Erika Lindemann
The 1840s did not begin auspiciously for faculty members, who once
again were preoccupied with putting down student rebellions. Beginning in 1838
students organized themselves into "combinations" to perpetrate
mischief, calling themselves members of the
Ugly Club and
the
Boring
Club.
1 Even
though faculty members required students to sign pledges promising not to join
such clubs and checked on students nightly in their dormitories, periodic
"sprees" nevertheless took place. In mid-August 1840, for a period of
three weeks, student rebellions became especially persistent. Students doused
faculty members with water when they attempted to enter
Old West;
stones, bricks, and furniture were thrown from dormitory windows; first-year
students headed into the woods after dark for a "freshman treat" and
returned "hallooing and shouting"; "the bell was rung
indefinitely"; and students stole horses and rode them through the campus
late at night (Letter from
Elisha
Mitchell
to
Charles
Manly
, September 11, 1840, University Papers, UA). Shortly thereafter,
students held a mock religious revival in front of
South
Building, leaving campus afterwards to paint a professor's horses to
look like zebras. They also cut the mane and tail off a horse and placed him in
the old chapel (
Battle 1:465). A few weeks later all of the
University's blackboards were stolen. When
Professor
James Phillips
announced that textbooks should not be carried into his
recitation room, students again rebelled.
Though dismissing large numbers of students was an option, the
faculty chose instead to elicit their cooperation, encouraging them to sign
pledges against further misbehavior. Only those few students who refused
ultimately were dismissed. Eventually order was restored. Throughout the 1840s,
however, students went on sprees from time to time. Despite numerous
regulations prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcohol, "getting
tight" was a perennial pastime for students and a common means of defying
authority.
2
By 1840 over 600 students had graduated from the
University since it opened its doors, and approximately the
same number had matriculated without earning a degree. Well over that
number—1,602 students—enrolled in the decade between 1840 and 1850
alone. The average annual enrollment in the 1840s was 160 students, with 30 to
40 students graduating every year (
"Matriculates and Graduates" 14).
Tuition increased to $50 per year in 1843, and room and board cost
between $80 to $100 annually, depending on where a student
lived.
Enrollment increases were the result of two significant
developments.
North
Carolinians, like southerners in general, were increasingly conscious of
their regional identity, especially of their political and economic differences
with the
North. Parents
who could afford college educations for their sons increasingly resisted
sending them to northern schools and enrolled them at
Chapel
Hill instead. Second, in January 1839
North Carolina's General Assembly had finally enacted a law
to establish common or public schools funded at taxpayers' expense. The first
school under this new legislation was opened in
Rockingham County in January 1840. By the end of the decade
there were 2,657 such schools in addition to some 630 private and religious
academies (Powell, North Carolina through Four
Centuries 290). Though many
North
Carolinians were still indifferent to education, the establishment of
common schools was a progressive step toward preparing the next generation of
the state's citizens for increased responsibility in civic and professional
life. Public schools also made it possible for young men to receive the
preparation necessary for study at the
University, and increasing numbers of them took advantage of
the opportunity.
The faculty of the 1840s included
President
Swain
, who also taught law;
Elisha
Mitchell
, professor of chemistry, geology, and mineralogy;
James
Phillips
, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy;
Manuel
Fetter
, professor of Greek;
John
De Berniere Hooper
, professor of Latin;
William
Mercer Green
, professor of rhetoric and logic;
Charles
Force Deems
, adjunct professor of rhetoric and logic; a professor of
French;
3 and two
tutors, one for languages and one for mathematics.
Gov.
Swain
heard seven recitations a week; most of the rest of the faculty,
ten recitations; the tutors, fifteen. The president earned $2,000 per
year; faculty members, $1,250, except for
Hooper
, whose salary was $1,000; the tutors,
$600. Faculty salaries were geared to enrollments, so whenever tuition
receipts exceeded $6,000 in a year, faculty salaries rose to
$1,500. As Bursar,
Mitchell
was entitled to a commission for collecting the
tuition, which added approximately $600 to his annual salary (
Battle
1:462, 467).
Deems
had been hired to provide additional support in
composition and oratory, areas of the curriculum previously handled by
Green
alone.
Deems
describes his duties in his autobiography:
For years the chair of rhetoric and logic had been occupied by the
Rev.
Dr. William Mercer Green
, an
Episcopal clergyman, reared in
Wilmington, well connected and well known, a gentleman and a
scholar—especially a gentleman of very suave and pleasing manners. The
duties of the chair were divided and the harder portion assigned to me. I had
to take the department of logic, but also assisted in the department of
rhetoric, in the correction of compositions, and in the teaching of elocution.
Before my advent the only book on logic used in the university was that most
absurd and contemptible little
treatise by
Professor
Hedge,
4 of
Harvard
University, a book bearing the title of logic, with every essential
thing belonging to logic left out. I adopted
Whately's
treatise
5 and
commenced with the junior class, in which there was not a single student who
could not have taken me by the nape of the neck and put me out of the window,
and I managed to make work for the class; so much so that they complained to
the president that this young professor was making the department of logic
absolutely more difficult than the department of mathematics. (
Deems 82)
Deems
and
Hooper
both resigned in 1848. The following year
Green
also left, which meant replacing almost half the
faculty by the end of the decade.
Professor
Mitchell's
science classes appear to be the first in the
University's history to include women as guests. On July 21,
1841, as
William S. Mullins
reports in his diary, "This Class
convened in the Labrotary at half past eight and heard
Dr.
Mitchell,s
opening Lecture on the Science of Chemistry. Misses
Margaret and
Ellen
Mitchell, and
Miss
Whitaker were also present, and perhaps drew off a little attention that
should have been given to the Lecture" (
William S. Mullins Papers, SHC).
Mitchell
began the class with a lecture that
"embraced nearly an hour and a half and he gave us a lesson to prepare for
Recitation at eleven, so that the intermediate time is generally pretty well
employed." Science classes did not include laboratory work for students
until 1854. Experiments and demonstrations, when they were conducted, were
performed by faculty members.
In March 1844 a group of students led by
Edmund Deberry Covington
launched
The North Carolina University
Magazine
, the
University's first literary magazine. Published "By a
committee of the senior class," the first issue of forty-eight pages
contained eight essays and two poems, all either unsigned or appearing over
pseudonyms.
6 A
"Publisher's Department" reprinted newspaper items concerning
politics, the economy, medicine, and literature, extracts inserted by the
magazine's publisher,
Thomas
Loring
of
Raleigh. An
annual subscription cost three dollars. The editors, whose names were not
listed, introduced their magazine with an "Address to Patrons" urging
the support of readers: "Such as it is, we commend it to you, as a
voluntary offering—a token of our devotion to Literature. We present it
as a flower in the bud. It is for you to determine, whether it shall wither and
die, from neglect, or increase in beauty and fragrance, and expand under the
genial sunshine of public favor" [
The North Carolina
University Magazine 1 (March 1844): 2, NCC]. After nine issues the
Magazine
ceased publication, deprived
of the liberal patronage for which its editors had hoped. It was revived in
1852, however, and though its publication history has been interrupted several
times, the
Magazine's present-day successor, the
Carolina Quarterly
, is still run entirely by
students.
As already noted, semester examinations took place twice a year,
before the
Christmas
vacation and before commencement in June. Until the end of the decade, these
examinations were oral, lasted between one and two hours per course, and
"counted hardly more than single recitations" (
Battle 1:554). The
first written examination given in a
University subject was a "paper" test on algebra
administered to the sophomore class in May 1849 by mathematics tutor
Charles
Phillips
. Though
Phillips
had examined his students "by papers"
as early as Fall 1844, the examination had not come at the end of the term, and
its novelty in 1849 created a rebellion among the students.
Phillips
reports, "On the night before the morning
appointed for the examination, I was told, to my very great surprize, that the
class, with the exception of two members had resolved in writing not to submit
to the examination, as it was unprecedented and tyrannical" (
Faculty
Minutes 4:flyleaf, UA). Only four sophomores ultimately were persuaded to take
the written examination.
The 1847 Commencement was especially memorable because President
James Knox Polk
returned to his alma mater. Preparations for his visit
included repainting college buildings
7 and
faculty houses, replacing the wooden benches in
Gerrard
Hall with pews, and generally sprucing up the campus.
Nancy Hilliard
, owner of the
Eagle
Hotel, added a smart new two-story addition to her establishment, where
the
President
and his entourage stayed from May 31 to June 4.
Though
Polk
gave only a brief speech in response to
Gov.
Swain's
welcoming remarks, the
President
attended all of the commencement exercises,
shook hands with hundreds of guests who had come to
Chapel
Hill to see him, and revisited his old room on the third floor of
South
Building. According to
Polk
the visit was "an exceedingly agreeable one": "My reception at
the
University, and the attentions paid me on the route going
and returning, was all that I could have desired it to be."
8
Endnotes:
1. "To be bored" meant "to be irritated," the
objective of the
Boring
Club being to irritate faculty members.
2.
Acts of the General Assembly and Ordinances of
the Trustees for the Organization and Government of the University of
North-Carolina (Raleigh: Office of the Raleigh Register, 1838).
William K.
Blake, writing to
Richard
Irby in
Virginia on
October 3, 1845, describes an almost annual event:
Our regular Sessional Spree came off last Friday week, about 20
or 30 fellows disguised with calico coats and pants, and paper hats plumed with
chicken feathers sallied out in the campus about 11 o'clock at night. They
commenced ringing the bell, blowing horns, shooting pistols, and then forming a
line, would charge against the trees, and piles of Rocks with a savage
vengeance. The Faculty came on the ground, and one attempted to enter one of
the passages; the fellows ducked him with two buckets of water, pelted him with
apples and finally threw a wash basin at him which made him desist. The Spors
in the campus marched round to each of the Tutor's rooms and rocked their
windows; after which they dispersed. But the Faculty had concealed themselves
near the entrance of the passages, and recognized the fellows as they would go
in their rooms. They had up about 20, but only 5 were dismissed; the others
were too slipery tongued to be caught. (
Knight 3:324-25)
3. The teaching of French, sporadic at best during the 1830s,
remained so for the early 1840s. In 1841
John
Jones Roberts
, a member of the class of 1838 who had studied in
France for two
years, joined the faculty as professor of French.
Roberts
resigned the following year, and the position went
to
Thomas
S. Barshall, a Frenchman, who held it for only a few months. Thereafter,
teaching French in addition to Latin became
John De Berniere Hooper's
responsibility until he left the
faculty in 1848.
4.
Levi
Hedge,
Elements of Logick (Cambridge, MA: Hilliard
and Metcalf, 1816).
5.
Richard
Whately,
Elements of Logic
(London: Fellowes,
1826).
6.
"American Poetry,"
"Miscellaneous Writings by Thomas B. Macaulay,"
"The Abuse of the Press,"
"Henry Erskine,"
"Revolutionary History—North Carolina,"
"Stray
Leaves of History—No. 1,"
"The
Military Academy at
West
Point: System of Appointing Cadets,"
"Rural Economy,"
"What Is Life?" (poem) ,
"Lines Addressed to an Aged Poplar, Standing in the College
Grove" (poem) [The North Carolina University
Magazine 1 (March 1844): contents, NCC].
7. In 1848 new additions to the
West and
East
buildings extended these dormitories northward by half their original length,
at a cost of $9,360 (Henderson 135-36).
Old East
became the home of
Philanthropic Society members;
Old West
belonged to the
Dialectic
Society. New society halls were located on the second floor of each
building, the third floor housing the society libraries, which by this time
numbered 7,000 volumes each.
8.
Milo
Milton Quaife, ed.,
The Diary of
James K.
Polk
, During His Presidency, 1845 to 1849 (Chicago: McClurg,
1910), quoted in
Henderson
95. An account of
President
Polk's
trip, written by "
The Doctor," a correspondent for the
New York Herald
, is housed in the SHC.