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Thomas Jefferson had a radical dream for higher education. Designed to become the first modern public university, the University of Virginia was envisioned as a liberal campus with no religious affiliation, with elective courses and student self-government. Nearly two centuries after the university's creation, its success now seems preordained-its founder, after all, was a great American genius. Yet what many don't know is that Jefferson's university almost failed. InRot, Riot, and Rebellion,award-winning journalists Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos offer a dramatic re-creation of the university's early struggles. Political enemies, powerful religious leaders, and fundamentalist Christians fought Jefferson and worked to thwart his dream. Rich students, many from southern plantations, held a sense of honor and entitlement that compelled them to resist even minor rules and regulations. They fought professors, townsfolk, and each other with guns, knives, and fists. In response, professors armed themselves-often with good reason: one was horsewhipped, others were attacked in their classrooms, and one was twice the target of a bomb. The university was often broke, and Jefferson's enemies, crouched and ready to pounce, looked constantly for reasons to close its doors. Yet from its tumultuous, early days, Jefferson's university-a cauldron of unrest and educational daring-blossomed into the first real American university. Here, Bowman and Santos bring us into the life of the University of Virginia at its founding to reveal how this once shaky institution grew into a novel, American-style university on which myriad other U.S. universities were modeled.

Americans spent much of 1800 embroiled in one of the first—and possibly still the fiercest—partisan presidential campaigns in the nation’s history, and at the center of the political storm that threatened to capsize the ship of state stood Jefferson. The campaign attacks on his character from politicians and preachers alike deepened the Virginian’s mistrust of power and reinforced the anticlerical views he would hold for the rest of his life. And those views, in turn, would help him define for himself how a modern university should work. As the year 1800 opened, Jefferson was serving out his final

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the youngest students to arrive on the university precincts in 1826. Like most students he traveled over a series of rough roads and ragged paths; it took twelve hours to ride the sixty miles from Richmond to Charlottesville by horseback. Rough-hewn tree trunks served as footbridges over streams and rivers. The town of Charlottesville, located in the center of the rolling hills and mountains of Albemarle County (with a population of about 9,000 whites and 11,500 black slaves), was a collection of small homes, busy hotels, taverns, a courthouse, and a stone jail. This

On October 3, 1825, Thomas Jefferson, who had imposed his will on history so many times before, stood in a crowded room in the still unfinished Rotunda of his fledgling university to face what he described as “the most painful event” of his life.¹ With the other members of the Board of Visitors at his side, he looked upon his assembled students “with the tenderness of a father,”² but they responded with looks of defiance and hostility. The students stood erect. He, in contrast, was ailing and bent by age. The murmur of the youthful crowd echoed against the high

Charles Ellis Jr. of Richmond enrolled at the University of Virginia in 1834, in the heart of its early, wild years, and the diary he left provides perhaps the only complete snapshot of daily student life—its tedium, its joys, its dangers, its burdens, and the perennial yearnings of youth for love and an adventurous life.¹ The diary recorded Ellis’s second year at school in a three-month period from March 10, 1835, to June 25, 1835. The diary gives readers more than just a running account of violence and misbehavior. It details how students studied, with whom they associated, how

Wayward students did not clash only with professors. Others had to be wary of the young hell-raisers. The students also scrapped with hotelkeepers over dirty linen and lousy food. They argued with local wagoners and laborers over their failure to show the proper respect to gentlemen. They tangled with local merchants over debts and the quality of their goods. They fought each other for the slightest reasons. And they bullied, beat, and abused slaves who had little protection by law and custom. They pummeled overworked slaves who failed to promptly light the morning fire in their dorm rooms. They kicked

For nearly a decade, the professors and governing board of the university had labored to keep the students in check. Yet the mayhem continued unabated. After a decade of trying, the school’s leaders still had not hit on the right formula to tame the wild teenagers in their midst. Nighttime on the Lawn often remained a scene of drunken revelry. Students blew horns, fired pistols, and sang profane songs. When professors rolled out of their beds and left their pavilions to end the disturbances, more students would pour out of their dormitories, joining in the commotion or hiding those who

Jefferson, twenty years after his death, had finally triumphed. His vision, the dream of his old age, had won out after a perilous birth and infancy. As a result of his efforts to create the university, Jefferson’s already controversial reputation had suffered a blow. Enemies had lashed out at him personally, but to the end, he remained optimistic that history would vindicate him. “The attempt [to create the university] ran foul of so many local interests, of so many personal views, and of so much ignorance, and I have been considered as so particularly its promoter, that I see evidently

Professors, who had anticipated that most of their work would take place within the confines of a classroom, were now forced to capture miscreants, judge their guilt, and mete out punishment. With students refusing to form a court to punish each other, the task of school discipline fell to the professors and, more particularly, to Faculty Chairman George Tucker. The task required steely determination—or, as Cabell once grumbled, steel of another sort: “I am particularly anxious to be informed on the best mode of governing a large mass of students without the use of the bayonet.”¹ The professors numbered

In the course of a duel, pistols were often shot in the air or combatants aimed merely to wound each other to satisfy their offended honor. Unlike most duels, though, the one about to unfold on this mild spring day promised to end in death. The showdown between students Louis Wigfall of South Carolina and Charles Hamer of Mississippi was to be a “duel of an unusually savage kind.”¹ The students planned to shoot at each other with rifles mounted on rests from a distance of a mere ten paces. At such close range, and with the accuracy of steadied