Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder Page A

American medicine and science. When Rush began teaching, he had fewer than two dozen students; the year before his death he taught more than four hundred. Dr. David Ramsay, a New Jersey graduate and the son-in-law of John Witherspoon, delivered the eulogy. He recounted Rush’s heroic sacrifices during the yellow fever outbreaks in Philadelphia, his contributions to science and public health, his service in the Continental Congress, and his educational and humanitarian endeavors. 44
    In fact, southern scholars had routinely and vigorously debated slavery. Student literary societies at the University of Georgia took up the question, and such exchanges were fairly common on southern campuses before the escalation of sectional tensions in the antebellum era. In 1828 Georgia’s Phi Kappas decided that slaverywas unjust, and a decade later they debated themselves to an abolitionist conclusion. Another campus society, the Demosthenians, came within a single vote of endorsing abolition. Students at Georgia became more reflexively proslavery as the sectional crisis intensified. In 1832 William Gaston, a graduate of New Jersey, included an antislavery critique in an address at the University of North Carolina. The university published the speech and kept it in circulation for decades. Gaston served as a trustee at North Carolina for forty years. 45
    Scholars became more reluctant to criticize slavery in the face of the social anxieties that followed Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia; the political pressure of an aggressive, organized Atlantic movement to abolish slavery; and the economic promises of financial speculation in Mississippi cotton lands and slaves. Professor Thomas R. Dew, a slave owner from a wealthy plantation family, earned the presidency of the College of William and Mary in part with his forthright defenses of slavery in the wake of the Turner uprising. President Thomas Cooper of South Carolina College (University of South Carolina) ended academic debate of slavery at that institution and insisted upon a full, positive defense of human bondage. Professor James H. Thornwell, who later served as president of South Carolina, lobbied to stop Presbyterians from publicly criticizing and opposing slavery, and he became an architect of a proslavery Christian theology that asserted the eternal morality of servitude in Judeo-Christian tradition. 46
    Academics had long exploited political opportunities to demonstrate the validity of science—as in the
Whistelo
trial—and southern scholars were equally adept at using the sectional crisis to establish their value to the region and the nation. “Are we to have peace or fratricidal war?” worried Professor William Barton Rogers of William and Mary. In 1819 Hannah Blythe Rogers and Patrick Kerr Rogers, professor of chemistry, had moved to Williamsburg with their four sons: James Blythe, William Barton, Henry Darwin, and Robert Empie. William and James entered the undergraduate class with young men like Thomas R. Dew. The Rogerses lived in Brafferton Hall—the old Indian College—which had itsown crew of slaves. William Barton disliked the South. He panned his classmates for their incessant “feasting, dancing, and music,” and he predicted that their graduations would hasten the decline of a civilization that was already “fast falling to decay.” In 1824 he warned Thomas Jefferson that his alma mater was lost. There was simply something about the place, he explained, that “must forever prevent it from being prosperous or successful.” In 1828 William Rogers replaced his father on the faculty. His concerns soon shifted to the political climate of the region. “In this part of the State the politics are ultra-Southern,” he lamented to his uncle. Nonetheless, he and his brothers Henry and Robert had substantial careers in tobacco and cotton country. 47
    The region’s dependence upon