The comments regarding southern colleges in the antebellum era certain have
a basis in fact, as do the comments about their denizens. The literacy rate
in the South was quite small compared to that of the North. The number of
southerners who acquired enough preparatory education to think realistically
about college was even smaller.
And while there were schools that were free, or the tuition was limited,
potential scholars and their parents still faced the opportunity costs of
attending -- something that kept almost ALL schooling the province of the "elites"
in both sections. The exceptions seem to have been those "mechanics" of the
South who "made good," and were determined that their sons would "work with
their heads" rather than their hands. The fathers often had the money -- and
occasionally the slaves -- to match the planter elite, but they lacked the
education. They determined their sons should have it. "Scholarships," as we
tend to think of them, were few and far between.
At the same time, there was quite a debate going on between, say, 1819
(UVA's founding) and the introduction of the Morrill Land-Grant Act to Congress in
1858 as to what a college education should be. The Yale Report of 1828
backed the "classical" education. If one peruses the pages of southern
newspapers of the era, one will be struck by the number of ads for academies that, for
boys anyway, offer Latin, the sine qua non for higher ed -- pun intended --
indicating that WAS the market. Francis Wayland, president of Brown, said
this was bunk in 1850, and argued for more "practical education." That was,
essentially, the basis of the land-grant schools. The problem was, no one
wanted to attend college to be a "practical" farmer, and engineering was an
apprentice-based occupation until after the War.
Madison did suggest a course of agriculture for UVA in 1822. Philip St.
George Cocke gave $20,000 to endow a professorship in agriculture at UVA in
1857; few attended. Francis Smith of VMI also backed agricultural education in
the late 1850s, as did DeBow's. The problem was that they assumed that
education would consist mainly of learning to manage estates -- and slaves. Justin
Morrill, a Vermont Republican, seems to have forgotten about slavery when he
offered his bill. Moreover, when Buchanan vetoed the original Morrill Act
he noted, in a rather snide obiter dictum, that "no father would incur the
expense a son to one of these instutitions for the sole pupose of making him a
scientific farmer or mechanic."
In any event, few attended ANY land-grant institutions UNTIL they took on
the trappings of traditional, belletristic, gentry-geared colleges. And even
then, southern attendance was limited to the few.
Sorry to be so long-winded.
Jim Watkinson
James D. Watkinson, Ph.D.
History Department
Virginia Commonwealth University
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