Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder Page B

northern and European scholars added to these tensions. The cotton wealth that funded southern education had enticed many ambitious northern- and European-born intellectuals to adapt to the slave regime. The pedigrees of intellectual outsiders came under greater scrutiny as slavery came under greater criticism in Atlantic discourses. The rapid expansion of the southern academy in the decades after the Revolution had brought a migration of scholars from the North and Europe to the plantation states. Academics looking for opportunities found new southern colleges and universities flush with money and students. They also found a growing defensiveness about slavery and a rising insecurity about the migration of people and ideas into the South. 48
    â€œI am a slaveholder, and, if I know myself, I am ‘sound on the slavery question,’” President Frederick A. P. Barnard responded to critics at the University of Mississippi. Toward the end of 1859 several students entered Barnard’s house while the president was away, with “shameful designs” upon an enslaved young woman named Jane. They assaulted Jane, beating her so severely that she carried scars and wounds for months, and one of them, Samuel Humphreys, raped her. When the faculty declined to dismiss Humphreys on the testimony of a black woman, the president ordered his expulsion. A divided faculty vote—the northerners voting with the northern-born president—and Barnard’s decision to dismiss the student brought accusations of race treason. Detractors accused the president of using “Negro evidence” against a white man. 49
    The faculty response to Barnard constituted a public unpacking and examination of the lineage and quality of the ideas that informed his moral and social judgments; it was an attempt to display the regional specificity of knowledge. “There were scores of thousands of [northern-born] men at the South in much the same position as he,” a biographer estimated, and many of them were scholars. Jefferson Davis, soon to be the president of the new Confederate government, sided with Barnard, making a public show of shaking the president’s hand during the controversy. Jacob Thompson, a university trustee, sent Barnard a note of support for exercising an honorable “paternalism” over his slaves. If Barnard’s actions signaled hostility toward slavery, Thompson added, “then I am a downright abolitionist.” Barnard left Mississippi at the outbreak of the Civil War, eventually taking the presidency of Columbia University, where he served for a quarter century. The trustees commemorated his death in 1889 with the dedication of Barnard College. 50
    Despite its troubled reputation, the University of Virginia saw its largest undergraduate classes in the years before the Civil War. Most of these students were southerners bound by the knowledge that they would soon take guardianship over an increasingly isolated region. They solidified their bonds with violent rituals, drunken games, and other passages into manhood. They had a well-known appetite for whiskey. Spirited contests and public disorder on campus—such as the chemistry faculty’s annual “Laughing-Gas Day”—were common and taxed the patience of administrations, but the campus soon became infamous for outright insurrections. On Thursday, November 12, 1840, a masked student began shouting and firing a pistol outside the house of John Davis, chairman of the faculty. Earlier that day, the student had borrowed a gun from a classmate, and declared his intention to defend his right to riot. When Davis went to the door to investigate the disturbance, the young man turned and shot him in the stomach. “He died a Christian hero, blessing his family and his weeping colleagues and friends,” William Barton Rogers, now a professor in Charlottesville, wrote to his brothers. It was part of a long and dangerous period,