It’s been days now since dozens of unruly masked students were cleared from University of Virginia Grounds.
The school and the surrounding Charlottesville community are still coming to terms with what happened, how and why.
Partisan newspapers across the country have blown the story out of proportion, claiming without evidence there was more violence and destruction than eyewitnesses remember.
Politicians in Richmond and Washington have openly questioned the university’s direction. Some blame a weak-willed administration, others blame professors instructing students in thoroughly un-American studies and others blame the students themselves, too young, too spoiled, too choleric to control their baser instincts.
All eyes have turned to the university’s leader, waiting for — what else — leadership.
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It might surprise you, but I am not describing the late student unrest at UVa, but rather the student unrest of 1825. Unrest is probably too gentle a word; it was a riot.
The school had not been open a year, when in October of 1825, students were in active rebellion. Thomas Jefferson, the school’s founder and first rector, called it “the most painful event” of his entire life.
Over the course of a wild night, students, wearing masks to disguise themselves, attacked professors and each other on Grounds.
Unlike the students of 2024, the students of 1825 were wildly violent and destructive.
“This riot had taken the form of one student throwing a bottle of urine through the window of one of the pavilions,” as recounted by Andrew O’Shaughnessy, professor of history at UVa and the former vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “They proceeded to get into fist fights. The students were indignant indeed at the professors for even daring to confront them.”
Unlike the students of 2024, the students of 1825 had no concrete list of demands for the administration they rebelled against.
The protesters who established an encampment by the University Chapel earlier this month were very clear about what they wanted: that the university disclose and divest from its financial ties with arms manufacturers contributing to Israel’s ongoing war in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.
Historians today still can’t pinpoint an exact cause for the riot of 1825, but the gist has always been the rioters were more petty than principled.
What we do know is that UVa had the longest semesters and shortest breaks of any college in America, and the students hated it. We know the school was among the first, if not the first, to institute mandatory final examinations, and the students hated it. We know drinking, gambling and smoking were banned on Grounds, and students hated it.
Moreover, almost all of the university faculty at the time was of European birth. Those first students at UVa chafed under the instruction of these relics of the Old World from which their parents and grandparents had fought a war to liberate themselves.
One striking similarity among the students of 2024 and the students of 1825 is the use of masks. The reasons for those masks also bear a striking resemblance.
Today’s students, raised in a digital age when any real-world action can be broadcast to millions worldwide, have an understandable fear of being implicated in anything that could threaten their livelihoods or, indeed, their lives. They have principles, yes, but they also have futures they are desperate to protect from online mobs.
It wasn’t so different in 1825, as noted by O’Shaughnessy. See, at the time, honor and integrity were not the synonyms they are today. Honor was about reputation.
“The main thing with honor was not necessarily that you be a good, chivalrous individual, but that you should appear to behave in a very civilized way. And if you did indeed not do so, you should disguise yourself and not get caught. Honor was all about maintaining your reputation.”
Seeing as how no state troopers were called in 1825 to subdue the riot, those masks almost protected the students from any damage to their reputations.
Hearing what had happened, and surely reading newspaper reports that blew the entire thing out of proportion (some newspapers at the time erroneously claimed students had torn down entire houses in Charlottesville), Mr. Jefferson called a meeting of the university’s students, faculty and Board of Visitors on Oct. 3 of that year.
Unlike the “virtual town hall” that followed our late unpleasantness, this meeting was live, in-person and on time in the freshly painted Rotunda.
The Thomas Jefferson that students saw in 1825 bore little resemblance to the portraits they would have seen, and we know so well, of the canonized Founding Father. His red hair had grayed, his 6-foot-2 stature had diminished and he showed every bit of his 82 years in a time when the life expectancy wasn’t much more than 64. They had no way of knowing, but he would be dead in less than a year.
Mr. Jefferson had every intention of addressing the crowd, to demand answers for what he called the “vicious irregularities” on Grounds. But standing before them, he could not speak.
“His lips moved —he essayed to speak — burst into tears & sank back into his seat! — The shock was electric!” Margaret Bayard Smith, a visitor to Charlottesville, wrote in a summary of student accounts at the time.
So moved were the students that 14 organizers of the riot stepped forward and identified themselves then and there.
“Mr. Jefferson’s tears,” Ms. Smith wrote, “melted their stubborn purpose.”
It was an act of humility and not a show of force that quelled student unrest in 1825. Students would not be so fortunate in later years without Mr. Jefferson. After his death, riots would break out in 1832, 1833, 1836 and 1845, and university leaders shed few tears as they aggressively cracked down on the student body.
Perhaps it is my North Carolina roots or my Methodist upbringing, but I have always prized humility as the noblest virtue.
The humorist Garrison Keillor once joked that Methodists are most known for “their blandness, their excessive calm, their fear of giving offense, their lack of speed.” And for their singing, but only in four-part harmonies, “too modest to be soloists, too worldly to sing in unison.”
North Carolina’s state motto is translated as “To be rather than to seem,” and Civil War Gov. Zebulon Baird Vance famously called the state “a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.” One of those mountains was South Carolina; I’ll let you guess the other.
I’m a Virginian now, and an Episcopalian, following a trail blazed by one of Mr. Jefferson’s closest friends, Dolley Madison. But much like Mrs. Madison, no matter how many years I call these red hills of Virginia home, this damned Virginian pride is still foreign to me.
As I sit here reflecting on it, I realize that in a commonwealth as great and storied as Virginia, pride must be easy to come by: Virginia’s history is legend, Virginia’s men are heroes, Virginia’s founders are gods. In a place such as this, it is only natural that humility is a rare virtue.
But I will remind my readers (and the UVa administrators who may be among you), those who possess it are remembered for it: George Washington’s voluntary resignation from the office of the president, Booker T. Washington (no relation) chopping wood for his neighbors in Tuskegee, Nancy Astor dropping in on her poorer relations and hometown neighbors even after she took a seat in Parliament, Anne Spencer (my favorite Virginia poet) using her home as a salon and launchpad for the Harlem Renaissance instead of promoting her own work and, of course, Mr. Jefferson’s tears.