum period, the demands on the college
slaves also increased. In 1836, one professor reported to his colleagues that, “it was not
possible for him to keep the negro servant Jim in the laboratory [as] long as he needed his
services, on account of other duties in college buildings.” He proposed that they “employ
a servant whose duty in the laboratory would require about half of the day” roughly
equivalent to half of the cost of one full hired out per month.43 Shortly thereafter, the

Professor of Chemistry William Ellet was granted a thirty dollar per month expenditure

 

" Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. November 29, 1833. University Archives.

South Caroliniana Library.
’2 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. November 28, 1855. University Archives.

South Caroliniana Library.
’3 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. April 20, 1836. University Archives. South

Caroliniana Library.

86

for hiring a servant to assist him in the laboratory.44 The College also made
appropriations for additional servants to work as waiters, bellmen, and domestics. For
example in 1833, Board of Trustees allotted one hundred twenty ﬁve dollars, if this much
was necessary, to compensate for the use of a “bellsman” in the steward’s hall,” to
summon workers and call students to meals.45 Later they authorized the employment of
“two additional servants, one for the laboratory and one to sweep the rooms, and make
the beds of the students.”46 Enslaved persons were frequently used as conduits among the
various groups of people within the college community. The trustees and faculty would
send slaves to retrieve students (or faculty) when necessary. The minutes of both bodies
frequently note that “the college servant” or the “servant of the faculty” was sent to
request students to present themselves. In one case of many, the “servant of the faculty”
was directed to request two students, Whaley and Boyce, to appear before the faculty.47
The range of tasks performed by enslaved men and women on campus thus were vital to
the everyday functions of college life, but these duties drew them into daily, familiar
contact with faculty and students alike.

Like many colleges during this period, the Trustees and faculty continuously
grappled with student disciplinary problems, but in 1831 they identiﬁed slavery and race
as the root of their problems deﬂecting blame away from the students themselves. They

believed that student misbehavior arose from the fact that they had “no white man as a

 

4" Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. November 28, 1845. University Archives.
South Caroliniana Library.

’5 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. December 5, 1833. University Archives.
South Caroliniana Library.

4" Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. November 28, 1836. University Archives. South
Caroliniana Library.

’7 Henry Junius Nott to Governor George McDufﬁe. c.1834. Henry Junius Nott Papers. South Caroliniana
Library. See also: Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. January 27, 1851. University
Archives. South Caroliniana Library.

87

janitor, to have care of the buildings or to supply evidence of misconduct.”48 Due to
slaves’ status as dependents and property, whites assumed that they always lied and as a
result their testimony, in court or on campus, could not be trusted. They would not be
able to garner respect or social mobility as had been able the janitor at Columbia College.
More important, slaves were incapable of assisting professors with student disciplinary
problems.49 The presence of slaves on campus pushed faculty and trustees to incorporate
a lower-class white man to help with the care of their dependents—students and slaves
alike. Although poor whites frequently lacked societal power, this would have provided
an opportunity to gain a sense of authority operating as an intermediary among students,
faculty, and slaves.

Slaves performed some of the same duties as Columbia’s janitor and servants, but
their position within the community and contribution to the educational landscape were
markedly different. Lieber captured the essence of this difference in the wake of the death
of an enslaved woman he owned, Elsy and the feeble health of another, Betsey, “We lose
all in all fully one thousand dollars—the hard labor of a year.” Similarly after Thomas
Cooper constructed a building for the housing of the college servants in 1833, the
Secretary of the Board of Trustees noted that prior to this some slaves had, at times, been

“lodged in rooms in the cellar of the President’s house.” He argued that this, in addition

 

4’ Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. November 31, 1831. University Archives.
South Caroliniana Library. Trustee records often only reﬂect what was considered the most important
matters of the College because the information goes through a ﬁltering process. The issues reﬂected in a
Trustee meeting had been ﬁrst discussed among faculty, entered into faculty minutes, entered by the
president in a letter to the Trustees, and then actually recorded in an ofﬁcial capacity in the Minutes of the
Trustees. The criticism of these records is that they tend to be too top-down to be helpﬁrl for understanding
the day-to-day operations of the College. On the other hand, the information contained within these records
represents issues that were important enough to make it through that ﬁltering process.

49 Kenneth Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts,
Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebel/ions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and
Gambling in the Old South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 40-41.

88

to “other inconveniences proved unhealthy,” and the purpose of “erecting the wooden
building was to avoid these consequences.”50 This statement reﬂects a concern for the
loss or damage to the institution’s ﬁnancial investment, but simultaneously illustrates a
concern for how the College was viewed as a Slaveholder: the health of its slaves
reﬂected their benevolence and signiﬁed their ability to be capable, effective masters of
both slaves and students.

Well beyond the complications that arose from student misbehavior, concerns
stemming from race-based slavery permeated the campus community. The committee on
the college buildings similarly reported a concern that, “There is no one connected with
the college who is especially charged with the care and preservation of the buildings,”
which they explained meant that the rooms and apartments on campus were vulnerable to
“natural decay mutilations and destruction.” More importantly, there was no one to
ensure “that the servants employed about the college faithfully discharge the duties
required of them.” The committee also believed that the servants should be more attentive
to “the cleanliness in both the public rooms and private apartments occupied by the
students.” The College recognized the need for an individual to take care of the buildings
and coordinate the tasks of the servants. At the same meeting, the trustees recommended
and adopted the creation of a janitorial post. The new janitor would “superintend the
College Buildings and the servants who are employed about the college with a view to
their preservation and cleanliness, under such rules and regulations the said faculty shall

present and that the said faculty shall have power to dismiss the said Janitor at

 

’0 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. December 5, 1833. University Archives.
South Caroliniana Library.

89

pleasure.”5 I In spite of this resolution, the College did not consistently employ a janitor
because the Steward or Marshal took over aspects of the aforementioned duties. For
example in 1860, the marshal’s main job was to guarantee that the “servants never absent
themselves from their respective charges during the absence of the students at meals,
during recitation hours, or Sunday during the hour for chapel services, and on Saturday
night during the sessions of the societies.” This statue also gave the Marshal permission
to “enforce” this “by his presence if necessary.” 52 Like an overseer, the marshal, steward,
or janitor would be blamed if something went wrong with the completion of these tasks.
The man in this position assisted with student disciplinary problems by faithfully
attending all faculty meetings and when necessary providing evidence against students.
However, he also operated as a mediating overseer for the larger college household as he
also ensured that slaves completed their daily tasks.”

Not trusting anyone else to handle their ﬁnancial investment, the Trustees
handpicked the slaves they purchased on behalf of the College. In August of 183 8, David
J. McCord, member of the Board of Trustees, coordinated with another Trustee, Wade
Hampton 11, “to buy some Negroes for the Steward’s Hall.” The trustees also indirectly
encouraged the faculty members to become slaveholders as McCord “thought it a pity”
that Professor Lieber had not “commissioned [Hampton] the same.”54 Several years later,
Richard Gnatt, another Trustee, assisted the Liebers in purchasing a nineteen-year old

male following the professor’s speciﬁcations. Lieber approvingly wrote to his wife that

 

5 ' Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. November 29, 1833. University Archives.
South Caroliniana Library.

52 Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. June 2, 1860. South Caroliniana Library. University of
South Carolina.

’3 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. June 2, 1860. University Archives. South
Caroliniana Library. Fox-Genovese, Plantation Household, 188 and 204.

’4 Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber. August 1, 1838. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

90

“the boy is not quite black,” and after looking at his “hair and teeth” Gnatt proclaimed
him “very healthy.”55 Slave buying was a social process that permitted slaveholders to
afﬁrm their identity through the evaluation of “others.” By including Lieber, a foreigner,
these more experienced slaveholders afﬁliated with the College, guided him in the
construction of an identity commensurate with his position. Discussing and evaluating the
enslaved man’s skin color as “not quite black,” allowed Lieber and Gnatt to conﬁrm the
enslaved man as a strong, healthy worker. At the same time, they asserted their difference
from him-«in race and gender. At nineteen years old, the enslaved man was not a boy,
but in referring to him as such a manner drew attention to his inferior position. The
cooperation of these white men drew them closer together by conﬁrming their superiority
in a public space as white men with the ﬁnancial independence to purchase slaves and the
manly mastery of a household to take care of them.56 As well-known members of the
College community, the actions of this Trustee and Professor even in an off-campus
setting reﬂected on the nature of this state-supported institution. These men utilized the
South Carolina College network of individuals to facilitate the slave-buying process and
to cultivate a slaveholding identity among faculty. The practice of Gnatt and Lieber
further signiﬁed to the broader public that the College materially modeled for its students
appropriate race relations and preserved social and racial order within the campus
grounds.

However, faculty members did not rely solely on the College network to perform
the business of slaveholding and slave buying. Lieber took the initiative to fashion this

identity himself. On a trip to Washington, DC. in 183 7, he wrote to his wife that “I have

 

5’ Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. July I, 1841. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.
56 Johnson, Soul By Soul, 78-88 and 137-138.

91

seen a boy here, who from mere appearance pleases me exceedingly about 14 or 15 years
old, lively, &c.” He continued to discuss the price stating, “the man, a small tavern
keeper, asks $700; of course I would not give more than $500, provided he pleases me
upon farther inquiry.” “For less,” he knowingly stated, “it is not well possible to get a
boy.” James Thomwell additionally hired out Rose, “an honest and faithful servant,”
from Margaret Du Bose and kept his “body-servant,” Charles, with him as he traveled.57
Beyond simply modeling this practice, the faculty members were entrenched in the
institution—personally and ﬁscally invested in the practice.

The faculty of South Carolina College also owned and hired out personal slaves.
Some were even large slaveholders earning them the distinction of “planter.” For
example, Maximilian LaBorde owned twenty-nine, many of whom he hired out to other
whites. Robert Woodward Bamwell owned one hundred and fifty-eight, although most
remained on his Beaufort plantation. Others were small slave holders; for example,
Lieber and William Ellet each owned two, Matthew Williams owned eleven, and Robert
Henry owned fourteen.58 Regardless of the number that they held and whether or not they
owned them or hired them, the enslaved men, women, and children on campus diversiﬁed
the educational landscape by contributing a sense of “otherness” to this elite community.

Faculty members relied upon slave women in particular to fulﬁll tasks crucial to
the maintenance of their own personal homes, such as the cooking of meals and caring
for their children and house. The hidden landscape of slavery provided a means for
linking the individual campus households into a cohesive community. Lieber reported

that he “consulted Twiss’s servant” on behalf of his female slave, Betsey, regarding a

 

57 F. H. Elmore to Margaret Du Bose. December 28, 1852. James Henley Thomwell Papers. South
Caroliniana Library. Palmer, Life and Letters of James Henley Thomwell, 46 l.
58 Moore, Columbia, 139-140. u. 5. Census Bureau. U. 5. Federal Census 1860: Slave Schedule.

92

“certain point in baking and I have now the ﬁnest bread every time, without fail.”59 The
slave women who performed domestic tasks linked the households together and
transposed the internal, private dynamics of faculty homes to the external space of the
broader college campus.

In addition to the slaves on campus, there was a family of free blacks who lived
immediately outside of the campus boundaries. In October of 1845, Dr. Henry was
ordered to “take the necessary measures with the town authorities to remove a certain
Negro family further from the college.”60 This report lacks enough details to ﬂesh out the
speciﬁc nature of problems that necessitated this family’s expulsion from the area
bordering the campus, but the nature of urban life meant that there were innumerable
opportunities for slaves to gather with free blacks, who could expose them to “new ideas
and strange notions.”61 To differentiate among this diverse group of slaves and free
blacks, the college slaves were identiﬁed by “a badge worn conspicuously.”62 This
permitted whites to quickly and easily discern the institution’s slaves from free blacks,
faculty-owned slaves, or others moving through or around the campus boundaries. The
marked slaves also differentiated the college household (and its property) from the urban
environment and the freedom associated with it.

Slaves, like domestic servants in New York City, identiﬁed white women as elite
ladies by freeing them from the labor that non-slaveholding women performed.63

However, the intimacy associated with daily contact within the home was fraught with

 

59 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. June 1 and 2, 1845. Francis Lieber Papers. HEH.

60 Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. October 16, 1845. University Archives. South
Caroliniana Library.

6‘ Moore, Columbia, 129.

62 Green, University ofSouth Carolina, 307-308.

6’ Fox-Genovese, Plantation Household, 197-202. Johnson, Soul By Soul, 90.

93

tension. Faculty wives found that owning slaves did not necessarily make their lives
immediately easier. Writing to a friend, one professor’s wife reﬂected that “The life of a
southern housekeeper is replete with small matters. Those who have their own
establishment of servants have it pretty comfortably, but we who have to hire our
servants from these housekeepers of course can only procure those who are not so useful.
I have been much tormented.”64 She also complained of many difﬁculties with adult
female slaves, including having to furnish space and provisions for the slave, her child,
and a nurse to assist them. That taking care of a very young slave was much easier, but
they tended to be unhelpful or “incompetent.”65 Incorporating house servants into their
home within the enclosed space of the campus community forced daily and close contact
between masters and slaves. These servants and the perceived potential for vexation drew
women together on the campus. In Matilda Lieber’s absence, Maximilian LaBorde’s
wife, a more experienced Slaveholder, checked in on her household and reported that
“Mamm, Betsey, Cresea are well” and “they all presented themselves to my gaze just
now” on the porch.66 The ivy covered porches of faculty homes faced the public by
opening onto the college green and being visible from other buildings on campus—it was
in this space that the ladies LaBorde and Lieber uniﬁed their position as mistresses of
privilege through the public examination of servants. Moreover, it brought the state of
faculty households into a shared space and rendered intimate the domestic status common

knowledge of the campus community.

 

6‘ Matilda Lieber to Fanny Appleton Longfellow. June 13, 1847. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E.
Huntington Library.
65 Matilda Lieber to Fanny Appleton Longfellow. March 1848. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington

Library.
66 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. July 7, 1856. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

94

Many southern families required the use of slaves to help within the household
structure, cooking, cleaning, and other sundry tasks, and with no great surprise, faculty
children found their daily lives shaped by slavery. Mary, an enslaved female hired by the
Liebers confessed that young “Master Norman taught me to read. . .the A, B, C and
spelling.” Moreover, she actively sought out this education even though South Carolina
maintained statutes that prohibited teaching slaves to read as part of an effort to limit
their autonomy and independence. She informed her master that when was “sowing [sic]
in the nursery, his son would come and teach me,” but only “when I begged him.”67
Instruction was particularly common within the Lieber household and his slaves (hired
and owned) created their own opportunities for education within an atmosphere dedicated
to the intellectual development of planter youth and the survival of the slave system in
particular.

Lieber additionally wrote to his wife that their slave boy, Henry, “settled it in his
mind that Master Norman is going to teach him reading, while Betsy says: ‘I shall get
master Oscar to do it,’ making free and certain.” Mary, Henry, and Betsey unmistakably
asserted agency in seeking out instruction from someone younger; this was common
among slaves who learned to read because children were less conscious of violating any
laws.68 The educational community inﬂuenced the internal dynamics of the home on
campus. Surrounded by a community of individuals drawn together by a common
reverence for higher learning would not have been unknown to the slaves on campus.

Every day slaves and faculty children would have been exposed to education. The white

children learned from their parents or at nearby grammar schools and slaves observed the

 

67 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. March 1-5, 1844. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.
68 Janet Cornelius, “‘We Slipped and Learned to Read:’ Slave Accounts of the Literary Process, 1830-
1865” Phylon v. 44 n. 3 (1983), I76.

95

work of education through faculty teaching and students learning. There was an entirely
different level—an informal level—of education occurring beyond the classrooms of the
College Hall.

In addition to shaping the elite white youth who attended the college and meeting
the needs of their immediate family, South Carolina College’s faculty invested in the
behavior and well being of their slaves. Slaveholding paternalism signiﬁed a system in
which “masters took a personal interest in the lives of their slaves” and masters
embracing this ideology viewed their slaves as laborers as well as “inferior members of
their extended households.” As members of their household, slaves consistently reﬂected
the status and leisure of their master and mistress and in return for protection and moral
guidance, slaves would ideally provide labor, loyalty, and obedience.” As fathers, faculty
utilized the presence of servants and slaves to teach their own children as well as students
appropriate relations with slaves. One professor encouraged his son to cease his behavior
of being “rough toward Rebecca.”7O They also placed limitations on their movements,
such prohibiting their attendance at camp meetings, encouraging their children to be kind
to their inferiors, and offering religious guidance.7| Professor Joseph LeConte noted that
“My negroes were dependent on me” and in an effort to care for them, he “cut up all my
carpets” to make clothing for them while he suffered with bare ﬂoors.72 The faculty and
the institution incorporated paternalism into their daily lives within the college

community. Most importantly, the faculty through these daily and often mundane acts of

 

69 Kolchin, American Slavery, 111-1 12.

70 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. 12 Aug 1837. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

7‘ Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. 21 Aug 1841, 12 Aug 1837. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E.
Huntington Library. Minutes of the Faculty of the South Carolina College. February 3, 1836. University
Archives. South Caroliniana Library. University of South Carolina. FL to his wife, Matilda Lieber. 12 Aug
1837. Boston, Mass. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

72 LeConte, Autobiography, 230.

96

paternalism modeled appropriate methods of caring for dependents as students gazed
upon them from the windows of the dormitory or the college green. In this capacity,
South Carolina College provided a type of informal learning about social and culture
ideals that was not conveyed at Columbia College.

The responsibilities, concerns, and intimacy of slaveholding were particularly
visible in issues afﬁliated with slave health. In the case of sick slaves, wives helped each
other. Professor Hooper’s wife checked in Matilda Lieber’s her household while she was
out of town. She informed the Lieber family that Elsa was “doing well and that the nurse
had accordingly left her, the doctor found her fever decreasing. However that lasted but a
short time. On Sunday she grew much worse. ...and [she] died on Wednesday night.” She
continued to express her emotional distress, writing that “I found my worst fears veriﬁed,
the poor girl was already buried and her unhappy mother met me heart broken; I cannot
tell you the distress I felt and still feel, for apart from our loss and the void which we
shall experience in our household when we return home. I have felt much personal
attachment to that poor girl, who had never given us much cause of complaint and whose
good constitution could give us no reason to expect so untimely an end.” 73 Slaveholding
women’s concerns and paternalistic affection drew the disparate campus households
together into a larger community.

The anxieties of slaveholding extended beyond health to issues of slave sexuality.
Many northemers and southemers alike held common assumptions about black male and

female sexuality. The two stereotypical images of “Jezebel” and “Buck” emphasized that

 

73 Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber. August 28, 1841. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

97

both male and female slaves were ruled exclusively by their libido.74 After Elsa gave
birth, Professor Lieber struggled with the meaning it held for his role as a slave master.
He rhetorically asked his wife if, “in a plain and practical sense will it be possible in the
natural course of things to keep two young negroes of different sexes to have intercourse
with one another.” Answering his own question, he continued to conﬁdently state that “I
see no possibility even if you were to keep Elsa in the house until 9 or 10 o’clock.”
Ultimately, circumscribing Elsa’s movement by conﬁning her to the home and limiting
her time in the slave quarters would not have prevented further wanton behavior.
Additionally, her master believed that the pregnancy projected an image that she was
“accessible” and as a result he feared that it would be “exceedingly difﬁcult to keep
our yard clear of rufﬁans.”75 The identity of the father was unclear, but in this case it
seems likely that pregnancy occurred from a consensual relationship. Lieber’s use of the
word rufﬁan, referring to individuals of low character, speaks to his disparaging moral
assessment of Elsa’s behavior. The slave system ideally robbed her of the luxuries often
taking for granted, including the opportunity to choose her own romantic partner or
deciding with whom and when to have a child. As a result Elsa’s actions could be
indicative of her ability to assert independence despite the all-encompassing control
asserted by the slave system. Within this elite atmosphere, slaves created their own
personal community; one that existed concomitantly with the constructed college

community. This attempt to harness what was viewed as the uncontrollable sexuality of

 

7" Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 2004), 118.
75 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. August 24, 1841. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

98

slaves speaks to the profoundly, racially and sexually, charged environment
extraordinarily different from that portrayed by traditionalists and recent revisionists.76

These sexual and racial dynamic played out across the campus as some masters
expressed an awareness of the dangerous liberties white men (or young students) could
take with enslaved women. One week after Elsa’s death in childbirth, Lieber reﬂected in
a letter to his wife that, “if you feel as myself we do not buy another. I have enough of
it.” Despite the complications arising from slaves’ sexual behaviors, he continued to
assert that it was absolutely necessary to have a slave for the house. They simply “must
have a girl.” A Charlestonian friend informed him that “his mother has a girl of 15 whom
they will hire out at $4 a month.” The key to understanding these dynamics was Lieber’s
cryptic emphasis that whomever they obtained must not be “too large---for then we have
that disgusting student business again, nor too young.”77 Searching for middle ground
between “too large” and “too young,” he could have been seeking to avoid the
complications of a girl transitioning into one of her ﬁrst placements on the work force
and a woman too old to satisfactorily complete the work.78.However, his desire to avoid
the “disgusting student business” again presents to us Lieber’s awareness of the risks
posed by holding a female slave within an enclosed and carefully monitored environment
populated-by white males who believed they had the right to black women’s bodies. This
case highlights one dangerous, yet unique component of slaveholding on a college

campus. It additionally points to the complex sexual and racial dynamics of student

 

’6 See Roger Geiger, American College, 2000).

77 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber. September 1 and 4, 1841. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington
Library.

78 Johnson, Soul by Soul, 144.

99

interactions with “others” which were noticeably absent from Columbia’s student-servant
relations.

On behalf of the institution, the faculty additionally coped with student
interactions that frequently resulted in violence. The youths drawn from plantations
throughout the state were reared in a society that privileged them due to their race and
class. College was frequently the ﬁrst time they left home and entered into the world on
their own merit and as young, white males from the planter class they sought to assert
their masculine privileges through interactions with enslaved males. Faculty frequently
brought students before them for “striking a servant in the commons Hall without giving
any satisfactory excuse” or for “disorderly conduct at the table in knocking a plate from
the servants hand.” The punishment for these behaviors frequently resulted in an
“admonishment” or severe warning.79 For example, when Mr. Hewitt was called before
the faculty for “beating a servant in the commons Hall” he received two warnings rather
than the standard single warning.80 Faculty mitigated and evaluated student behavior with
slaves on campus using discipline as a method of shaping and eliciting appropriate
actions.

These violent interactions highlight the youthful student assertions of masculinity
and race. In the case of E. M. Davis, who was reported for “striking a servant in the hall
with the ﬂat side of a knife and cutting his face,” the professor who reported him did not
see the inﬂicted blow. The victim was a slave and there was no other witness, the trustees

asked the student if he struck the slave. The student operated within the southern code of

 

79 Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. February 6, 1837. May 9, 1836. University Archives.
South Caroliniana Library.
8° Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. April 4, 1838. University Archives. South Caroliniana

Library.

100

honor which stipulated their words always be accepted as truthful and honest.8| The
student “confessed he had struck” the servant because he “contradicted him.” The slave
employed in the Commons acted above his station by either verbally or physically
opposing a white male. In further explaining his actions the student also “apologized for
the disrespect shown to the professor.” With this society, male honor was so deeply
entrenched that the white, elite student did not need apologize for his conduct because
they should always be “accorded respect.” His only superior, Professor Brumby who
reported him, received the only apology. More signiﬁcantly, the faculty body similarly
assessed the situation in the Commons as they issued him only a warning about the
“impropriety of such acts.”82 Similar acts of violence occurred frequently, as Austin
Black who whipped a “tenement boy” and then defended his actions as a response for
disobeying his orders. He, like Davis, was given a verbal warning for his unsuitable
actions.83 Students interacted with slaves on a daily basis and these small struggles
permitted students to stretch the boundaries of youth and perform the actions of racist
men while other students gazed upon them. i

In other instances, violent interactions occurred in groups allowing students to
bond together in a symbolic enactment of their position within the socioeconomic
hierarchy. In 1851, the college servant prepared to ring the last bell of the evening

announcing nine o’clock hour, the time at which students must return to their rooms and

 

8' The South Carolina students, in particular, were well-known for their honesty. Professor LaBorde lauded
their “high sense of honor...in relations to one another and to the faculty” and he also attested that “no form
of untruthfulness among them selves or toward the faculty was for a moment tolerated.” Green, University
of South Carolina, 259.

82 Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. May 25, 1849. University Archives. South Caroliniana
Library.

83 Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. January 10, 1850. February 25, 1850. University
Archives. South Caroliniana Library.

101

l.84 The students hoped to prevent this bell from ringing

remain there until the morning bel
because if the ofﬁcial nine o’clock hour was not announced, technically the students
believed they would not have to retire for the evening. Ideally this small rebellion was
aimed at the trustees and faculty who composed and enforced the rules, but in the practice
the enslaved man whose duty it was to ring the bell was caught in the middle. Using a
small bell, not the ofﬁcial College bell, he prepared to ring it as instructed by his
master(s), “a crowd of students. . .fell violently upon him and wretched it from him.”85
Aggressively beating the slave, the students uniformly acted together in preventing the
servant from fulﬁlling his duty by force. Unresponsive to verbal requests to not ring the
bell—he could not refuse to complete this task because his master (the College)
commanded him—the students asserted their authority and power over this enslaved man
collectively announcing their positions as white men. They also abused trustee property
as an extension of their rebellion utilizing the enslaved man as a conduit for expressing
their disdain for the regulations.

Interactions between students and slaves were not always violent, but these were
more closely monitored because they violated the ofﬁcial regulations. Students would
have interacted daily with the slaves who cleaned their apartments, washed the laundry,
worked in the Commons, and cared for the buildings, but these mundane interactions do
not always make it to the records. We do have allusions to these interactions, such as in
the poem, “Morning Hour,” composed by student James R. Chalmers a member of the

class of 1851. Reﬂecting upon the beauty and chaos of the college students waking in the

morning, he lyrically encouraged his friend to “do get up my sleepy chum” before “Jim

 

8" Green, University of South Carolina, 225.
85 Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. March 21, 1851. University Archives. South
Caroliniana Library.

102

shall close the door.”86 Jim could have been a hired or College-owned slave,87 whose
duties included closing the door for the commencement of chapel in the mornings—in
this case, the students would pass by this man every day. Another student, Thomas
Moore, was recuperating from a bout with dysentery, which he described as “very
prevalent” there, wrote to his mother of his circumstances. He described the lack of care
he received from a boarding house in Columbia, stating, “I could not get anything from
my boarding house. I would tell my tenement boy to go and get me something to eat
which he would do whenever he got ready.” He assured his mother that he was receiving
better care and attention because he was “boarding with an old negro who lives in the
campus for the last few days.”88 It is unclear whether the “old negro” he referred to was a
male or female, but it is clear that this individual had a residence or room on campus
grounds in which he/she could open up to students. In addition to providing health care,
Moore’s anecdote reveals interactions between slaves and students occurred within their
own domain and outside of the ofﬁcial boundaries. The presence of slave men and
women on campus stabilized and re-created the racial and gender dynamics of a southern
household and larger society.

Slaves manifested their dissatisfaction for institution and their masters in several
ways. The most egregious act was that committed by “the Negro man, Henry, the
property of the Trustees” who in 1833 utilized his literacy skills to forge a pass “in the
name of the Secretary.” He used this pass to travel south to Savannah, where he was

caught and then taken to the Coosawhatchie (SC) jail “from which aﬁer a few days he

 

86 Green, University of South Carolina, 348.

37 The name, “Jim,” does not refer to the Steward, bursar, or any of the professors during this period.
83 Thomas John Moore to A. B. Moore, his mother. April 28, 1860. Thomas John Moore Papers. South
Caroliniana Library.

103

escaped and returned to Columbia.” The Trustees, taking him up in Columbia, conﬁned
him in the city jail and put up for sale immediately. He was sold soon aﬁer to “Mr.
Williamson, a negro-trader” for $800 dollars.”89 In this dramatic form of resistance,
Henry removed himself (and his labor) immediately from the power and authority of his
master(s), and it reﬂected on the College poorly—that it may be a poor master because its
slaves were unhappy and disobedient. In selling him soon after return to its authority, the
College demonstrated to the community that it would not tolerate disorder of any sort
within the campus and thus, reassured the public of its ability to manage its collective
household. In other, more subtle cases of resistance, slaves simply worked slowly. Lieber
wrote that “the slowness of my servants” delayed his ability to catch the appropriate
steamboat. Similar slow-downs or facades of “incompetence” occurred in the household

and caused delays for slaveholding women.90

The evidence from the various records of both colleges illustrates how the
household unit, including immediate family members, servants and slaves shaped the
emotional and physical landscape of the college by fostering social and cultural networks
and stabilizing racial and gender structures. The household unit of Columbia College
reﬂected the increasing divisions between the home and work that prevented the
emergence of close-knit familial network on the college campus. However, this
arrangement did provide certain opportunities for working-class men to take on positions

of authority and autonomy by regulating and monitoring campus activities. The

 

89 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. December 5, 1833. University Archives.
South Caroliniana Library.

90 Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner. 19 Nov 1836. Matilda Lieber to Fanny Appleton Longfellow. June 13,
1847. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.

104

fundamental nature of household unit common to the antebellum South often involved
more individuals and it is clear that within the campus, there was an ease of movement
among its disparate members. The network of households within the enclosed college
community reinforced social relations, especially through the positioning of bound and
free laborers who contributed to the particular environments desired by their employers
through mundane tasks that brought them into daily contact with the various members of
the community. In some cases, they provided the impetus for drawing other individuals
of the community together in afﬁrmation of their collective identity. The individuals of
these communities were not completely lacking in autonomy as they shaped speciﬁc
emotional and physical spaces for themselves. These spaces reproduced societal ideals,
particularly in regard to race and class divisions, but also challenged those ideas, such as
seen in slave resistance or acknowledging the merits of working-class masculinity. One
effect of these different labor systems upon the college community was the production of
varied understandings and levels of intimacy. More important though, these workers
operated as agents of the informal education offered by the antebellum college through
the replication and transgression of social roles. The human-social landscape, thus,
combined with regionally speciﬁc labor systems to determine how, where, and when

members of collegiate communities interacted with one another.

105

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CHAPTER THREE

The Work of Education: Masculinity and Friendship among Faculty and Students

On the evening of May 9, 1853, South Carolina College student Edward Kellers
walked around the college green after evening prayers with a classmate and sauntered
into Professor Francis Lieber’s yard. Caught by the professor taking some of “his green
peaches,” Lieber “shockingly” exclaimed “‘that was a species'of communism he did not
teach in political ethics.’” Laughing about their crime, the boys were permitted to leave
with peaches in hand, but this was apparently a comfortable exchange between faculty
and student outside of the classroom.I This incident could have rapidly progressed into a
trite example of unscrupulous students wreaking havoc on an unwitting professor, but the
conﬁguration of the college drew faculty and students closely together in a residential
community with an emotional climate conducive to amicable, friendly relations. A
signiﬁcant work of education was performed in moments such as this as professors and
pupils stepped out of their formal roles. Operating within the fundamentally paternalistic
structure of the college, the faculty of South Carolina and Columbia Colleges deployed
the language, images, understandings, and practices of friendship for the broader purpose
of guiding students into an intellectual manhood. Although the contours and intensity of

these relationships differed according to urban landscapes, campus geography, and

 

' Edward Henry Kellers. Manuscript touching on Dr. Lieber lectures (1854), Dr. LaBorde lectures (1854),
and EHK Journal. Edward Henry Kellers Papers. South Caroliniana Library. Journal Entry for May 9,

1853.

106

region, students and faculty of these antebellum colleges were on “friendly and intimate
2

terms” as they fashioned relationships outside of formal classroom instruction.

Historians of the “old-time college,” including authors of institutional histories of
Columbia University and the University of South Carolina, have contended that the
nineteenth-century faculty lacked signiﬁcant “autonomy and independent agency.” The
teacher-student relationship did not inherently entail friendship as some faculty and
students simply were not interested in cultivating this relationship. There were riotous,
antagonistic relations, which historians, including Helen Horowitz, David Allmendinger,

and Frederick Rudolph, have documented extensively.3 Most recently, J. M. Opal argued

that the relationship between professors and students was “the deﬁning facet of collegiate
life.”4 He breaks new ground by calling attention to the signiﬁcance of the faculty-student

relationship, but perpetuates the view that these relations were embroiled in recurring
conﬂict or the potential for conﬂict by extending Horowitz’s vision of a constant war
between professors and students. According to Opal, the students and faculty of Amherst

College were drawn together in “combustible intimacy,” but actively and cautiously

sought to avoid violent eruptions common to other institutions.5 Faculty have frequently

2 Robert M. Kennedy to Fitz Hugh McMaster. February 10, 1938. Robert MacMilian Kennedy Papers.

South Caroliniana Library.

3 McCaughey, Stand, Columbia, 102. McCaughey argues that the Columbia faculty were limited in their
authority and only retained power to reject initiatives put forth by the Trustees. Other scholars of this
perspective include Merton E. Coulter, Richard Hofstadter, and Laurence Veysey. See Frederick Rudolph,

The American College and University: A History with an Introduction by John Thelin (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1990). David Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life

in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975). Helen Leﬂ<owitz Horowitz,
Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the end of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1988).

4 J .M . Opal. “The Making of the Victorian Campus,” 343.

5 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the end of the Eighteenth
Century to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 32. Opal, “Victorian Campus,” 344.
I ohn Thelin, most recently, characterized the student-faculty relationship as one fraught with “perpetual

’ension.” John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University

’ress, 2004), 2 I .
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been portrayed as the victims of administrative whims or uncontrollable students, yet this
perspective remains valid only when looking at their ofﬁcial instructional roles.
Examining the faculty-student relationships at Columbia and South Carolina Colleges
outside of their ofﬁcial roles provides an alternative view and illustrates a consistent,
conscious pursuit of affective relations, a few combative moments notwithstanding.
Some scholars have additionally assumed that antebellum professors only
approached students in a coercive paternalistic manner due to many colleges’ adoption of
the in loco parentis posture.6 This structure required colleges to incorporate paternalistic
features into their educational environments, such as room checks, study hours, and
various prohibitions on music, alcohol, and tobacco.7 Although their power was checked
by the Board of Trustees, college professors were charged with enforcing the rules and
regulations of the college in addition to their instructional duties. This clearly positioned
them as authority ﬁgures responsible for moral development and intellectual rigor. The
faculty bodies at both institutions were required to note, evaluate, and punish students for
absences, irregularities, and disorders.8 This established a paternalistic framework that
seemed to command professor-student relations. But some professors under scrutiny here
only sparingly employed the images and language of paternalism and rather, preferred to
capitalize upon shared understandings and images of friendship and affection. By
adopting a different perspective toward faculty-student relations at these two institutions,

one that seeks to understand how an emphasis on the manliness of intellectual pursuits

6 Douglas Sloan, "Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus: The American College Curriculum" Teacher's College
Record Vol. 73 No. 2 (Winter 1971), 221-257. Rodney Hessinger, “‘The Most Powerful Instrument of
College Discipline: ’ Student Disorder and the Growth of Meritocracy in the Colleges of the Early

Republic” History of Education Quarterly Vol. 39 No. 3 (Autumn 1999), 237-262.
7 John C orri gan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 2002), 181.
8 Green, University of South Carolina, 227.

108

shaped these relations, a more complex picture of mid-nineteenth century higher
education emerges.
. Patemalism inﬁltrated antebellum colleges from their inception and was woven

into the very essence of their educational mission. Historian Lorri Glover has ﬁrmly
established that southern colleges “planted the seeds that turned boys from the South into
self-conscious southern men.” North Carolinian Edward Rufﬁn captured this sentiment
precisely when he called for the establishment of southern colleges because: “We have
worshiped their [northern] deities, Princeton, Yale, & Cambridge long enough. . .Let the
Yankees manufacture woolen clothing, let us manufacture men.”9 This was not a goal
unique to southern colleges as many educators, North and South alike, understood that
they took over this burden of making men from students’ fathers. Northern and southern
fathers alike wanted their sons to develop into men of independent thought and actions.
The task of guiding sons in attaining the delicate balance between asserting independence
and deference to social conventions fell to fathers, particularly in regard to intellectual
independence. Stephen Frank has shown that it was the duty of mothers to “sway the
dominion of the heart,” but the task of fathers to facilitate their children’s intellectual

development. '0 When sons entered college at approximately ﬁfteen years old, faculty

assumed this burden of teaching these young men to think for themselves.
South Carolina College and Columbia College embraced this idea of guiding

boyish students into intellectual manhood by providing them with a working knowledge

of the classics. While at South Carolina, Professor of Political Economy Francis Lieber
9 Lorri Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2007), 65. Quoted in Glover, Southern Sons, 51. See in particular, chapter 4 “Creating Southern

Schools for Southern Sons.”
' 0 Quoted in Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-century
4 merican North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 39-40.

109

reﬂected on President Everett's inaugural speech at Yale College. He especially identiﬁed
with Everett’s emphasis on “the importance of rearing good men as well as good
scholars.”ll Recognizing that students already “look[ed] upon themselves as men,”
northern and southern faculty members creatively approached this challenging
occupational task by creatively extending their reach beyond the classroom to inculcate
ideas and practices of manhood, particularly in terms of conforming to moral conventions
and intellectual independence.‘2 Never an easy task, the faculty acknowledged that they
worked with “young men who are only beginning to feel their responsibility . . . [and]
commit many crimes.” '3 Aware that they worked with youths who already imagined
themselves as already grown men, professors utilized the language and images of
friendship in an effort to reach students beyond classroom instruction and perform their
roles as makers of men.

Although some students maintained ambivalent personal relationships without
any desire for anything deeper or more meaningﬁil, others developed a more intimate
education from their instructors. A former student wrote to Guy Van Amringe, the son of
Professor “Van Am” of Columbia College after his death, to convey condolences. In
lamenting this “severe blow” to the college, the student “claim[ed] the proud distinction
of having had him for a teacher as well as a friend.” This student continued to clarify the

nature of their friendship stating that although Van Amringe did not provide formal

 

” Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard. May 14, 1846. Francis Lieber Collection. Henry E.

Huntington Library.
'2 Nathaniel Fish Moore to Clement Clark Moore. June 4, 1849. Moore Family Papers. Rare Book and

Manuscript Library. Columbia University.
'3 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. November 25, 1845. University Archives

South Caroliniana Library.

110

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instruction to him after his sophomore year, “he continued to teach, as a man.”'4 Beyond

their intellectual expertise, students recognized faculty as models of manliness regardless
of region or residential schema. An epistolary exchange between Lieber and his friend
George Hillard, a professor (albeit brieﬂy) at Harvard College centered on the problems
that Edward Everett had as President of Harvard. Lieber and Hillard both admired his

dedication to making men, but believed that his infamous struggles with mischievous and

riotous students stemmed ﬁom his “want of manliness.”15 Outside of imparting

knowledge, faculty members, thus, were ideally supposed to provide a model of mature
masculinity.

In both New York and South Carolina, faculty and students shared intellectual
interests and work extended beyond the classroom offering a collective method of
identifying one another as men in both New York and South Carolina. In nineteenth-
century America, there existed a diverse range of masculine ideals and practices, but
many contemporaries associated intellectualism with effeminacy, uselessness, passivity. '6
Historians have demonstrated that understandings of manliness shifted according to race,

gender, region, age, and religion, but even among the elite a range of masculinities were

 

'4 Oliver K. Hand to Guy Van Amringe. September 16, 1915. John Howard Van Amringe Papers. Rare
Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University. Emphasis in original.

'5 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber. April 14, 1847. Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard.
May 14, 1856. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library. According to Harvard University
historian, Everett approached his presidency as if this was a step-down from his previous position as
Governor of Massachusetts and service as a United States diplomat. Everett was known for his “complete
ineptitude in dealing with undergraduates” and was the victim of endless student pranks. Lieber and Hillard
believed that students rebelled against Everett because they knew he did not think highly of the position.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard

University, 1963), 276-279.
'6 Richard Hofstadter notes that nineteenth-century Americans identiﬁed intellectual pursuits as

“unworldly, unmasculine, and impractical.” Richard Hofstadter, Anti-lntellectualism in American Life

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 33. Leslie Butler similarly outlines the mobilization of gendered
images (feminine, passive, impotent, or members of a “third sex”) to discredit elite, educated, intellectual
liberal reformers in the late nineteenth century. See chapter 5 “The Politics of Liberal Reform.” Butler,
Critical Americans: Victorian lntellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2007), 202-203.

111

it

 

 

considered acceptable.17 Moreover, in some cases these masculinities crossed sectional
lines. James Corbett David has recently illustrated that elite northemers and southemers
held diverse views about what it meant to be a man, but that elite men across the United
States recognized self-restraint as a key component of masculinity. '8 As the identiﬁcation

of intellectual work as masculine crossed sectional boundaries, it provided a model of

manhood practiced by faculty in both educational settings.
Arguing that intellectual work was manly work, Francis Lieber informed the

students of South Carolina College that “the acquisition of knowledge must form your

chief occupation as you now enter the period of manhood.” He further urged them to
continue their education aﬁer college because knowledge, wisdom, and intellect are
necessary for “diligent and manly” actions during “an agitated and energetic age” and
deﬁned them as “resolute and good men.”'9 Academic men lived by their intellect and as
such, it was not unusual for professors to model masculinities rooted in intellectual
terms.20 In a letter directed to Professor LaBorde, chairmen of the faculty, a South

Carolina College professor lauded “the present generation of students,” who sought to be

' 7 Although the diverse models and practices of white masculinity continue to be expanded and revised by
historians, some key works illustrating the range of options available include: Eliot Gorn, The Manly Art

( I 986), Mark Carnes and Clyde Grifﬁn, Meanings for Manhood (1990), Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article
2001), Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover Southern Manhood (2004), Amy Greenberg, Manifest

Manhood and the American Empire 2005), and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Disorderly Conduct (1985). For
political independence, see: Roediger, Wages of Whiteness and Glover and Friend, eds. Southern Manhood.

These models and practices could be employed in a piecemeal fashion as men employed parts of these
models in one set of circumstances or embrace another model in a different context for whatever best suited

their purpose. This movement and ﬂexibility with which masculinity was practiced contrasts against the
rigidity with which ideals were engaged or discussed by historians. This perspective forms the framework

for my analysis of student domain in the subsequent chapter.
' 8 James Corbett David, “The Politics of Emasculation: The Caning of Charles Sumner and Elite Ideologies
9f Manhood in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Gender and History vol. 19 no. 2 (August 2007):

:24-3 45.
9 Francis Lieber, The Necessity of Continued Self-Education. An Address to the Graduating Class of South
'arolina College at Commencement, on the ﬁrst of December, MDCCCLI (Columbia, SC: A. S. Johnston).

See chapter 5 ahead, referring to Lieber and his friends in this regard. J. M. Opal also discusses the
illeg iate reverence for intellect as part of masculinity in his essay “The Making of the Victorian Campus’

r'eviously mentioned).

112

“distinguished by a manliness of thought.”2| In New York, professors similarly reported
to the Board of Trustees that the successful students’ performances at year-end
examinations were “eminently scholarly and manly.”22 Independence was an important
component of the available masculinities throughout the nineteenth century. The notion
of “independence” could be applied to emotional independence and physical strength as
well as independence from others for material needs, economic independence, political

independence, but it is important to note that regardless of region professors applied it to

intellectual vigor and skill.23

Not entirely neglecting their authoritative positions, faculty utilized the images
and language of paternalism to guide students towards this independence. With express
permission from parents and guardians, some faculty members monitored and guided
student ﬁnancial responsibilities. Robert Woodward Bamwell of South Carolina College
wrote to Robert Bamwell Rhett, guardian of student W. Ford that he “supplied him
[Ford] with funds to about $250 including a tailor’s bill charged to me and intended to go

on to the $200— expecting after that funds from you which will be necessary to about

 

2' Unknown to Max. LaBorde, chairman of the faculty. May 7, 1862. Faculty Manuscript Collection. South

Caroliniana Library.
22 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. July 28, 1851. University Archives. Columbia

University.

23 On emotional independence please see: Stephen W. Berry Jr., All That Makes A Man: Love and Ambition
in the Civil War South. On physical prowess, strength, and independence, see: Gom, Manly Art. Smith-
Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, “Nature By Design: Masculinity and Animal
Display in the Nineteenth-century America” in Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture edited
by Ann B. Shteir and Bernard V. Lightman (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2006), 113. Lori
Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
2007), 25-26. The subject of intellectualism and masculinity was the subject of a panel at the U. S.
Intellectual History Conference, October 17-18, Grand Rapids, MI). In addition to my presentation of
Lieber, Jack Dwiggins presented any essay evidencing Professor Robert Henry’s understanding of science
as masculine labor and Krister Knapp noted William James use of intellectualism as a basis for masculine

friendships.

113

$150 in April next.”24 Five months later, Bamwell again wrote to Rhett about Ford’s
excessive spending and lack of responsibility. The student “spent about $300 and
probably will get on to commencement on $100 if therefore you can spend $50 at that
time I will try to make out for him until them.” Ultimately the professor and guardian
decided that the student should receive “$400 and be told he must live upon this or try
something else” other than college education.25 Without mastering the skills of ﬁnancial
responsibility, this student would not gain the status of a “gentleman” acquired through
college education.26 This task of instilling ﬁscal responsibility and teaching ﬁnancial
independence occurred solely at South Carolina College as part of its in loco parentis
mission and goal of re-creating the household unit with the campus boundaries.

The Carolinian professor as a paternal ﬁgure played to the familial atmosphere of
the southern campus, but Columbia College, lacking a similar residential schema and
approach to students, was unable to use this tactic with the same intensity. However,
Columbia professors too believed they were an extension of the domestic realm by
envisioning themselves as an “academical parent” through the distribution of knowledge
and guiding students’ intellectual development.27 Paternal images at both colleges offered
a way for individuals to understand their social relationships within the college campus.

At both institutions the most basic features of professors’ occupational duties
were shaped by the paternalistic structure of the college. Professors acted as gentlemanly

fathers to students and it is evident that this applied to the shaping of student political

 

2“ Quoted from Robert Woodward Bamwell to Robert Bamwell Rhett, January 1841. Located in Bamwell.
John, ed. “Hamlet to Hotspur: Letters of Robert Woodward Bamwell to Robert Bamwell Rhett” South
Carolina Historical Magazine 77 (October 1976): 236-56.

2’ Quoted from Robert Woodward Bamwell to Robert Bamwell Rhett, May 1841. Located in Bamwell ed.
“Hamlet to Hotspur,” 236-256.

26 See Lori Glover, Southern Sons (2005), esp. chapter 3.

27 Anthon, Introductory Lecture. Anthon Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia

University.

114

 

 

involvement in South Carolina. Michael Sugrue has pointed to the various ways that
South Carolina College faculty utilized the curriculum under President Thomas Cooper to
propel students toward political radicalism?8 Beyond curricular instruction however,
several students solicited the guidance and support of Professor Matthew Williams and
James H. Thomwell for the establishment of a “Southern Rights Association.”29 In the
same year, student Nathan Whetstone received permission from the faculty body to
“attend a meeting last night” regarding “the great questions” of secession.30 In addition to
providing political guidance, professorial duties further illustrated paternalistic features as
faculty checked student tenements and made reports on the condition of rooms with
speciﬁc references to cleanliness. The professors similarly encouraged students to sign a
temperance pledge or join the student temperance society as well as inviting students to
their lectures on temperance in the city of Columbia.31 A youth’s father would have
normally supervised his son’s political and moral inclinations, but professors took on a
role as substitute fathers by encouraging students to make better choices and limiting
their independence for broader purpose of guiding them into adulthood.

Although Columbia College was non-residential, the faculty also worked within a

paternalistic framework. Like their South Carolinian counterparts, the Trustees included

among the professorial duties: “to try offences committed by students; To determine their

 

2’ Michael Sugrue, “’We Desired Our Future Rulers to Be Educated Men’: South Carolina College, the
Defense of Slavery and the Development of Secessionist Politics” in Roger Geiger, ed. The American

College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 91-114
29Matthew Williams to Francis Lieber. February 1, 1851. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington

Library"

3fNathan Whetstone to his mother. October 4,1851. Whetstone Family Papers. South Caroliniana Library.

3'Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. March 24, 1845. May 5, 1845. University
Archives. South Caroliniana Library. Daily South Carolinian. March 13, 1852. As Sugrue identiﬁed the
political inﬂuence of professorial lectures upon student, Lieber similarly offered a lecture addressing the
dangers of intemperance dividing the subject into: “physical intemperance, mental intemperance, political
intemperance, moral intemperance.” Francis Lieber. Lecture 1. No Date. Francis Lieber Collection. Henry

E. Huntington Library. Green, University of South Carolina, 227.

115

 

 

relative standing; To adjudge rewards and punishments; and to make all such regulations
for the better execution of the College system.” The students were obligated to conduct
themselves with the “strictest decorum when in class, neither doing nor countenancing
anything that which may tend to incommode his Teacher” and to treat professors with
respect at all times. 32 Like South Carolina College, the educational setting wove
paternalism into the students’ meticulously scheduled days, from the moment of their
arrival in morning to their departure in the aftemoon. However, the lack of residential
structure deemphasized professors’ authoritative positions except when dealing with
student disciplinary problems. For instance, in March 1849, several students were
reported for entering the college building after hours and removing and breaking the
stand for calling roll. Shortly thereafter, “a large number of students were again upon the
green (the names of some already reported) cheers and groans for the different professors
were given.”33 In this instance, such expressions of hostility aimed at the college and its
professors resulted in the suspension of several students. Although manifestations of
paternalism permeated the faculty-student relationships at both colleges in some
overlapping arenas, they differed in both breadth and intensity as the on-campus housing
schema of South Carolina College required a more intense level of top-down authority.
Within these paternalistic structures and obligations, nineteenth-century northern
and southern educators agreed that friendly faculty-student relationships outside of the

classroom should play an important role in the college environment.34 These relationships

 

32 Columbia University, Statutes of the Columbia College (New York: Columbia University. 1843), 12-13

and 18.
33 Stephen Roe Weeks to the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. March, 26 1849. Columbia College
Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University. Students argued that if role could not

be taken, they could not be counted as absent.
3" Jon Wakelyn brieﬂy touched on this relationship, but only as a reference to planter fathers’ struggle to

maintain control and inﬂuence over their sons while they were away at college. Jon L. Wakelyn,

116

reveal more about the educational experience and emotional landscape than the
traditional perspective rooted purely in an instructional relationship. Employed as
professor and president at the University of Alabama, University of Mississippi, and
Colmnbia College (NY), F. A. P. Barnard found that his understanding of the faculty role
resonated in both the South and urban New York. He believed that “It would be well,
both for the students and professors, if there were somewhat more intercourse between
them at times when the artiﬁcial relations of the instructor and pupil might be forgotten,
or at least kept out of sight.” Ideally, this would stimulate “a feeling of kindly personal
interest between the parties, of wonderful efﬁcacy in promoting harmony and happiness
in the entire community.”35 Francis Lieber, professor of political economy and law at
both South Carolina College and Columbia College, similarly contended that the
relationship between teacher and student was of the utmost importance. Writing on the
Character of the Gentleman, he argued that “the friendship between the teacher and the
taught . . . lends new strength to the mind to seize what is offered.”36 Furthermore, at
South Carolina College the president’s home “was always open cheerfully to the well
behaved students and it was a very delightful home?”7 Joseph LeConte, professor of
chemistry and geology, agreed in 1856 to assist President McCay, who also taught

mathematics, by teaching the freshman level math courses because it “brought me into

 

“Antebellum College Life and the Relations between Fathers and Sons” in The Web of Southern Social
Relations: Women, Family, and Education edited by Walter Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr., and Jon L.

Wakelyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985): 109-126.
35 F. A. P. Barnard, Letters on College Government and the Evils Inseparable from the American College

System (D. Appleton & Co., 1855), 55-56.
36 Francis Lieber, The Character of the Gentleman Third Edition (Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co. 1964),

1 12-1 13.
37 Robert Macmilian Kennedy to Fitz Hugh McMaster, February 10, 1938. Robert Macmilian Kennedy

Collection. Manuscripts Division. South Caroliniana Library.

117

closer contact with the students.”38 Regardless of region and residential schemas, college
educators participated in and valued a culture of education that brought them into
intimate, friendly contact with students.

In some cases the language of friendship and paternalism combined as a way for
the wider public to understand the relationship between professors and students. The
members of the South Carolina Presbytery presented John W. F urgeson (a nineteen year
old who was teaching school in Newberry District) as a student eligible for a scholarship
at South Carolina College (his funding was shared by the Presbytery and the College).
Due to his youthfulness and “as both his parents are done,” his supporters requested that
the College provide the “watchfulness and sympathy of Christian friends while in
College.” Lacking the supervision of parents and citing a relatively recent “public
profession of religion,” the Presbytery “superintend[ed] his collegiate education” with the
view that he would enter the ministry. 39 While out of the watchful view of their own
committee, they sought reassurance from Thomwell that he, as one of the founders of the
Southern Presbyterian Church and professor at the College, would substitute for them as
a moral counselor—essentially a social father—to Furgeson within the notoriously
“immoral” college environment.40 They clearly wanted Thomwell to play a paternal
ﬁgure to the youth by convincing him to regulate his behavior, but employed the

language of friendship—asking him to make a free choice rooted in desire to do what is

 

3" William Dallam Armes. The Autobiography of Joseph Le C onte. New York: D. Appleton and Company

(1903), 165-166.
39 W. B. Belford to James Henley Thomwell. September 30, 1853. Jams Henley Thomwell Papers. South

Caroliniana Library.
40 Wilson and Fiske, American Biography, vol. VI, 103-104. For the idea that colleges breed immorality

through the congregation of unsupervised male youths see: Julie Reuben, Making of the Modern
University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1996), 256. Rudolph, American College, 87-88.

118

best for the youth (framed as Christian charity).4| In this regard, paternalism and
friendship ran together as the public tried to understand the relationship between
professor and pupil as both mentoring and authoritative, but some faculty members
consciously harnessed the language of friendship to order their relationships with
students. As a state-supported school, this case reﬂects the popularly held ideals of its
host society and also may have contributed to pressuring faculty members to conform to
certain ideals.

A number of professors in New York and South Carolina sought to cultivate
friendships with students, and likewise some students described their relationships as
affectionate and amicable. Although the stereotype of combative faculty and student
relations contains some basis in reality, the available student generated records reveal
their afﬁliation with faculty was amiable and warm. Celebrating John Howard Van
Amringe’s more than ﬁfty years as a Columbia College professor, one former student
extended to him “the sense of obligation and the affectionate respect felt by one of your
old-time students” because “it has been no small pleasure to count you as my friend.”42
Upon the death of James Renwick, professor of chemistry, his former students recalled

that he “entered with pleasure into the society of the young. . .and all who came in contact

with him were by his urbanity and kindness of heart made ﬁ'iends.”43 Several South

 

4' Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Aﬂiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 8-9. Lorraine Smith Pangle, Aristotle and the Philosophy of

Friendship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 142-143.
42 C. F. Goddard to John Howard Van Amringe. November 3, 1909. John Howard Van Amringe Papers.

Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.
43 Association of the Alumni. Memorial of James Renwick upon his death. February 9, 1863. Renwick

Family Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University.

119

Carolina students corresponded with Lieber after their graduation referring to him as “My
dear friend,” “my true friend,” and “respectful friend.”44
Without a doubt, ofﬁcial instructional duties structured students’ daily

interactions with professors. The letters and diaries penned by students of Columbia
College and South Carolina College contain similarly prosaic entries regarding the
classroom experience. In April of 1853, Edward Kellers recorded his performance in the
classroom noting that he was “called up on Dr. Lieber on geography” and had “done
well.” At Columbia College, Christodoulus Evangeles recorded that he attended “1St
Renwick’s Mechanics. 2nd McVickar’s. 3rd Anton’s. 4th to the old pres.” Within the
routinization of curricular responsibilities, such as attending class, studying, and
preparing for recitations, examinations, and public orations, some faculty members
consciously created moments to establish a foundation for their relationship with students
outside of the classroom. For instance, on the ﬁrst day of class, Professor Charles Anthon
described his vision of the faculty-student relationship he hoped to cultivate through their
“intercourse during the short period that we are to be together.” They should be bound
together as “friend[s]” rather than the stereotypical formal cold relation of instructor to
pupil.45 Daily classroom exchanges provided a foundation for faculty-student
relationships, but only in New York was the language of ﬁiendship employed during
ofﬁcial instruction.

Before and after ofﬁcial instruction, the classroom space continued to provide an

arena for learning, but it took on a new tone as it facilitated the development of amiable

 

4" Samuel Jones to Francis Lieber. March 14, 1847. James Warley [Worley?] Miles to Francis Lieber. June

26, 1852. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.
45 Charles Anthon. Introductory Lecture. 1835. Anthon Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Columbia University.

120

faculty and student relations. A Columbia College student, George Templeton Strong
recorded that on a frosty December morning he “was agreeably surprised when I walked
into Renwick’s room to warm my ﬁngers” and learned that “‘he would always be very
happy to see me there whenever I wished to come.”’ The following year, the professor
extended another invitation “to come into his room whenever I liked.” Another professor
encouraged a student to “prepare a lecture for deliver[y] in the Lyceum of Brooklyn.”
Similarly, Edward Kellers recalled that he had “staid to [Professor] Preston’s room all the
morning.”46 In each case, time before or after the class period offered an opportunity not
only for the students to extend their intellectual interests beyond the conﬁnes of the
curriculum, but it also provided a physical and emotional space for the development of a
deeper relationship between the two parties. In one case, Professor Nathanial Moore kept
a few students after class to thank them “with some affectionate remarks about the
likeness [painting]” that they had commissioned of him"7

Although historians have presented a rather severe view of the intellectual
capabilities of antebellum college professors (often comparing them to their counterparts
in the emerging research universities), students appreciated the intellectual achievements
of their teachers. Education historian, Frederick Rudolph argued that “only rarely were
the professors scholars” and they were often transitory in their membership in

academia.48 According to Robert McCaughey, 53% of the faculty at Columbia College

 

“’6 George Templeton Strong Diary. December 1, 1835. and October 13, 1836. New York Public Library.
Edward Henry Kellers Journal. April 18, 1853. South Caroliniana Library. Christodolus Leonidas Miltiades
Evangeles. Diary. Volume 2. November 17, 1837. Manuscript Collections. New York Historical Society.
’7 Christodolus Leonidas Miltiades Evangeles. Diary. Volume 2. June 17, 1836. Manuscript Collections.
New York Historical Society. Although students did not commission paintings of all professors, the
members of the literary societies sought to obtain likenesses of the professors before the retired. In this

case, Moore was retiring at the end of the year.
48 Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University with Introduction by John Thelin (Athens:

University of Georgia Press, 1990), 157.

121

 

between 1815-1857 identiﬁed themselves as full-time academics.49 These included
published scholars: Henry James Anderson (mathematics), Charles Anthon (Greek
language and literature), Mariano Velasquez de la Cadena (Spanish Language and
literature), Charles Davies (Mathematics), Henry Drisler (Classics), William H. Ellet
(chemistry), Charles Hackley (mathematics), Charles Arad Joy (chemistry), John
McVickar (biographical essays, scholarly work on religion and political economy),
Francis Lieber (political economy), and James Renwick (chemistry) among many
others.50 A similar analysis of South Carolina College’s faculty has not been produced,
but it is clear that this body also contained known and published scholars albeit fewer in
number than Columbia. These included Lieber and Ellet (both also employed by
Columbia) as well as Lewis Gibbes (classics), Robert Gibbes (medicine, sciences),
Robert Henry (sermons, classics), Joseph and John LeConte (physics and geology),
Augustus Longstreet (legal, literature), Henry Junius Nott (essayist), William Preston
(well-known publications of his orations), William Rivers (religious tomes), and James
H. Thomwell (political, religious). The culture of publishing for academics during this
period differed from modern deﬁnitions as many professors wrote for journals aimed at a
broader public than current scholarly journals, such as DeBow ’s, Harper ’3 Weekly,
American Quarterly, Whig Review, and The Southern Presbyterian Review. Many
successful scholars and intellectuals of the antebellum period published books, which

were then used for instructional purposes in other institutions—as textbooks for

 

’9 Please see Appendix B of Robert McCaughey’s Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in
the City of New York, 1754-2004 located online at:
http:/fbeatl.bam_ard.columbia.ed11.«"stand_columbialbhtm1

5° The publications of these faculty members and others can be found in Appleton’s Dictionary of National
Biography.

122

 

 

colleges.51 Some students took advantage of the scholarly works produced by their
teachers as a method of intellectual interaction that they perceived as exceptionally
personal. In her 2008 book, Anglophilia, Elisa Tamarkin, basing her conclusions on an
analysis of novels written by students/faculty of Harvard about the antebellum college
experience, argued that intellectual exchange at antebellum Harvard College was
consciously modeled after the British style in which faculty and students engaged in an
informal exchange of ideas. She contends that relations had a loose nature to them and
easily stemmed from a mutual, organic love of ideas. Students at South Carolina and
Columbia College engaged their professors intellectually in a similarly organic method,
although there is no evidence that this was a conscious emulation of a British style.
Nevertheless, these students displayed a personal attachment to the faculty and their

intellectual engagements that allowed them to practice the very type of intellectual

manhood that faculty sought to cultivate.52

In April of 1853, South Carolina student, Edward Kellers noted that he went to
the library and read Ross’s Encyclopedia and the encyclopedia compiled by his professor,
Francis Lieber. He “compared them” and concluded that “Ross is better.” On another
occasion, student William Pinckney Stark wrote to Lieber that upon reading his Political
Ethics he found “you had embodied all your principal news upon the constraint of
property, previously to the publication of the essay.” Stark further inquired what Lieber

thought about the idea that “modems will excel the Ancients in creating,” particularly in

 

5‘ Guion Griffs Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 193 7), 817. Johnson makes this point speciﬁcally regarding the University of North
Carolina faculty members. George Daniels, “The Process of Professionalization in American Science” Isis
v.58 n. 2 (Summer 1968): 150-166. Douglas Sloan, "Harmony, Chaos, and Consensus: The American
College Curriculum" Teacher's College Record 73 (Winter 1971): 242-247.

52 Elisa Tamarkin, A nglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 2008), especially Chapter 4.

123

 

 

considering the following three ideas: “1. they [the Ancients] do excel us. 2. what are the

basis of this superiority? 3. shall it always continue?”53 This student not only drew from

Lieber’ s instruction in the classroom, but engaged intellectually with him in an epistolary
exchange before graduating from college. George Templeton Strong similarly found

intellectual engagement with Professor Anthon as he recorded in his diary that he “Saw
Anthon’s new edition of Sallust. Very handsomely got up with the notes of the dialogue
by the professor himself continuing an account of Sallust’s writing.” Finding the quality.
of the professor’s work compelling, Strong insisted “I must have a copy of the work.” 54
The following year, Strong similarly recorded that he “had read some few articles in

Anthon’s Lempriere[‘s Classical Dictionary] which had set my head full of Greek

tragedies as being something very splendid.”55

The more peripheral members of the college community similarly recognized the

value of professorial intellectual contributions. In 1857, Columbia College Board of
Trustees sought to remove Professor Hackley from his position as chair of Mathematics
and Astronomy. Current and former student wrote to him volunteering to attest to the
strength of his books for instructional purposes.56 As Lieber departed South Carolina
College for a position at Columbia College in 1856, the alumni placed an announcement

in the newspaper claiming that the College “sustained a heavy and serious Ioss” due to

’3 William Pinckney Stark to Francis Lieber. July 18, 1842. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington
Library.

5’ George Templeton Strong. Diary. May 5, 1836. New York Public Library.
5’ Nevins and Thomas, eds. Diary of GTS, p. 75 (16 Oct 1837). George Templeton Strong Diary. October
16, 1837. New York Public Library.

5’ George Washington Dean and George Franklin Seymour to Charles Hackley. c. 1857. Columbia College
Collection. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University. The Trustees felt compelled to ﬁre
Hackley due to complaints from Professor McCulloh. He was unable to perform his duty to teach the junior
class physics because Hackley had taught them “so little mathematics that any proposition relating to or
involving conditions of ‘time, space, quantity, or proportion would be considered by them equally
mysterious, incomprehensible, and disgusting.’”

Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds. The Diary
of George Templeton Strong: The Turbulent Fifties, 1 850-1859 (New York: The MacMillan Company,
1952), 326-327.

124

his “eminent standing as a scholar in the republic of letters.”57 Some students, alumni,

and trustees not only appreciated professorial intellectual scholarship, but also engaged
with it outside of the college environment. This type of work provided a basis for
conversation and method of bring students and faculty together, but it additionally
illustrates that students participated in an intellectual manhood. Intellectual activity, with
an emphasis on classics signiﬁed elite status and masculinity in both northern and

southern society well into the Gilded Age.58

This intellectual engagement also ﬂowed in the opposite direction for Francis

Lieber. He beneﬁted from exchanging ideas with students or testing out new ideas in
lecture classes. Shaped by his training at Jena and Halle which sought to provide
professors and students with opportunities to pursue and advance knowledge through
Lehrﬁeiheit (training freedom) and Lernﬁeiheit (Ieaming freedom), Francis Lieber often
used both classical texts and modern works (including newspapers) to intellectually
engage students in contemporary social and political problems.59 He also utilized his
classroom lectures in 1835-1836 as an arena for laying out the basic chapters of his ﬁrst
book Political Ethics."0 In addition to planning his lectures and lessons around ideas for
his scholarship, Lieber dedicated his second book, Legal and Political Hermeneutics

(1853) to his students. He agonized over the phrasing of this dedication as he struggled to

 

57 Newspaper clipping attached to Francis Lieber to Samuel Austin Allibone. December 3, 1856. Francis
Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library.
58 Caroline Winterer, The Culture of C lassicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life,

1780-1910 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), especially Chapter 4.
59 James Turner and Paul Bernard, “The German Model and the Graduate School: The University of

Michigan and the Origin Myth of the American University” in Roger Geiger, ed. The American College in

the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 222. See also: Carl Diehl,
Americans and German Scholarship, 1770-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) and Jurgen
Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1965).
60 Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner. August 25, 1835. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library

125

decide among “students,” pupils, or scholars—ultimately settling on the word
“students?“ Lieber also found that students provided him access the state’s political,
legal, and intellectual minds as James Edward Calhoun frequently delivered letters
between Lieber and his father. While Lieber sought to increase his political inﬂuence in
the state through the cultivation of friendships with the parents of his students (if they
beneﬁted him), Calhoun, like many fathers of antebellum students, sought to monitor his
son’s academic and social progress. After reporting that James was an attentive and well-
behaved student, Lieber discussed with Calhoun free trade and the war in Mexico and
assisted him in publishing an essay in the Literary Messenger.62 Although I have not
discovered evidence of other professors acting in this way, Lieber’s actions demonstrate
that professors could enter into intellectually beneﬁcially relationships with students and
their fathers—inside and outside of the classroom.

The classical authors and their understandings of perfect and lesser friendships
provided a language through which faculty and students could make sense of their daily
intimacies and intellectualism outside of formal classroom instruction. These faculty-
student relationships paired older men with their younger male students in an
intellectually cooperative friendship—what Aristotle referred to as lesser friendships
because it was an unbalanced, unequal relationship. In opposition to the “ideal” or
“perfect” friendships that sought the “realization of individual human potential

(‘happiness’),” this type of lesser friendship paired a superior individual with an inferior

 

6' Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard. June 7, 1853. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington
Library.

62 John Caldwell Calhoun to FL. 11 Nov 1846. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E. Huntington Library. See
also: Clyde N. Wilson and Shirley Bright Cook, eds. The Papers of John C. Calhoun Vol. 23 1846
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 522-524.

126

individual in a proportionally beneﬁcial relationship.”3 For example, the student would
reap more beneﬁt from knowledge and expertise of the teacher, but the teacher would
expect something, such as a payment (his salary, for example) or favor in return.
However, the virtuous and “true” teacher must have a real affection for and interest in his
students. Plato acknowledged the inequalities between himself and his students, yet
attained excellence (freely given, perfect) because he held a genuine affection for his
students and found pleasure enough in the gratitude and reciprocal affective sentiments of
the students.64

Students and faculty alike would have been familiar with this particular model of
friendship through their studies of the classics, which formed foundational curriculum at
both institutions as well as from the “broadly disseminated culture of classicism” that
reverberated through bourgeois society.65 Lieber, in his Character of the Gentleman,
employed the “touching example” provided by Socrates and his followers to impress the
necessity of ﬁiendship between teacher and pupil because it “lends new strength to the
mind to seize what is offered.” Moreover, the practice of friendship within the college
community “overcomes the difﬁculty of communion between soul and soul” through the
transmission of knowledge from one to another. For faculty and students, perfect
friendship through instruction would not have been possible because the faculty were
paid (by either the Board of Trustees of Columbia College or the state of South Carolina),
but they still used images of perfect friendship, including reciprocal respect and affection.

Learning would be rendered more effective, Lieber argued, if “affection toward [the

 

63 Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship, 34-36. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Books VIII and IX,
Translated by Michael Pakaluk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. Book VIII.

6“ Pangle, Aristotle, 133-135.

65 Winterer, Culture of C lassicism, 3.

127

teacher] enlivens your attention and you will integrate with your very soul that which,
without friendship, remains matter of purely intellectual activity.” 66

Some students clearly identiﬁed the difference between lesser and perfect
friendship and after graduation sought to pursue the more ideal form of friendship with
professors. In 1853, James Miles wrote to Lieber that as “your attached pupil and
respectful ﬁiend” he had “no ground on which to ask the friendship of a learned literary
man.” With a “sincere heart” he sought to form a friendship rooted in a “love of
knowledge” because “I can appreciate learning” even if from a distance.67 Leaving the
college signiﬁed a transitional moment in their relationship as previous intellectual
interactions could fall under the category of friendship because of their mutual esteem
and common goals, however, it could never become an ideal friendship at that stage
because the professor was paid to offer guidance and instruction. Subsequent to the
completion of college, ideal friendship could be attained because the former professor
and student were no longer unequally yoked. Now they were free to pursue knowledge
together out of a genuine desire for knowledge and become friends as equals.

Some southern faculty members employed the images and understandings of
friendship without explicitly evoking the terminology of friendship. South Carolina

College president James H. Thomwell, granted the petition by the Class of 1852 to have

their classmate, H. A. Troutman restored to the college. However, his response painted an

 

6” Although Caroline Winterer makes a persuasive argument for the importance of Greek language and
literature in popular culture and points to how it operated as a powerful tool of political instruction during
the antebellum period, she contends that Plato did not play a signiﬁcant role in college curriculum.
However, the Trustee minutes of Columbia College and South Carolina College demonstrate otherwise.
See: Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. November 28, 1838. University
Archives. South Caroliniana Library. Minutes of the Board of Trustees of Columbia College. January 2,
1837. March 6 1855. December 5 1859. University Archives. Columbiana Library. Lieber, Gentleman,
113-1 14.

67 James Warley [Worley?] Miles to Francis Lieber. June 26, 1852. Francis Lieber Papers. Henry E.
Huntington Library.

128

image of mutual respect found in the ideal friendship, stating “your opinion, simply _ag
your opinion is entitled to great weight. . .it will never fail to have that weight with me.”
He expounds the idea of friendship——one rooted in mutual esteem with this statement, but
he clearly conveys that their relationship was not ideal or perfect. Rather, this was a
lesser friendships situated in the production of a common goal. Thomwell explained that
their petition “convinces me that you have the good order of the college at heart as much
as the faculty.” 68 In theory, both parties held the same goal—harmonious and orderly
relations at the college—and working together produced a mutual esteem.

Outside of the intellectual space of their own work, some of the professors and
students of Columbia and South Carolina Colleges utilized their physical surroundings,
such as dorms, homes, and streets, to construct emotional spaces for the development of
relations outside of the classroom. As an urban institution centered on meeting the needs
of the City of New York, Columbia College did not offer boarding for students. They did
not embrace the in loco parentis doctrine found at many other antebellum colleges
because they believed that students would be best supervised by their families at home.”9
South Carolina College embraced in loco parentis and set up a campus residential system
that later included licensed, off-campus boarding houses for the upper classes. Both
institutions prided themselves that their residential system was the best means for
protecting, guiding, and supervising students. After news that a group of Yale College
students destroyed property throughout New Haven, The New York Times concluded it
was due to the College’s residential schema and in loco parentis posture. “The American

boy” the author wrote, “early assumes to be a man; and the only way to meet this

 

68 James H. Thomwell to the Class of 1852. April 1, 1852. James Henley Thomwell. South Caroliniana
Library..
’9 McCaughey, Stand, Columbia, 107. Columbia did not open its ﬁrst dormitory until 1905.

129

propensity, and turn it to a good account, is to treat him like a man. . .have a man’s
privileges; hold him, then, to a man’s responsibilities.” Essentially, the paper argued that
because Yale embraced in loco parentis and treated their students as children, they
behaved childishly, but Columbia College avoided similar acts of student behavior
because they did not exist in a similar relationship with their faculty. At the same time
that Columbia College lauded its student behavior and subsequently, harmonious faculty-
student relations due to the off-campus residential schema, South Carolina believed that
students should live on campus under the watchful and caring eye of the president,
faculty, and their families. This formed an underlying principle of the educational
experience at this College. From its inception in 1801, the state intended that “the youths
of all sections, all classes, and all creeds should . . . lodge in one common dormitory” to
foster “the ties of perpetual friendship” and the creation of “reﬁned and Christian
gentlemen.”7O The use of faculty homes was common to both institutions, but other
locations were determined by the institutions’ setting and region.

The campus formation at South Carolina College was particularly conducive to
the creation of friendly student-faculty relationships. The Rutledge College and
DeSaussure College buildings and the Elliot and Pinckney buildings (after 183 8)
mirrored one another across the college green from a distance of 300 feet apart. These
College buildings contained dormitories organized on a tenement system with one large
room, eighteen square feet, and two small rooms, sixteen feet by eight feet, organized in a
“suite” arrangement. Three stories high, the buildings were divided into three sections

with brick lined staircases dividing the sections. The center section contained classrooms

 

70 Green, University of South Carolina, 10-1 1.

130

and the wings were designated as student housing.7| Faculty members were required to
visit student tenements up to twice a day: once during study hours and once during the
evening at their convenience. The faculty held the power to write a schedule for these
visits on their own outside the scope of ofﬁcial trustee orders. Professors “divide[d]
amongst themselves the different tenements of the college and that each of them be
required to visit each room in the part assigned to him every night during the college
session.”72 The faculty residences ﬂanked these main campus structures providing faculty
and students with a consistent view of one another. In addition to watching students on
the green from the windows of their own homes, faculty members informally meet and
talked with students at least twice a day within these student-centered spaces.

Historians, such as Frederick Rudolph, have argued that student rebellion
originated in dormitories because “the atmosphere . . . invited frustration, argument, and
crime.”73 The faculty frequently complained about this aspect of their occupational duties
and the records of the Faculty Minutes contain references to students causing trouble in
their residential tenements.74 However, these records often reﬂect instances of “bad”
behavior rather than reﬂections of the daily, mundane, and acceptable behavior.

The student-generated records from this period suggest that even though
professors may not have enjoyed the task of checking student tenements, it provided a
moment for professor and student to enter into brief cordiality and pleasant conversation.

In one case, a student noted in his journal that he returned to the dormitory a few minutes

 

7' Hollis, University of South Carolina, 26- 29. Green, University of South Carolina, 149. After 183 8,
Rutledge College housed lecture rooms, chemistry and physics laboratory, literary society rooms, and the
Chapel. In some years, when housing was particularly tight rooms were ﬁtted up for student residences.
72 Minutes of the Faculty of South Carolina College. March 2, 1830. December 1 1, 1830. University
Archives. South Caroliniana Library.

73 Rudolph, The American College, 97.

7’ For example, refer to: Minutes of the Faculty Meeting. March 10, 1830. May 32, 1831. April 20, 1836.
February 1 l, 1852. University Archives. South Caroliniana Library.

131

late and encountered Professor Brumby as he exited another student’s room. After
Brumby assured the student that he “had not yet been in [his] room,” they chatted for a
moment in the hallway about nothing in particular.75 Charles Hutson, South Carolina
College class of 1860, wrote to his mother that on the evening of May 12, 1857 Professor
Bamwell remained in the dormitory “very late talking over all College matters.”76 These
moments of pleasant conversation apparently did not contain content signiﬁcant enough
to record, but they did create an intimacy between students and faculty that has been
overlooked in the past.

In addition to the casual exchanges occurring daily between faculty and students
in the dormitories, these two parties also interacted at the Steward’s Hall (or
“Commons”). Until 1848, it was located on the south side of campus immediately west of
the faculty residences. Composed of two ﬂoors, the second ﬂoor was reserved for the
Steward’s family and the ﬁrst ﬂoor ﬁtted entirely for feeding the students. After 1848, the
Hall was moved to a house adjacent to the campus grounds. Both locations required
students to walk by faculty homes providing continuous opportunities for informal
contact. Meals were served promptly at 8 AM, 1 PM, and 7 PM. Professors presided over
the Commons in month-long shifts that required them to eat three meals a day with the
students. With a built environment that offered spatial proximity of dormitories, faculty
residences, and the Commons, the twice daily tenement checks, and thrice daily meals,
the College setting could not help but create an intimacy it created between its students
and faculty that encouraged informal faculty-student relationships outside of the

classroom.

 

7’ Edward Henry Kellers Diary. April 18, 1853. South Caroliniana Library.
76 Charles Woodward Hutson to his mother. May 12, 1857. Charles Woodward Hutson Papers. South
Caroliniana Library.

132

The essential nature of the exchanges evidently differed signiﬁcantly depending
on the venue. Although classroom instruction varied, most antebellum professors lectured
and expected students to record every word (and then recite it as full texts later), a
method that created a top-down, authoritative classroom environment. Outside of this
encapsulated, hierarchical instruction, professors and students engaged one another in a
more relaxed manner.

Faculty homes themselves also furnished a domain for the construction and
maintenance of friendships outside of the classroom. As these homes were often located
off campus at Columbia College, students and professors gathered together in the privacy
of their homes less frequently than those of South Carolina College. Nevertheless, New
York student Christolodoulus Evangels went to see Professor of Greek Language and
Literature Nathanial Moore in his home for the purpose of showing him his “Greek
costume” and socializing with his professor and the “three Miss Mayors,” who he was
“quite in love with.”77 Professor Joseph LeConte “organized a Shakespeare club that met
once a week at his home.” These meetings were informal, but one student reﬂected that
this club was a “high educational inﬂuence for us.”78 While employed by South Carolina
College, Lieber similarly invited students into his home. In May of 1847, he invited
James Edward Calhoun, a member of the junior class and son of John C. Calhoun, to his
house for dinner because “Mr. [Daniel] Webster will be out our house this evening and I
beg you to join the party.”79 These invitations drew students into the domestic sphere of

the professors. Throughout the antebellum period, the home—north or south—remained a

 

 

7 Christodoulus Leonidas Miltiades Evangeles. Diary. Vol. 2 (1834-1838). June 3, 1836. Manuscript
Collections. New York Historical Society.

Charles Woodward Hutson to Edwin L. Green. August 24, 1909. Reprinted 1n entirety in Green, History
0; the University of South Carolina, 395-402. Hutson was a member of the class of 1860.

Francis Lieber to James Edward Calhoun. May 1847. South Caroliniana Library.

133

private place where families and their close friends gathered together. By opening this
space up to students, faculty members simultaneously created an emotional space in
which professors and students viewed one another as “friends.” These friendships
reﬂected an important emotional experience found in northern and southern educational
experiences. These interactions within the home reveal a level of comfort and closeness
between professors and students beyond what formal instruction facilitated. Friendship
extended the learning process beyond the classroom as they began with the idea of an
intellectual exchange—from Greek artifacts (clothing), Shakespeare, or contemporary
political issues.

At faculty homes, young male students might meet with women of an appropriate
status (middle- to upper-class) with home they could socialize with under supervision.
These moments also provided opportunities for romantic relationships to evolve as
exempliﬁed by the marriage of Joseph W. Lesesne (member of South Carolina College
class of 1832) and Sarah Cooper, daughter of College president Thomas Cooper. At both
South Carolina College and Columbia College, professors invited students into their
homes and allowed them to socialize with their younger daughters or female relatives, as
can be seen with the case of Evangels mentioned above.80 In these cases students were
supervised by faculty members—upper and middle-class white male authority ﬁgures—
and engaged in a conversation of intellectual merits (Shakespeare, Greek culture) and
undoubtedly, also general pleasantries. According to historian Karen Lystra, this type of

setting—~within the privacy of a home, male and female youths gathered together under

“_—

80 Charles Woodward Hutson to Edwin L. Green. August 24, 1909. Quoted from Green, University of South
Carolina, 395-402. Hutson was a member of the class of 1860. Christodoulus Leonidas Miltiades
EVangeles. Diary. Vol. 2 (1834-1838). June 3, 1836. New York Historical Society. Green, University of
South Carolina, 35.

134

 

 

the watchful eyes of an elder—provided an arena for the development of romantic
heterosexual relationships. Across the mid- to late-nineteenth century as companionate
marriages increasingly became the standard, male youths sought female partners who
possessed knowledge and participated in intellectual conversation (albeit only in private
and without exceeding their own intellectual prowess).8| Faculty could play an important
role in presenting opportunities for romantic relationships between their students and
daughters. For example, after participating in the Shakespeare Club at Professor
LeConte’s home, Means Davis became well-acquainted with his daughter and after the
Civil War, the LeConte’s moved to California. Davis followed the LeConte family to
further pursue a relationship with Sallie LeConte, whom he married and then brought
back to South Carolina.82

Although manliness differed according to location, age, and generation, it could
operate as an impetus for drawing students and faculty together in informal, amiable
relationships. Some students, such as Christodoulus Evangels, admired and sought out
professors who emulated the Christian Gentleman. This model, according to Michael
Kimmel, “embodied love, kindness, duty, and compassion.”83 Evangels recorded in his
diary that Professor John McVickar encouraged his interest in philosophy and agreed
with his sentiment that “every true Christian” is interested in the study of this subject.”
McVickar further provided a model of the Christian Gentleman through his well-known

status as an ordained Episcopal minister and superintendent of the Society for Promoting

 

8' Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-century America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 127-128.

82 Green, University of South Carolina, 405.

83 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 16.

135

Religion and Learning which supported the creation of an informed clergy.84 At other
moments, students found that their professors offered models of overtly elite, white
manhood. Across Antebellum America, the “whiteness” of the Irish was often called into
question as they were categorized alongside of Blacks due to their poverty and
employment in dangerous jobs, such as transportation.85 In New York City on a cold
snowy day in January of 1836, a group of students engaged in a playful snowball ﬁght
while President Duer’s daughter watched them carefully from the side. A series of
snowballs hit a sleigh with three Irish in it “by mistake.” The Irishmen stopped the sleigh
in the middle of the street to “make faces” at the students and as a result “Old Jim
Renwick. . .ﬂings a ball and hits one of them on the breast.”86 The “furious paddy” leapt
from the sleigh, ran over to the professor, and punched him in the face. “With a gentle
kick” a student prostrated another “paddy” in the “muddy snow” and then proceeded to
“pepper him with some applications of his heels against his you know what!” A third
“monstrous” Irishman stood with a “most tremendous” weapon and with his “voice full
of war. . .he swung the weapon round,” but a student “unceremoniously twisted it out of
his paws.” As the ﬁght wound down the student and his comrades “stood erect like a
cock” and the paddies “gave way.”87 Together the professor and students demonstrated a
physical and symbolic mastery over the “animalistic” Irishmen conveyed through the

description of their “paws” rather than hands and looming over the “old fellows” as they

 

8’ Christodoulus Leonidas Miltiades Evangels. Diary. Vol. 2 (1834-1838). October 28, 1837. New York
Historical Society. James Grant Wilson and John F iske, eds., Appletons ’ Cyclopaedia of American
Biography (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887), Vol. 4, p. 163.

85 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class Revised
Edition (New York: Verso, 1999), 133-146.

8" Professor James Renwick taught chemistry, geology, and physics and “old” differentiated him from his
son, James, who was a member of the Columbia College Class of 1836.

’7 Christodoulus Leonidas Miltiades Evangels. Diary. Vol. 2 (1834-1838). January 14, 1836. New York
Historical Society.

136

retreated. The professor acted as a leader and instigator in this attack and offered a
physical manifestation of the notion that Irish were not white and as such, social, cultural,
political inferiors. This additionally illustrates native-born white male ownership of the
streets surrounding the campus and the clear exclusion of Irish men.

Professor Renwick’s performance with the students against the Irishmen
cemented their race and class solidarity. Students and faculty of Columbia College took
advantage of the cityscape surrounding them to further these relations. They were able to
gather together at local restaurants and hotels—the favorite among the Columbia crowd
was Delmonico’s which, in addition to being popular with the elite, upper-ten thousand
crowd. also hosted the College’s banquets. Chatham Street, located east of the College at
Park Place, contained numerous restaurants and hotels, including Nash and F uller’s.88
This local eatery provided another opportunity outside of the college for professors and
students to interact outside of the College. Strong recorded in his diary that he “went to
Fuller’s in the aﬁemoon and mentioned to Anthon that curious scene that took place in
Renwick’s room,” involving the students roughly executing a prank with small ﬁreworks.
Strong observed that “nothing gives him such delight as to hear of these matters and it
recalls to mind his school and college pranks.” 89 Strong saw himself and his classmates
in Anthon because he too was once a “college man”—and concomitantly Anthon
understood the logic and fun of being a college man. This provided a mutual sense of
sympathy and understanding that gave validity to the language of affectionate

friendliness employed at the College.

 

8’ Charles Lockwood, Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History (New York: Houghton Mifﬂin,
1976), 269.

89 George Templeton Strong Diary. 9 July 1836. New York Public Library.

137

In New York, thus, the streets provided the opportunity for the two parties to
engage in simple pleasantries, to further instruction, or to develop a better understanding
of one another. George Templeton Strong recorded in his journal that he “encountered
Prof. Renwick—asked him whether there were any lectures?” His professor responded
that “the president had directed that there should be but there was nobody to lecture ‘if I
wanted one, he said, he’d be very happy to give it to me if I walk with him.’ Told him I
believed I wouldn’t ...him today’ & took my departure.” Strong’s friendly interaction
with Renwick extended the relationship that the two developed through the time that
Strong spent in Renwick’s classroom before and after class. Their relationship included
intellectualism, joviality, and gossip about college. At one point, one of Strong’s
classmates, Osbourn, was dismissed from College for making disparaging remarks about
Columbia College in a public speech. Strong noted that he “had a talk with Renwick
about it.” 90 Evangeles, another student recorded that he “walked up and down Broadway
to Professor Anthon’s” and then, “walked with him to Wall Street.” During the course of
this walk the Professor “apologized for. . .why he did not give me the medlle [sic]?9|
Aware that the student was disappointed, the professor used this opportunity address the
student’s concern about his academic performance. On this walk, Anthon reassured his
student that he continued to have conﬁdence in his intellectual capabilities.92 Faculty and

students extended their relationships beyond the campus grounds to the city. Evaluating

student performance was an essential part of Anthon’s occupational duties, but comfort,

 

90 George Templeton Strong Diary. November 25, 1836. May 18, 1836. New York Public Library.

9' Christodoulus Leonidas Miltiades Evangeles. Diary. Vol. 2 (1834-1838). April 3, 1837. New York
Historical Society.

92 Christodoulus Leonidas Miltiades Evangeles. Diary. Vol. 2 (1834-1838). April 4, 183 7. New York
Historical Society.

138

understanding, and encouragement were additional behaviors that fostered emotional
connections between professors and students.

Limiting South Carolina College students to campus unless they received express
permission from the college president meant that most faculty-student relations occurred
within the physical boundaries of the College. When faculty and students interacted on
the streets of Columbia, the result could often be a negative experience that resulted in
disciplinary actions. James Henley Thomwell was rumored to have arraigned a student
after running into him on Main Street. The day after being reported to the President by
another faculty member, Thomwell met the student, Gibbes, in the street without
permission for absenting himself from the college. The President inquired if “he were
guilty and upon his confessing that he was, the president warned him of the serious nature
of the offence.”93 During the College session, being on the streets of Columbia identiﬁed
students as disciplinary problems and ampliﬁed any preexisting tensions between faculty
and student.

Whether on the campus in Columbia, South Carolina, or on the streets or in the
homes of professors in New York, guiding, disciplining, and protecting students, while
simultaneously exerting professorial dominion over them formed the basic paternalistic
framework for faculty-student interpersonal relationships. Outside of the classroom, and
even outside of the campus grounds, these two parties sought to create intimate, affective
bonds utilizing the language and images of friendship. The manifestations of these
relationships either through paternalistic practices or friendships ultimately contributed to

the broader institutional purpose of guiding students into an intellectual manhood. Later

9’ James Henley Thomwell. Report to the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. James Henley
Thomwell Papers. South Caroliniana Library.

139

in the century, Paul Chadboume, president of Williams College, reﬂected upon the role
faculty members prior to the advent of the research university and stated “professors are

”94 The crucial

sometimes spoken of as working for the college. They are the college.
work of education was performed by the faculty members and many signiﬁcant

manifestations of this work occurred outside of the classroom.

 

 

s4 Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College edited and with an
Introduction by Roger Geiger (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 274.

140

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

Reconsidering Town and Gown:
Gender and Student Culture in New York and Columbia

On the cold spring night of April 9, I836, twenty-three year old Helen J ewett,
well-known prostitute in New York City, was brutally murdered while she slept in her
lower Manhattan apartment at 41 Thomas Street. Before her body was discovered at 3
AM, Richard Robinson, a nineteen-year old clerk and a frequent “guest” of J ewett’s, had
shared a bottle of champagne with the young woman in her room. Although the
respectable Robinson was quickly indicted and then acquitted for the murder, the case
attracted unprecedented attention by the press and the public. Jewett and Robinson, as the
primary parties involved, highlighted the sexual tensions of the era—the fear of female
sexuality (and its natural devolution into prostitution) and the hidden life of urban male
youth. This case underscored the pressure between middle- and upper-class respectability
and the increasingly visible urban underworld of New York City located near Columbia
College.1

Although Robinson was not one of their own, the students of Columbia College
were profoundly caught up in the tensions drawn out by this case because it permitted
them to coexist in the world of respectability associated with their families and college
and the underworld that surrounded them. George Templeton Strong, a Columbia student
during Jewett affair, commented on the J ewett/Robinson affair a number of times in his

journal. On the afternoon of April 12 1836, three days after the murder, with several

¥

‘ Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-

I 920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 92-103. Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The
Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 21, l 13,
and 309-310.

141

classmates, he walked past 41 Thomas Street and commented, “Miss Helen was
possessed of ﬁrst-rate talents and was seduced under [the] promise of marriage by a
rascal in Maine. He deserves hanging as much or more than her murderer.”2 In his
evaluation and judgment of the seduction of Jewett, Strong used her murder to convey his
own understanding of gender conventions and sexual propriety. He emphasized the
indecorum of the men in this story, especially of Robinson and the man who “seduced”
J ewett and described J ewett, the prostitute, in a favorable light. The murder drew out
controversial views of prostitutes—on one hand they could be viewed as helpless victims
of male injustice or on the other hand they could be seen as desperate, degenerate women
who preyed on men. The students’ deliberate visit to the scene of the crime draws
attention to the tension surrounding issues of youth culture during this era, and places the
students and Columbia College within an emerging conversation. Region and geography
produced different student cultures, particularly manifestations, understandings and
practices of socioeconomic relations, but nevertheless both Columbia College and South
Carolina College students utilized the urban context to experiment and engage with
dominant and alternative masculine identities through interactions with other groups of
people. Town and gown relationships constituted a formative part of students’ social and
cultural education during their college years.

Region provided different social systems ﬁrmly entrenched in issues of race,
gender, and class producing a range of dominant and alternative masculinities. The
southern white elite youths of antebellum South Carolina oscillated between two

masculine models: the planter and the cavalier. The planter model drew heavily from a

 

2 Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong: Young Man in
New York, [835-1849 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1952), 16. Strong continues, throughout the three
month trial, to comment on it and in June expresses his surprise and disgust at Robinson’s acquittal.

142

cultural understanding of mastery requiring elite men to demonstrate mastery over all
others and refusal to be mastered by others. This concept was closely tied to
independence from others manifested in land and slave ownership, paternalism, and
households. Masculinity, in this case, was an internal realization of power over others.
The cavalier model was rooted in a European tradition of primal honor that valued
emotion over intellect as well as chivalry, independence, and aggression. Whereas the
planter received an internal validation of his manhood, the cavalier required his
masculinity to be validated by the public through activities like duels, lynching, or gift-
giving. The difference between these two models could additionally be understood as the
difference between self-restraint and passion. While planters and cavaliers offered two
ideals of manhood, they were informed by the same social values, including
independence and domination.3
James Corbett David has recently pointed out that “surprisingly little has been

”4

written about elite manhood in the pre-Civil War North. Scholars have not explicitly

 

3 Craig Thompson Friend and Lon'i Glover, eds. Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the
Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), viii-x. For mastery, see: Drew Gilpin Faust, James
Henry Hammond: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). Carol
Blessor, ed., Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Elizabeth F ox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black
and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). On honor, the
crucial work is Bertram Wyatt Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982). See also, Bertram Wyatt Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor,
Grace, and War, I760s-I8805 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Kenneth
Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers,
Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in
the Old South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime
and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). It is
important to note that these two models are images of what men should be or how men should act, Stephen
Berry’s work complements both of the models by pointing to the inner emotional life of southern men,
painting an emotional picture of southern men struggling with expectations placed upon them by the
patriarchal society that they controlled. Stephen W. Berry 11, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in
the Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

4 David, “The Politics of Emasculation,” 341 n6. He astutely notes that most of the literature, led by
Michael Kimmel and Anthony Rotundo, focuses on the middle class and the growing prevalence of the
self-made man ideal over the nineteenth century.

I43

 

laid out models of elite manhood for the North as they have for the antebellum South. But
work by David and David Kilbride do explore key components of elite ideologies of
manhood in both the North and South. For Knickerbocker elite and the upper ten-
thousand, masculinity included displays of money and leisure as well as oscillating views
of intellect and passion. Adult men of elite New York City also engaged with a Genteel
Patriarch model representing “a digniﬁed aristocratic manhood, committed to the British
upper-class code of honor and well-rounded character with exquisite tastes and manners
and reﬁned sensibilities.” This model required property ownership and included some
paternalistic aspects of a Christian Gentleman, such as love, kindness, duty, and
compassion.5 However, the city made it possible for men to maintain their elite status and
participate in alternative masculinities, particularly that of the sporting world. Timothy
Gilfoyle has noted that the rise of sporting culture and commercialized sex “confused
divisions based upon social class, work, and education” allowing for a ﬂuidity among
masculinities. For example, one could ﬁnd dandies and fops among the upper ten
thousand of Broadway as well as among the working Bowery b’hoys.6 Southern society
rested delicately on the ability of white elite southern men to adhere to ideals, but the
chaos of New York City produced a mobility that allowed men to move among
masculinities without repercussion.

The urban landscape offered a forum for the development of a masculine identity
to students because it afforded them an audience composed of their peers and broader

society. Columbia College’s location at Park Place on lower Broadway and situated it

 

5 David Kilbride, An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia (Columbia:

University of South Carolina Press, 2006). Kimmel, Manhood in America, 16-17.0ver the course of the
ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, this model, according to Kimmel, became increasingly less popular.
" Gilfoyle, City ofEros, 104-106.

144

within a four block radius of the infamous sex district and the only slightly more
respectable entertainment district of New York City.7 With its plethora of venues for
students to gather together, the city itself operated as the crucible for forging gendered
identities. Students challenged and reproduced genteel, bourgeois masculine ideals by
experimenting with alternative understandings of masculinity accessible throughout the
city. Similarly embedded within a city, South Carolina'College surrounded by urban vice,
entertainment, and throngs of people, but it was also strategically located near the
legislative heart of the state.8 The rigid southern gender ideals and the residential schema
of the College created an insular student culture reproducing dominant constructions of
manhood available to “future rulers” of the state.

Columbia College acknowledged the risk of educating young men in a chaotic,
dangerous urban environment. The administration, faculty, and the public debated the
merits and faults of a college in the city. One concerned citizen wrote to the faculty and
trustees arguing that the city counteracted all of the beneﬁts of higher education through
its “seductive pleasures” which “corrupt[ed] the healthful mind.” He feared that a city
college could not properly inculcate students with the reﬁned qualities of a gentleman, a
love of learning, or properly prepare students to compete in the increasingly competitive,
modern society because they could not control student access to the environment. The

city would unknowingly lead them into an immoral spiral downward to “the breach of the

Sabbath, profanity, vagrancy, riot, nuisance, &c” from which they might never return.9

 

7_See the detailed maps compiled by Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 31-33. John F. Harrison, C.E., Map of the City
of New York (New York: M. Dripps, 1851). Map Division of the National Archives, Washington DC.

3 Federal Census data. In 1830, New York City boasted a population of 202, 589 and the second largest
city, Baltimore, Maryland, held a population of 80, 620. See also: Burrows and Wallace, Gotham (1999).
Moore, Columbia and Richland County (1993).

9 A Letter to the trustees of Columbia College from A Citizen (New York: Thomas N. Stanford, 637 B-
way) 1856.

145

Some faculty recommended that the college should be moved because the city intruded
into the educational process and that its location was “a spot [of] violence done to the
ﬁtness of things.”lo They complained that the city’s cartmen frequently passed in front of
the College gate antagonizing students, that the proximity to the red-light district made a
perilous walk to the campus, and construction, trafﬁc, and that city-dwellers provided
additional distractions.ll When juxtaposed with Columbia concerns about immorality,
noise, and “others,” South Carolina College’s anxieties appear much milder. The trustees,
faculty, and city dwellers worried about students entering into the city’s taverns, eating
houses, hotels, markets, and shops—all of which overlapped with the concerns of
Columbia. However, the College accepted this as an irrefutable part of college life. In
November of 1832, the trustees agreed with the faculty that “intercourse with the town is
at all times night and day open to the students.” Although they agreed that “this is an evil
at every college beside our own” and they were resigned “to bear it,” several years later
the College paid for a six-foot wall to be built around the campus.12 Thomas Cooper
succinctly summarized faculty sentiments regarding student movement into the city in a
letter to the trustees. He asked, “how are the faculty to be answerable for the conduct of
the student in town, out of college hours?” Appealing to a sense of basic efﬁciency and
common sense, he argued that “the trustees cannot expect the professors to call, daily, at
every tavern in the town to examine whether any students are there. We have quite

enough to do, to regulate our business within the college.” In addition to the College

 

'0 F .A.P. Barnard to the Chairman of the Committee on the Site of the College. 15 Nov 1871. Columbia
College Collection. Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

M John Strong Newberry (from School of Mines at 49th Street & 4th Ave.) to F.A.P. Barnard. 10 Nov
1871. F.A.P. Barnard to the Chairman of the Committee on the Site of the College. 15 Nov 1871. Columbia
College Collection. Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

'2 Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College. November 28, 1832. University Archives.
South Caroliniana Library. Green, University of South Carolina, 159.

146

ofﬁcers, every city dweller knew of their “repeated declarations that we shall be ready to
proceed against any student for any delinquency out of college, duly made know to us by
proper testimony.” '3 The risks and dangers of urban life were similar in New York and
South Carolina, but the extent and degree of these differed immensely. Moreover, both
schools recognized the risk associated with urban life, but understood it as an
uncontrollable piece of college life—Columbia believed this problem as one belonging to
student families and South Carolina admitted there was not much that could be done to
limit student activities outside of the college. The city of Columbia provided support for
reporting students outside of the College, but this meant that the students themselves
were fairly recognizable within the city itself—standing out from all the residents as
students of the College. The sheer size of New York City (spatial and population)
provided a sense of anonymity for students as they moved among city dwellers. The city,
however, played a crucial role in the development of student culture because of its status
as a no-man’s land outside the realm of parental and professorial authority.

Many American scholars, including David Allmendinger, Leon Jackson, Helen
Horowitz, and Robert Pace have examined student cultures from a variety of vantage
points, including its origins, character, friendships, socioeconomic differences,

understandings of honor, and youthful reﬂections of British imperialism. '4 Most recently,

 

'3 Thomas Cooper to the Board of Trustees. Minutes of the Board of Trustees of South Carolina College.
November 27, 1833. University Archives. South Caroliniana Library.

M Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholar ( 1975). Steven Novak, The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and
Student Revolt, 1798-1815 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). Leon Jackson, “The Rights of
Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth-Century Harvard” in Roger Geiger, ed., The
American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000). Horowitz,
Campus Life (1987). Robert Pace, Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State Press, 2004). Paul Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 2005. For more general treatments of youth culture: John
Demos, Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and Life Course in American History (New York: Oxford

147

Lorri Glover in Southern Sons argued that higher education was explicitly linked to
attaining manhood in the early republic. Identifying higher education as youth’s testing
ground for manhood, she explained that it was here that students were inculcated with a
sense of autonomy and duty to family and nation. College afforded southern students a
unique moment to develop into men through assertions of independence and expressions
of loyalty and honor. Like other historians of student culture, Glover focused her analysis
on the violent and rebellious actions of students. This chapter moves beyond stereotypes
of misbehaving students to focus student culture as it was manifested outside of the
campus to identify additional avenues for gender role development.IS

Those historians who have addressed off-campus culture often center on the
aggressive, tumultuous behavior associated with “town and gown” activities. Town and
gown referred to the two community groups that existed in a college/university town
(citizens/townspeople and college community). This concept was often only employed in
regard to unruly student behavior that disrupted town life. The less violent interactions
between the students and their host communities have received limited attention from
scholars. This approach has been shaped by the type of primary sources frequently
used—mainly administrative and ofﬁcial college records. These documents often include
disciplinary records which, then, paint a bleak picture of students as constant
troublemakers. In New York, students moved seamlessly from one neighborhood to
another without detection, but this was not the case in Columbia. It is a common

contention among education historians that southern students were more disorderly than

 

University Press, 1986). Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present
(New York: Basic Books, 1977). Rotundo, American Manhood (1993).

'5 My analysis, thus, moves a consideration of student culture away from a focus on the cultural geography
of rebellion of those groups possessing less power, and onto considering how these college students used
their position to insert themselves into the larger masculine culture.

148

northern students. Glover stated, “Things were worse at southern universities and
colleges.”'6 This view has been overemphasized as students fashioned other methods of
interacting with city dwellers in less controversial ways—in some cases, they participated
in community-sanctioned activities or provided the impetus for bringing the town into the
college grounds.

Student culture was also more diverse and less homosocial than scholars have
previously assumed. The primary American scholar on undergraduate cultures, Helen
Horowitz, divided nineteenth-century students into two groups based on socio-economic
backgrounds: “college men” (eventually become frat boys) and “outsiders” (later this
group embraced Jews, female students, and evolved into the rebel groups of the 19605).
From the upper echelons of society, college men used adherence to independence,
loyalty, and rowdiness to signify their identity. Ideally, these values would serve to
prepare them for the competitive business world that awaited them. Outsiders, often
composed of scholarship students drawn from the lower classes, embraced a less
aggressive sense of self and adopted a more serious, even Somber, view of their collegiate
experience and later pursued careers in the ministry.17 These divisions help us to
understand how socioeconomic backgrounds shaped student culture, but student
experiences were more diverse than this. Incorporating students and the city into our
understanding of student culture reveals that these categories were permeable and
suggested that students actively. sought to interact with various gender and sexual

conventions of the period.

 

’6 Glovver, Southern Sons, 78.
‘7 Horowitz, Campus Life, 41.

149

Students believed that college was a transitional period for them; one in which
they entered as youths and left as men. They often expressed such sentiments in their
private writings and published works. Preparing for graduation, one senior composed a
poem that lauded the collection of students as youths four years earlier and lamented their
parting on the eve of manhood. For students their preparation and practice for manhood
was also validated outside of the sanctioned college duties—it was rooted in their
cultures. South Carolina student, Giles Patterson recorded in his journal that a childhood
acquaintance “would not associate” with him because he was a “little poor country boy.”
On the eve of his graduation, he encountered this individual in town and Patterson noted
how his perception of him had changed. He wrote, “How does he regard me now! And
how it will be hereafter!”'8 His association with the college and pending graduation
elevated his status and placed him on equal standing with this man who once looked
down upon him. Higher education rendered youths into men and this fact was not lost on
the students themselves.19

Classmates played an important role in the formation of masculinity. In some
cases, peers formed intense emotional bonds that helped to manipulate parents, resist
professors, and afﬁrm understandings of manliness. Collectively they afﬁrmed each
other’s status as men by recognizing their independence and assertiveness in resisting
authority and exercising independence from parents and college authorities. Lorri
Glover’s assessment of these relationships is rooted in the idea that the memory of the

American Revolution idealized the exertion of individual rights and resistance to

 

'8 Giles J. Patterson, Journal of a Southern Student, 18464848, edited by Richmond Croom Beatty
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1944), 36-37.

'9 Scholarship students were younger and older and after graduation may have experienced a level of social
mobility, but few found higher education to be a gateway to the elite ranks. See: Allmendinger, Paupers
and Scholars (1975).

150

authority and drawing from this, students rebelled on campuses and towns throughout the
country with a particular intensity in the South. While antebellum South Carolinian
students participated in a few intense rebellions on- and off-campus, such as the Biscuit
Rebellion of 1852 or the Guard House Riot of 185620, they were not in a constant state of
revolt as many scholars have suggested. Furthermore, juxtaposing the two student
cultures reveals the signiﬁcance of spaces outside of the city for the creation of gendered
student culture, including physical spaces within the city or emotional and epistolary
spaces, such as love letters, in the creation of student culture and masculine identities.
Most student activities sanctioned by the College focused on intellectual
exercises, such as literary societies and exhibitions in which students performed orations
and held debates—activities that were compatible with the college’s mission of
reproducing a class of gentleman leaders. That the residential schema gave Columbia
College faculty and administrators little power over their students outside of campus
meant that student did not need faculty permission to attend activities in the city, but
South Carolina College permitted students to attend and participate in activities in the
city only as long as it supplemented their intellectual goals. William Mclver wrote to his

father that he “paid two dollars in consideration of four lectures which were delivered by

 

2° The Biscuit Rebellion of 1842 was a struggle over the quality of meals offered in the commons. It drew
together the entire student body as they threatened to quit the College if the compulsory common eating
system was not abolished. President Thomwell refused to submit to this request and 108 students withdrew
reducing the student body brieﬂy from 199 in 1852 to 122 in 1853. See, Hollis, University of South
Carolina, 169-169. The Guard House Riot of 1856 was the “most violent student uprising of the ante-
bellum period.” A drunk student accompanied by three classmates passed in front of the Columbia guard
house (police station) and upon spotting Marshal Burdell (who had arrested one of his relatives earlier in
the year) hurled insults at him. Blows were struck and the ﬁght ended when the intoxicated student was
dragged into the guard house. His friends rushed to the college reporting the student received “rough
treatment” from the marshals. The students then assembled in front of the guard house with clubs in hand
demanding the student’s release and forced their way into the jail enduring violence by the marshals
throughout. The college president and professors ﬁnally convinced the students to return to the college.
Although later in the evening three students snuck out of campus to recommence their assault and were
defeated by a group of police. In the end, the students were dismissed and the marshals were investigated.
See, Hollis, University of South Carolina, 196-199.

151

a Greek” recommended by President Bamwell. Reﬂecting the public’s preoccupation
with all things Greek and coinciding with the classical cun'iculum of the College, the
student witnessed a “style . . . like that of the ancient orators of Greece” and praised the
speaker’s ability to draw “the circumstances of events with perfect clearness. He used the
. English language with elegance, ease, and correctness.” 2' Mclver utilized his knowledge
of ancient Greece acquired through the college and bourgeois culture to assert an
independence of thought in his evaluation and assessment of the lectures. While he left
campus to attend this series of public lectures, doing so clearly coincided with and
extended the collegiate mission to the public space of the city. Attendance at such events
additionally provided an opportunity for the students to mingle with the city dwellers in a
nonviolent manner.

On other occasions, students entered into the town to identify with masculine
leaders of the country’s past. As Glover has astutely identiﬁed a reverence for
Revolutionary heroes was a key marker of manhood among southern men who identiﬁed
with their virtue, honor, and independence.22 With the permission of the trustees and
faculty, at South Carolina College this reverence was in an annual celebration of
Washington’s Birthday. The Daily South Carolinian reported on one such celebration
praising the eloquence and quality of the students’ speeches. They also noted that “the
celebration was well attended and the Chapel graced with the presence of ladies.”23 In
addition to conveying students’ submission to this model of manhood in performing

orations, original and Washington’s “Farwell Address,” in front of a mixed audience, it

 

2' Caroline Winterer has depicted the bourgeois obsession with Greece in her book The Culture of

C lassicism. William Mclver to Father. May 14, 1836. Quoted in Matalene and Reynolds, eds., Carolina
Voices, 16.

22 Glover, Southern Sons, 11.

23 The Daily South Carolinian. February 23, 1856.

152

provided students with the opportunity to prove their place among the adult men of an
elite status. In the same year however, students also organized, hosted, and performed at a
public celebration of John C. Calhoun’s birthday. The Daily South Carolinian reported
that the students performed orations excellently reﬂecting Calhoun’s greatness—“great in
his intellect and personal purity—great in his zeal and ﬁdelity—great in the principles he
professed—great in his long unsullied career of honor and usefulness.” Thus, the paper
concluded that it was only appropriate that his birthday was commemorated at the South
Carolina College.24 These celebrations provided students with an opportunity to practice
for their future positions as the political leaders of the state through public orations with
the elite men of their state in the audience.

In addition to bringing the town into the campus for peaceful demonstrations and
afﬁrmations of masculinity, the proximity to the capital facilitated student ventures into
the city to conﬁrm their place among this group of men. In 1855, this annual
commemoration took place in the town. “The military companies in town escorted the
students” to the Presbyterian Church of Columbia and the public welcomed speeches by
the top-ranked students of the senior class.25 In early February of 1860, Lawrence Keitt,
US Congressmen from South Carolina and an alumnus of the College, was staying at the
Congaree Hotel approximately ﬁve blocks from the campus. Approaching the hotel, the
students “serenaded Keitt, who gave . . . a very ﬁne speech.” Although this speech was
“not in the least political [and] relating almost entirely to the college,” Keitt employed
“rich classical allusions” that resonated with the students’ classical training. Students

identiﬁed with the models of white manhood and demonstrated their future position

 

24 The Daily South Carolinian. March 18, I856.
25 Andrew to his Mother. February 24, 1855. Thomas John Moore Papers. South Caroliniana Library.

153

among these ranks to the public—on the street outside of the Congaree Hotel and on their
college campus.

The town also entered into the campus by targeting the students as members of an
elite class with disposable income and valuable items. One student reported to his mother
that “this is the greatest place for robbers.” The previous evening at midnight, “one broke
into the Hall lit a lamp and went all over the house trying to steal something.” This
attempt was broken up by Mr. Black, the librarian/ j anitor, but another burglar “came into
campus and stole twenty ﬁve or thirty dollars out of the pockets of the students, while
they were all asleep.”26 Such incidents illustrate some of the ﬂuidity of movement that
could take place between the two spaces of the college and city worlds. In targeting
students, the criminal(s) drew students together as the students determined to be more
vigilant and offered support to one another as in the case of Andrew who loaned his
friend $5.00 for a trip home after he was robbed.27 Offering ﬁscal support to his friend,
gave Andrew an occasion to demonstrate his ﬁnancial independence, a clear marker of
his masculinity.

In Columbia, South Carolina, the students organized and participated in a “torch
light procession” on April 12, 1847 to celebrate the American capture of San Juan de
Ulua, one of the fortresses protecting Vera Cruz during the Mexican-American War. As
the students paraded through the city at night, they were praised by city dwellers. Giles
Paterson recorded in his diary that “That they could do anything was on every citizen’s
lips, and many a feeble effort was made as we passed to raise a shout for the students.”

More meaningful to the students was that even though it was late at night, “the ladies . . .

 

2" Andrew to his Mother. February 24, 1855. Thomas John Moore Papers.
27 Andrew to his Mother. February 24, 1855. Thomas John Moore Papers. South Caroliniana Library.

154

condescended to step into the street before their door and encouraged us by the waving of
white handkerchiefs and still more by their kind countenances.”28 On this occasion of
departing campus without permission the students received shouts, cheers, and support
from men and women alike. In the coalescence of student and city sentiment, it is likely
that college youths also provided an entertaining respite from daily life. These parades
celebrating military victories frequently excluded women, blacks, and poor from active
participation. It would have drawn together yeomen, planters, and middle class men in a
deliberate effort to “reinforce their collective identity” as men.29

Columbia and its inhabitants also beneﬁted economically from congenial relations
with students. Their socioeconomic backgrounds meant that they (and their parents) had a
great deal of disposable income. Students were consumers—they purchased clothing,
books, watches, and other goods—and made a serious impact on the economic life of
Columbia. William Mclver wrote to his mother that he bought his summer clothing in
Columbia including stockings, pantaloons, and shirts. He insisted on acquiring collars
which were “very pointed and the sharp ends are intended to turn over the collar and be
work with a ribbon.”30 His awareness to the fashion and large purchase situated the

student well within the elite class, but the process of picking out and purchasing those

items that signiﬁed his status as a “man.” Although it was not unknown for elite men and

 

28 Paterson, Journal, 51.

29 Harry S. Laver, “Refuge of Manhood: Masculinity and the Militia Experience in Kentucky” in Craig
Thompson Craig and Lorri Glover, eds. Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 4-6. See also, Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds:
Y eomen Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low
Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 269.

3° Quoted in Matalene and Reynolds, eds., Carolina Voices, 30.

155

women to shop together, frequently antebellum men shopped alone and used stores as
gathering places.3 '

Student consumption, thus, altered the face of Columbia businesses while it drew
students together. They took meals in boarding houses, hotels, and restaurants and while
the owners beneﬁted, the students were drawn closer together. As one student recalled:
“Last night I went up town to an oyster supper treated by Fresh.”32 This meal symbolized
freshmen deference to upper-classmen, but also gave restaurant owners a larger number
of paying customers. Despite being consumers of goods, services, and recreation, the
impact of Columbia College students may not have been as signiﬁcant on New York
City, where business owners were reliant upon them. Moreover, the New York legislators
did not attempt to alter the city in order to curb student behaviors. New York students
were able to become part of the city itself, whereas students in South Carolina could
participate in the city spaces, but remained an identiﬁable group to onlookers.

At both institutions students wished to participate in sport on the college grounds,
although in New York these were more likely to be circumscribed by the intervention of
college ofﬁcers who believed it disrupted the order and nature of college (as well as
overtaxed the students’ bodies). Nevertheless, George Templeton Strong mentioned a
number of times that games of football and episodes of bare-knuckled boxing that took
place on the college green.33 In New York such sports provided an opportunity for young

men to compete with one another in tests of strength, virility, and endurance that

coincided with the city’s bachelor subculture. South Carolina students, on the other hand,

 

3' Ted Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, [830-1998 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). See, chapter 1 “Men Buying Cloth” and chapter 2
“Wealthy Men, Wealthy Women, and Slaves as Antebellum Consumers.”

32 Patterson, Journal, 33.

33 Nevins and Thomas, eds. The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 1: 65-69.

156

received permission from the faculty to receive instruction in fencing. And they had at
their disposal an “open air gymnasium, consisting of swings, swinging rings, bar, parallel
bars, ‘volador,’ and a ‘ﬂying jinney.”’ They also played games of ball, such as “town
ball” or “cat” on the campus green.34 In some cases, an informal College team competed
against the City ball club. “The whole city turned out” for this daylong event as the
students demonstrated their physical prowess, and established a public claim to manhood,
with a 96-66 victory.35 These games afforded opportunities for students, north and south
alike, to demonstrate physical strength, agility, endurance, and virility—the physical
components of masculinity that crossed regional and class divisions.

Outside of the college campus, billiards proved one of the most popular of
prohibited sporting activities among the Columbia College students because it was cheap
and easy to locate saloons with tables near the college. John Ward Jr., a student, made
entries into his journal such as, “Meade and I after lecture played 2 games of billiards. He
won both. At 3pm Dwight delivered the closing lecture of the course.”36 Because billiard
tables were found easily throughout the city, particularly within the entertainment & red
light district located near the college, it could be played between lectures. Billiards
provided an ample distraction from their academic duties and permitted them to take part
in what historian Melvin Adelman, calls the linchpin of a “bachelor subculture.” Most
moral reformers opposed the game for its obvious association with drinking and .

gambling and believed that it was a “breeding ground for other more serious social ills.”37

 

’4 Green, University of South Carolina, 169, 242. A ﬂyingjinny was a device in which riders were whirled
in a horizontal circle, like a merry-go-round, but the riders supply the motive power.

35 John Marion Sellers quoted in Matalene and Reynolds, Carolina Voices, 33.

36 Diary of John Ward, Jr., March 31 1858. New York Historical Society.

37 Melvin Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-1870 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1986), 223-226.

157

The game also allowed the students to rub elbows with lower classes of the city because
popular billiards was “ﬁrmly entrenched within the life-style of the working class.” 38 For
example, a series of short verses composed by the class of 1855 paid homage to Fields, “a
Celebrated billiard saloon,” located on West Broadway squarely within the red light
district: “E’en from ‘F ield’s shop are hear[d] the ‘senior’s cries.”’ A self-confessed
“dandy” speciﬁcally sought out Field’s saloon to keep company with “a lot of sporting
gents and a certain Columbia College clan.”39 The author, although not a student,
recognized that to ﬁnd his College friends he must visit this particular saloon, which was
known for its rowdy clientele. Although billiard playing formed only a small component
of student culture, it highlights student interactions with dandies and sporting men of the
bachelor subculture. Students not only successfully participated in a male subculture
different from their own, but they could temporarily and anonymously become part of it.

Billiards provided students additional opportunities to emulate and bond with men
of their own socioeconomic (wealthy, prominent) status, who according to Adelman,
frequently chose to play the game in their own home rather than in public pool halls,
which were associated with taverns and lowlifes. In another entry, Ward wrote that on a
visit to his classmate’s home, he not only played billiards with his classmate’s father, but
he also won the game. Students, in competing with men of their aspiring status, conveyed
a desire and ability to position themselves within this particular class of men by

demonstrating the admirable skills of “a steady hand, a clear head, quick perception and a

 

3" Adelman, A Sporting Time, 224-225.

39 Columbiana: A bagatelle by the students of Columbia College, Not by the faculty. 1855. New York
Historical Society. John Vose, ed., Fresh Leaves from the Diary of a Broadway Dandy (New York: Bunnell
& Price, 1852), 31.

158

pleasurable exercise of the calculation powers.” ’0 Through varying contexts of the game
the students experienced the grittier side of urban male cultures, but returned to the
respectable society of their families and college.

Paired with gambling, horse racing offered numerous opportunities for South
Carolina College students to practice variations of southern manhood such as billiards
provided in New York. The race track drew together a variety of individuals—the elites
owned the horses and made large wagers illustrating their dominate position in society,
but the lower sorts formed the bulk of the spectators as the elite men often made
arrangements for town folks to attend the races. Upon visiting a racetrack with
classmates, the disapproving Giles Patterson noted that the track was surrounded by a
gambling house, bar, and crowds of men. Inside the gambling house, he observed
“numerous modes of losing money arranged around the room to suit every man’s taste, or
so that no man could go home with any money in his pocket with an excuse.”41 This array
of gambling situated around horse racing included “chuck-a—luck” associated with poor
whites and slaves in the Antebellum South.42 Students attending this type of track event
were able to pick and choose the type of men they wanted to associate with—from lower
sorts to elder members of their own class. Gambling was a contest of risk in which two
men predicted the future and at the end, someone would be proven a liar. Some men
would be accorded respect as a man of good judgment because their predication came

true and others would be liars. At the end “each gambling contest bestowed honor or

 

’0 Diary of John Ward Jr., May 31 1858. New York Historical Society. Adelman, A Sporting Time, 225.
4’ Patterson, Journal, 48-49.

42 Jeff Forret, Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern
Countryside (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 56-57.

159

humiliation.”43 Eating houses and certain hotels also provided students with the
opportunity to associate with elite men or to emulate them. Columbia’s students often
went to Delmonico’s one of New York’s expensive, luxury restaurants and ice-cream
saloons modeled after those in Europe. Such spots were unique to New York.44 On May
17‘ 1858, John Ward Jr. recorded that he went with three of his classmates to
Delmonico’s on Chambers Street for dinner.45 Considered respectable, yet fashionable,
this restaurant and ice cream saloon hosted local politicians as well as Columbia’s
celebratory graduation dinners.46 South Carolina students, for their part, frequented the
Congaree Hotel—the same hotel that hosted Daniel Webster and Lawrence Keitt. This
hotel, owned and operated by William Maybin and later by his widow, contained two
distinct sections: an upstairs eatery and a downstairs tavern. Rather than refer to it as the
Congaree Hotel, the students referred to it by the owner’s name, “Billy Maybin’s.” The
subject of a popular song written by James Chalmers Jr., a member of the class of 1851,
the students recalled that “many a time we’ve had a spree at Billy Maybin’s.” There, they
recalled “the nightly chime” of singers “‘Uncle Ned’ and ‘Vive l’amour.”’ However, the
students exercised caution in attending this establishment for drinking. This popular song
stipulated that students should not “forget still to be moderate” and think of morning
prayers. 47 Southern men ideally were to demonstrate control over themselves, to meet

their responsibilities. The Congaree Hotel and Delmonico’s each provided students with

 

’3 Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, 138-140. This would have been very different from gambling in a dorm
room with other students as the stakes were bigger and the audience expanded from other students to adult
men of the community.

44 George Foster, New York by Gas Light and Other Urban Sketches Edited and with an introduction by
Stuart Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 9-1 1.

“5 Diary ofJohn Ward Jr. May 17, 1858. NYHS.

’6 Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner. 12 May 1864. Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

’7 Quoted in Green, University of South Carolina, 343-344. Original in South Caroliniana Library.

160

opportunities to function like and interact with men of their own class who patronized
these eateries.

Columbia College youths found additional ways to challenge bourgeois gender
conventions set for them by their families and the college, particularly by going into the
city under the guise of their “secret societies” (fraternities). In an expose published in the
Sunday Mercury, an unknown author sheds light onto the inner world of college life,
including their secret societies. The Columbia student body of approximately 140
students supported no less than seven of these societies, which were distinct from the
College-supported literary societies by their more casual and speciﬁcally social
purpose.48 The author of this article informed his readers that, “If you ask what they do
when they meet the answer is Nothing! And that is about what all secret societies do,
save the usual drinking, smoking, playing poker, etc. which all men and boys do when
they get together.” With this description, the author drew a parallel between the culture of
these societies and that of the general male youth culture of New York City. These core
activities were shared by ﬁve of the seven societies and with such commonalities, the
author differentiated them from one another according to the relationships they had with

women.

 

’8 “Columbia College Life.” Newspaper clipping from The Sunday Mercury. 1865. Columbia University
Archives and Columbiana Library. These organizations were pre-cursors to the more widespread, popular
fraternities that exploded in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It is also signiﬁcant to note that
although the author of this article remains unknown, it is clear that he either was a student or an associate of
the students due to his familiarity with the students—their names, personalities, class ranking—all items
that were not common knowledge or accessible to the public. Theses societies functioned to disrupt the
dominance of literary societies on campus and disrupted the class distinctions among students. Horowitz,
Campus Life, 36-37. According to Henry Davidson Sheldon and Brooks Mather Kelley, the social system
of fraternities and secret societies at Yale, including the “Skull and Bones” were more rigidly regulated
than any other college during this period. Literary societies, Fraternities, and secret societies all offered
members similar literary entertainments and social beneﬁts, but the secret societies were local organization
generally reserved for seniors. Columbia brieﬂy supported its own secret society, Axe and Cofﬁn, but
Henry Davidson Sheldon, The History and Pedagogy of A merican Student Societies (New York: D.
Appleton and Co., 1901), 172-176. Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1999), 224-225.

161

The Psi Upsilons, for example, were accused of admitting women to their
meetings held at the Apollo Hall. In defense of this action however, the journalist admits
that there are so many pretty girls in this area that perhaps, “notwithstanding all their
Greek and Latin, only human the Psi Upsilons seeing the ﬁre so near them, and all around
about them, have in an unguarded moment admitted crinoline into their sanctum
sanctorum.” The author associated these women not with the middle-class women of true
womanhood linked with piety and purity, but rather through the use of “ﬁre” conveys
danger, excitement, and overwhelming temptation. The students invited women to these
meetings in which they drank, smoke, and played cards—a place that would have been
without question inappropriate for the ladies of their own class who would have attended
their college exhibitions. Furthermore, these Columbia youths—as many reformers
suspected—fell prey to their own moral weaknesses and permitted women to invade their
“sacred” male space.49 The Psi Upsilons were also known for talking freely with “the
dark-eyed senoritas” of lower Broadway, but the author states clearly that he had never
“heard of their buying anything.” In suggesting that there is something to be “bought”
from these women on the evenings of society’s meetings, the author clearly accuses the
students of associating with either prostitutes or working-class women described by
Christine Stansell.50Although the students may never have purchased any services, they

consciously placed themselves within the world of New York’s sporting men. Such

 

’9 “Columbia College Life.” Newspaper clipping from The Sunday Mercury. 1865. Columbia University
Archives and Columbiana Library. More about Columbia students’ solicitation of prostitutes can be found
in Harrison Buchanan Gray, Asmodeus, or, Legends of New York being a complete expose of the mysteries,
vices and doings, as exhibited by the fashionable circles of New York (New York), 1848. New York
Historical Society.

50 As historian Christine Stansell notes in City of Women, New York City’s middle-class reformers often
conﬂated young working-class women who attracted attention—through behavior or dress—with
prostitutes. As the students’ backgrounds and education were rooted in this middle-class understanding, it
would not be surprising if the students found these associations scandalous. See especially p. 93-94 and
175.

I62

behavior places student culture outside of college, and also illustrates ways in which
some students pushed the boundaries of the genteel manhood associated with their class
and their college due in part to their privilege as upper class white men.5 I The students
socialized with a growing class of independent, although perceived morally inferior,
women without hindering their ability to return to the intellectual and moral propriety
associated with their families and College.

In comparison to the Psi Upsilons, another society, the Delta Phis, were
characterized by their encouragement of more respectable, even honorable relationships,
with women. They were “above the suspicion of female weakness and it is even said that
any member of the latter organization whoever is seen talking to a woman near the
society rooms is suspended and that if he is ever known to kiss a pretty girl in an
unscientiﬁc and unclassical manner, unworthy of his alma mater, he is expelled
forthwith, or ﬁned. . 3’52 The members of this group valued the traditional male/female
relationships exempliﬁed by the rising middle and upper-classes and looked to associate
themselves with young women who would ﬁt the prescription of “true womanhood.”
Moreover, they presented themselves as men worthy of true women.

The popularity of these Greek name societies, and their individual members,
were intimately linked to relationships—perceived as either scandalous or respectable—
with women outside of the purview of their parents and the college authorities.53 While

the societies shared a set of core activities (various degrees of drinking and gambling),

 

5 ' More on elite men exerting this privilege with working women see Stansell, City of Women, 174-175.

52 “Columbia College Life.” Newspaper clipping from The Sunday Mercury. 1865. Columbia University
Archives and Columbiana Library.

53 This article also discusses in jovial terms, the notoriety of one student who was known as a “ladies man”
and for “the reputation of kissing more pretty girls than any other man in the delta psis” which brought a
higher status to that particular society. This warrants further investigation, but minimally suggests that the
students themselves created an internal hierarchy of popularity for these societies based on what in
bourgeois society would be considered promiscuous behavior.

163

the students and the public distinguished among them according to their different
interactions women. In expanding student culture beyond campus boundaries, Columbia
College students took advantage of the urban setting to challenge notions of appropriate
behavior by interacting with men and women of different backgrounds. Their ability to
move among the lower sorts yet return to their place among the elites additionally
demonstrates the power of elite masculinity.

In addition to providing opportunities for students to explore different types of
associations with women and alternative masculine ideals, secret societies, due to their
location away from adult authority, allowed students to behave in ways ordinarily
unacceptable to their station in life. Mid-nineteenth-century New York City experienced
the emergence of a male sporting culture “at odds with middle class respectability.” This
particular facet of urban culture enabled groups of middle-class and elite male youths to
move freely between respectable society and the disreputable underworld of the city.54
While the Psi Phis considered themselves “highly” and “tremendously” moral, they were
also known for being “intensely addicted to theatricals” and it was common knowledge
that their main objective was “to attend the theatres on the sly and to have fun generally
without letting the rest of the world know it.” This society enabled its members to project
an acceptable type of manhood, a genteel Christian gentlemen, associated with the
“outsiders” described in Horowitz’s earlier work, but it allowed them to mingle within
New York’s “ﬁrst exclusive, large scale sex district” as it held its meetings at Clarke’s
restaurant and frequented Wallack’s Theater, located at the cross-streets of Broadway and

Broome. Their insignia contained a star, emblematic of controversial British actress

 

5" Helen Horowitz, ReReading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 122. Also see Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 105.

I64

Lydia Thompson, who was known for exposing the shape of her body by under-dressing
and wearing tights. She participated in one of the ﬁrst burlesque productions in New
York and was incredibly popular in spite of ﬁerce opposition from New York moral
reformers.55 Members of this student society maintained a dual identiﬁcation: they
aligned themselves with the image of the conservative, morally-conscious middle- and
upper-classes, while situating themselves within the increasingly licentious nightlife of
Broadway’s theater district. Thus, through the urban environment, the secret societies
masked students’ transgressions of bourgeois gender boundaries without formally
challenging them.

South Carolina’s students also attended dance and theater productions in the city
of Columbia. Giles Patterson recorded in his journal that “Miss Mary Ann Lee, a dancer,
has a beneﬁt tonight.” As Patterson recalled that “there was a great impatience
manifested in the Society tonight so anxious were the members to see the last exhibition
of this pretty little actress in Columbia.” Mary Ann Lee was the lead dancer of a ballet
and character dance troupe that performed a series of dances in Columbia during a tour of
the country that ended in an incredibly popular concluding series of shows in New
Orleans. Lee was one of the ﬁrst American ballerinas to capture the nation’s attention
through “romantic ballet techniques and choreography of Europe.” In spite of her
popularity, she, and other dancers such as Lydia Thompson were condemned by religious
and moral leaders, including Benjamin Palmer. In the mid-1840s, Palmer, a Presbyterian
minister in Columbia (although he later served as the ﬁrst moderator of the Presbyterian
Church of the Confederate States of America), spoke to his congregation about the

dangers of dance. It was not the physical actions of dancing that he found offensive, but

 

55 Gilfoyle, City ofEros, 128-129.

165

rather the dance as a recognized social pleasure, with all its adjuncts of large assemblies,
levity, dissipation, revelry, forgetfulness of God and duty, that the Church in every age
has leveled its census and pointed its warnings.”56 Patterson did not identify the context
of dance as immoral, but he did afﬁliate the dancers/actresses themselves with nefarious
values and morals. “All of the students,” he wrote, “have fallen dreadfully in love with
her [Lee] and another here called Mrs. Skearet.” Although both were quite beautiful,
Patterson questioned the veracity of this sentiment because their “virtue is as uncertain as
a weather cock.”57 Americans viewed ballet as exotic; audiences focused on its titillation
(exposure of shape of the body) rather than its aristocratic European roots and the
students were no different. 58

In the antebellum South, moral reformers, including those opposed to theater,
were not members of the ruling planter class, but rather professionals “closely connected
with towns and cities.”59 Most students came from planter backgrounds and their support
of theatrics differentiated them from many of the full-time city dwellers and identiﬁed
them as members of the idle, leisure elite class. The extreme popularity of this particular
troupe afforded students the luxury of participating in urban culture without garnering too
much attention or raising “general hell whenever given an opportunity to do so” as one
scholar has claimed of South Carolina students.”0

While some Columbia students, such as the Psi Phis, balanced genteel male ideals

With their experimentation in the urban male youth culture of the city, others responded

 

 

56 Palmer quoted in: Ann Louise Wagner, A dversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present (Urbana:
5lgniversity oflllinois Press, I997), 150.

Giles Paterson, Journal ofa Southern Student, 38.

Karen Elliot, Dancing Lives: Five Female Dancers from the Bullet d'A ction to Merce Cunningham
gyrbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 38.

John Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of A ntebellum Reform in Michigan and Alabama
goBaton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, I998), 41.

Moore, Columbia and Richland County, I 10.

166

to the turbulence of changing understandings of masculinity by borrowing elements of
alternative male models of behavior, such as the fop or the dandy. Emerging in the 18305,
these models of masculinity had challenged bourgeois values of self-control, chastity,
sobriety, and frugality. These effeminate “fancy men” were known for their indulgence in
“ﬂashy outﬁts,” fashionable behavior, and frequently deﬁned their manhood according to
leisure, consumption, and (hetero) sexual bravado.6| Some students rejected the foppish
nature of this masculine sub-culture as a model for themselves. For instance in 1835, a
Columbia student wrote in his journal that he intended to “raise my standard of morality
higher” and confessed that “it is a shameful thing to let the unclean thoughts of any
description dwell in my mind.” In this entry, he consciously declared his identiﬁcation
with the somber, genteel, and Christian based understanding of bourgeois masculinity
and rejected the moral laxity associated with the male subcultures of the city. After
spending the aftemoon with a classmate walking around the city, he additionally
expressed disdain for these “fancy men.” “How much vanity indeed there is among
women—but is there any less among men? I am disgusted to hear these fops little good
for nothing scamps.” In another instance, a Columbia student reafﬁrmed his
determination to “lead a pure life” after observing the licentiousness of the young men
and women in what he termed the more “fashionable” “Gates of Hell” located on Church
Street near City Hall Park.62 Such statements highlight student awareness of new
understandings of masculinity, but also that some of them explicitly rejected them after
observing or engaging in such alternative models. Other students adopted elements of the

dandy and fop models of masculinity, such as fashionable items like an eyeglass or a

 

6' Gilfoyle, City ofEros, 105.
62 Diary of Christodoulus Leonidas Miltiades Evangeles, June 23, 1835. New York Historical Society.
Journal of Edward F. Travis, June 27 1845. New York Public Library, Manuscripts Division.

167

brightly colored velvet jacket characteristic of Beau Brummel, although they rejected the
lifestyle and masculine behaviors signiﬁed by the fashion.63 By taking on pieces of
various masculine subcultures, students made conscious decisions about their own gender
identity through their observations, judgments, and eventual conﬁrmation of middle- and
upper-class standards.

Bachelors, sporting men, and the male youth of the city generally held an
unfavorable view of marriage. Contemporaries described it as the death of male sexuality
and signiﬁed the beginnings of a captive life, which contrasted with the safe haven,
stability, and respectability imagined in the model of middle-class manhood.64 Some
students may have identiﬁed with this attitude as an article stated, “J. Murray
Livingston. . .is engaged to be murdered, we mean to be married” and another student, “D.
Wood. . .is to be shortly led like a lamb to the halter—we mean alter.”65 The language in
this description — murdered — echoes the attitude that marriage signiﬁes an end to
something pleasurable, while halter suggests an involuntary constraint upon the young
man. In another instance, George Templeton Strong, upon hearing the news of his
classmate John Jay’s engagement, exclaimed “Poor devil! He looked as weak as a lamb
and perfectly resigned to his fate.”66 Strong’s description further demonstrates that the
students operated within this subculture of bachelorhood, but in noting that his ﬁ'iend
submitted to the marriage willingly straddled the line between the bachelorhood and

respectable middle-class culture. Strong himself could operate within and understand this

 

(’3 Nevins and Thomas, Diary of George Templeton Strong, 2: 62-66. Diary of Christodoulus Evangeles
May 17 1835. New York Historical Society. Journal of Edward F. Travis, May I 1846. New York Public
Library, Manuscripts Division.

6“ Gilfoyle, City ofEros, IDS-106.

65 Sunday Mercury, May 4, 1865.

66 Nevins and Thomas, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, l:l2, n. 3.

I68

element of youthful urban manhood, but he rejected it in many of his own personal
choices, including his own attitudes toward marriage and prostitution. Such examples
reveal a ﬂuid image of student culture that moved between two worlds: the respectability
of their middle- and upper-class families and Columbia itself and the scandalous urban
male culture with which they interacted.67

Columbia students had the freedom to experiment with a range of alternative
masculinities that included varying attitudes toward and interactions with women of their
own status and outsiders, was not possible for South Carolina students. Southern society
rested on their masculine mastery and dominance over all others. Nevertheless, women
played an important part in the development of their culture. South Carolina College
students attended a party in “Waverly hosted by Mary Preston Darby,” who married
Confederate surgeon John T. Darby. Located immediately outside the city limits,
Waverly was a large property owned by Robert Latta who began dividing it up into
blocks like those of the city.”8 That these students were welcomed at a party hosted by an
older married woman suggests that the group of elites situated near Columbia embraced
their younger counterparts. Students also paired off with young women of their age and
class through the Zimmerman Female Institute in Columbia, a female equivalent to the
South Carolina College. This female residential college, like others scattered throughout
the region, was a “marker of gentility . . . that inculcate[d] the demeanor of a lady.”69 The

female students invited the young men to attend a May party in 1855. One student in

 

67 It is also worthwhile to consider that perhaps the students recognized the end of this liminal state which
permitted the freedom of gender exploration.

6’ Robert M. Kennedy to Fitz Hugh McMaster. February 10, 1938. Robert M. Kennedy Papers. South
Caroliniana Library. Moore, Columbia, 278. Mary Boykin Chestnut frequently discusses John and Mary
Darby in her A Diary from Dixie.

69 Christie Anne Famham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student
Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 92-93.

169

attendance wrote that the young ladies of the Mrs. Zimmerman’s School requested “the
assistance of some of the boys or young men in ﬁxing their school room for the party.”
Arriving at the school early in the day, the college men spent “two hours in obeying the
directions of the ‘Queen of May.”’ She directed Chesley Herbert to “wreathe a hoop with
ﬂowers,” which he “did my best . . . being the ﬁrst I had ever made or seen.” In addition
to helping with the decorations, the boys and their classmates were invited back to the
party that evening, although Chesley Herbert reassured his ﬁance that “I could not enjoy
myself at the party because you were not there. It was a dancing party.” Educational
institutions helped male and female youths identify one another as members of the same
socioeconomic background, but it also provided an opportunity for male students the
opportunity to gather outside of the campus. Two male students took a walk in the
country one Saturday afternoon following recitation and describing this to his
correspondent, one rhetorically asked “you can’t guess where we went, think again
perhaps you may, you know that where the magnet is there will be the needle point” and
the attraction was “young ladies.” 70 From organized parties to a stroll in the country,
women played a prominent role in drawing student culture off of the South Carolina
College campus.

Negative attitudes towards marriage in South Carolina did not necessarily reﬂect
a bachelor subculture, but rather conveyed a sense of immaturity and a state of being ill-
prepared for adulthood. Stephen Berry argues that even though southern men saw

marriage as a critical juncture in the attainment of manhood, requiring an emotional

 

7° Chesley Herbert to Lizzie. March 26, I855. Chesley Worthington Herbert Papers. South Caroliniana
Library. On other occasions, Herbert recalled that they visited the girls at the female institute in
Barhamville on the northeast side of Columbia. See: Chesley Herbert to Lizzie. February 26, 1855. N. C.
Whetstone to his Mother, Margaret Boatwright. February 17, I855. Whetstone Family Papers. South
Caroliniana Library. Moore, Columbia, 278.

170

submission to their future wives, taking on dependents with marriage and opening oneself
up emotionally signiﬁed a young man’s independence and fulﬁllment of manhood. But
some students believed that the college years offered an opportunity to gain experience
with women.7l Writing to his friend attending South Carolina College, John O. Rigby
declared “you could not do a better thing than to visit the ladies.” College, in his opinion,
was “the very place to learn the manners of young ladies.” Attempting to give his friend
some conﬁdence and galvanize his efforts, Rigby wrote: “You need not to be ashamed of
them for fear of being a little green; for you do not expect to marry them.”72 The young
men viewed college as the place to cultivate facility and ﬁnesse in relationships with
women. The public also acknowledged this facet of the college student experience as the
South Carolina Temperance Advocate and Register of A griculture and General
Literature reported that one student “has found the ladies ‘too many’ for him this year.”
One of these women, known as Rebecca, made it known to the reporter that “some young
gentleman of the S. C. College. . . has unconsciously to himself, been playing sad havoc
with her affections?” The paper recognized the student’s interest in several ladies, but
did not approve of the emotional distress that this caused to the women involved.
Regardless of approval or disapproval, it was understood that college students used the
period as an opportunity to pursue relationships with the ladies of the city.

Although some students viewed college as an opportunity for experimenting with
non-serious relations with women, others viewed this period as the key to making

themselves worthy of a meaningful relationship with a woman of their same

 

7' Berry, All That Makes a Man, 88-91.

72 Quoted in Matalene and Reynolds, eds., Carolina Voices, 18-19.

73 South Carolina Temperance Advocate and Register of A griculture and General Literature. March 7,
1844.

171

socioeconomic positioning. While contemplating his future plans with his friend Nathan
Whetstone, a student at South Carolina College, Hiram Gareth reﬂected that “In as much
as I contemplate going to school some time yet therefore that is the cause of my not
falling in love with some nice little Miss as you very well know that I am unprepared for
the various occupations of life.” Lack of schooling, he explained, prevented him from
“enjoy[ing] myself among the ladies.” He argued that cultivation of the mind was critical
to developing a sense of ease and conﬁdence around women. From this vantage point he
presumed “if I was as fare [sic] advanced in an education as yourself, I would think very
strong of the fair sex.”74
Given the preoccupation with establishing heterosexual romantic relationships as
part of conforming to social roles, much of the student culture at South Carolina College
involved pursuing relations with women outside and inside of the college grounds.
Within the campus, daughters of professors served as likely targets of student affections.
Spending the evening writing to his sweetheart, Chesley Herbert informed her that “I
have been listening to a serenade given by some of the students, to the daughters of one
of our professors.” This was not a tin-pan serenade such as that performed for
Congressman Keitt, but it was a carefully planned and administered composition
involving “the harmonious notes of the guitar, the sweet and soft melody of the ﬂute, the
lively strain of the violin. All accompanied by excellent voices, which all in all made

beautiful music.”75 Another student reminisced with an early historian of the College that

 

7" Hiram Gareth to “dear ﬁ'iend.” May 15, 1852. Whetstone Family Papers. South Caroliniana Library.
7’ Chesley Herbert to Lizzie. April 30, I855. Chesley Worthington Herbert Papers. South Caroliniana
Library.

172

“We visited the girls on the campus and in town, but had no ‘dates.’” 76 Perhaps, these
students did not engage in isolated couple dating in a modern sense, but they certainly
imagined group outings as potential for engaging with women on a one-on—one level.
While at a private party, “Miss H.” impressed student, William Mclver with her “features
[that] glow with the light of the soul which the skills of the pencil cannot portray.”
Describing the evening, he noted that “she plays admirably well the guitar and
pianoforte” and he “accompanied her by the singing the second.”77 On- and off-campus,
interactions with the opposite sex reminded students of their socially-ordered destiny:
marriage, as old unmarried bachelors were looked down on as “mere fragments of
humanity” or an “unfortunate class.”78 While these moments also reminded students of
their role as men pursuing romantic interests, they also drew students together in
homosocial groups.

While some students ascribed to the part of the bachelor subculture associated
with marital attitudes, some not only wanted to marry but also looked forward to this next
chapter in their lives. One such student devoted much of his detailed, four-year journal to
recording his search for love and the perfect wife. He stated, “I must-I will marry. I wish
I was right now” and later stated “I want a wife in whose arms I may rest my head.”79 He
envisioned his future wife as his helpmeet in his all of his future endeavors, particularly
in his desire to perform missionary work. Regardless of the students’ view of marriage,

the fact that they engaged the subject reveals that they not only considered, but were also

 

76 Robert M. Kennedy to Fitz Hugh McMaster. February 10, 1938. Robert M. Kennedy Papers. South
Caroliniana Library.

77 Quoted in Matalene and Reynolds, eds., Carolina Voices, 18.

78 Berry, All That Makes a Man, 88.

79 Diary of Ch. Evangeles, 2 July I835 and 18 Oct 1835. New York Historical Society. I think it would also
be fruitful to consider that perhaps the young men in the 18305 responded to the increasing proliferation of
prescriptive literature calling for “true women” among the middle class. It certainly appears that Evangeles
also embraces this vision of womanhood.

173

consciously invested in, the process of exploring competing gender models and weighing
the various masculine identities in front of them. Likewise, some southern students
embraced a similar positive posture towards romantic love and marriage. Writing to his
“afﬁanced love,” Charles McClengahan conﬁded in her that “When I am not missing
you, I am studying for you. Not studying, living for you.”80 On another occasion, he
reassured her that “You are my all—and the all I desire. I am happy with you and am
grieved in your sorrow.”8| Subscribing all that he did—essentially “living”—to Mary and
inextricably tying his success and happiness to her, Charles practiced manhood by
surrendering himself emotionally to her. Even though the creation of this emotional space
occurred individually and outside of the immediate college world (away from other
students and in the privacy of correspondence), emotional preparation for the marriage
and manhood crossed regional boundaries and formed an important part of some college
students lives.

The urban environment of Columbia College provided ample opportunities for
students to participate in alternative forms of masculinity, from the rough and tumble
crowd of billiard-saloons to the promenade of fashionable fops and dandies on
Broadway. Just as the city permitted a growing faction of middle-class youth to take part
in a new breed of sexualized popular culture (in the streets, theaters, saloons, etc.), it also
created a venue for students to participate in working-class male culture and interact with
young working women, but with the ability to return to the safety, stability, and
respectability of their families and College. In using the city as part of their student

culture, Columbia’s youth interacted and experimented with various models of manhood.

 

8° Charles McClengahan to Mary. February 24, 1855. John Charles McClengahan Papers. South
Caroliniana Library.
8' Charles to Mary. October 1, l855. John Charles McClengahan Papers. South Caroliniana Library.

174

For these students, the college experience provided the option of transforming
themselves, rather than simply reproducing the gentlemanly ideal prescribed by
bourgeois families and college authorities.

In contrast to Columbia College students, South Carolina College students used
the city of Columbia to conﬁrm their status as the future rulers of the state. Students used
the urban landscape to afﬁliate with “others” through parades, gambling houses, horse
tracks, parties, and theaters. But unlike New York students who used these moments for
experimentation, South Carolina students conﬁrmed their identity as members of the
masculine members of the ruling class. Southern society hinged precariously on
conformity to the status quo and elite white men were crux of this society. As a result,
southern students were left with little room for experimenting with alternatives.

The ﬂuidity of movement that existed between colleges and adjacent cityscapes
highlights the role that the urban context played in the cultural landscape of deﬁning
one’s role in antebellum society. “Town and gown” need not be considered a pejorative
term. The similarities in student behaviors, such as drinking, attending the theater, and
eating at hotels, expose how, despite the two different contexts, the city provided the
youths with an opportunity to participate in different masculine worlds and to establish
their place therein. Columbia College students demonstrated a higher level of autonomy
than their South Carolina counterparts due to the residential schema and expansive nature
of New York. This also provided them with a greater sense of gender plasticity as they
experimented more with alternative masculinities and tried to blend in among other
members of the social order. South Carolina students adhered to dominant gender ideals

as an effort to prove that they were worthy of their position as the leaders of the state, but

175

in this context, they had little room for experimenting with alternatives. Although the
substance of masculinity and urban culture differed between New York City and
Columbia, both illustrate that town and gown relations provided a forum for students to
practice dominant and alternative masculine ideals. Student cultures were inherently
gendered and shaped by their local settings, but intimate friendships among faculty and
intellectuals outside of the college grounds were far less dependent upon their local

contexts.

176

 

CHAPTER FIVE

 

“The Economy of Friendship:” Gender, Intellectualism, and Francis Lieber

Six years into their friendship, the German émigré scholar, Francis Lieber
described Charles Sumner as “full of noble enthusiasm, true to the inmost ﬁbre of his
heart, without guile, ardent, very much ardent in the pursuit of knowledge for
knowledge’s sake.” If Sumner displayed “slightly uncouth manners” and “untrained
gestures,” these ﬂaws were trivial given his stature as “essentially a r_n_ar_r, a true man,”
who had “ever shown a warm devotion” to his conﬁdantes.l These short passages
identiﬁed the key components of friendship not only among this particular group of
scholars, but also within a larger transatlantic pattern of ideas. What Lieber termed the
“economy of friendship” depended on a pure desire for intellectual pursuits and a mutual
appreciation of devout emotional ties. But, it was conditioned just as fundamentally by
gendered understandings of what it was to be “essentially a man.” Lieber’s friendships
with men and women illustrate that the relationships formed around an intellectual core,
but the extent and intensity of these relationship depended upon shared understandings of
“manliness” between himself and his correspondents.

Lieber navigated the Antebellum South’s emotional terrain through the creation of
intimate relationships with American men and women rooted in European understandings
of friendship. Letter-writing among these friends provided a vital means for intellectual
interchange. Gender shaped the structure of intellectual exchange and the boundaries of

friendship in these single- and mixed-sex friendships. These external intellectual

 

' Francis Lieber to Fanny (Appleton) Longfellow, July 20, 1840. Francis Lieber Collection. Henry E.
Huntington Library. Emphasis in original. All letters in this chapter are from the Lieber Collection at the
Huntington Library unless otherwise noted.

177

friendships were not equivalent to the collegiate intellectual community and provided an
indispensable arena for the articulating and developing ideas. Comparing Lieber’s single-
sex and mixed-sex friendships reveals the signiﬁcance of intellectual discourse in the
construction of intimate, meaningful friendships. The dual focus in this chapter on
intellectualism and gender merges two recent trends in friendship studies.

In early friendship studies, scholars neglected men’s affective relationships due to
pervasive perception of women as emotional beings relegated to the private sphere. In
resurrecting the emotional side of men, early scholars of male friendships built from
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s description of “rituals” in intimate nineteenth-century female
relationships. She described key moments in the intimate relationships among women,
including letter writing, nicknames, and visiting.2 Anthony Rotundo and Anya Jabour
echoed her work in highlighting similar rituals of youth and adult male ﬁ'iendships.
However, like Smith-Rosenberg, these authors embraced a rigid perception of separate
spheres that suggested American male friendships posed a serious threat to ideal
Victorian heterosexual relationships and marriages.3 Other American scholars, such as
Julie Ellison, Lorri Glover, and Stephen W. Berry, argued that men’s friendships
developed from a complex of kinship, political, and professional networks. In this view,
friendships themselves were not the primary objective in relationships, but either the

consequence of kinship or cultivated as an avenue for meeting professional and/or

 

2 Carroll Smith—Rosenberg. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in
Nineteenth-Century America” Signs v.1 n.I (I975): l-29.

3 Anthony Rotundo. “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United
States, 1800-1900” Journal of Social History v. 23 n. 1 (I989): 1-25. Anya Jabour, “Male Friendship and
Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and His Friends” Journal of the Early Republic v.
20 n. l (2000): 83-111. See also Frederick Blue’s treatment of Henry Longfellow and Charles Sumner’s
friendship which he argues was an anomaly in the increasingly competitive public world of men.

178

political goals.4 Lieber and his friends sought friendships ﬁrst and foremost. These
occasionally produced occupational opportunities. Addressing American friendships,
Berry, Glover, and Karen V. Hansen, have argued that most mixed-sex friendships
occurred among siblings because separate spheres ideology did not “disassociate” them
from one another as it did with unrelated members of the opposite sex.5 Lieber fostered
meaningful, emotional relationships with Dorothea Dix and Fanny Longfellow, but
gendered intellectualism prevented them from replicating the emotional intimacy found
in his single-sex friendships. German historians Anne-Charlott Trepp and Stefan-Ludwig
Hoffman described eighteenth- and nineteenth-century masculine afﬁliation as
ideologically compatible with heterosexual relationships and supplementary to male
public identity. Lieber’s relationships with American men and women similarly
demonstrate that intimacy in friendship harmoniously complemented a happy, successful
marriage.

More recently, Ivy Schweitzer located the classical, early Christian, and early
modern roots of American friendship in her monograph, Perfecting Friendship. She
emphasized ﬁ'iendship as a rational, voluntary choice that crossed race and class
boundaries and linked public political culture to the private realm.6 Schweitzer set out to
disengage ﬁ'iendships from “privacy, emotion, and derogated femininity.” Lieber and his
friends provide ﬁrrther evidence that friendships were simultaneously emotional, rational,

and masculine. They also highlight the difﬁculties of forming intimate mixed-sex

 

4 Julie Ellison, Cato ’s Tears and the Making of A nglo-A merican Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, I999). Stephen W. Berry II. All that Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, eds. Southern Manhood.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.

5 Karen V. Hansen. “‘Our Eyes Behold Each Other’: Masculinity and Intimate Friendship in Antebellum
New England” in Peter Nardi, ed. Men ’s Friendships (Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, 1992), 35-58.

6 Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship, 9-16.

179

friendships. The intellectual discourse that characterized his friendships contributed to
Lieber’s sense of personal and professional identity. The boundaries placed on
intellectual exchange within friendships reveal the gendered limitations of friendship.
Through a rich epistolary world, emotional and private relationships permitted Lieber’s
intellectual identity to ﬂourish in an imagined “literary Sahara.”7 Lieber’s friendships
with Americans conﬁrm scholars’ reevaluation of separate spheres ideology and draw
attention to the importance of creating and maintaining friendships.

Lieber’s friendships allowed him to escape the “ﬂat” emotional terrain of the
Antebellum South through the development of a rich intellectual epistolary life.8
Although he continued to pursue alternative positions in the North, Lieber arrived in
Columbia, South Carolina hopeful and open to making new friends. He initially described
South Carolinians as “ﬁne, open hearted” and reported to his northern friends that a few
had “made a most excellent impression.” He also approved of John C. Calhoun because
he “could freely speak, although we differed on so many points” and became well-
acquainted with Unionist James Louis Petigru and Senator William Campbell Preston.
The realities of southern society soon revealed to him that male-male friendships
contained “a standofﬁshness, an unwillingness to appear weak, vulnerable, or
emotionally needy.” White southern masculinity, as evidenced by historian Stephen
Berry, idealized love, but this was bounded by an emphasis on heterosexual love. Lofty
masculine ideals characterized in images of planters and cavaliers left little room for
intimate male-male friendships. Desiring of emotional fulﬁllment outside of marriage and

family projected an image of male dependency that conﬂicted with the masculine ideals.

 

7 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, January I, 1836.
3 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber, August 24, I841.

180

White southern men deﬁned their self-worth by their dependents, such as slaves and
family members; they themselves were not dependents.9

The emotional landscape of the Antebellum South left Lieber with little hope of
fulﬁlling German ideals of friendship.’0 Three models of love relationships informed late
eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Germans’ sense of self as “total human
being[s].” First, the Enlightenment ideal dictated a desire for intellectual companionship
and equal estimation of male and female relationships.ll Second, seelenge meinschalf
(soul union) was developed through Empﬁndsankeit or Sentimentatlitc‘it (sentimentality).
For men, this was a particular moment in their lives characterized by individualized drive
for self-improvement through sociability, feeling, and “conscious conviviality.” Unlike
American friendships, these two models of friendship complemented the last, the
romantic love model and its embodiment in marriage. This expressed empathy,
sensuality, and passion, but more importantly it united two individuals’ emotional and
physical essence. It permitted love to emerge as a primary reason for marriage. These

models allowed German men to fashion a complete sense of identity that “encompassed

 

9 Stephen W. Berry. All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 39. See also Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (I996).

'0 Over the course of the antebellum period, the South Carolina College faculty was increasingly drawn
from the state or neighboring southern states, such as the LeConte brothers were ﬁom Georgia. This
created a sense of divisiveness among them. In addition to Lieber, William Ellet was from New York,
Charles McCay was from Pennsylvania, and Thomas Park was from Massachusetts. Ellet and Lieber
remained at the College the longest and one of their colleagues wrote that some of the faculty were “cold,
heartless and calculating. Less amiable than our Carolina members....” Some of the southern faculty
members, such as James Henley Thomwell and Matthew Williams, formed long friendships rooted in
shared appreciation for Christian values, political postures, and academic posts, but these lacked the
emotional vitality and vulnerability that Lieber required out of his friends. South Carolina College
professors also had to cope with squabbles rooted in the residential schema—arguments over housing and
space for their families may have produced tension among them. Essentially, the southern faculty members
were friends with one another, but their relationships did not display the same affectionate intimacy found
in Lieber’s transregional friendships. See: Josiah Evans to James Henley Thomwell. November 9, I837.
James Henley Thomwell to Matthew Williams. August 26, 1850. James Henley Thomwell Papers. South
Caroliniana Library. Francis Lieber to Robert Woodward Bamwell. c. 183 8. Francis Lieber Papers. South
Caroliniana Library.

” Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, “Civility, Male Friendship, and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century
Germany” Gender and History, vol. 13 n. 2 (August 2001): 224-248.

181

the private sphere no less than the professional.”12 Lieber formed friendships with
American men and women who valued intellectual pursuits. These relationships also
required an honest intellectual discourse which would provide the basis for intimacy and
self-improvement.

In addition to providing a domestic sanctuary for Lieber, his “dearest wife
Matilda” provided him with intellectual and emotional companionship. Writing to her in-
laws, she described an average day in which she spent the afternoon working with her
husband. She reported that she “assist[ed] Frank in translating and copying.”'3 Frank and
Matilda both viewed their marriage as the fulﬁllment of the idealized romantic,
companionate marriage. In an assessment of their condition in South Carolina, he wrote
that “no ﬁbre of our soul is connected with the life there.”'4 Lieber identiﬁed their shared
soul and cited the discontinuity that they felt in living in the American South. Matilda
supported his work even though it meant that they had to live in the South where her life
was “so void of interests.”'5 She encouraged him to spend summers with his northern
friends, writing to him “every day I rejoice more and more that you went to the North.”
Despite being unhappy with their living conditions, Matilda and Frank found joy in their
marriage and family.

Although he found satisfaction with his domestic life, German bourgeois identity

also called Lieber to engage in a rich emotional life outside of marriage. Enlightenment

 

’2 Anne-Charlott Trepp, “The Private Lives of Men in Eighteenth-Century Central Europe” ’entral
European History, v.27 n. 2 (I994): 128—135.

'3 Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber, September 28, 1842. Matilda Lieber to Dr. Lieber’s Parents, October
I7, I838. Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, July 9, I849.

'4 Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber, September I I, I846. Matilda and Francis frequently spent their
summers apart and the letters exchanged during these absences frequently contained emotional expressions
such as this from Matilda to “her Frank”: I miss my husband, the being on whom depended all my
happiness, whom I love with all my might and all my soul.” Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber, July 25,
I840.

'5 Matilda Lieber to Francis Lieber, July 27, l838.

I82

ideals and Empﬁndsankeit provided him with the tools to construct intimate relationships
with Northern men and women. These European models held friendship and love as the
key to higher intellectual development and self-improvement, while the southern model
dictated emotional independence except in cases of heterosexual romantic love and
marriage.

Straddling these two antithetical understandings of male emotional life, his wife,
Matilda, conveyed suspicions of his unhappiness years before he was able to coherently
articulate it to others. She keenly observed that it was only in the North that he had
“friends who can understand and value him.” She also wished for belonging in an
“intellectual world” not for her sake, but for “those dearer to me than my happiness and
peace.”'6 Matilda clearly identiﬁed the key component of Lieber’s ﬁiendships as honest,
free intellectual discourse. His ability to do so in the South was not only limited by
southern dictates of male emotionality, but also by the xenophobia of South
Carolinians.l7 The state’s steadily increasing sectional anxiety regarding slavery and
abolitionism produced an atmosphere that suppressed dissent and further complicated
Lieber’s desire for meaningful relationships outside of his marriage.18 William Campbell
Preston warned Lieber of this danger stating that “if the abolitionists go on at this

rate. . . [he] will not be at liberty. . .to speak his mind.”'9 This environment of political and

 

'6 Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix, February 6, 185 I. Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner, October 27, 1835.
Matilda Lieber to Fanny (Appleton) Longfellow, October 28, 1842. Making this comment about Calhoun
aﬁer his death, Lieber felt it was a “strange” feeling of attachment.

’7 Michael O’Brien. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press (2004), 1:88. O’Brien identiﬁed Robert W. Gibbs, alumnus and
Trustee of South Carolina College, as the most vocal member of the movement to purge South Carolina
College of “foreign inﬂuence.” Moreover, Lieber wrote to Samuel Ruggles in 1842 that upon entering his
classroom one morning he found “why should a German draw South Carolina salary in Columbia” upon his
chalkboard. Cited in Friedel, Francis Lieber, 231.

'3 Edgar. South Carolina, 344-346.

’9 Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner. October 27, 1835. Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

183

social conformity contributed to Lieber’s inability to create a satisfying emotional life in
South Carolina due to the emphasis he placed on honesty among friends. As the political
landscape became more stultifying, his mood shifted over the years from feeling simply
“not in my element” to describing Columbia as his “tarring” and “false place.” 20 His
feelings intensiﬁed after the secession crisis in the wake of the Compromise of 1850.
Siding with the losing unionists, he described South Carolina as “dreadfully poor in men”
and found his loneliness only intensiﬁed. Lieber speculated that if he could only draft
“something slightly in favor of secession or against the union” he would be revered as a
great “man of the people” in South Carolina. The heightened pressure to conform to
southern political, social, and cultural life pushed Lieber to pursue more satisfying,
emotional, friendships through a vast complex of letters. His most intimate ﬁiendships
were with two men, George Stillman Hillard and Charles Sumner, and two women,
Dorothea Dix and Fanny Longfellow. This correspondence spanned nearly forty years
and over one thousand letters.”

Born in Berlin on March 18, 1798 to a middle-class family that endured economic
duress during the Napoleonic Wars, Lieber’s expectations of relationships with American
men and women were shaped by German understandings of sociability and friendships.22

Prior to arriving in the United States in 1827, he fought against the French in the War of

 

20 Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner. June I l, 1840. Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix. February I 1, 1851 and
January 12, 1851. Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

2‘ Except for the letter written by Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, all are contained in the Francis Lieber
Collection at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, Ca. The original Sumner letters are located
in the Houghton Library at Harvard University and are available on microﬁlm. Taking cues ﬁ'om William
Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling, l processed this mass of letters with a series of questions about
emotional communities. When were affective statements acceptable and to whom? What circumstances
elicited emotive statements? In spite of geographical distances, what gave these relationships 3 sense of
intimacy and love?

22 James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds. Appleton ’s C yclopaedia of American Biography. New York: D.
Appleton and Company (1887), 709-71 1.

184

Liberation, studied under “Turnvater” Jahn, and developed strong nationalistic sentiments
that produced a student group critical of the Prussian government. He was arrested and
imprisoned for sedition, fought the Turks in Greece, and lived in Rome where he studied
with Barthold George Niebuhr. Never truly escaping the suspicion of the Prussian police,
Lieber set out to make a new life for himself in America. Upon his arrival, he struggled to
make a living. He ran a gymnasium, wrote for German newspapers, gave lectures,
translated texts, promoted prison reform, and composed various articles and essays for
publication. However, on the eve of his marriage to Matilda Oppenheimer in 1829, he
recognized that “a man who wishes to marry must ﬁnd permanent occupation.”23
Although he had found some success editing the Encyclopaedia Americana (1829-1833),
a collection of entries on politics, arts, sciences, history, and biographies based on the
extensive German C onversations-Lexikon, Lieber felt pressured to support his new wife
and a growing family. Shortly thereafter, South Carolina College provided him with the
economic security he desired in the form of a professorship of history and political
economy. Before taking up this new post, Lieber initiated friendships with Charles
Sumner, George Stillman Hillard, Dorothea Dix, and Fanny Longfellow that provided
him with an emotional sanctuary throughout his tenure.

In 1834, Lieber visited the Congressional Library in Washington DC. and
became acquainted with Richard Peters a Supreme Court Reporter who encouraged him
to compose a report for Congress requesting a larger appropriation for the paltry library.
While nothing came of Lieber’s petition, Peters provided a letter of introduction to

Charles Sumner who became his life-long friend and conﬁdante. Sumner, a prote’gé of

 

2’ Frank F riedel. Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal. Baton Rogue: Louisiana State Press (1947),
12-22, 25, 29, 36-37, 41-43, and 47.

185

Judge Joseph Story, with whom Lieber was also acquainted, had recently graduated from
Harvard Law School and admitted to the Massachusetts bar.24 He was already an admirer
of Lieber’s as he had received, at the age of nineteen, a copy of his Encyclopcedia
Americana as prize for an essay written as an undergraduate. A serious-minded young
man with a reputation for academic achievement and desire to learn as much as possible,
he was known as “unsophisticated” and uncomfortable in moments of humor and light-
heartedness. After their meeting in Washington, Sumner returned to Boston and entered
into a law practice with George Stillman Hillard (also a former student of Judge Story),
but he preferred writing professional essays rather to his legal practice and spent time
ﬁlling in for Story at Harvard Law School teaching courses on Law of Evidence and Law
of Nations.25 He soon embarked on a three-year trip to Europe and inspired by the
opportunity to learn as much as possible, Lieber, thirteen years his senior, provided him
with a number of letters of introduction and offered advice about traveling in Europe.
Through the 18405, Lieber and Sumner continued to exchange letters regularly discussing
politics, books, travels, friends, and, of course, Lieber’s publications. As sectional
differences intensiﬁed in the early l8508, Sumner was elected a United States Senator
whose abolitionist zeal marked his political identity. Their friendship became
increasingly strained as Lieber continued to live in South Carolina. Sumner believed that
Lieber was an apologist for slavery and Lieber believed that Sumner was unsympathetic
to the economic necessity that caused him to live there. Breaking off all communications

in 1853, this breach in their ﬁ'iendship lasted until 1861 when Lieber humbly requested

 

2’ Friedel, Francis Lieber, 109-110. This friendship is recorded in over 750 letters from Lieber to Sumner
alone and is housed in the Francis Lieber Papers at the Henry E. Huntington Library.
2’ David Herbert Donald. Charles Sumner. New York: Da Capo Press ( l 996), 30-35.

186

Senator Sumner’s help for his son during the Civil War. As a result, they resumed their
relationship and remained close until Lieber’s death in 1872.26

Lieber most likely met George Stillman Hillard through Sumner.27 Hillard and
Sumner were partners in a less than successful legal practice in Boston, but they had met
as undergraduates at Harvard in 1827.28 After graduating Harvard Law School (class of
1832), Hillard continued his law studies and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in
1833. Hillard and Sumner were key members in the “Five of Clubs,” an informal social
group that also included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Cornelius C. Felton, and Henry
R. Cleveland. They met every Saturday for dinner and long conversations about
literature, politics, and society. While none of them were recognized as having wealth or
family connections, their intellectual and literary talents provided a gateway to the
highest ranks of Boston society.29 Hillard served as a state Senator, City Solicitor, and
US. District Attorney, but his desire to serve the government paled in comparison to
Sumner’s. In addition to their legal practice, he also entered into a number of literary
endeavors, such as editing the Unitarian paper, The Christian Register (1833),
collaborating with Sumner on The Jurist, giving lectures to the Lowell Institute, and
purchasing interest in the Boston Courier.30 Lieber and Hillard gravitated toward each
other during Sumner’s prolonged European tour in 1837-1838.31 From this point forward

the two men exchanged letters until Lieber’s death; Lieber alone wrote an estimated 237

 

2" Donald, Charles Sumner, 241-243. Friedel, Francis Lieber, 264-266. See also a summary of the

dissolution of their friendship in a letter from Lieber to Dorothea Dix, November I l, 1852 and letters from

Lieber to George Stillman Hillard dated: April 4, 1852, January I I, 1853, March 16, 1853 and May 1853.

27 No biographies, memoirs, articles, essays, dissertations, or essays on George Stillman Hillard could be

located for further development of his background, but due to Sumner and Hillard’s close professional and
ersonal ties, it is not unlikely that Sumner introduced them.

-8 Gertrude B. Diehl, “The Five of Clubs” New England Galaxy. v. 12 n. r (1970): 10.

29 Donald, Charles Sumner, I6, 23, 39-40.

30 Wilson and Fiske, eds. Appleton ’s C yclopcedia v. Ill, 207-208.

3' Freidel, Francis Lieber, 141-142.

187

letters to Hillard. Their content resembled those exchanged with Sumner; both series of
letters embraced a wide range of topics including families, ﬁiends, health conditions,
literature, politics, and travel. Lieber occasionally passed summers with these two friends
and joined their informal social group, called the “ﬁve of clubs,” for Saturday dinners and
conversation.32 Cemented by honest intellectual interchange, emotional ﬁdelity, and
constant epistolary exchange, Lieber’s friendships with Sumner and Hillard required
disagreement and discussion to foster intimacy.

Like his relationships with Sumner and Hillard, Lieber’s with Dorothea Dix
united over shared intellectual interests, in this case a shared passion for prison reform.
The exact origin of their relationship remains unknown, but their letters commence
regularly in 1850 shortly after Dix had earned international recognition.33 Upon her
father’s death in 1821, Dix founded a school for girls in Boston and subsequently hearing
about the conditions of prisoners in the state penitentiary, she dedicated herself to
improving their conditions. When her health declined in 1834, Dix closed her school and
traveled to Europe. Returning to Boston in 1837, she renewed her devotion to
“investigating the condition of paupers, lunatics, and prisoners.”34 She was inﬂuential in
the creation of state penitentiaries in New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and
Illinois. Her travels brought her to South Carolina where she visited Lieber and his
family. She designed a bill that appropriated ten million acres to several states for the

relief of the indigent insane (this bill had been preceded by her efforts to procure support

 

32 Friedel, Francis Lieber, 141-142.

3’ In February of 1845 after the death of British reformer, Elizabeth Fry, James Barclay wrote to Lieber
who was on a European tour. He implies that Lieber and Dix have not yet been introduced as he asks:
“Have you heard of Miss Dix?” and the letters commence shortly thereafter in 1846. See Charles B.
Robson, “Papers of Francis Lieber” Huntington Library Bulletin February 1933: 135-155.

’4 Wilson and Fiske, eds. Appleton ’s Cyclopaedia V. II, 183.

188

in 1848 and 1850). In April 1854, this bill successfully passed through Congress, but
President Pierce vetoed it on the basis that the federal government had no grounds to
make such appropriations. During the Civil War, she was the superintendent of hospital
nurses, controlling appointments and assignments, but after the war ended she returned to
her work for the insane.35 Lieber and Dix’s friendship endured many years, but lacked the
duration and quality characterizing his relations with Hillard and Sumner and highlighted
the gender dynamics controlling friendship. Dix and Lieber focused their epistolary
exchange on prison reform, such as reports on their individual efforts and opinions of
others’ perspectives, but outside of these work-related issues, their letters also discussed
politics, literature, and family. Their correspondence reveals the limitations that gender
placed on mixed-sex friendships. Even though Lieber and Dix were emotionally invested
in one another, their letters did not reﬂect a depth and intensity of intellectual exchange
similar to Lieber’s male-male friendships. They discussed the current literature, politics,
and moral issues related to prison reform—issues he also debated with men—but an
awareness of appropriate gender boundaries constrained the depth and intensity of their
intellectual discourse. The cultural landscape of gender relations allowed Dix only a
moderate inclusion into the male economy of friendship.

Lieber met Frances (Fanny) Appleton Longfellow, daughter of the wealthy
merchant Nathan Appleton, when she was only a girl. Their families became so close that
she passed the summer of 1832, when she was thirteen years old, with Lieber and his
wife in Newton, New Jersey.36 While traveling in Europe with her family in 1836, Fanny

met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Initially, she was not romantically interested in him,

 

’5 Thomas J. Brown. Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1998),
164-168. Wilson and Fiske, eds. Appleton ’s Cyclopaedia v. II, 183.
’6 Friedel, Francis Lieber, 75-76.

189

but after seven years of courtship, they married.37 Lieber did not attend their wedding in
Boston even though Samuel Ward offered to pay his expenses; however, he and Charles
Sumner spent time with the newlyweds during their honeymoon in Nahant and the
Catskills. Fanny Longfellow and Lieber wrote to one another with less frequency than
was the case with his other friendships, particularly after she married. Lieber was twenty
years her senior, but their friendship spanned thirty years ceasing only with her death in
1861.38 As a result of their age difference and gender constraints their letters reﬂect a
paternalistic, instructive and protective relationship, more stereotypically Victorian than
the other three friendships.

By strictly adhering to separate spheres ideology, historians risk feminizing
emotion and intimate friendships by conﬂating emotion with women, passion,
irrationality, and the private sphere. As Schweitzer has recently reminded scholars,
affective relationships were a conscious, rational choice.39 Lieber and his friends
carefully considered the arrangement of their affective relations, which they referred to as
the “economy of friendship.” The structure of their affection required that they make an
active, conscious decision to participate or abandon their relationship. Charles Sumner,
defending himself against Lieber’s accusation of neglecting their ﬁiendship,
acknowledged that he was within his rights to “vacant [the] friendship,” but he

consciously chose not to do 50.40 Although they had been friends for many years, the

 

37 Edward Wagenknect, ed. Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow
(1817-1861). New York: Longmans, Green, and Co (1956), 64-66, 88.

’8 Friedel, Francis Lieber, 212. Francis Lieber to Matilda Lieber, August 13 and 16, 1843.

’9 Ivy Schweitzer is the most recent to adapt this perspective in Perfecting Friendship (2006), but see also:
Dorothée Sturkenboom, "Historicizing the Gender of Emotions: Changing Perceptions in Dutch
Enlightenment Thought" Journal of Social History 43 n. 1 (Autumn 2000): 55-75. William Reddy, The
Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001.

4° Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, January 25, 1841. Charles Sumner Papers. Houghton Library.

190

work of binding their friendship was a process that took place over a long period of time.
It took place time and time again. With every letter exchanged, these friends reafﬁrmed
their choice and reengaged in the economy of ﬁiendship. The emotional epistolary world
these friends created provides a window onto the ways in which they structured,
practiced, and understood friendship.

Lieber and his male friends preferred the “vigorous and suggestive” method of
conversations in person and described letter writing as an “inferior form of
communication.” But, geographical separation required frequent use of this “imperfect

”41

medium. Written communications, no matter how lengthy or detailed, could never

capture every essence of sentiment that they would have been able to convey in person.42
Writing to Lieber, Hillard longed for their conversations, particularly about “art,
literature, politics, pretty women, and good wine” all of which they both “loved and
understood.” These discussions inspired in him “new ideas and impressions” ﬁlled with
“energy, point, and vividness” and letters seemed like a meager substitute for the vitality
of face-to-face conversations. Lieber confessed to Hillard on more than one occasion that
geographical proximity would permit them to engage in intellectual discourse about
books, ideas, and politics with more regularity and depth. Their conversations not only
contributed to bringing them closer in an emotional sense, but also permitted the
development of their own intellectual convictions. Lieber turned to Sumner lamenting

their geographical separation because he had lately “developed some difﬁcult point and

other entirely new ones” which he was sure would bring the two of them immense

 

4' George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, December 7, 1842. George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber,
January 31, 1851. Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, November 25, 1859.

’2 See Steven Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of Planters (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

191

pleasure.43 Face-to-face interactions permitted individuals the freedom of expressing
sentiments with looks and gestures in addition to spoken word, but letters conﬁned
individuals strictly to the words available to them. Hillard explained this particular
problem, stating that “a man’s words do not always interpret his mind.” Letters limited
the ability to convey the depth and sincerity of affection for one another by “chill[ing] the
genial ﬂow of thoughts” rather than simply conducting them onto the page.44

The inherent deﬁciencies of letter writing did not prevent friends from

”45 Letters could

acknowledging that this practice “created and ratiﬁed patterns of friends.
not replicate the intimacy of face-to-face interactions, but nevertheless they constituted an
indispensable component in the development of intimacy and affection.46 Letters
symbolized to the recipient the author’s desire for developing and nurturing their
friendship. Lieber rhetorically asked Hillard: “are not such letters full of symbolical
meaning? Do they not show that the writer had a desire to communicate with a friend?”47
Their letters bridged the geographical distance between them by creating an alternative
emotional reality. While he lived in South Carolina, Lieber expressed gratitude for his
friends’ letters because they were his “sole and exclusive conversation” outside of his
wife. These letters represented affective bonds and as such, friends did not require a
purpose in writing to one another. Lieber wrote to his ﬁiends even when he had “nothing

distinct or deﬁnite in my mind to communicate, ask, or discuss.” 48

 

’3 Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner, October 23, I837.

4" Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner, August 10 and 14, 1840. George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber,
January 31, 1851, November 25, 1859, and April 10, I854.

45 Michael O’Brien. Conjectures of Order, 1:455.

’6 I draw here from the work of Smith-Rosenberg and Stephen Stowe who both understand letter writing as
a key ritual in the development of relationships.

’7 Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner, October 12, 1849.

’8 Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, May 1853.

I92

According to Michael O’Brien, intellectual letter writers composed letters with
precision and accuracy because there was a looming possibility that their letters could
end up in print. O’Brien identiﬁed three types of letters written by intellectuals: 1. Letters
on current controversies exposing the author’s private thoughts to the public 2. Travel
letters that functioned as memoirs 3. Private letters written with an awareness that they
could end up in print.49 The letters exchanged between Lieber and his friends do not ﬁt
neatly into these categories; rather, they wrote for each other with the purpose of building
intimate bonds between one another. These friendships produced an intimacy and honesty
that fostered intellectual production.

Lieber and his friends carefully monitored their letters and chose their words
precisely, but not because they feared they would end up in print. Rather they sought to
prevent any misunderstandings that would impede the development of their friendships.
Lieber complained to Hillard that Sumner occasionally used words without caution “as
boy[s] do stones [to] break windows and knock down ﬂowerpots.” Hillard, trying to
comfort his friend, wrote that Sumner did not always “use words with the moral and
intellectual responsibility which you or I do.”50 Lieber found that miscommunications
also occurred in mixed-sex relationships. On one particular occasion, Lieber received a
map and bust from Dix. He wrote her that “The contents were uninjured,” but he was
confused because “there was no explanatory note.” He wanted to know if she sent “this as
a gift?” He informed Dix that Matilda translated her gesture for him, stating “My wife

say[s]: I feel sure she sends it as a token of friendship.” And he addresses the issue

 

:: O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, vol. I, 441-442.
Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard. May 1853. George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber. June 3,
1853 Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

193

directly, asking “Does she, the woman, understand by woman quicker?”5 I If Dix’s gift
had been accompanied by a note explaining the gesture, Lieber would not have needed
Matilda to translate it for him. Precise language not only prevented miscommunications
from occurring, but also provided a common ground from which single-sex and mixed
sex correspondents could build.

Nineteenth-century Southern male friendships grew primarily from close kinship
ties and professional development, particularly the “crucible of professional
mentorship.”52 Intellectuals, in particular, wrote letters for a variety of purposes
including: business (authors, editors, printers), exchanging information and news, “ideas
sought,” “trivial, friendly, or malicious gossip,” and advancing knowledge of books.
Lieber’s letters could easily fall into these categories, but those addressed to Dix, Hillard,
Longfellow, and Sumner had a higher purpose: friendship itself.

By creating an emotional community, epistolary exchange provided the intimacy
and companionship that Lieber desired, but could not ﬁnd in South Carolina. Turning to
his closest friends for comfort, Lieber compared the isolation of the antebellum South to
the period he spent in solitary conﬁnement as a youth. He wrote, “I am alone and feel it
dreadfully. I never felt lonesome in prison, but I do feel so in the midst of men here.”
Daily interactions with other men on campus and conversations with family members did
not replace Lieber’s need for a rich emotional life outside of the home. He searched
South Carolina “not to ﬁnd a man but a soul.” Through honest intellectual discourse and
Sentimentatlita't, Lieber sought idealized seelenge meinschalf (soul union) with other

men, something that European men found indispensable to personal development and

 

5 ' Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix, 6 Nov 1850.
’2 Anya Jabour, “Male Friendship and Masculinity,” 90. See also: Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness:
Family and Values in Jefferson ’s Virginia (1983) and Friend and Glover, eds. Southern Manhood (2004).

194

identity.53 On the most rudimentary level, letters closed the geographical space between
friends, but more importantly they provided a means to “guard, foster, and nurture”
friendship and love, “the soul’s noblest treasure.”54

The economy of ﬁiendship required male and female friends to write letters with
regularity and depth. Lieber confessed that within the “economy of friendship. . .no one is
so eager in the husbanding [of] ﬁiendship as myself.” He admonished Sumner, “on the
other hand, you are the one of my ﬁiends who takes more his own time in replying.”
However, this was not a one-sided opinion that Lieber impressed upon others, Sumner
echoed this sentiment. “My dear Lieber,” Sumner wrote, “What can save you? —I have
written you a long letter, which you have not heeded—not even noticed the receipt of. . ..
But I will not cut you off absolutely. Perhaps you did not receive it—possibly it was
dull—perhaps you determined to repay me in my own fashion, after prolonged delay. Oh!
Lieber! Understand the economy of friendships!”55 Sumner acknowledged his own
shortcomings and at the same time, the indispensable role of letter writing in their
ﬁiendship. Letter writing progressively drew ﬁiends closer together and failure to write
eroded their relationships. Lieber, comparing friendship to a protective shield wrote to
Sumner, “why do you allow those specks of rust to settle on the bright shield of
conﬁdence which covers us both?”56

Lieber’s female friends wrote with less frequency than his male friends, but their

economy of friendship still necessitated a regular stream of letters. However, he broached

the issue more cautiously and less frequently. He boldly demanded that Sumner write him

 

5’ Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, May 1853. Trepp, “Private Lives of Men,” 135.

5" Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard. February 25, I847.

’5 Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner. May 22 1847. Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber. Charles Sumner
Papers. May 3, 1847. Houghton Library.

’6 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, December 7, 1842.

195

more often and explicitly invoked the nature of friendship to make his point, however,
when growing frustrated with Dix’s short notes, he kindly requested, “Can we never have
once more a real letter from you?” In his next letter, he denied scolding her for infrequent
letters, “Scolding? Scolding you?” He continued to playfully tease her, stating “How can
you ﬁnd the heart to write down such a word?”57 Lieber held different expectations for
the economy of friendship for single- and mixed-sex ﬁiendships. Lieber’s emphasis on
the signiﬁcance of letter writing in drawing their souls closer together meant that mixed-
sex friends could not establish the same intimacy as single-sex friends. There was, thus,
not a single understanding of the economy of friendship, but rather economies of
friendship mitigated by gender.

Joy expressed at receiving letters also reveals the importance of letter writing, but
it similarly illustrates the gendered nature of the economy of friendship. Lieber frequently
expressed happiness at receiving his friends’ letters. In 1842 he wrote to Hillard, “A
thousand thanks for your long letters,” and continued, “I am very grateful for such
communications.” Likewise, he wrote “my eyes were delighted by a letter in whose
address I recognized at once your welcome characters.” Hillard returned similar
sentiments to Lieber, “I was very glad to get your letter... I give you a decisive sign that I
was rejoiced to hear from you.”58 Lieber also understood this issue along gender lines. In
expressing his happiness in their ﬁiendship, he wrote to Dix that “I shall always
acknowledge grateﬁrlly that I have become acquainted with you more intimately and that

my [wife] and children have been allowed to participate in this enjoyment of the purest

 

’7 Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix. October 12, 1852. Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix. November I I, 1852.
Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

’8 Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, January 21, 1841; April 3, and June 24, 1849. George
Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, July 3, 1849.

196

kind.”59 Single-sex friendships may have indirectly inﬂuenced Lieber’s family, but
mixed-sex ﬁiendships expanded Sentimentatlitc‘it by taking shape as “shared” ﬁiendships
that beneﬁted he, his wife, and his children. Mixed-sex friendships were not Lieber’s sole
provenance as they directly contributed to the happiness and comfort of his family.
Privacy played an important role in the development of Lieber’s ﬁiendships. Both
the author and the recipient held an expectation of privacy. While reﬂecting on an
acquaintance’s loss of his desk along with all of his wife’s letters during a move, Lieber
wrote “think of there [sic] being published in the Herald some future day!” Letters could
be saved or preserved particularly with the increasingly popularity of posthumous
printings of letter collections.”0 With this in mind, this group of intellectuals reiterated
their desire for privacy by either requesting that recipients destroy the letters or by
explicitly requesting it. Lieber frequently used the French phrase entre nous (between us)
to reiterate that his letters were reserved for the recipient alone and applied to concerns of
affection, work, politics, and family. The privacy exacted from letters, fostered the
development of intense affective bonds by encapsulating the recipient and writer together
in a unique emotional world of their own. In December of 1855, Lieber conﬁded to
Hillard “Entre nous” that steps were being taken “to get Fremont nominated for the
presidency... Do not let this slip into the papers. Indeed, keeg it for yourself.” Hillard
similarly believed this to be true, when he wrote to Lieber, “I hold [your letters] to be
matters ‘private juris’ and that all the charm and ﬂavor of letters evaporates the moment
that the writer thinks of any body but his correspondent.” Writing about Sumner, Lieber

wrote “this letter is strictly conﬁdential, for it treats of private effusions and would be

 

’9 Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix. April 2, 1851.
60 O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, vol. 1, 442-443.

197

treacherous were it not strictly conﬁdential.” Bringing uninvited individuals into their
letters through letter-sharing endangered the “conﬁdential band of friendship” which
“encircle[d] them?“
His mixed-sex friendships also called for privacy, but with less urgency and they
were incorporated into his family situation. In ninety-two letters Lieber wrote to Dix, he
explicitly asked that information be kept “entre nous” only once and in regard to a plan
for building a prison in Columbia. Lieber and Dix often assumed an audience larger than
the recipient and incorporated others, such as his wife, into their letters. Lieber informed
Longfellow in November of 1839 that he forwarded her latest letter on to his wife.62 After
Lieber established the friendship, Matilda took up correspondence with Longfellow,
although with less frequency than her husband. The Matilda-Longfellow letters often
referred back to Frank, providing a constant reminder of Matilda’s position as his wife
and re-emphasized that the basis of their exchange rested on their relationships to him. In
other instances, Matilda added her own notes to Dix or Longfellow in the blank spaces of
Lieber’s letters to them.”3 The Liebers passed messages to Longfellow through one
another’s letters. Matilda wrote that, “Frank wishes me to ask of you whether you
have any idea what for instance a family like that of Agassiz may require for annual

expenses” and later conveyed that “This moment Frank comes from his library. . .and

inquires to who I am writing, expressing great satisfaction that it is to you.”64 Lowered

 

6' George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, February 10, 1852. Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard,
October 23, 1856. Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, March 2, 1852. Emphasis in original.

62 Francis Lieber to Fanny (Appleton) Longfellow, November 10, 1839.

6’ Matilda Lieber to Fanny (Appleton) Longfellow. October 28, 1842; December 18, 1843; June 17, 1847.
Francis Lieber Collection.

6" Matilda Lieber to Fanny (Appleton) Longfellow, February 16, 1856. See also, Francis Lieber to Fanny
(Appleton) Longfellow, November 10, 1839.

198

expectations of privacy in mixed-sex friendships meant that letters could be used in a
more traditional manner—read aloud or passed among friends.

Hoffmann and Trepp argue that German men expressed affection for their friends
without reservations, but Lieber’s affective statements reveal the limitations gender posed
to intimate ﬁiendships. Letters exchanged with his female friends, frequently included
Lieber’s his wife and children. He ensured that affective expressions directed at female
friends were mitigated with references to his wife or family. He wrote to Dix, “I take
delight in your correspondence and my wife delights in all her husband’s delights” and in
another instance he stated, “We love you as we always did...” The “we” expands the
conversation to include his wife, but he continued, “I am doing nothing except, indeed,
loving good people like you.” While he further emphasized his deep affection for her and
closed the letter with, “Matilda sends her warmest love? He again uses this strategy in
September of 1851 in which he was determined “to make use of the hour to tell our dear
friend how dear she is to us. You are one of those that make us the more regret our distant
home, separating us from most we love behind.”65

This strategy of incorporating his wife into affective statements returned the
conversation to the domestic realm—to private sphere of the home and family—where it
was safe to engage in relationships with unrelated individuals of the opposite sex. He
included his family directly following emotive expressions. Ever grateful for their
friendship, Lieber wrote to Dix that “I shall always acknowledge gratefully that I have
become acquainted with you more intimately and that my [wife] and children have been

allowed to participate in this enjoyment of the purest kind.” Even in his most explicit

 

6’ Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix. January 12, 1851; February 14, 1857; January 12, 1852; September 28
and 29, 1851.

199

affective statements, he still managed to include his wife in the exchange. In a letter dated
January 28, 1854, after admiring Dix’s “brightest ﬂame of charity” he states, “If I were
not married this would sound like a declaration of love.” He furthered this, stating “Well,
married or unmarried it i_s a declaration of love.” However, this strategy was also
employed by Dix, she requested Lieber “to write about [his wife] and boys” and he
promptly obliged her. This epistolary practice effectively eliminated privacy by
incorporating others into the conversation and this was not employed in letters to his male
friends because intimate affective statements exchanged among men did not endanger
any middle-class expectations of mixed-sex interactions.66

Lieber and his male friends also expressed affection for one another. They opened
their letters in a typically Victorian manner with expressions of “my dear Lieber,” or “my
dear Sumner” and closed with statements of emotional ﬁdelity, such as “ever unchanging
love.” It was more unusual for them to express affection throughout entire bodies of
letters. After drawing upon memories the summer they passed together and passing along
news of his family, but before discussion of his Political Ethics, Lieber confessed
“Sumner, your ﬁiendship is very dear to me. I thank God for it and count it among the

”67 His friends returned the sentiments stating, in

things worth being wanted in my life.
one case, “my heart throbs for you.”68 This group of scholars, similar to the women of
Smith-Rosenberg’s study and the men of J abour’s research, also expressed love,

intimacy, and friendship through images of physical intimacy. Hillard urged Lieber to

“take these lines as a symbolical clasp” of their hands. When Hillard’s son died, he

 

6” Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix, January 12, 1851; September 28 and 29, 1851; April 2, 1851; February
24, 1857; January 28, 1854. Emphasis in original.

67 Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner, August 10 and 14, 1840.

68 Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, October 21, 1837. Charles Sumner Papers. Houghton Library.

200

wished he could be comforted by weeping into Lieber’s lap.69 Such references to physical
gestures of affection reveal the multitude of ways in which men could express their
feelings toward one another. Lieber’s mixed-sex friendships could not include
corresponding expressions. While emotional vulnerability and intimacy was acceptable in
Lieber’s perspective, physical expression with unrelated women would have signiﬁcantly
violated Victorian ideals of male-female interaction. Also differing from his female
friends, Lieber’s male friends intimately bound their emotional expressions to the
intellectual discourse of their letters.

Lieber and his friends developed emotional bonds with one another through
discussions of intellectual topics, including politics, books, reform, and ideas. Hillard
commented on this important piece of their relationship, writing to Lieber, “Indeed you
are ever freshly in my recollection, since my readings and studies are constantly
reminding me of matters we have talked about or else suggesting to me thing on which I
should be glad to discourse with you.” While visiting Boston in the summer of 1840,
Lieber similarly found that staying up all night discussing a wide range of topics with
Sumner made “my attachment for him very much increased.”70 The discussion of
ideas, in person or through epistolary interchanges, provided a critical opportunity for
intensifying the bonds between them.

Discussions of ideas, politics, science, or history were a vital aspect of their
friendship, especially because doing so gave them freedom to challenge one another
intellectually. Lieber captured the signiﬁcance of this when he asked: “what is the use in

writing things about which I know we have but one feeling, one way of thinking, one

 

6’ George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, January 6, 1855; November I9, 1838.
70 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, April 9, 1846. Francis Lieber to Fanny (Appleton)
Longfellow, August 2, 1840.

201

regret?” Clarifying this issue, Hillard wrote “there is no true friendship which does not
rest upon a basis of frankness” and theirs “is of the purest water and highest type because
it survives, or could survive honest difference of opinion upon important subjections.” 7'
After the publication of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline”
in 1847, Hillard wrote to Lieber praising this work. Lieber responded that he was
“absolutely startled” by his opinion and asked redundantly, “Can we so totally disagree?”
Lieber proceeded to send Hillard his copy of the poem with notes written in the margins,
but not for the purpose of convincing him that he was correct, but “to place myself right
with one whose judgment I value so much as yours.”72 Differences of opinion did not
drive these two friends further apart, but rather intensiﬁed their bonds as they respected
one another’s opinions. Following the publication of Louis Agassiz’ ﬁrst volume of A
Natural History of the United States, Hillard and Lieber commenced a discussion of the
author and his scholarship. Hillard claimed that other scholars and scientists supported
the argument that diversity of human languages derived from creation of “human tribes,
precisely as the different song of birds.” Lieber, believing that his friend was mistaken,
challenged him to cite these scholars and then reasoned that this recent work illustrated
“an utter want of knowledge of the subject.” He continued to reﬁrte Agassiz’ claims and
characterized them as “irrational and philosophically speaking absurd.”73 Regardless of
the differences between them Hillard comforted Lieber stating, “Do not fear that I shall

74
ever cease to love you.”

 

7' Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard. October 18, 1845. Francis Lieber Collection. HEH. George
Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, January 6, 1860. Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

72 Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, July 9, 1849.

7’ Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, April I 1, I858.

74 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, July 25, I850.

202

Another of Lieber’s intellectual disagreements with Hillard illustrates the
intertwining of friendship and intellectual discourse in their letters. Lieber informed his
friend without hesitation or preﬁx, “I cannot agree with [you] in your view of the English
church.” After confronting their difference of opinion, Lieber then defended his
perspective. Hillard, in his opinion, had permitted his “present study to enshroud [his]
head when you say that you almost doubt whether the reformation was a blessing to
England.” In opposition to Hillard, he believed that “the Episcopal government. . .is the
reason why the English people are that nation which is most pervaded by religion.” After
asserting this difference of opinion, Lieber characteristically shifted to the topic of
friendship wondering why “people allow their hearts to be crampones [sic] and their
minds to be constricted, when they differ from a friend. ...I have never given out a friend
from neglect or a difference of opinion.” He continued from the abstract and kindly stated
to his friend: “Let our minds differ ever so much, our souls never.” Love between friends,
according to Lieber, “is so choice and rare a thing that people ought to keep guard, foster,
and nurture it as the soul’s noblest treasure.”75 Differences of opinion provided
opportunities to reconﬁrm their ﬁiendship rather than pushing them away from each
other. The Lieber correspondence demonstrates that there was no limit to the expression

of disagreement followed by affective statements, including divergent opinions of

 

7’ Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, February 27, 1847. See George Stillman Hillard to Francis
Lieber, February 16, 1847 for the statement to which Lieber was responding: “I have just ﬁnished my
introductory lecture which is a view of the religious and political state of England in Milton’s time. All my
researches give me a renewed admiration of Hallam whose learning, candor and good sense....The subject
of the reformation in England I am almost a Cobbelite. 1 am not at all sure that taking England [and] Ireland
together, the reformation has not been an evil.”

203

Longfellow’s poetry, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, public executions, and the Nebraska
am.76

From personal matters to intellectual production, honest opinion proved an
important component in their friendship and inﬂuenced every aspect of their ﬁiendship.
The transmission of sincere opinions to one another always included the possibility of
hurting someone’s feelings. While conﬁding about recent trouble with Sumner, Lieber
wrote “I have been obliged to do violence to my feelings not to speak out.”77 Lieber felt
he had not only betrayed himself, but also their ﬁiendship by failing to express his
sincere feeling. Moreover, as long as he kept it to himself, Sumner would continue to
misunderstand why he was upset. In another instance, a friend confessed to Lieber that,
“it was rather a weakness in me not to have told you frankly that with your poetry you
had not succeeded in building a bridge from your soul into mine.” His friend withheld his
sincere opinion because silence seemed more favorable than casting “even a momentary
shadow over the heart of one whom we love.” Recognizing his failure as a friend in this
capacity, he sought to rectify his sin by pledging to “never let there be any veils of
reserve between us.”78

Lieber’s intellectual discourse in mixed-sex friendships differed. His relationship
with Dix allowed a two-direction exchange, but only in regards to their shared passion of

prison reform. He offered his expertise on the subject, particularly drawing from his

German resources and experiences. Writing to Dix about a new book in Germany which

 

76 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, September 17, 1839. George Stillman Hillard to Francis
Lieber, March 21, 1842. Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner, May 1842. Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner,
June 7, 1842. Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, December 2, 1835. Francis Lieber to Charles Sumner,
December 13, 1835. Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, February 12, 1854. George Stillman Hillard
to Francis Lieber, March 2, 1854. George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, September 9, 1850.

77 Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, May 1853.

7’ George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, July 3, 1849.

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supported solitary conﬁnement, he stated “I wish something could be done with the book
of the German penologist were it only to stire [sic] up again the interest in prison
matters.” Concerned about the declining interest in prison reform, Lieber conﬁded that
“All such things I should like to talk over with you.” While he did not hesitate to instruct
and assist her in her efforts, she also reciprocated his efforts, but only in the area of
prison reform. In February of 1853, Lieber was working to create an asylum in Columbia
and the legislature appropriated $30,000 in support of this task. He petitioned the
legislature to create a committee to report on what to build and how to go about it, but he
before putting together this resolution he wrote to Dix requesting “any advice.” He was
particularly interested “to know which source you would indicate as the best to apply to
or what method to obtain the best architect plan after the committee has once settled the
main principles.”79

Outside of prison reform, Lieber and Dix rarely disagreed or argued about ideas.
Their friendship lacked the intense discussion and disagreement found in his male-male
friendships, preventing the honest distribution of opinions that proved critical to creating
intimacy and affection. They discussed issues of reform, Dix’s work in the legislature,
Lieber’s desire to relocate, and friends and family, and they performed favors for one
another just as he did with Hillard and Sumner. Dix sent him documents from
Washington DC. and he placed announcements about her reform efforts in local
newspapers. This contributed to the creation of a tenuous sense of equality as they both
“patiently” labored and suffered for their causes “unnoticed” and “unrewarded,” she for
her land bill and he for liberty. Their common work drew them together and provided

opportunities for expressing affection. Easing Dix’s concerns about her bill, something he

 

7’ Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix, August 21, 1857; December 5, 1852.

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called the “ﬂood and ebb tide of your soul,” Lieber invited her to stay with his family
where she would have “loving hearts in “abundance.” Her unceasing dedication to reform
and Lieber’s interest in this issue provided opportunities for affective sentiments to pass
between them.80

Dix’s transgression of gender roles permitted the friends to bond over a shared
passion for reform efforts. Lieber observed in 1850 that in regards to gender, “the usual
state of things is reversed in our two cases!” She, “a woman, [is] in action, up and doing
everywhere” in the public sphere, while he was limited to a “morganatic marriage with
literature” through South Carolina College.81 Dix moved around in the public sphere
comfortably, but was able to do so because she adhered to traditional “standards of
ladylike propriety” by appearing as a “housewife writ large.”82 Yet, underneath the
reciprocity and friendliness, Lieber viewed her through the lens of traditional gender
roles. In one case requested that she, “who help[ed] so many thousand,” help him
organize his library which suffered from “ﬁts of insanity.” In another instance, he
abruptly ended a paragraph about his employment difﬁculties because it was unfair to
write such to a “lady.” Lastly, he believed that she should write an essay on Laura
Bridgman because they were both women.83 It is signiﬁcant that Lieber never requested
Dix’s assistance on his books, essays, or lectures, something that was critical to

intensifying his emotional bonds with male friends. Dix crossed traditional gender

boundaries by working in the public sphere and this work permitted affectionate bonds to

 

’0 Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix, March 21, 1851. Francis Lieber Collection.

8' Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix, December 26, 1850. Francis Lieber Collection.

82 Thomas J. Brown. Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998),
167-168.

8’ Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix, February 28, 1854 and March 7, 1851. Francis Lieber to George
Stillman Hillard, January 16 and 23, 1851. Brown also notes that Dix maintained a close friendship with
President Millard Fillmore.

206

grow between them. His awareness of her gender role and failure to engage her in
analytical, intellectual discourse prevented the cultivation of the intense emotional bonds
that characterized his single-sex friendships.

Age and gender differences further complicated Lieber and Longfellow’s
friendship and their intellectual exchanges draw attention to Lieber’s paternalistic
relationship with her. If his correspondence with Dix did not elicit that same level of
frank and critical discussion as found in his same-sex friendships, it did permit an equal
exchange of information about reform. Lieber, however, was twenty years Longfellow’s
senior and they discussed current events, books, and writers, including the arguments of
Johannes von Miiller and Immanuel Kant (books and issues also found in his single-sex
friendships). These discussions, however, were limited by Lieber’s recognition of her as a
young woman. Although, she was twenty years old, he referred to her as a “girl.” In
discussing the “sacred and holy” issue of “truth,” he wrote that he could refer her to his
Political Ethics or Political and Legal Hermeneutics, but rather preferred to summarize
his views for her in. a letter. He preferred to simplify it here in the letter because his books
were “unaccustomed” to be read “by eyes like yours” and would as a result become
“confused.”84 Yet Lieber carefully tread the issue of gender here by turning this
declaration against himself: rather than Longfellow becoming confused or embarrassed
by the intellectual work, as might have been the Victorian perspective, he suggests that
his intellectual work would become self-conscious under her feminine gaze. At times,

Lieber also pointed to her frivolous girlish nature, but he also noted the absence of her

 

8" Francis Lieber to Fanny (Appleton) Longfellow, September 20 and October 12, 1840. Francis Lieber
Collection. HEH.

207

foolish, fanciful talk since they parted company and she left him with Sumner and
Hillard.”

Even though he offered Fanny Longfellow instruction in certain intellectual
matters, the only issue in which he asked her to reciprocate was in explaining her
husband’s poetry. Five years after she married Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lieber
informed her that he wrote a letter to her husband in which he criticized his latest work.
He “cherish[ed] the poem” and found “great beauties in it,” but he wanted her husband to
know that “he did not relish the hexameters” and “prefer[red] to read the poem as
metrical prose.” He even went as far as to condescendingly comment, “if your Henry
writes again in hexameters. . .he must lay down for himself a few more strict and clear
rules.” Lieber wished Fanny to assure her husband that it was in his duty of friendship
that he conveyed this clear and honest opinion. She was a pathway to forging a friendship
with her husband. He further illustrated this by asking questions about Longfellow and
his poem, “Evangeline,” including his beliefs in magnetism and how this may or may not
have inﬂuenced the poem’s reality in the readers’ hearts and souls. Before Henry,
Lieber’s friendship with Fanny ﬂowed in one direction as he offered advice and
instruction with a discerning eye. After she married Henry, they continued to share news
of family and friends, but their friendship also provided a means to becoming better

friends with him.86

 

8’ Francis Lieber to Fanny (Appleton) Longfellow, August 20, 1838. Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

8" Francis Lieber to Fanny (Appleton) Longfellow, February 27, 1848. Lieber exhibited a desire to not only
be friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in letters also to Charles Sumner. In one case he wrote to
Sumner that he received such a warm welcome from Longfellow that it moved him and on the eve of
Fanny’s wedding he consented to Sumner that he would no longer criticize Longfellow’s poetry in his letter
out of his affection for her.

208

Shared intellectual endeavors translated into support for one another in various
approaches to a life of the mind. Lieber and his friends read, praised, and distributed one
another’s publications. 87 These scholars placed intellectual discourse at the center of their
friendship, but they also actively and consciously participated in a collective construction
of knowledge produced by members of their circle.

While male and female friends alike supported Lieber’s intellectual production,
only male friends played a part in this constructive criticism because they represented the
ideal audience for the speeches, books, and essays. Anna Ticknor, the well-educated wife
of Harvard professor, George Ticknor, criticized one of Lieber’s essays. Afterwards,
Hillard consoled his hurt feelings explaining that “few women” possessed the “power of
application and concentration to sufficient degree to follow you in all your reasonings
and illustrations.” Most women were perceived as incapable of providing sufﬁcient
feedback for their work and these scholars effectively constructed their intellectual work
as men’s work. These gender assumptions positioned Dix and Longfellow as peripheral
members of Lieber’s life of the mind and barred them from the intimacy found in male-
male friendship.88 Women’s inability to understand men’s intellectual works in the same
way prohibited them from intimate moments in which ﬁiends could touch each other’s
souls through their formal writings and informal letters, such as the essay that Lieber read

“not with his eyes, but with my soul” In other cases they praised the “manly” character of

 

’7 Glover and Friend, ed. Southern Manhood (2004). Jabour, “William Wirt and his Friends,” JER183-1 1 1.
Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, April 20-23, 1852. George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber,
September 30, 1846.

’8 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, April 24 and 25, 1851. Francis Lieber Collection.

209

one another’s work, but also in the work of others. Only they, as men, could discern the
masculine nature of intellectual work.89

Manliness among this cohort of scholars, thus, was distinctly tied to the
discussion and development of intellectual ideas. Beyond simply acquiring new
knowledge, they praised the strength and wisdom of looking at politics, history, and
culture with keen analytical skills. On the eve of a trip to Europe, Hillard heralded
Lieber’s opportunity to revisit places of his past with the “manly judgment” that
accompanied a “mature understanding.”90 The combination of past experiences and
knowledge for the pursuit of self-education was the key marker of manhood. Lieber
explicitly explained to his students that this was the “chief occupation as you enter
manhood?”l The masculine economy of friendship fostered a meeting of minds and souls
that was only accessible through the honest intellectual discussion of men.

The freedom and honesty that characterized these male-male friendships also
played an indispensable role in the intellectual work they did together. Although they
lamented the pain caused by the constructive criticism, they clariﬁed that it “came from a
warm and deep heart of love.” Michael O’Brien has astutely characterized such letters as
“prolegomena” or a testing ground for ideas before sending them into the larger public
realm.92As friends and intellectuals, they “love[d] and admire[d]” each other “far too
much either to conceal what is true or affect what is not true.”93 Sending Hillard an early

draft of a new work, Lieber requested that he “propose any alteration” and assured him

 

’9 Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, April 20-23, 1852. Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard,
December 15, 1852. Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

90 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, December 17, 1843. Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

9' Francis Lieber. The necessity of continued self-education. An address to the Graduating Class of S. C.
College at Commencement on the ﬁrst of December, MDCCCLI. Columbia, South Carolina: A.S. Johnston,
1851. Rare Book Collections. Henry E. Huntington Library.

92 O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, vol. 1, 456.

9" George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, December 2, 1852. Francis Lieber Collection. HEH.

210

that he could “speak quite freely, for I am conscious of perfect liberality even toward
myself, so that I shall weight all you say.” Shortly thereafter, Lieber informed him that “I
have adopted most of your correction, indeed all, only I have improved as I think I have
made the words say more distinctly what I mean.” Following Sumner’s praise of his ideas
on the “right of veriﬁcation,” Lieber explained “you must admire yourself, because I
cannot see what important point there is in my memorandum that you had not
mentioned.” 94

This group of scholars, however, did not provide criticism and feedback out of a
purely professional or intellectual courtesy. The masculine economy of friendship
entailed a responsibility to provide this critical support system. Lieber charged Hillard
“by [his] allegiance” of friendship to read drafts of his latest manuscript, Legal and
Political Hermeneutics. In the 18508, tension between Lieber and Sumner ascended at the
same time that South Carolinians entered in a secession crisis. This explosive political
terrain intersected with his personal life and produced a situation that highlights the
indispensable role that intellectual support and criticism played in binding friends
together. Unionist Benjamin Franklin Perry read Lieber’s “Union letter” at an 1851
Fourth of July celebration in Greeneville, South Carolina. Writing this with “a knife close
[his] neck” because he renounced secession and warned that it would indeed spawn a
revolution and war, Lieber poured his soul into this controversial and important subject.
After reading it, Sumner returned it to him “without a solitary accompanying word.”

Lieber was outraged that Sumner “return[ed] it without a word,” particularly since it

 

9" Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard, June 3, 1847. Francis Lieber to George Stillman Hillard,
February 24, 1850.

211

“could cost him his neck.”95 The economy of friendship dictated that friends take
responsibility to help each one another with their intellectual productions and provide
support for their efforts regardless of whether or not they agreed with each other.

In practice, however, the terms of the economy of friendship did not always
coalesce easily, as in the case of Sumner and Lieber, who parted as friends for eight years
(1853-1861). This gaping hole in their friendship has been the subject of many scholars,
including Frank Freidel and Michael O’Brien, who have placed the cause of their trouble
on the issue of slavery. In this perspective, Sumner’s increasingly absolutist abolitionist
politics collided with Lieber’s employment in South Carolina that minimally required
silence on the issue. Sumner believed that Lieber had become an “apologist for slavery”
while Lieber felt he continued to compromise himself only to support his family. Lieber
initiated this split by coldly requesting Sumner to cease sending him sensational articles
about the harsh realities of slavery and adulating essays on himself.96

Intellectual discourse, thus, formed the central tenet of the economy of friendship,
but the particulars of this ﬁiendship were shaped by two signiﬁcant elements: exactly
how male friends should relate to one another and the assumption that the life of the mind
was strictly a masculine endeavor. The heart of the Lieber-Sumner split rested in two
different understandings of male friendship. Hillard captured the essence of the problem
between his two friends: “[Sumner] makes assent to his doctrines the measure of
friendship. He sets upon his own opinions as an absolute meridian and every departure

from that is an aberration.” Earlier in their relationship, Sumner and Lieber had embraced

 

9’ Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix, April 1 1 and 12, 1852. Francis Lieber to George Hillard on April 4,
1852. Francis Lieber to George Hillard, January 6, 1839.

9” Friedel, Francis Lieber, 264-266. Frank Friedel, “Francis Lieber, Charles Sumner, and Slavery” Journal
of Southern History v. 9 n. 1 (Feb 1943): 75-93. Michael O’Brien, “‘A Sort of Cosmopolitan Dog’: Francis
Lieber in the South” The Southern Review v. 25 (Spring 1989): 308-322.

212

the liberality of the economy of friendship that permitted them to express Opinions openly
and honestly without damaging their friendship. The issue of slavery reveals Sumner’s
shifting understanding of the economy of ﬁiendship. The idea of agreement was a
popular view of friendship in nineteenth-century America rooted in Aristotelian
understandings of friendship in which friends were “virtually and visually
interchangeable.”97 Sumner complained of Lieber’s “want of sympathy” which was
understood as meaning “sympathy of an entire identity of sentiment.” In adapting this
understanding of friendship, he embraced the idea of an intimate friend as a second self;
this concept placed the highest value on likeness and agreement as opposed to honesty,
intellectual pursuits, and devotion. Unlike Sumner, Lieber continued to practice an
economy of friendship that valued the differences he had with his friends because they
were opportunities for self-improvement. As different understandings of friendship and
diverging opinions about slavery contributed to Sumner and Lieber’s split, Hillard
reminded Lieber that “all these things make you more dear to me.” He later stated it
much more explicitly: “No difference of opinion shall ever make me love you any the
less” and while their minds may change, their hearts would not.98 Differences of political
opinions provided one friendship with an opportunity to draw the bonds of friends closer,
but it also illuminated another friendship’s divergent understandings of the economy of
friendship.

Male-female friendships, for their part, tended to be shorter in length with fewer
letters exchanged and contained strictly regulated affective boundaries that re-shaped

them into shared ﬁiendships. Some intellectual exchange took place, but only with

 

’7 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Lieber, June 2, 1853; May 17, I853. Schweitzer, Perfecting
Friendship, 14-15.
98 George Stillman Hillard to Francis Leiber, June 2, 1853; November 25, 1861; February 26, 1863.

213

women, such as Dix who were already challenging notions of acceptable behavior and
pursuing similar interests. Mixed-sex friendships appeared more typically Victorian, such
as seen in Lieber’s more parental relationship with Longfellow.

Male friendships capitalized upon a shared value of honesty and openness to form
intense bonds through intellectual exchange. Moments of disagreement and divergent
opinions brought Lieber and his friends closer together as long as they adhered to similar
understandings of the practice of friendship. These epistolary contests served as an
impetus to emotional afﬁrmations of affection, but because intellectual work was manly
work these disputes also conﬁrmed a shared understanding masculinity. An
understanding rooted in passion for intellectual endeavors and independent thought very
similar to that found among the faculty-student relationships. Utilizing differences of
opinion as opportunities for self-improvement, Lieber created an intellectual and
emotional world distinctly separate from the intellectual community and social life of the

South Carolina College.

214

 

CONCLUSION

 

The Memory of Francis Lieber and the Social Functions of Antebellum Higher Education

In the early fall of 2007, South Carolina journalist Neil White welcomed
University of South Carolina students back to campus with “pseudo-historical tidbits”
about their school. After jesting that the College was founded thanks to a “big boozy
barbecue” hosted by higher education lobbyists for the state legislatures, White impishly
claimed that in 1841 Francis Lieber commenced a weekly “Saturday afternoon sporting

”I

and social activity known as ‘Horseshoes on the Horseshoe. Although written in jest,
this public history lesson draws attention to the very different ways that the University of
South Carolina and Columbia University remember their shared past. Walking through
the historic horseshoe on USC’s campus today, one immediately takes notice of the
Georgian style Lieber College, “named after Francis Lieber, arguably the most
distinguished scholar in the history of the University.”2 This sentiment differs
dramatically from 1860 when the Euphradian society, a student literary group, repudiated
Lieber’s Union loyalties by expunging his name from their roll of honorary members and
removing his portrait from their society room. The University now claims his scholarly
endeavors as their own, oft citing his celebrity as the author of the Encyclopedia
Americana, even though he completed this project prior to arriving in 1835. Renaming

the faculty residence for the renowned scholar in 193 7, the community maintains a

personal image of Lieber reﬂected in the use of his former residence as a tribute to his

 

' Neil White, “Reeling Through the Years: Pseudo-Historical Tidbits about the History of Your USC” The
State. August 24, 2007 (Columbia, SC).

2 This quote is taken from the official USC website. Please see the description of the building at:
Myth/WWW.sc.eduluscnraptbldg/lieber.html. Also note that the archival photos of the building also contain
this wording. http://digital.tcl.sc.edu..t’cdm4/item_viewer.plrp?ClSOROOTT—‘t’UltﬁzClSOPTRI49&REC:l

 

 

215

contribution. Further buttressing this image, White solidiﬁed the public memory of
Lieber as a man tied intimately to the social functions of the college.3

While Lieber remains an important part of the University of South Carolina
landscape, he has faded into obscurity at Columbia University. Even though he composed
his most signiﬁcant contribution to society while at CU—General Orders Number 100 (a
code of war) completed shortly after the bloody battle of Antietam in 1862, few
remember Lieber as professor at the University. These laws of war, particularly those
pertaining to “enemy combatants,” remain especially relevant in our own time by
prohibiting torture and cruelty, protecting prisoners and forbidding assassinations, and
distinguishing between soldiers and noncombatants. It further “forbade attacks motivated
by revenge and the inﬂiction of suffering for its own sake.”4 In spite of this contribution
to the world, when walking around Morningside Heights today, you will not see any
memorials or testaments to Lieber’s existence at Columbia University. Created in 1904
by an act of the Board of Trustees, the Lieber Professorship of History and Political
Philosophy in the Political Science Department has fallen into obscurity. Inquiring to the
political science department in September 2007 about this chair, I was told that in the last
ﬁﬁeen years no one in the political science department had held that position.5

These two Lieber memories—one almost nonexistent and the other emphasizing
the social components of education (teetering on misconception)—offer education

historians a glimpse of the antebellum college’s past. The South Carolinian reminiscence

 

3 Hollis, University of South Carolina, 133 and 251. It is important to note that he wrote the Encyclopedia
Americana before coming to the College in 1835. It was published 1829-1833.

4 John Fabian Witt, “Lincoln’s Law of war: How he built the code that Bush attempted to destroy”
Slate.com posted February I I, 2009. httpzl/www.slate.com/idf221091Stipagenurn/alI/JELZ

5 Personal correspondence with Kay Archer in the author’s possession. September 7, 2007. Thanks must be
extended to John Witt who offered insight on the Lieber Professorship at Columbia University during a
very fruitful summer at the Henry E. Huntington Library.

 

216

reminds us of their emphasis on the creation of a close-knit community, while
Columbia’s anamnesis evokes the intimacy lost to the urban environment and research
orientation. Each school’s present mission statement further emphasizes this point. USC
underscores its responsibilities to students and the community (embodied in the city and
the state) and CU, ﬁrst and foremost, calls attention to its position as a research
institution beneﬁtting the entire globe. These purposes are not necessarily antithetical, but
operate as outgrowths of their nineteenth-century heritage.

Both memories fail to acknowledge the work of those laborers who ensured the
day-to-day operations of the college. More than simple laborers, these free and bonded
individuals brought a sense of difference to the college community and thus, served as a
stabilizing force. One the one hand, their presence helped faculty and students deﬁne
themselves according to the status quo of race, class, and gender prescriptions. On the
other hand, these laborers created opportunities to subvert the prescribed social order
compelling recognition of their status as “men” or asserting agency through sexuality. At
both South Carolina College and Columbia College, laborers created and sustained their
own communities intertwined with that of broader social and cultural educational
objectives.

Moreover, despite regional inﬂuences, a key component of these educational
goals for faculty members at both institutions was guiding students into an intellectual
manhood that revered deep, independent, rational thinking. It was in this capacity that
professors forged a sense of autonomy through the personal and intimate relationships
that they developed with students as a method of instructing and modeling manhood.

New York and South Carolina professors worked under common paternalistic rubrics and

217

 

they consciously employed a similar idiom of friendship rooted in classical texts to
appeal to students on a personal level. The venues and contexts in which these
relationships were cultivated reﬂected regional and residential differences as Columbia
faculty and students embraced the urban environment, but Carolinians refashioned
campus space for the development of these friendships. The college campus was in
constant ﬂux as families, laborers, and professors fashioned and refashioned spaces to
meet their needs, but students extended their deﬁnition of the collegiate experience to
included space outside of the campus.

By comparing these two colleges, it is clear that a key component of the students’
educational experience was the development of a regionally deﬁned sense of manhood.
Within the burgeoning urban environment of New York City, students found a sense of
anonymity and experimented with alternative masculine identities often considered
unacceptable to their elite status. Moving namelessly among the immigrants, workers,
and poor, students temporarily became a part of a different life, but returned to the
security of their elite status. Embedded in a rigid social hierarchy resting precariously
upon the ability of elite white men to retain their positions at the top, the elite students of
South Carolina College, for their part, were left with little space to explore alternative
masculinities. Rather than providing a space for experimentation, the city of Columbia
provided various arenas for students to demonstrate their worthiness as southern white
men. In asserting these divergent masculine identities, it is clear that the city and the
students were not engaged in a constant battle as some historians have posited. Shaped by
regional deﬁnitions of masculinity, the city offered students arenas for proving

themselves “men.”

218

 

Buttressing this demonstration of the role of masculinity in the experiences of
students is the case of German e'migré scholar, Francis Lieber. His correspondence
illustrates that intellectual friendship could transcend the collegiate environment as he
created an epistolary milieu rich with emotion. More important for our understanding of
the issue of masculinity in antebellum higher education, however, is the evidence of how
his friendships were rooted in a speciﬁc conception of masculinity that required honest,
open, intellectual exchange. As southern ideas of masculinity placed constraints on male
emotion, Lieber drew from his European background to imagine and practice friendships

outside of the college boundaries as well as outside of the region. Although he actively

 

pursued emotional and intellectual ﬁiendships with women, he recognized American
limitations on intimate relationships between unmarried men and women. Through
constant epistolary exchange, Lieber created a network of intimate friendships rooted in
intellectualism that allowed him to escape the perceived emotional desert of South
Carolina.

By pushing beyond the study of formal classroom instruction, this dissertation has
illustrates that the American antebellum community was far more heterogeneous than
scholars have previously acknowledged. The physical form of the campus combined with
the internal diversity to support the social reproduction of dominant familial and
gendered ideals. Nevertheless, these institutions were consistently in ﬂux and the
meaning of the college experience simultaneously meant different things to different
people. As such, laborers found moments to break from social expectations within their
workplace, while students had to leave the campus to ﬁnd a reciprocal sense of

autonomy. Within each institution region and social positioning to determine whether or

219

not the college fostered subversion and reproduction of social order, but despite these
differences a common culture of education rooted in an transregional intellectual
manhood colored the way that faculty and students interacted with one another. The
antebellum college provided important social and cultural instruction that was not
directly tied to its curriculum, but rather located in the ubiquitous moments and emotional

spaces outside of the classroom.

220

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