University of Virginia Library

XI. The Professors

In July, 1841, there were three vacancies in the circle
of the Faculty. When the Board, during that month,
held their annual meeting, they selected professors for
the Schools of Law, Mathematics, and Modern Languages.
The chair of law had been occupied from December

10, 1840, to July 3, 1841, by Nathaniel P.
Howard, who had been chosen temporarily to succeed
the murdered Davis. Henry St. George Tucker, as
already mentioned, had been offered the position in 1825,
but declining then, now accepted a second tender. He
seems to have been influenced in this course by the fact
that his sons had arrived at an age when they needed
collegiate training. "The expense of their tuition," he
wrote Cocke, in July, 1841, when informed of his election,
"will be very heavy if I remain as I am, while they
will be trivial if I remove to the University." Furthermore,
the duties of his office as a member of the Court
of Appeals called him away from his home and family
about eight months of the year; should he accept the
professorship, he would be able to stay with them without
intervals of absence. He was apprehensive, however,
lest the pavilion assigned him should not be spacious
enough to accommodate his entire household comfortably,
for that household was composed of seventeen
persons besides servants; and he was also expecting an
addition of two more, whose support had fallen on him.
Would he be permitted, like Dr. Emmet, to occupy a
larger house beyond the precincts? If so, he said, he
would be willing to accept the incumbency of the chair.
A satisfactory reply was returned, and he began his duties
with the opening of the session of 1841–2.

Tucker combined to an extraordinary degree the qualifications
required for success in his new position. He was
not simply a distinguished practitioner at the bar: he
had already won an extended reputation as a teacher in
the private law school which he had established at Winchester,
had written a commentary on the laws of Virginia,
which was held in just esteem by the profession;
and had presided with great learning and easy dignity

over the Court of Appeals. The polish of his manners
was remarkable even in that superior social age. Moreover,
like most of the prominent Virginians of those
times, he was deeply versed in polite letters; and like
the vast majority of his fellow Virginians, too, he was
in favor of every man deciding for himself how far he
should enjoy all the pleasures of life provided that he
did not cross the bounds of moderation. "I drink not
a drop," he wrote Cocke in May, 1842, "and, for some
months, have not offered a drop to a student's lips;
and although I have never joined a temperance society,
yet I throw no obstacle in the way of others, but, on
the other hand, encourage it as convenient to us here,
where many are apt to be found not duly influenced by
a sense of propriety, and requiring, therefore, to be
fortified by pledges." He was opposed, he said, to
taking this pledge himself, because he was unwilling to
surrender into the hands of others that untrammeled freedom
of personal carriage which he had always considered
it a duty, as well as a right, to retain.

It was an extraordinary tribute to Tucker's reputation
for temperate judgment and discretion that he should
have been appointed by the Board of Visitors chairman
of the Faculty at the meeting at which he was elected
professor at law. He was reappointed in July, 1842,
and also in July, 1843, and but for the failure of his
health, his tenure of the position would have continued
indefinitely. He seems to have taken up and performed
the duties of his chair with that unfailing fidelity, thoroughness,
and geniality which characterized every phase
of his fruitful and varied career "Four acts of the
drama," he wrote Cocke, "are past, during which I
have had my full share of good fortune, and a larger
portion of public favor than I was entitled to. With the

consciousness that the last act was approaching, I did not
regret an opportunity of putting off an occupation which
eminently requires the unimpaired vigor of an active intellect,
and of finishing my course by the pleasing and useful
employment of imparting what I have acquired by my
labors to the ingenuous youth of the rising generation. I
have this year (1841–2) been very fortunate, a large proportion
of my class being far above the ordinary character
and talent of our young men. I am most happy in
finding the greater part very diligent and attentive, and
the whole very respectful, and indeed, devoted to me."

John C. Rutherfoord, of Goochland county, afterwards
distinguished in political life, a pupil of Judge Tucker,
testifies to the correctness of this statement. "I have
a great attachment for the Judge," he wrote his father
in March, 1844. "He is not only a Chesterfield in manners,
but a gentleman in every feeling of his heart."
This was the opinion and the attitude of his entire class.
Although constrained by ill health to resign in July, 1845,
after an incumbency that lasted only four years, he had
stamped his views upon the whole framework of the
University by the leading part which he had taken in
abolishing the uniform and early rising ordinances, and
in proposing the introduction of the Honor System in
the examinations.

In July, 1845, John M. Patton, one of the most conspicuous
members of the Virginian bar, was appointed
by the Board to succeed Judge Tucker; but he was unwilling
to accept; and John B. Minor was, on the 29th
of the same month, chosen in his place. Minor was
now in his thirty-second year. The University of Virginia,
at this time, was languishing under a cloud, owing
to the disgraceful riot which had recently occurred.
There was then less to tempt the lawyer in full practice

to consent to take the position vacated by Tucker than
at any time since the establishment of the school. It
was fortunate that this should have been so, for, in Minor,
the institution secured for its Faculty a man, who, although
not yet enrolled among the greatest members
of the profession in Virginia, was destined to become the
greatest teacher of the law that the State of his nativity,
perhaps the entire South, has produced.

From the hour of his first admission to the bar, he
had displayed all those qualities which afterwards so
conspicuously distinguished him as an instructor. It is
said that, even as a young lawyer, he exhibited extraordinary
powers of analysis; that he refused to ask for
or accept any relaxation in the stiffest requirements of
pleading; and that he showed familiarity with the most
obscure and abstruse rules and forms of practice, but, at
the same time, was equally well informed about the broad
general principles of jurisprudence. It was affirmed of
him even then that he seemed to move in an atmosphere
of law and to live by labor. The draft of his lectures
from the beginning was remarkable for a rigorously logical
and scientific arrangement in imitation of the searching
methods of Hale and Blackstone. "His system,"
said a distinguished graduate of his school, "revealed the
law to the mind's eye as a topographical map of a country
cast in bas relief. He seemed to cut the law into thin
slices."[7] All the principles of modern law were diligently
and confidently traced by him to the common law,
—the form might have changed, but the spirit itself remained
unaltered. He carried this admiration of the
common law to the verge of fanatical conservatism.[8]

The modifications in that law brought about by new conditions
rarely, perhaps never, obtained his approval,—he
only looked upon such innovations as diminishing, to that
degree, the essential beneficence of the whole system.
His industry seemed to have no halting point. Year
after year, he chalked on the broad blackboard of his
classroom the long daily syllabus; and hours after the
University households had gone to bed, his lamp was to
be seen shining through the window of his study, where
he was adjusting the heads of his next lecture, making up
a file of examination papers, writing advisory letters to
former members of his class, or drafting a thoughtful
report for the Faculty. His oral lectures were always
remarkable for their clarity of exposition, and sometimes
for pungency, not to say, causticity, of expression, when
the subject justified personal comment in that vein.

His lofty attitude towards the moral side of the profession
which he taught reached far in its elevating influence.
In those times, the most important figure in every Southern
community was its most respected lawyer. To shape
the character of the leading members of the Southern bar
was to make a broad and profound impression upon the
whole trend of Southern life. Minor's pupils were
drawn from every town and every county in Virginia, and
from every large center in the other States of the South,
and from many of the cities of the West and North.
They afterwards became, not only the legal counsel of the

people of their commonwealths, but the trusted judges and
legislators. They had the foremost part in drafting the
laws, and the foremost part also in moulding public sentiment.
Upon their conception of personal duty and civic
responsibility depended largely the physical well-being
and the moral health of the myriads of people who looked
to them as guides and exemplars. It was upon this great
body of men, the intellectual flower of the South, sitting
in relays under his eye, year after year, during fifty years,
that Minor stamped his lofty standards of professional
obligation, his passion for thoroughness, his austere convictions
of right, and his never ceasing hatred of moral
foulness.[9]

He was as intolerant of relaxation in principle as he
was of innovation in law; and he evinced the religious
feeling that lay at the root of his character by his readiness
to assume any form of personal inconvenience or additional
labor to foster the religious life of the community.
He was a vestryman of his church, the superintendent of
a Sunday school for the slaves, the teacher of a students'
Bible class, and, under his own roof, never omitted family
prayers from day to day. In his character, there was
combined an extraordinary fund of learning, a perfect
firmness and clearness of moral principle, a highly trained
intellect, an almost unapproached capacity for work, and
a spirit responsive to every dictate of civic and religious
duty.

James P. Holcombe, Minor's associate, was a descendant,
on both sides of his house, of military officers of the
Revolution. While still a lad, he was so inflamed by the
adventures of the boy Franklin, as recounted in the famous
autobiography, that he ran away from home in imitation

of the budding philosopher, and when met by a
friend of his father, was found buried in the pages of that
fascinating book as he walked, dusty and sorefooted,
along the highway. "Where are you going?" he was
asked in astonishment. "To the West to make my fortune,"
was the ingenuous and cheery reply. It was only
by threats that he could be moved to return home. The
desire to wander, however, still lurked in his breast. But
it was not as a tramp that he ultimately emigrated,—
having married early in life, he and his bride made the
journey to Ohio in a coach-and-four placed at their disposal
by his father-in-law. During the time that he
was practising law in Cincinnati, his parents left their
home in Lynchburg, and settled in Indiana in order to
rear and educate their other sons in a State that was free
from the institution of slavery. Before turning their
backs on Virginia, they had not only liberated their own
bondsmen, but had also refused to accept a large inheritance
because it consisted of that form of chattels. Such
was the fibre of the stock from which Holcombe, the most
ardent and eloquent advocate of Secession in the Faculty
of the University of Virginia, was sprung! Such was the
atmosphere in which was trained the future member of
the Secession Convention and the Confederate Congress!

When he was first proposed as a candidate for the former
body, he said to the Board of Visitors: "The steadily
increasing number of my students furnishes the most
satisfactory evidence that, notwithstanding much misrepresentation
as to the character of my instruction, it commands
the confidence of the community at large. I have
acted on the persuasion, shared by men of all parties, that
the peace, prosperity, and civilization of the Commonwealth
are at stake; and that, under such circumstances,
no patriotic citizen should hesitate to take any place in

which men who agree with him as to the proper history of
the Republic, suppose that he can render most service."
The spirit which had led him, in his boyhood, to steal
away from a safe and comfortable home, in his search of
great adventures, now prompted him to launch his fortunes,
at the very start, on the dangerous flood of the rising
Confederacy. The brooding peace of the arcades,
the calm dignity of the teacher's platform, the varied
charms of literature, the bonds of intellectual friendship,
—all were left behind, in the spirit of a mediaeval knight,
as he withdrew from the precincts to put his great talents
at the disposal of the new-born nationality. There
was a generous impulsiveness about the whole character
of the man which seemed to attach him more naturally to
the cause of Secession, with its romantic hazards, than
to the drab duties of the lecture-room, however numerous
the opportunities there of discoursing upon questions
which were then dividing the people of the whole country.