Anne:

The exception that "proves the rule": Berea College, founded in Kentucky in 1855 as the South's first interracial and coeducational college, charged no tuition; most of those admitted were Appalachians of limited means.

Most Southern and Northern colleges and universities in the antebellum decades were denominational in origin and subsisted on tuition. The ambitious young men of both regions who could not afford such tuition tended to pick up a professional education in someone's law offices (not in college per se). In the South, if such individuals managed to make a name for themselves, it was generally by imitating, marrying into, and serving the planter class--most certainly in those states where the commitment to plantation slavery was most secure, but much less often in those where slavery's hold was tenuous. As the Southern writer Richard Weaver put it in his 1968 book of essays, The Southern Tradition at Bay:

"It is a maxim that in every society education will ultimately serve the needs of the dominant class, and in the South this consisted of gentlemen planters, who contemplated lives of ease and independence.... The Southern planter, although his ancestors might have been tradesmen or yeomen, became, once he had perfected his material establishment in America, an aristocrat by calling, upon whom there devolved the work of keeping harmonious the efforts of a stratified and fairly complex community "(57).

The work of more recent social historians of education should be consulted by those who wish to see how this antebellum ideal turned out in practice. A good start, though one that focuses on the North, is Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism. Bledstein notes that books like The Education of Henry Adams--mentioned by Anne in her posting--reflected the prejudices of the culturally dominant North. Adams wrote, "Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament. He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two" (quoted in Bledstein, 29).

Doug Deal
History/SUNY Oswego
----- Original Message -----
From: Anne Pemberton <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Friday, December 14, 2007 9:23 pm
Subject: Southern Colleges
To: [log in to unmask]

> In a discussion about "The Education of Henry Adams", someone 
> remarked that 
> the colleges in the south were exclusively for the plantation 
> class. Can 
> someone provide examples of southern non-planter sons who 
> attended college 
> prior to the Civil War?
> 
> Thanks a bunch!
> 
> Anne
> 
> Anne Pemberton
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.erols.com/apembert
> http://www.educationalsynthesis.org 
> 
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