Yale's Southern Accent

One evening on the Old Campus in 1819, over 100 years before the gothic imports arrived and when the brick row stood strong, a secession crisis held hostage one of Yale's two literary societies. On the top floor of the Georgian-Colonial brick Lyceum, the university's chapel and library on the Old Campus, a face-off began within the Linonia Society.

Two candidates, one northern, one southern, were being considered for president of the society. The northern candidate emerged victorious, and a southern party of 32 students within the Linonia Society walked out and formed the Calliopean Society. Whether the walkout was sectional or personal in origins remains unclear, but the Calliopean became the society of choice for southerners until its dissolution in 1853. Without the residential college system, the dormitories on the Old Campus, or the Political Union, these literary societies formed the major avenues of social and intellectual interaction. Only those who belonged to a society could use the respective its books and attend its meetings and debates. In the same year the Calliopean was formed, the national debate over the admission of Missouri into the Union as either a free or slave state was on the minds of most Americans. The formation of the Calliopean Society foreshadowed the course that history was to take 40 years later.

Eli Whitney & John C. Calhoun

The national dilemma of sectionalism which took hold of the Yale campus and eventually killed its sons can be traced to two of Yale's most prominent students, Eli Whitney (B.A. 1792) and John C. Calhoun (B.A. 1804). Whitney, a resident of New Haven, played an unexpected, yet pivotal role in the advent of the Civil War. The summer after his graduation Whitney traveled to the South to visit the widow of General Nathanael Greene, a hero of the American Revolution. There he invented the cotton gin. His invention coronated "King Cotton," transformed the southern economy, and in turn changed the nature of American slavery. The cotton gin made the production of cotton quick and profitable throughout the South by increasing the production potential and value of slaves. After returning to New Haven and failing to secure a patent for his cotton gin, Whitney was awarded a contract from the Federal Government for 10,000 guns. To fill this order, he opened a gun factory, the Whitney Armory, in New Haven and introduced interchangeable parts. This marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in America, forever changing the northern economy. Ironically, the guns that were produced at Whitney's New Haven gun factory would later be used in a war over the existence of slavery in America.

Many of the South's most prominent sons came to Yale in the first half of the nineteenth century out of their cult-like adoration for the cult-like figure of John C. Calhoun. In 1830, 69 southerners were enrolled at Yale, compared to 17 at Princeton, and 16 at Harvard. However, this preference for Yale among the Ivy League schools should not be misinterpreted as evidence of peaceful relations between northern and southern students. Many of those attracted to Yale by Calhoun's influence formed the Calliopean Society, a by-product of the slowly dissolving Union.

John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the validictorian of his class, was the most influential American politician to have graduated from Yale during its

John C. Calhoun

first two centuries. During his long tenure in U.S. politics, he held the positions of Congressman, Secretary of War, Vice-President, Secretary of State, and Senator. Calhoun's numerous letters to Yale faculty and alumni reflect his sense of connection to Yale. New Haven, a bastion of Federalist support for a strong central government in the Early Republic, solidified Calhoun's anti-federalist, state rights commitments.

The pro-southern sentiments of Calhoun and the Calliopean Society, however, represent only one perspective of antebellum southerners at Yale. One man in particular, Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky (B.A. 1832), stood in stark contrast with many of his fellow southern students. Clay complicates many preconceived notions about the homogeneity of the antebellum South, and about the southern experience at Yale. Rather than reacting negatively to the opposing viewpoints of his new environment, he embraced them and returned to the South with a new vision. Even though he was the son of a slaveholder, Clay became one of the South's leading abolitionists after hearing the fiery rhetoric of the abolitionist champion William Lloyd Garrison in New Haven. During the Civil War, Clay intermittently served as a major-general of the Union Army and as Minister to Russia.

In the ten years leading up to the Civil War, the campus and the city saw the warning signs of the coming violence. In 1853, the Calliopean Society dissolved, and many southerners returned to the South. When the society disbanded, the center of southern social and intellectual life collapsed and southern enrollment plummeted. In 1850, 72 southerners were enrolled at Yale, 65 at Harvard, and 115 at Princeton. By 1860, only 33 remained at Yale while Harvard and Princeton remained stable with 63 and 113 respectively. The dramatic increases in southerners at Harvard and Princeton can be attributed, in part, to those universities' shifts away from a local perspective to a national one by mid-century. For the southern students who remained, the sectional instability only increased.

Secession & Civil War

Sunday morning, January 20, 1861, the national secession crisis rocked the Yale campus when students and professors awoke to find a secession flag flying above Alumni Hall on the Old Campus. During the night, southern students had broken into the building and raised the flag up the flagpole. It had a large white background with a red cross in the center that spanned the flag's length and width. Depicted in the upper left-hand corner was the cresent moon and palmetto tree associated with the state of South Carolina. Northern students stormed the building but they found the locks plugged up with nails and the doorknobs removed. After failing to break open the doors, they found a back entrance which they used to climb to the roof. Once on the roof, they tore down the flag and took back Alumni Hall. This event made national headlines when the following issue of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly reported the confrontation and illustrated the chaos with three of on-the-scene sketches. Unlike the majority of Ivy League schools during the secession crisis, Yale did not expel its southern students at the outbreak of the war, though the war itself would draw many men back home.

The Civil War began in 1861, and would not loosen its grip until 600,000 Americans -- 166 Yale men -- were dead. The issues fueling the backroom squabbles of a student organization were brought out into the open and decided on the battlefield. Of those killed, 55 were Confederate, 48 from Yale College, and seven from the Yale Law School. The casualty rates for Union and Confederate students were vastly different: 69 percent of Confederates while only 13 percent of the Union alumni, were killed. In 1915, the names of both Union and Confederate dead were immortalized in the freshly cut marble of the Woolsey Rotunda. Yale students' important contributions to the Confederacy, however, came not on the battlefield but within the government.

Judah P. Benjamin

The Confederacy's Attorney General Judah P. Benjamin (B.A. 1828), later appointed Secretary of War, was the highest-ranking Yale man on either side of the Civil War. He had been expelled before graduating for reasons still contested today. The official records say that he was expelled for "cheating" but there is no further elaboration on the charge. He was at the top of his class and there are no signs that he cheated on his academic work. It has been assumed that he was cheating at cards or engaged in some other form of gambling on campus. Yale men also held power within the private sphere of the Confederacy. Burton N. Harrison (B.A. 1859) was Jefferson Davis's private secretary; Richard Taylor (B.A. 1845) was Davis's son-in-law and President Zachary Taylor's son.

It would be easy to conclude that the return of southern alumni to Yale and the voyages of new southern students would be strained by the events of the early 1860's, but the divisions did not settle as deeply as at many of the other Ivy League schools. With Harvard's proximity to Boston, the seat of abolition, and Brown's expulsion of its southern students during the war, Yale was left in a better position to restore post-war ties with the South. Only Princeton fared better, with its Presbyterian tradition and long-standing complacence toward slavery. Alumni from the South returned to Yale as early as 1866, and by the mid-seventies, ivy from Robert E. Lee's house was planted on the Old Campus during Commencement to symbolize the reconciliation of the Confederacy with the rest of the nation. The Civil War had changed the nation, and each regions concept of itself, but Yale's ability to attract students and scholars was not permanently diminished by the war. With the arrival of the twentieth century, the South would help transform Yale into a great research university.

Reconstruction & the Guilded Age

Although the country was reunified and moving toward international prominence, the North and South were developing in different ways. Jim Crow thrived in the South and the Robber Barons began to dominate the national economy. The aristocracy, North and South, which had sent its sons to Yale saw a new capitalist, urban culture emerge. New money from northern industrialists such as the Vanderbilts, Sterlings, and Harknesses supported the rapid construction of the residential colleges, library and graduate school school. Social life began to revolve around secret societies, eating clubs, and the other groups formed from the ranks of New England's prestigious and elite boarding schools. Southerners entered a social order dominated by this group, and felt it necessary to form their own brotherhood.

The Southern Club first appeared in the Yale Banner in 1895. Between 1895 and 1905, their logo exhibited themes related to persistent racial stereotypes, alcohol, guns, and women. One of the early club logos depicted a Sambo-like black man chasing a chicken down the street. These logos suggest a reliance on entrenched stereotypes and icons of southern life in the face of a new and unfamiliar social elite. The Southern Club had chapters on the majority of the Ivy League campuses. An April 1898 article in the Atlanta Journal reported the annual meeting of the Southern Clubs that was held at Harvard that year. The members ate, drank, sang "Dixie," and discussed the contributions of southerners in the Ivy League.

The Southern Renaissance in literature and the emergence of southern universities, in the first decades of the twentieth century, created a new generation of southern intellectuals and writers who gained national. As these changes occurred in the South, Yale was expanding and opening its doors to a larger portion of the American population. New professors without Yale degrees and students without New England pedigrees began to arrive in New Haven.

One of the best-known figures of the Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner, came to New Haven in April 1918. Living in an apartment at 120 York Street, Faulkner worked in the Winchester Arms Factory while visiting his friend Phil Stone (B.A. '14, LAW '18). Faulkner's letters from New Haven to his parents in Mississippi offer a glimpse into the life of a southerner living at Yale in the beginning of the twentieth century. He was intrigued by the lack of African-Americans in New Haven and the suprisingly large number of southerners living in the city itself. The obsession with the clock and the other trappings of industrialization, such as trolleys, trains, and large factories, were both fascinating and annoying to Faulkner. He found the people friendly and interesting, although excessively preoccupied with status and tradition. Many literary critics argue that Faulkner's Quentin Compson of Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury are based on the author's observations of Yale and New Haven. In 1942, Yale became the first university to exhibit Faulkner's writings since much of his work was out of print.

Ulrich B. Phillips to C. Vann Woodward

C. Vann Woodward

The social and academic scene became more integrated as the residential college system replaced the eating clubs and other elite groups, with the exception of the the secret societies. The emphasis on research brought new professors from the South in the 1930s. The faculty of the History and English departments benefited greatly from this infusion of southerners. Among the new names were Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, a historian of the Old South; David M. Potter (GRD '36), student of Phillips and a historian of America and the South; Mary Wright, a historian of China and the first woman to be tenured at Yale;Cleanth Brooks, a literary critic; Robert Penn Warren (M.A. '28), an author and poet. Phillips and Potter were influential in shaping the discipline of American history, while Brooks and Warren, through their founding of the school of literary criticism known as New Criticism, reshaped the way students read literature. The presence of these luminaries attracted more southern minds, such as one of America's most distinguished historians, Sterling Emeritus Professor C. Vann Woodward who replaced Potter in 1961.

John Blassingame & Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The more democratic Yale also opened its doors to a group of southerners that were merging into the American mainstream: African-Americans. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, African-Americans were admitted in sizable numbers for the first time. During these first few years, John Blassingame (GRD '71) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (CC '73) came to Yale as students. Blassingame, a history professor at Yale, and Gates, the W.E.B. Dubois Professor of Humanities and Chairman of the African-American studies department at Harvard, are now two of the preeminent scholars of African-American life, past and present. Both came from the rural South to New Haven and Yale during the years of the last years of the Civil Rights movement, the Bobby Seale trial, and the Black Panthers . The incongruity of a rural southern African-American at a wealthy, elite university in an urban setting created unique tensions and new ways of understanding the South and the relationship of African-Americans to the South.

Professor Edward Ayers (GRD '79), Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History at the University of Virginia, said, "Yale, in short, made me see the South through eyes other than my own. In a very real sense, it gave me the South." Now one of the foremost scholars of the American South, Ayers came to Yale with no overwhelming interest in the region of his birth but left with a new vision.

Yale's urban New England environment gave many southerners the opportunity to begin the process of understanding the South. They defined the South for themselves but also for the others around them. Exploring the lives of nearly three centuries of southern Yalies, the stereotypes of both the South and New England dissolve. In their place, new ways of seeing emerge attesting to the many Souths that exist within the past and the present.

Reprinted Courtesy of The New Journal

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