One of my projects this summer is going to be looking closely at the ideas of UVa students before the War. I'm going to focus on their ideas about jurisprudence. We know a lot, actually, about the UVa faculty towards jurisprudence. UVa law professor James Holcombe wrote extensively about the support for slavery in natural law and about the utilitarian calculus that supported slavery, too. He brought these ideas to the Virginia legislature when they were debating secession. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a mathematics professor at UVa, wrote an extensive treatise, Liberty and Slavery, that relied upon the hierarchy inherent in nature to defend slavery. George Frederick Holmes had a similar interpretation of political theory -- and also critiqued Uncle Tom's Cabin in particular. He thought that slaves were treated well and fared better than they would in freedom. There were some other ideas on campus, too -- a little known professor who spent only a short time teaching at UVa presented an antislavery critique of Bledsoe's treatise.
But what has received relatively little attention up to now are the ideas of students. Peter Carmichael's outstanding book, The Last Generation, looks at a number of facets of intellectual life at the University (and other Virginia schools, too), to give us a sense of the political and social attitudes of UVa students. He shows they shifted decidedly towards proslavery ideas and actions in the decade before War. Peter reconstructs these ideas from a variety of sources, including masters' theses, letters and addresses by undergraduates, and student literary journals. I want to build on Peter's work by returning to many of those sources and reading them for students' ideas about historical jurisprudence, political theory as it related to stages of civilization, and the role of law in reform mores (or, more likely, the dependent role that law serves in supporting mores).
The student literary magazine was published periodically and under a couple of different titles from the late 1830s to the Civil War. My primary focus is going to be on late antebellum period when it was known as the Virginia University Magazine. Want to see some of this? Here are scans of some of the more relevant pieces from the June 1859, October 1859, January 1860, March 1860, and June 1860 issues. All of this, I hope, will be further testimony to how much you can learn about a people by reading their literary output.
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