College of Charleston Voices: Campus and Community Through the Centuries

By The History Press

In 1770, the founders of the College of Charleston realized their dream of establishing an institution built upon the goal of instructing young minds with a traditional liberal arts education. As the oldest institution of higher learning in South Carolina, the College of Charleston has played an integral role in the development of a variety of young men and women from the Palmetto State and beyond. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, this group of students current and former has enjoyed a unique college experience that they have chronicled and shared in letters to family and friends, diaries, student newspapers, journals and, more recently, e-mails. These personal accounts reveal the effect that the College of Charleston has had on its students for generations, and the ways in which those students have shaped the college s long history.

This engaging book features a collection of correspondences written by College of Charleston students, from the school s earliest years to the present day. Individually, these writings offer a candid glimpse into students daily lives during several periods throughout the college s history. Considered together, the thoughts, concerns and opinions found within paint a fascinating picture of the past at the College of Charleston.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jan 7, 2006
• ISBN: 9781614235606

Book preview

Authors

Preface

In the heart of downtown Charleston, South Carolina, on narrow George Street, stands a two-storied gatehouse known as the Porter’s Lodge. Four Tuscan columns adorn this Roman triumphal arch, and its rosy stucco is faded by age and spotted with moss. The Lodge announces the College of Charleston, a name asking to be spoken with heavy emphasis on Charleston, that small southern city so momentously enmeshed in the history of the colony, of the country and of all its wars. The uniqueness of the city itself has always been a powerful influence on every local institution, on every citizen.

Charlestonians love their city with a devotion they readily admit is irrational. Josephine Pinckney, a student at the College in 1919, has the character Lucien in her best known novel Three O’Clock Dinner muse: The swampy area on which he had been born, had lived, and hoped to die was probably in no way superior to similar acreages… but no…that was hardly true…some special lucence bathed this plot of ground, he insisted…this precious stone set in a slightly muddy sea. For people loved it with extravagance…in spite of its absurdities, its gross failures. Perhaps because of them…

An irrational love of Charleston is common indeed, here where a sense of the past seems to hang in the air—especially in the College quadrangle. Those who walk through the gateway of the Porter’s Lodge enter one of the most beautiful spaces in the city and one of the loveliest college campuses anywhere. Live oaks draped with Spanish moss line the brick walkway that leads from the Lodge to the Cistern, the raised circle of grass that was once a public water supply, catching the rainwater from the leaking roof of College Hall. In the twentieth century, College Hall was renamed Randolph Hall for Harrison Randolph, made president of the College at age twenty-six in 1897 and its stalwart leader for more than forty years. Fittingly, Randolph Hall serves as both spiritual and physical center of the campus, the six great Ionic columns of its raised and pedimented porch attesting to the seriousness and permanence of the College of Charleston.

Since its founding, the College of Charleston has for more than two centuries provided higher education for the youth of the city. Then, a few professors could and did constitute the entire faculty for the student body of fewer than one hundred local young men. Today, the faculty numbers some two thousand and the student body over ten thousand; they now come from every state and more than seventy countries. But today’s thriving institution—with its six separate schools, carefully preserved old buildings and graceful new ones—emerged only through hard-fought victory over adversity. In fact, the College weathered so much adversity—lack of funds, dilapidated buildings, leaking roofs, yellow fever, unruly students, Civil War, earthquakes, hurricanes, racial tensions—that its very survival seems miraculous.

But survive it has, this college that Charleston invented and nourished and sustained. And it is naturally as special, precious and unique as the city itself. Charlestonians, in fact, constitute what biologists call an endemic species. Thus, from the beginning, graduates of the College of Charleston became the doctors and lawyers, teachers and ministers, merchants and civil servants of the town, dutifully carrying on the planter tradition and revering its code of behavior. Faculty of the College also revered the past, especially the classical tradition, and required all students to take three years of Latin and Greek until as late as the 1970s. Some notable alums, however, remembered a different past—one that included the evils of slavery and racism—and worked very much against the grain. John C. Fremont, class of 1836, served as a major general in the Union Army. Judge J. Waties Waring, class of 1900, wrote the dissenting opinion (Segregation is per se inequality) in Briggs v. Elliott, a case absorbed into the epoch-making Brown v. The Board of Education. But for most graduates of its College, Charleston seemed a harmonious place. Thus, Robert Marks, a student in the 1920s, returned to his native city in the 1970s and remembered the sweetness of the campus, the gentleness. Most of the professors had gone to the College themselves, so there was no separation between town and gown, the gown was the town.

The history of the College, so subject to local conditions, also provides a telling chapter in the development of American higher education from colonial times to the present. In 1935 the Board of Trustees published history professor J.H. Easterby’s carefully researched work, The History of the College of Charleston, and there has been no institutional history since. We have not tried to write one. Rather, using primary sources, we have allowed participants to tell the story of the college in their own voices.. To these documents, we have added only brief explanatory introductions. Among the most persistent voices is the anonymous one that insists upon a founding date of 1770. Thus, the College calls itself the thirteenth oldest academic institution in the country and the nation’s oldest municipal college. The very nature of the College as a city school has, however, confronted us with unique difficulties. For the first century and half, students at the College had no need to write letters home. They all lived there. Since so few letters were written, we have had to find the voices of Charleston’s College in other genres: minutes, newspapers, literary magazines, yearbooks, journals, diaries and memoirs. Some of the texts we recovered were written by students or alumni from battlefields—or prisons.

Though it has been said that the business of America is forgetting—immigrants striving to partake in the national identity abandon their mother tongues and ethnic origins—in marked contrast, the business of Charleston has always been remembering: remembering lands and servants, ancestors and kinfolk, rituals and romances, achievements and even defeats. As one of the College’s most famous nineteenth-century graduates, James Dunwody Brownson DeBow, wrote elegaically in his college reminiscence: Bring me back the beautiful past—the youth of hope and joy—the heart fluttering with each new prospect, and chasing away upon light wing the momentary intrusion of care. Thus, many of our sources are reconstructions of the past, memoirs written long after the author’s actual college experience and inevitably colored by that golden haze of memory. But who is to say which is more real: one’s years in college or one’s memory of them?

We want to thank those at the College who encouraged us, two professors from off, as we began our project. Sue Sommer-Kresse, senior vice-president for Institutional Advancement, and David Cohen, dean of Libraries, were the first to offer support. Tony Meyer, executive secretary emeritus of the Alumni Association, shared his wealth of knowledge about the College as well as his files.

This project, like all historical studies, was made possible only by the many expert archivists who organize and protect the documents of the past and who help researchers discover and recover texts. At the College of Charleston’s Library, those who manage the Special Collections offered us a warm welcome and endless help. We are especially grateful to Marie Ferrara for her infectious cheerfulness and expert management of the collection, to Gene Waddell for his insider knowledge, to John W. White for his willingness to explain arcane history and to Anne Bennett for finding whatever we wanted. Nicholas Butler at the Charleston Country Public Library and Harlan Greene at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture gave us excellent advice and directed us to important historical collections. At the South Caroliniana Library, Henry Fulmer, Robin Copp and Elizabeth West helped us on yet another project. Staff at the South Carolina Historical Society, the Charleston Library Society and the Library of Congress also offered invaluable assistance.

Others at the College of Charleston who shared their memories or their expertise include: Theodore Stern, Amy McCandless, Larry Carlson, Bonnie Devet, Amber Stegelin, Martha Attisano, Michael W. Haga, Meredith English and Loren Bridges. Alex Moore, class of 1970 and acquisitions editor at the University of South Carolina Press, again offered advice and support. Kirsty Sutton and Julie Foster at The History Press made publication of this book possible and painless. H.W. Matalene and Esther Gallieshaw provided valuable technical assistance.

Many loyal alumni and faculty made time for us to interview them, and we want to thank: Jack P. Brickman, Margaret Welch Lever, Arlinda Locklear, Elizabeth Fletcher Cole, Harry Freeman, Margaret Smith Freeman, Frank Aydelotte Rice, Lucille Simmons Whipper, Mary Croghan Ramsay, Otto B. German, Kenneth Riley, Jane Lucas Thornhill, Elise Pinckney and Marianne Sullivan.

Padgett Powell generously gave us permission to quote from Edisto. Jennet Robinson Alterman talked to us about her father’s role in the College drama program. Dawn Brock Crone sent us her recollections and Anne Hawkes made her daughter Ellen Hawkes’s e-mails available to us. Thomas Henry let us reprint his e-mails to his grandparents, Brittany Warren wrote about her internship and Alex Sanders shared his letter file.

Now we have both moved to Charleston, attracted by its special lucence, and now we know why all those associated with the College of Charleston, past and present, love and revere its beautiful quadrangle, dedication to learning and unquenchable spirit.

A Note on Archival Editing

The letters, journal entries and other written records appearing in this volume generally are excerpted versions of the originals in order to allow space for numerous documents. Salutations and closings of letters are retained only when their wording connotes something of interest about the sender or recipient. Dates and locations of origin, when included in the original, are worked into introductory head notes.

As editors, we retained as much of authors’ original writing styles as possible in the excerpts. We silently corrected only those spelling errors and small grammatical mistakes that appeared to be careless, one-time occurrences and might cause confusion for readers.

When writers referred to themselves or to others by last names or by initials only, we added full names in brackets when identification was possible. Additionally, for students we added class years when these were available and would assist in identification.

Charles Town Needs a College

One of the earliest mentions of a college for Charles Town appeared in the rules founding the Charles Town Library Society: Rules of the Society for erecting a Library, and raising a Fund for an Academy at Charles Town, South Carolina; begun the 28th of December, 1748. But the fund was not raised, and the members of the Society, many of whom were also members of the General Assembly, proposed legislation to found a college in 1770. Then the Revolution intervened and even the siege and surrender of Charleston. But with the war won—partly by South Carolina’s militias—the College was officially chartered in 1785. A few years later, sixty students from the Reverend Doctor Robert Smith’s academy became the first students of Charleston College Academy, with Dr. Smith as principal. The impressive curriculum consisted of Greek and Latin as well as mathematics, astronomy, logic, natural philosophy, chemistry, geography and elocution. Students performed daily recitations and underwent yearly examinations, conscientiously attended by members of the Board of Trustees.

Now the city had a college and the boys could stay at home. But in spite of Dr. Smith’s efforts and local interest and philanthropy, the school struggled along with drunken tutors, scarce funds and fewer and fewer students, sometimes functioning as a high school, not a college. The trustees undoubtedly thought they were doing the right thing when they persuaded the Reverend Jasper Adams to return from his northern post and again assume the presidency in 1828. They were wrong. Although in 1830 sixty-two students were enrolled in the college—the highest number until 1904—and a number of the graduates distinguished themselves professionally, Adams managed to offend everyone, and by 1835 the College had dwindled to just seventeen students and the faculty—except Adams—had resigned. In 1837, the Board closed the College and negotiated with the city for financial support. Adams, however, unabashed, began the tradition of the memoir by writing his anonymous but self-serving history of the College and publishing it in 1839.

Sending Boys Abroad

In the colonial period, gentlemen planters sent their sons to Europe, especially to England to be educated. Thus, in his History of South Carolina, 1809, David Ramsay, whose grandson would graduate from the College years later, asserted:

None of the British provinces in proportion to their numbers sent so many of their sons to Europe for education as South Carolina… South Carolina has furnished to the United States two Presidents of the revolutionary Congress; a Chief-Justice and an Associate-Judge of the supreme court; six diplomatic characters; a comptroller and treasurer; three General officers for the revolutionary army; a Major-General for the army of 1798, and a Brigadier-General for the army of 1808. With the exception of Virginia, no State in the Union has obtained a greater, or even an equal proportion of national honors. This was in some degree the consequence of the attention paid by the early settlers of Carolina to the liberal education of their children.

To have sons educated in England was both socially prestigious and academically desirable as Hugh Swinton Legare, himself educated at South Carolina College in Columbia, noted:

Before, and just after the Revolution, youth of opulent families were educated at English schools and universities. There can be no doubt their attainments in polite literature were very far superior to those of their contemporaries at the North, and the standard of scholarship in Charleston was consequently much higher than in any other city on the continent.

But many Lowcountry citizens thought that sending boys abroad was wrong, among them Henry Laurens, who in 1771 wrote to his friend Benjamin Elliott in Philadelphia:

That Necessity which we are at present reduced to, of sending our Children away from Carolina in order to obtain Education is owing wholly to our own Neglect and Obstinacy—and it is therefore a great Reproach upon our Public character. I have been more than once distress’d on that Account, when Gentlemen have enquired of me in these Parts what makes you send your Children to Philadelphia for Education?—Have you no Schools in Carolina, or is it owing to the unhealthfulness of that Country? I could not admit the latter—and tho’ truth obliged me to confirm the first Suggestion, yet I have been ashamed to assign the true Cause of our Barrenness…I wish more and more to see the Beginning of a College near Charles Town. I should receive the Accounts of such a Beginning as one of the most agreeable Parts of Intelligence from my native Land—more Pleasure to me would result from such Intelligence than I am capable of feeling from the Accounts of the most flourishing State of our Plantations and our Commerce.

Furthermore, boys abroad learned such bad habits. Dr. Alexander Garden, a Charleston physician, wrote to Henry Laurens in 1774:

I have now another request to make which is, to favour me with your opinion of the Comparative state of Education in Geneve and England. You will perceive that my view in this request is pretty much Interested as I have a Boy who must soon go to some University to pursue his Education & from all hands I have such Accounts of the Relaxed state of Education at Oxford & Cambridge that I really tremble to put my Son to either.

Charleston needed its own college, and loyal citizens left money in their wills before the Revolution for just such an institution. But Timothy Ford, an attorney who would eventually serve on the Board of Trustees, writing in his diary in 1786, lamented the lack of a local college:

That there is but little of the spirit of Education here is evident (if it needs to be made more so) in that there has been ample provision made for the endowment of a College by persons who saw with regret the unletter’d situation the State was in on their death beds; and yet nobody has the spirit to draw them forth into utility. This appears the more extraordinary after reflecting that many send their young sons to England for education from whence they generally return but little more improved & much more dissipated than they went—& after this much expense has been lavished upon them.

The College is Chartered

The first such provision had been made in 1770 when Benjamin Smith bequeathed five hundred pounds sterling for the erection of a college, hence the conjectural dating of the College’s founding in that year. Other bequests soon followed even in the midst of the Revolution. But for years, nothing happened. Then in 1785, an act founding three colleges was passed by the General Assembly. The sole historian of the College of Charleston, J.H. Easterby, begins his volume:

Because the proper education of youth is essential to the happiness and prosperity of every community there was passed on March 19, 1785, by the General Assembly of South Carolina an act for erecting and establishing the College of Cambridge, in the district of Ninety-Six; Mount Zion College, at Winnsborough, in the district of Camden; and the College of Charleston, in or near the city of Charleston. Of these three institutions the first was soon abandoned; the second became and continues to this day a useful academy or secondary school; only the third, the College of Charleston, attained the full purposes of its establishment.

Though the bequests were difficult to collect after the Revolution, the College of Charleston was well provided for in land. The General Assembly had appropriated ten acres, from George to Calhoun Street and from Coming to St. Philip Street, including two rows of brick barracks, erected to house the soldiers defending Charleston. But the newly established Board of Trustees, meeting between sessions in the State House in Columbia, could do little but worry about collapsing buildings.

Report of the Committee from Feb 28, 1786:

We the Committee Report—that on examining the buildings erected on the land belonging to the College, we found them so much out of all repair that on consulting workmen, the expense of repairing the same was too great for the present low ebb of resources belonging to the College—and as the legacies bequeathed, cannot be realized for some years—Recommend that the buildings be let out in Tenements on Leases for a term of time not exceeding 7 years and that such Tenement have an allotment of ground sufficient for a yard and garden etc.

Not until March 14, 1789, do the minutes report progress:

The Revd. R Smith proposed to the Trustees to lay the foundations of the College by giving up to it, on the 1st day of January next the youth in his Academy, amounting to sixty Scholars.

School Starts at Last

Robert Smith was elected principal of the College, and he loaned the College enough money to repair the buildings, a debt that his heirs would one day collect with interest. But at last there were students so the examinations could begin:

At a meeting of the Trustees of Charleston College—in the College School, Tuesday the 28th of April 1790, "The Youth in the Academy having been examined—unanimously agreed—that the same be announced to the public as follows—

Present: Thomas Bee, Pres

Richard Hutson, Vice Pres

David Ramsay

David De Saussure

Gabriel Manigault

The Trustees of the Charleston College from an examination of the Youth of the College of Charleston Academy on Wednesday, the 28th April experience the most sensible pleasure in thus publickly announcing that the various specimens exhibited by the youth in their several literary pursuits, reflected the highest honour on the ability, assiduity and attention of the Principal, and other members of the faculty of that infant Seminary, and that they afford the most flattering prospect of its fully answering the sanguine expectation of the Public, and of its rapid rise to eminence and respectability in the American Republic of Letters.

An alumnus of those early years was the artist Charles Fraser, who would serve as secretary and treasurer on the Board of Trustees from 1817 to 1855. Fraser’s Reminiscences of Charleston includes this account of the campus and his extracurricular experiences there:

I was at that time a pupil in the Charleston College, which was kept in one of the old brick barracks, that had been fitted up for its accommodation, and which, with the corresponding one parallel to it, about one hundred fifty yards to the west, were almost insulated buildings. This latter was taken down about the same time, for I remember the helping hand which the boys gave at the ropes.

We had quite a domain to the north and west for a campus, or play ground, and it was not an uncommon amusement for us to dig musket balls out of the old ramparts. We were also, occasionally, entertained with an execution, for that neighbourhood was the Tyburn of Charleston; and I remember once seeing one of the gentler sex step gracefully from the scaffold into the air. Hanging was much more frequent then than it is now.

When the corner-stone of the Orphan House was laid, in 1792, the college boys were made to form a procession; on which occasion, as one of them, I remember that the Rev. Dr. Smith, our principal, pronounced an address. Mr. John Huger, our then Intendant, a tried patriot of the revolution, as indeed both these gentlemen were, stood at his side. It was truly, with all its associations, a most interesting spectacle; for they were both standing on the declivity of the old ramparts.

In 1794, and after many more examinations, the first degrees were granted and proudly announced and later even engraved on a stone table in Randolph Hall:

On Friday the 17th inst. was held the first Commencement in the Charleston College when the degree of Batchelor of Arts was conferred on the following young Gentlemen five of whom had been entirely educated at the College, viz.

John Callaghan

Samuel Thomas

Isaac McPherson

Nathaniel Bowen

William Heyward

John Lewis Gervais

For two days preceding the commencement the Candidates for Degrees underwent a strict Examination in the learned Languages, arts & Sciences in which they acquitted themselves in a manner that fairly entitled them to the literary honors which in older Colleges are usually conferred on the youthful votaries of Science. The other Students were also examined in the Presence of the Trustees and evinced that there had been Diligence on the part of the Teachers and application on the part of the Students. On the day of Commencement, the Rev. Dr. Smith, the Principal of the College, agreeable to a resolve of the Trustees, announced the Prizes of medals and Books which had been adjudged to the Scholars on their Examinations which were as follows:

First Class—To Samuel Thomas, the best Grecian, a Medal.

Second Class—The Grecians were so equal that the superiority could not be determined.

To Daniel Elliot Huger, the best Latinist, a Medal.

Third Class—To William Bohun Baker, the best Latinist, a Medal.

Fourth Class—To Benjamin Palmer, the best Latinist, a book.

Fifth Class—To John Pringle, the best Latinist, A Book.

A numerous and elegant assembly of Gentlemen and Ladies, who attended on the Commencement, were entertained with Public speaking, and expressed their approbation of the young orators with frequent & loud Plaudits. Among the many who acquitted themselves well, John Lewis Gervais made a distinguished figure. He spoke the valedictory Oration, which was both elegant and animated with the fire of youth, and the correctness and Propriety of riper years. With a feeling heart, he returned thanks to the Trustees, Principal, Professors and other teachers in the College, for their care of the Institution; and with the ardor of Patriotism, congratulated the Citizens at large, on the state of the College, which that day presented to their Service its first-born sons.

Charles Fraser, writing in 1854, remembered that day and those sons:

On the 17th of October, 1794, was held the first commencement of the Charleston College, when six young gentlemen were graduated with great promise of future usefulness. But in the case of four of them, public hope was disappointed, for they died young. Of the two who survived, one [William Heyward] chose the walks of private life, in which he was distinguished for every quality that adorns it. The other was the late Bishop Bowen—afterwards president of the college—and whose elevation in the church was the best recognition of his worth…I remember that the principal, on that occasion, wore his Cambridge (England) gown and trencher.

Adjunct Faculty

The respect for the British system of education inclined the Board to hire English tutors. Second sons, anxious to make a fortune in the new country, came to trade their learning for currency. One such opportunist, Caleb Cotton, wrote long letters home, beginning in May of 1799:

My dear Father and Mother,

I have at length the pleasure of announcing to you my arrival and appointment to the Mastership of Charleston College…there is a vacation here during the month of May, so that I have arrived at a fortunate time to commence my new office on the first Monday in June, when the College opens, until the month of December, the annual holidays being May and December. Tuesdays and Saturdays being half holidays here. I am very busy as Mr. Bee assures me that though the School is very much diminished, in consequence of there having been no regular Master for eighteen months past, yet that it will soon increase he has not the least doubt…Mr. Bee happens himself to be an Oriel man, our meeting thus unexpectedly in so far distant a place is singularly agreeable to us both, and of course affords many common