The Village on the Plain: Auburn University, 1856–2006

By Dwayne Cox

Auburn University possesses a rich and storied past as well as an esprit de corps that is the envy of its rivals. Dwayne Cox’s The Village on the Plain traces the school’s history in fascinating detail from its origins as a private college through its emergence as a nationally recognized land-grant university.

Founded before the Civil War to provide a classical education, Auburn became the state’s land-grant college after the cessation of hostilities. This infused the school with a vision of the reborn South as a commercial and industrial power. By the 1880s, the applied sciences were at the core of Auburn’s growth and strength. Like most southern universities, Auburn never enjoyed financial abundance, and scarcity intensified internal debates over investments in liberal arts or science. Modest state funding for higher education also complicated Auburn’s rise. It became a source of competition with the University of Alabama. This rivalry was most intense between 1908 and 1948. The two schools did not meet on the gridiron but blocked and tackled one another in the legislature over the division of state funds.

On the idyllic plains of Lee County, Alabama, Auburn developed a unique, sometimes introspective culture, which is true of many universities founded far from urban centers. Long Auburn’s head archivist, Cox describes this culture with an insider’s insights and shows how it shaped the school's history and community.

Auburn University’s history is that of a small private college that rose to the challenges of convulsive state and national events, not only to survive but to emerge more vibrant and thriving. Offering much to students of higher education and Alabama history, as well as readers affiliated with Auburn University, The Village on the Plain tells the story of this complex and fascinating institution.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9780817389758

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The Village on the Plain

The Village on the Plain

Auburn University, 1856–2006

DWAYNE COX

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2016 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Caslon

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover illustration: Engraving of the East Alabama Male College building as depicted in the college’s 1869–1870 catalog; courtesy of Auburn University Libraries, Special Collections

Cover design: Todd Lape/Lape Designs

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cox, Dwayne, 1950– author.

Title: The village on the plain : Auburn university, 1856–2006 / Dwayne Cox.

Description: Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015039648| ISBN 9780817319090 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780817389758 (e book)

Subjects: LCSH: Auburn University—History.

Classification: LCC LD271.A6615 C68 2016 | DDC 378.761/55—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039648

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Purpose Debated, 1856–1884

2. Purpose Defined, 1884–1902

3. Purpose Refined, 1902–1920

4. Out of Control, 1920–1928

5. In Search of Control, 1928–1935

6. In Control, 1935–1947

7. Delicate Balance, 1947–1965

8. Balance Threatened, 1965–1980

9. Balance Lost, 1980–1984

10. Academic Politics 101, 1984–1992

11. Academic Politics 102, 1992–2001

12. Academic Politics 103, 2001–2006

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

All authors accumulate debts. The danger in acknowledging them lies in overlooking some. If guilty of that offense, I seek pardon in advance.

I owe a debt to those who gathered and preserved the historical records of Auburn University long before I became associated with the school. They included Thomas A. Belser Jr., Allen W. Jones, Robert J. Jakeman, Norwood A. Kerr, David J. Rosenblatt, and, undoubtedly, others.

I employed archival and manuscript collections at several other institutions: the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the University of Alabama’s Hoole Library, the Louisiana and Mississippi Valley Collections at Louisiana State University, and the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University. I want to thank the individuals at these institutions that assisted me.

The Auburn University Libraries provided valuable resources in addition to the archival and manuscript collections housed there. These included historical monographs, microforms, digital collections, university publications, and a variety of other holdings. The libraries also provided funds for indexing this book.

Several individuals read all or portions of the manuscript. All of them offered valuable advice and encouragement. They included Martin T. Olliff, David E. Alsobrook, Leah R. Atkins, and Clarence L. Mohr. I owe special thanks to readers J. Wayne Flynt, John R. Thelin, Tennant S. McWilliams, and Bonnie J. MacEwan.

All of my present colleagues in Special Collections and Archives at Auburn University contributed to this book in one way or another. Jennifer P. Wiggins and Jaimie L. Kicklighter checked the accuracy of newspaper citations, Gregory J. Schmidt helped make university publications readily accessible online, Tommy C. Brown assisted with technical questions regarding formatting and editing the manuscript, and John C. Varner shared his extensive knowledge of Auburn University football.

I want to single out two groups cited in the endnotes for special thanks. First, I thank the historians who, particularly in recent years, addressed the topic of higher learning in the United States in a variety of studies that improved my understanding of the subject. Second, I thank those who shared with me their candid recollections of Auburn University in oral history interviews.

I appreciate the assistance provided by the University of Alabama Press. In particular, I want to thank Daniel J. Waterman, editor in chief; JD Wilson, sales and marketing director; Vanessa Lynn Rusch, managing editor; Judith Antonelli, copy editor; and the anonymous reviewers who commented on the manuscript.

I also thank Auburn University, which for thirty years gave me the opportunity to document its history and to work with others who did the same. I found ghosts at Auburn and wanted to bring them to life.

I owe a debt I can never repay to my mother and father, Velma and Billy Cox, who encouraged my interest in history and helped finance my education.

Finally, like many authors, I owe the greatest debt to my spouse, Ada Elizabeth Cox, who read the manuscript several times with a keen eye for clarity and the author’s welfare. I dedicate this volume to her.

Introduction

In 1770 the Anglo-Irish author Oliver Goldsmith published a poem depicting a mythical placed called Auburn, a bucolic village where sturdy English yeomen raised happy families and farmed the surrounding plain. Unfortunately the inhabitants deserted the formerly lovely village. In the social context of his time, Goldsmith employed the heroic couplets of his poem to criticize the enclosure of formerly common lands and the decline of the English yeomanry. Despite the melancholy tone of this work, many towns in the United States took the name of Goldsmith’s deserted village, including one in Alabama. The college founded there eventually became Auburn University. People called the school Auburn long before the college took the town’s name.

What became Auburn University originated shortly before the Civil War in a rivalry between two towns that wanted a college. The residents of both believed that such an addition would further their communities’ reputations as centers of commerce and education. In 1856 the state legislature incorporated the East Alabama Male College located in Auburn. The municipal rivalry continued after the war when the federal government provided support for land-grant colleges through the Morrill Act. Again several towns competed for the funds available under this legislation, but Auburn became the home of Alabama’s land-grant college. The property of the East Alabama Male College went to the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama, which opened in 1872.

A variety of difficulties challenged the Agricultural and Mechanical College through the mid-1880s: the lasting impact of the Civil War, the political instability of Republican rule during Reconstruction, a lack of financial support from the conservative Democrats who eventually took political control of the state, the beginning of a rivalry with the University of Alabama, a student rebellion against the strict military regulations that governed their behavior, instability in the president’s office, a power struggle between the board of trustees and one of its chief executives, and the definition of the school’s academic purpose. The debate about academic purpose, replicated on the national and regional levels, pitted those who favored applied disciplines against others who favored the classical curriculum common in antebellum colleges.

Between the mid-1880s and the turn of the twentieth century, the school continued to struggle financially, but it did acquire additional support from the state and federal governments. During this period the land-grant college at Auburn achieved a greater degree of stability in the president’s office and in the chief executive’s relationship with the governing board. Nevertheless, at least some vocal faculty members believed that the school suffered from poor leadership at the highest level.

During the same period, the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama followed patterns that appeared elsewhere in the South. The school adopted the regional rationale for its relationship with the freedmen who inhabited the state after the abolition of slavery: segregation of the races. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the school instituted intercollegiate football, which immediately brought forth questions of institutional control. The Morrill Act required the college to teach agriculture and mechanics, which by this time overshadowed the classical curriculum of the antebellum era. The school now focused its academic efforts on applied science, a regional trend that some believed would convert the South into a modern industrial society rather than one based on plantation agriculture and slave labor. In 1899 the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama became the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (API).

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, API followed the well-worn pattern that had developed earlier. Applied science remained at the center of the school’s academic purpose. Agriculture in particular prospered as state and federal funds rose for teaching, research, and outreach in this field. The wall barring the admission of African Americans became even stronger as the state continued to develop black colleges that reinforced segregation. The school admitted women late in the nineteenth century, but few enrolled until after World War I. During this period the state became somewhat more generous with appropriations for higher learning in response to a national demand for trained experts in various fields. This intensified the political rivalry between Auburn and the University of Alabama.

Other problems afflicted the school between the turn of the twentieth century and the end of World War I. Despite some progress, the state of Alabama and the South generally remained well behind the national curve in terms of support for public higher education. This occurred at a time in which a college degree represented an increasingly important credential for entry to the middle class. The state’s underdeveloped system of secondary schools also kept Auburn’s freshman admission standards low compared with those of colleges and universities in other parts of the country. Meanwhile, the spell of intercollegiate football gained an even stronger hold on the minds of alumni and undergraduates. Eventually, this threatened institutional control of the sport. The API of 1920 bore a strong resemblance to the school of two decades earlier. It remained largely a white man’s institution devoted to applied science and intercollegiate football.

From 1920 to 1928 the central administration lost control of the school. Several factors, none of them new, contributed to this. Alabama public higher education continued to experience revenue problems. This exacerbated the competition between Auburn and the University of Alabama. Each school claimed that the other received too much of the relatively small pie. One group of Montgomery boosters even proposed moving API from Auburn to the state capital. In Montgomery, they claimed, it would better prosper. The federal, state, and local funds that the school received for agricultural outreach created a network of county farm and home demonstration agents under a politically astute director based at API. In many ways the agricultural extension director operated outside board and presidential control, a problem that grew worse over time.

The social atmosphere of the 1920s also posed problems for the administration. After World War I, American college students, even in the relatively conservative South, demonstrated an increasing tendency toward rebelliousness. Alcohol often fueled their behavior. Drinking problems intensified in connection with football games. At Auburn and throughout the South, fans developed a voracious appetite for winning intercollegiate football teams and little patience with losers. This resulted in abuses. From 1920 to 1928, API’s relative lack of success on the gridiron topped the list of complaints that vocal students and alumni leveled at the president, who eventually resigned.

Between 1928 and 1935 a new president attempted to restore stability. The board of trustees searched carefully for a new chief executive and found one with national credentials as an academic administrator and strong experience in land-grant colleges. Apparently the trustees wanted him to serve as a counterweight to the growing power of the agricultural extension. Unfortunately API’s new chief executive came from outside the state and possessed few if any political contacts in Alabama.

Unlike the president, the agricultural extension director grew up in Alabama, graduated from API, and possessed statewide recognition as a friend of at least the more prosperous class of farmers. By this time he enjoyed a strong political alliance with the Alabama Farm Bureau Federation. He exercised far more political influence than the president, which undermined the chief executive’s authority.

In addition, the state suffered from a depressed economy through much of the 1920s, which again intensified the political rivalry between Auburn and the University of Alabama. After the stock market crash, the economic situation worsened and the once-promising president resigned. Many considered the agricultural extension director the best choice to lead them through the troubled years that lay ahead. Others opposed him with equal determination.

In 1935 the former director of agricultural extension became API’s president. He did not fit the establishment model for a chief executive at an institution of higher learning. He claimed no credentials as a scholar. He possessed little experience as an academic administrator, other than in programs related to agricultural outreach. He considered higher education a practical endeavor, not an enterprise designed to produce a learned elite. He viewed outside academic regulatory organizations and accrediting agencies as interest groups whose agendas did not necessarily coincide with his own or those of the institution. He did not seek confrontation, but neither did he shy away from it, either internally or externally. He understood the politics of public higher education in Alabama. He possessed the political skill and connections to challenge the University of Alabama in the state legislature. In many ways he resembled presidents who built strong public universities in other states during this era. Many admired him and many detested him. Yet he left API stronger than he found it upon taking office.

American higher education entered a period of unparalleled prosperity during the quarter-century after World War II. To some extent the land-grant institution at Auburn shared in that prosperity. Enrollments grew, course offerings expanded, and the physical plant became larger. In 1960 API became Auburn University. The state appropriation grew in absolute dollars, but it failed to keep pace with the expansion of the student population.

The school faced other challenges during this era. A new president curtailed the power of agricultural extension, but not without difficulty. Coupled with the addition of graduate programs at the doctoral level, this caused some to wonder whether Auburn had strayed too far from a narrow interpretation of its responsibility to teach agriculture and engineering, as the Morrill Act required. The presidents of both Auburn University and the University of Alabama sought to agree on a common legislative agenda, but sometimes failed. Meanwhile, Auburn continued to experience problems with its win-lose record in intercollegiate football, its questionable recruitment practices, and disgruntled fans that used the coach as a punching bag.

Many Southern whites considered racial desegregation the greatest threat to the region during this period. Shortly before World War II the US Supreme Court began to chip away at the doctrine of separate but equal, which created anxiety and generated resistance throughout the South. Even after the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) struck down the separate but equal doctrine, Auburn and other southern universities remained segregated. In 1964 Auburn University finally admitted its first African American student. This took place with some tension but no violence.

Challenges related to race did not disappear with the admission of the university’s first black student. The desegregation of agricultural extension resulted in federal litigation, as did Auburn University’s establishment of a branch campus in Montgomery, where the state already supported a historically black institution of public higher education. Issues related to what the federal courts called the vestiges of segregation troubled the university into the twenty-first century.

New threats to institutional harmony appeared in the mid-1960s and continued through the 1970s. Students demonstrated an increasing awareness of the issues that troubled their counterparts nationwide: civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and policies under which the school operated as a surrogate parent. A new president focused more attention on the liberal arts, which again raised questions about Auburn’s lack of devotion to a narrow interpretation of the land-grant mission. Statewide, the continued growth of public higher education and the increasing difficulty in funding an expanding number of schools led to the creation of a coordinating agency that exercised little actual control over the situation. Eventually a national economic downturn produced a governor who demonstrated little sympathy for the economic problems of public higher education. Finally, football remained king of the campus gods with the power to depose presidents.

Between 1980 and the early twentieth-first century, new questions about governance combined with several of the university’s historic problems to form a critical mass of discontent with the board of trustees. The old issues included the debate over academic purpose, the institutional control of intercollegiate football, and the distribution of limited resources. The new issues related to governance included questionable presidential appointments, the selection process for board members, trustee meddling in daily operations, and a growing assertiveness among the faculty. Increasingly, students and alumni, as well as the faculty and the board, became involved in an intense battle with factions either unable or unwilling to negotiate. A succession of presidents became caught in the crossfire between the trustees and the faculty. This toxic level of conflict continued into the early twenty-first century. Signs of its end appeared when both sides demonstrated a willingness to take some ownership of the university’s problems.

Universities present themselves to the public as stable and venerable, but this image often belies the truth. Some people undoubtedly remember Auburn University as a bucolic place blessed with equipoise, not unlike the once lovely village described by Goldsmith. Historically, however, the school resembled a stormy village as much as a lovely one.

1

Purpose Debated, 1856–1884

Before the Civil War, Southern colleges typically prescribed a curriculum that included required courses in ancient languages and literature. The proponents of this academic model remained active after the conflict but encountered opposition from advocates of the New South creed, which called for industrialization, commercialization, and scientific agriculture. New South educators believed that the region’s antebellum colleges had failed to develop the talent necessary to defeat industrialized opponents on the battlefield and compete in the modern world. The region needed colleges that taught more applied courses, particularly in the sciences. The early leaders of the land-grant college that became Auburn University shared this academic vision for the New South. They encountered opposition from those who favored the more traditional curriculum.¹

What became Auburn University inherited a classical curriculum from the East Alabama Male College, an institution that grew out of a rivalry between two Alabama towns and a feud among the state’s Methodists. This originated in 1854, when representatives from the town of Auburn asked the Alabama Conference of the Methodist Church to consider establishing a men’s college. The Methodists, like other denominations, wanted to spread their vision to an educated class of leaders trained at their own institutions of higher learning.

In response to the request the church’s Alabama Conference appointed a commission to determine a location for the school. The following year Auburn’s advocates made their case, as did those who wanted to put the college at Greensboro in west Alabama. Both towns pledged support for the school, but a majority of the commissioners favored Greensboro, which was undoubtedly the wealthier community, given its location in the state’s cotton-rich Black Belt. In late January 1856 the state legislature incorporated a Methodist school named Southern University in that city. Greensboro had won the battle, but in the process the victors had insulted Auburn by stigmatizing the eastern part of the state as poverty-stricken and unworthy of a college. According to Anson West, a nineteenth-century historian of Alabama Methodism, the taunts from Greensboro galvanized those who wanted a college in Auburn.²

The aims of both Auburn and Greensboro typified the aspirations of numerous settlements of the interior South. Both towns owed their origins to the migration of settlers from the Atlantic seaboard states to the interior. Auburn did not lie in the more prosperous Black Belt region of Alabama, but one thousand whites and seven hundred black slaves soon called the settlement and the surrounding area home. By the 1850s the town boasted a bank, a post office, a railroad, rooms for rent, photographers, churches, and stores that sold groceries and dry goods. Naturally, local boosters also wanted a college to further Auburn’s destiny as a place of promise. The nationwide prevalence of this attitude encouraged a boom in college building during the first six decades of the nineteenth century, particularly west of the eastern seaboard states. As the sectional crisis worsened, many Southerners began to pull their sons out of Northern colleges, which led to the creation of more institutions of higher learning in the South. On the eve of the Civil War, Alabama alone boasted seventeen colleges.³

In early February 1856, not long after the legislature had incorporated Southern University, the lawmakers overrode a gubernatorial veto to create the East Alabama Male College in Auburn. The bill empowered the college corporation to own real and personal property valued up to $250,000 and exempted all the school’s holdings from taxation. The lawmakers identified forty-nine trustees, who included ten board members from Auburn and thirteen clergymen. The founders obviously hoped to benefit from local residents with a financial interest in the school’s success and the efforts of ministers experienced in fund-raising, for the college received neither tax money nor direct support from the church. Anson West considered the large board capable of producing a smaller corps of effective advocates for the college. The legislation gave the trustees financial authority over the East Alabama Male College. In addition, the board would fill vacancies within its own body, appoint the school’s administrative officers, select faculty members, and control the legal and financial life of the college.⁴

In 1859 the East Alabama Male College opened for classes, forty years after Alabama had attained statehood and two years before it left the Union. By then the governing board numbered fifty-two, including eighteen members from the town of Auburn and twenty Methodist clergymen. Theoretically this gave the school a broad base of support locally and within the state’s Methodist churches. College rules required the presence of each student at prayers twice daily and at church twice on Sunday, but they did not dictate a particular denomination. The faculty consisted of six professors, one each in moral philosophy, natural science, pure and applied mathematics, and ancient languages. The fifty-two trustees thus outnumbered the professors almost nine to one.

According to a college publication, admission to the freshman class required knowledge of Latin, Greek, English, and mathematics. As in most colleges of this era, the four-year curriculum included no electives but exposed students to a variety of subjects. During the first three years, students took classes that included mathematics. During the junior and senior years, they took classes that included science. During the first, second, and third years, the prescribed course load included a heavy dose of the classics: the languages, literature, and history of antiquity. The same publication indicated that the senior class studied moral philosophy, political economy, modern languages, history, and evidences of Christianity.⁵

The school’s early emphasis on the classics followed national and regional patterns. Before the late nineteenth century the study of antiquity stood second to Christianity as America’s chief intellectual pursuit. This had begun with the revival of interest in antiquity during the Renaissance and later found its way into the curricula of colonial colleges. The Revolutionary War generation idealized ancient Rome. Early in the nineteenth century the Greek revolt against the Turks shifted some of the focus away from Rome toward Athens.

The East Alabama Male College fell within this tradition, but it offered a distinctly Southern version of it. During this period Southern colleges existed almost exclusively to benefit the region’s upper class. The curriculum reflected that group’s affinity for the classics, for Southerners admired ancient Greece and Rome as model slave societies. The founders of most Southern colleges located them in small interior towns such as Auburn, isolated from the vices associated with larger cities. Church-related institutions often emphasized piety rather than analytical thinking.⁶

On November 11, 1859, Britton C. Lee, a student at the newly opened school, wrote to his mother about life at the college and the town. He described them both as largely devoid of wicked influences. Lee found the local residents friendly, the water pure, and the school’s faculty excellent. In reference to the rival college in Greensboro, Lee boasted that Auburn enrolled twice the number of students. He also called the town of Auburn healthier than Greensboro. Lee wanted to acquire a college education before he studied for any profession, ridiculed those who went straight to the medical school in Mobile without the necessary background, and predicted that the majority of those students would lack the competence to treat a sick horse after they became physicians. Finally, Lee advised his mother not to purchase a slave named Julia, whom he described as old and abused.⁷

Three months later, in February 1860, Lee delivered an oration to the school’s Wirt literary society, named in honor of the Virginian William Wirt, the US attorney general during the James Monroe and John Quincy Adams administrations. Lee praised the American Revolution as an event that liberated political thought in both the Old and the New Worlds. According to his assessment, the Americans who overturned British colonial rule broke the chains that bound Europeans to hereditary monarchs. France soon followed the US example with its own revolution, which furthered the cause of liberty across Europe. Unfortunately liberty led to license and popular tyrants arose in the Old World.

Lee further argued that, on America’s southern frontier, pioneers cleared a wilderness once populated only by Indians and created schools to educate their sons and daughters. He spoke in an atmosphere in which the ruling class of Southerners believed that Northern abolitionists threatened the efforts of their pioneer ancestors. His audience undoubtedly preferred social stability but also saw an analogy between the American Revolution and their situation. Lee did not say so directly, but he clearly implied that Southerners soon might throw off the oppressive rule of Northern tyrants.⁸

Shortly after opening, the East Alabama Male College became formally affiliated with the Methodist Church. On February 7, 1860, the legislature gave church authorities control over appointments to the board of trustees. Later that month the lawmakers prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages within the town of Auburn and five miles outside its corporate limits, which undoubtedly pleased the Methodists. The state imposed a fine of $100 upon those convicted of a first offense. Every subsequent conviction resulted not only in the fine and court costs but also in imprisonment for three months. The legislature passed the act to preserve order, protect students from immoral influences, and instill confidence in the patrons of the college. The bill covered all alcoholic drinks regardless of quantity. Supporters of this legislation undoubtedly wanted to set the college at Auburn morally apart from the more secular state institutions of higher learning.⁹

In 1860 the college boasted 228 students, a handsome building, and strong local support, but its modestly bright future soon changed. In July the board prohibited students from joining militia companies, a portent of the coming Civil War. Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, the board nullified the prohibition on enlistment. Before long the board’s executive committee agreed for the college to create its own militia company. After the school closed, most of the students and many of the faculty members enlisted in the army. James F. Dowdell, who later became president of the East Alabama Male College, commanded the 37th Alabama regiment, which he raised locally. The town remained relatively deserted during much of the war, but in July 1864 Union soldiers under the command of Major General Lovell H. Rousseau arrived, set fire to the depot, and mutilated the train tracks to sever Southern supply lines. By this time the college building served as a Confederate hospital. Nevertheless, the school survived with both its facilities and its corporate identity intact.¹⁰

Reconstruction exposed the fissures in Alabama’s body politic, as it did in other states of the former Confederacy. War and military defeat discredited Alabama’s white leadership, aggravated discord between unionists and secessionists, depleted capital, destroyed property, gave Northern whites a large degree of control over the state’s destiny, added a vast number of freed slaves to an already tense situation, and brought an uncertain political future. President Andrew Johnson’s moderate plan for Reconstruction displeased radical Republicans, for it allowed conservative whites to regain power in the South.

Congressional radicals took control of the process and divided the defeated Confederate States into military districts under an army of occupation. Black men became eligible to vote for the first time in Alabama’s history, which helped the Republicans take control of the government and terrified white Southerners. In response whites in Alabama and other Southern states joined the Ku Klux Klan, which employed violent tactics to intimidate black voters and resist Radical Reconstruction. Southern Democrats accused the Republicans of corruption and inefficiency and began efforts to recapture their state governments, which they eventually did. The fledgling college in Auburn faced a complex and inhospitable atmosphere when it reopened after the cessation of hostilities.¹¹

Evidence of the tense situation appeared in a speech by John Frederick Greene of Jamestown, Georgia, who attended the East Alabama Male College during the academic year of 1869–1870. Ostensibly Greene spoke on the powerful influence of public opinion. Actually, he delivered a thinly disguised attack on Radical Reconstruction, using the American Revolution as an analogy. In the course of his presentation Greene praised the eloquence of Edmund Burke and other members of Parliament who sympathized with the grievances of the American colonies.

According to Greene, the words of Burke and others undermined the British government’s efforts to subjugate the colonies. As a result, any American who could read became more determined to protect the rights of the colonies and their citizens. Some made the mistaken assumption that autocrats backed by force could prevail against all opposition, but Greene contended that the power of well-informed public opinion constituted a more potent weapon. The speaker advised his listeners to express their opinions in vigorous support of liberty and in stout opposition to oppression. Greene and many other white Southerners considered the Civil War a battle for their own independence from tyranny no less severe than that imposed on the American colonies. Likewise, they considered Radical Reconstruction the equivalent of armed occupation by an alien enemy whose oppression they would overthrow at the earliest opportunity.¹²

Despite Greene’s oratory, the East Alabama Male College never recovered its prewar momentum, even after adding elective courses and applied disciplines. Shortly after the war, at least one donor offered to pay her pledge in Confederate money. In 1866 the trustees created an auditing committee to classify the school’s assets as good, bad, or doubtful. Apparently the bad and the doubtful outweighed the good. In 1868 a board committee appointed to eliminate the $10,000 college debt recommended that each citizen of Auburn make a personal donation to the school. The committee also empowered Methodist clergymen to keep for themselves 10 percent of the money they raised on behalf of the institution. Finally, the group urged the board to circulate an earnest fund-raising letter.

The situation failed to improve. In 1868 the board downsized the faculty, eliminated the presidency, and gave the remaining professors day-to-day financial control of the college. Unfortunately the term ended with little money remaining for salaries after the payment of other expenses. Meanwhile, the college building suffered serious water damage, the consequence of a leaky roof. In June 1871 the board appointed a delegation to visit Southern University in Greensboro with the charge of unifying the educational enterprises of Alabama Methodism. Six months later the trustees donated the East Alabama Male College’s property to the state for an agricultural and mechanical college, made possible by the US government’s foray into higher education.¹³

The federal legislation that resurrected Auburn’s college passed in 1862 after the Confederate States withdrew from the Union. The bill took its name from Congressman and later Senator Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, who possessed a long-standing interest in the use of public land to further practical higher education. Before the Civil War, Morrill’s efforts gained congressional backing from Northern legislators, but Southerners generally opposed the measure. When passed, the original act excluded the rebellious Southern states, but after the war Congress extended its provisions to them. Under the Morrill Act Congress gave the individual states either federal land or a scrip for the same in proportion to the size of their congressional delegations. The lawmakers intended for each state to invest its returns and endow a college required to teach agriculture, mechanics, and military tactics, but not to the exclusion of other disciplines. Traditionally, historians considered the Morrill Act a bill that made higher education more democratic and facilitated the growth of a rapidly expanding nation.¹⁴

Antebellum Southerners did not oppose the Morrill Act without cause. During the 1850s Morrill’s legislation constituted an important component of Northern Republicans’ larger program for federal support of internal development through free labor and industrial capital. Southern Democrats overwhelmingly opposed land-grant college legislation because they viewed the Republican program as antithetical and probably fatal to their interests in slavery and plantation agriculture. After the Southern states seceded, the land-grant college legislation easily passed Congress and received presidential approval.

After the Civil War, the situation changed. The Morrill Act’s emphasis on teaching applied science complemented the plans of those who sought to rebuild the defeated South in a Northern image. The leaders of Southern land-grant colleges, such as the one in Alabama, often viewed the courses required under the Morrill Act as vital to their states’ economic development. Extension of the legislation to the former Confederacy also developed Southern land-grant colleges that served Northern-dominated industry and helped convert the South into an economic colony after the war.¹⁵

After hostilities ceased, Alabama applied to participate in the provisions of the Morrill Act. The state received a scrip for 240,000 acres of public land, but the location of the college remained unsettled. The Morrill Act precluded the use of federal funds to construct facilities, which became a factor in determining the school’s location. The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa presented a strong case for bringing the land-grant college under its wing. This would not only consolidate the state’s resources for public higher education but also take advantage of the existing campus, although it had suffered damage from Union troops during the Civil War.

Tuscaloosa’s competitors included Florence and Auburn, the homes of struggling Methodist colleges. Advocates of those towns offered to donate school property to the state if the legislature put the college where they wanted it. The residents of Florence, Auburn, and Tuscaloosa viewed their existing colleges as municipal assets and wanted to keep or strengthen them. In 1869 one source estimated that the University of Alabama’s presence in Tuscaloosa pumped approximately $100,000 into the local economy annually. Residents of Auburn and Florence undoubtedly sought the same benefits. The University of Alabama faced the additional threat of a federally sponsored rival located elsewhere in the state.¹⁶

Race and religion also complicated the debate about where to put the new school. During Reconstruction the state legislature considered either admitting blacks to the land-grant college or establishing a separate African American institution. Representative Holland Thompson, a black legislator who taught in a Montgomery school with a biracial faculty, led the effort, which ultimately failed but undoubtedly disturbed many whites. The possibility of grafting the new school onto a former Methodist college did not raise fatal opposition from the growing ranks of Alabama’s Baptists, although some feared that denominational rivalries might figure into the debate. This certainly constituted a reasonable concern, for denominationalism played a detrimental role in the early history of the University of Georgia.

The dispute over location also reflected a historic geographic split within Alabama, for the northern part of the state originally served as the center of political power, but influence shifted southward with the expansion of plantation agriculture in that direction. It came as no surprise that the advocates of Florence, from their watchtower in Alabama’s northwest corner, claimed that they deserved more state patronage. Auburn won the land-grant college, but the legislature gave Florence a normal school to soothe the ill feelings.¹⁷

The legislation that created a land-grant college in Auburn came in two acts, both passed on February 26, 1872. The first bill empowered the state to accept East Alabama Male College’s property, identified Auburn as the new school’s site, and named it the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama. The legislators reserved to themselves the power to move the college from Auburn to any other location in the state, provided that would serve the public good.

The second bill created an administrative framework for the land-grant college. The board of trustees consisted of seven members initially appointed by the governor with no term limitation. This group enjoyed the power to fill its own vacancies created by death, resignation, or departure from the state. The governor, the superintendent of public instruction, and the president of the state agricultural society served as ex-officio members. The legislature directed the board to meet within thirty days, at which time it would elect a president, a treasurer, and a faculty. The faculty would govern the students’ daily routine and behavior. The trustees would handle finances, oversee the school’s purposes and objectives under the Morrill Act, and each receive a remuneration of four dollars a day when in session.¹⁸

The board selected Isaac Taylor Tichenor as the first president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College. Though not a career academic, he possessed credentials that recommended him for the post. Born in Kentucky, Tichenor received an early education in Latin, rhetoric, mathematics, and logic. He wanted to attend college, but illness obstructed his plan. Subsequently Tichenor taught school, read widely, and gained repute as an orator. He became a Baptist minister and began to cultivate denominational contacts throughout the South. In 1851 the congregation of Montgomery’s First Baptist Church called him to their pulpit—a major appointment, particularly for a man not yet thirty. The church prospered under the leadership of its young pastor, who continued his wide involvement in denominational affairs. Tichenor took a particular interest in missions at home and abroad.¹⁹

Though not an extremist, Tichenor embraced secession once it came. He accepted an appointment as chaplain to an Alabama regiment and saw his first combat at the Battle of Shiloh, where he shot and killed an enemy sniper. Tichenor’s brigade commander, John K. Jackson, criticized him for stepping outside the role of pastor to the troops. Subsequently the offended chaplain resigned his commission. Eventually he returned to the First Baptist Church in Montgomery. On August 21, 1863, Tichenor delivered a sermon to the Alabama legislature in which he described the Confederacy’s suffering as punishment for the sin of pride. According to Tichenor, pride caused Southerners to overestimate their own military strength and underestimate that of their opponents. The Southern nation likewise suffered from divine punishment for the abuses of slavery but not for the institution itself. Tichenor predicted that the war’s trials would prepare the South for a glorious future.²⁰

After the war Tichenor espoused views on race, economic development, and education typical of New South advocates. He urged the region’s Baptists to educate the former slaves, but he did not consider free blacks equal to whites. As a Southerner, he took a paternalistic attitude toward the freedmen and did not want Northerners to educate them or minister to their spiritual needs. The threat of black suffrage, social equality, and miscegenation preyed on his mind. After the war, newly freed slaves left his flock at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery. This occurred in denominations throughout the former Confederacy as whites and blacks established racially separate congregations.

The economy of the postwar South also influenced Tichenor. The church’s problems with the payment of their pastor’s salary possibly hastened his decision to leave Montgomery, but probably no more so than did his interest in exploiting the state’s mineral wealth. In 1868 Tichenor moved to Shelby County, where he served as president of the Montevallo Coal Mining Company. In this role he embraced the New South creed, saw no dark side to Southern industrialization, and believed that this process provided personal and regional economic opportunities.

Tichenor held these views in 1872, when he became president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama. The college opened later that year. The appointment of a minister as president followed a pattern typical at the time, particularly in the South.²¹

Tichenor embraced the agricultural courses required under the Morrill Act, but not everyone agreed with the president. The first catalog issued by the land-grant college anticipated criticism and addressed the issue in a forthright fashion. According to the official statement, many failed to understand that agriculture’s foundation rested upon basic sciences such as biology and chemistry. Too often the misinformed looked upon agriculture as no more than guiding the plow, planting the crop, and gathering the harvest. Naturally,