University of Virginia Library

XLII. Private Schools Tributary to the University

Whoever wishes to understand the spirit, and obtain a
correct knowledge of the training, of the young Englishmen
domiciled under the fostering wings of the Universities
of Oxford and Cambridge must not be satisfied to
confine his observations to the ancient colleges of those
renowned seats of learning. It is just as imperative that
he should extend his investigation to the system of instruction,
and the social and moral atmosphere, which
prevail in the public schools of Harrow and Winchester,
Rugby and Eton. Those are the folds from which the
greater number of the youthful students on the banks of

the Isis and the Cam are annually recruited; it was there
that all learned the first practical lessons of independent
manhood; and it was there too that many laid the solid
cornerstones for the soundest scholarship and the most
varied culture.

What was true of those splendid English foundations,
—college and public schools alike,—was also, throughout
the Seventh Period, 1865–95, eminently pertinent to
the University of Virginia and its principal subsidiary
private academies. We have seen that, before the war,
very close ties existed between the University and the
high schools taught by such headmasters as Franklin
Minor and Lewis and Frederick Coleman. Direct and
loyal as that relation was, it was not quite so intimate or
so sympathetic as the one which, after the war, united
the University with a still larger number of private academies.
Emphasis has previously been laid upon the increased
esteem shown by the Southern people for college
education when they stood desolate, but not disheartened,
amid the ruins of their former civilization. There arose
at that hour a general conviction that primarily through
such training the rehabilitation of the South was to be accomplished.
Parents, as we have already pointed out,
made extraordinary sacrifices in order that their sons
might gain admission to the lecture-hall; and these sons
showed their profound appreciation of those sacrifices,
and their keen sense of the practical benefit of education,
by the intense earnestness of their application.
Many young men turned to the University of Virginia for
the means of equipping themselves, not only for the practice
of law or medicine, or engineering, but also for the
pursuit of the teacher's calling.

Never before in the history of Virginia at least was so
much talent, energy, and scholarship enlisted in the profession

of pedagogics; and to that great fact must be
attributed no small share of the success which followed
the efforts of its people to recover their old prosperity.
It was in the private schools that the largest number of
the men who designed to make teaching their business in
life found their first positions; and here a very considerable
proportion of those who had intended to become
lawyers or doctors or engineers ultimately remained,
without passing on to any of these different vocations.
The headmasters of these schools, taken as a body, were
remarkable for force of character, high principle, and
thorough scholarship; and the teachers associated with
them in a subordinate capacity, represented the best social
and intellectual training which the Virginian home
and the University of Virginia of that day was able to
impart.

During many years, the public sentiment which supported
the State system of education did not make enough
headway to curtail the prosperity of these private academies.
They continued to flourish through the long interval
between 1865 and 1895. It is no overstatement
to say that, during this period, there were no citizens of
Virginia,—not even the clergymen, or the older members
of the bar trained in the atmosphere of slave institutions,
—who exercised a more virile moral, or a more
fructifying intellectual, influence over society at large
than half a dozen headmasters whose names can be
mentioned. It is true that the impression which they
did make was made principally on the minds and hearts
of the young; but it was the recruits from the ranks of the
young,—who, year after year, were merging in the ranks
of the adults,—who formed the most dynamic force in
every community.

Among the private foundations of this period which

were employed in preparing the majority of their pupils
for the University of Virginia,—not for its lowest but
for its highest classes,—were the McGuire and Norwood
Schools, of Richmond, the McCabe School, of Petersburg,
Hanover Academy, Norfolk Academy, Pantops
School,—under the control of John R. Sampson,—St.
Albans School, Norwood School, in Nelson county, the
Kenmore School,—of which H. A. Strode was the principal,
—the Onancock Academy, under the superintendence
of F. P. Brent, the Dinwiddie School at Greenwood,
Va., the Shenandoah Academy, at Winchester, the Episcopal
High School, the Bellevue High School, the Rugby
School, in Louisville, Kentucky, the Dabney School, in
New York City, and the Horner School, in North Carolina.
Of a later date in their establishment than most of
the preceding schools were the Woodberry Forest, Locust
Dale, and Bethel Academies, in Virginia, and the Chattanooga
Academy, under the supervision of John Roy
Baylor. These private foundations do not complete the
entire list, but they were undoubtedly the most prominent
of those which followed the pilot star of the University of
Virginia. Perhaps, the most vivid way of presenting the
character and the spirit of the men who controlled the
destinies of the leading preparatory schools is to offer
a brief portrayal of four conspicuous headmasters who
seem to typify most fully all that was most admirable in
the principles of the main body.

William Gordon McCabe, the founder of the University
school at Petersburg, which bore his name, was the
grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
He shared the blood of fighting stock through a
great-grandfather, who was a gallant officer in the Revolutionary
armies, and an uncle, who, for his services as a
commodore in the war of 1812–15, was awarded a sword

of honor by the State of Virginia. His father was rector
in turn of two of the most ancient parishes in America,
—Smithfield and Hampton,—and in the midst of
the refined social influences that hovered around these
colonial churches, confirmed by the instruction received
from a teacher belonging to one of the oldest of Virginian
families, his first impressions of history, English
literature, and the ancient classics,—in which he was, until
his last hour, to find such a fountain of delight,—
were formed, and his earliest conception of what constituted
true manhood permanently fixed. It seemed to be
in the nicest harmony with these mellowed social and intellectual
surroundings that he should have passed some
months as a tutor under the roof of Westover, the most
famous colonial mansion in Virginia, and still redolent
with the vivid memories of a romantic past.

In the middle of his first session at the University of
Virginia, he shouldered a musket as a volunteer in the
march to Harper's Ferry. Almost from the first hour
of this excursion, he was a participant in the privations
and perils of camp and battlefield until the end of the
war; and his appetite for fighting was so far from being
satiated at its close, that instead of surrendering with
the soldiers of Lee at Appomattox, he set out, before that
event was consummated, with several comrades as unconquerable
as himself, to join the army of General Johnston
in North Carolina.[43] During the course of the hostilities,
he had served as adjutant of Pegram's Battalion,
and had been advanced to the rank of captain of artillery.
When he returned home, although a veteran in experience
and achievement, he was still almost a boy in years.
His intention was to become a member of the bar, and

in order to obtain the funds necessary for his preparation
for that profession he opened a school in Petersburg.
He had come back from his campaigns with but one suit
of clothes and without a dollar; and the prospect of competing
successfully with the fine academies already established
in that city, so as to assure the temporary means of
subsistence as well as the money for a legal education,
seemed to be entirely visionary; but a capacity for faith
and hopefulness which could survive the shock of Appomattox,
and conceive, with ardor, of the possibility of
victory, through Johnston's stricken army, was not to be
daunted by his own poverty, or by the presence of rivals,
or even by the dismal prophecies of thoughtful and solicitous
friends.

McCabe began with the benches of his classroom occupied
by only seventeen boys; but so deeply interested
did he become in his new pursuit that he soon determined
to follow it as his permanent business in life. "Well do
I remember," says Alexander Hamilton, one of his most
brilliant pupils during this early period, "a small, live,
wiry, active man, physically almost a boy in appearance,
full of hope, enthusiasm, mental activity, accomplishments,
and ability, with the highest ideals upon all subjects,
and with rare power to maintain discipline and
conduct his school,—the latter due, doubtless, to his experience
in the army,—a disciplinarian in the schoolroom,
yet a player on the baseball nine of his older boys;
and in and out of school, always recognizing and treating
each boy as a gentleman, and out of school, as his equal
and companion."

He ever enforced upon them, as the most reliable rudder
of conduct, the lofty principle, that "although every
man cannot become a scholar, every man at least can live
a gentleman." "He set a premium on two things," adds

the pupil already quoted, "high scholarship and high
honor. All other considerations he made secondary to
these, and of these two, honor was always first. Every
boy's word was deemed by him as good as his own. 'Be
gentlemen first, and then only be scholars, statesmen, business
men, or whatever else,' was always the motto of the
school. No boy ever attended it who did not learn,
whether his stay was long or short, that, in his master's
eye, it is honor, honor, honor, first, and last, and always,
that is worth living for; and that, without it, no life is
worth living."[44]

How extraordinarily capable McCabe was on the pedagogic
and practical side of his calling, was proven by the
national reputation which his school enjoyed; President
McCosh, of Princeton University, pronounced him to be
one of the three "best high-school instructors in the
United States"; and Gildersleeve, Peters, Price, and
other distinguished teachers of the classics testified to
the breadth and ripeness of his learning.

The career of Lancelot M. Blackford, like Colonel
McCabe's, was tuned to a high and harmonious key of
manhood, duty, and scholarship. In the graphic sketch
of his life which we owe to the reverence and loyalty that
his pupil, Profesor W. H. Echols, felt for his memory,
we detect in the character of the headmaster of the Episcopal
High School, at Alexandria, the same noble spirit
which always prompted his contemporary, McCabe, to
lay the primary stress on the subordination of the scholar's
training to the training of the gentleman. He entered

the Confederate army soon after receiving the degree
of master of arts at the University of Virginia. He
was first enrolled in the Rockbridge Artillery, which
seems to have possessed an irresistible attraction for
college graduates, if the number entered on its long roster
is to be accepted as a proof; and with this command,
he marched behind Stonewall Jackson up and down the
Valley, not infrequently traversing a distance of thirty
miles a day. "These battles," Professor Echols justly
says, "hardened, broadened, and condensed the manhood
in him. While his messmates at first were disposed to
laugh at his finicalness, preciseness, delicacy, and utter
ignorance of the most ordinary material things, they soon
grew to respect and admire him, and saw him develop into
a cool and courageous soldier, who was as religious in
the performance of his soldier's duty, at all times, as he
was in his daily prayers." These stirring experiences in
the harsh but glorious lot of a patriotic warrior gave him,
while still young in years, both a wide and a profound outlook
upon life, which afterwards enabled him to exercise a
more masterful and fruitful influence over the minds of
his pupils.

In 1870, he became the principal of the Episcopal High
School near Alexandria, and one of his first acts, in that
capacity, was to employ as his chief associate, Colonel
Liewellyn Hoxton, a pattern like himself of the stainless
soldier and gentleman. Hoxton was an honor-graduate
of the Military Academy at West Point, and had served
as chief of artillery in Hardee's corps. He brought to
the curriculum of instruction a mathematical scholarship
as ripe as the classical scholarship of Blackford. "No
words," says Professor Echols, "can express the way
these two men impressed their personalities on the several
thousand boys who came under their influence." Many

of these youths were the orphan sons of their teachers'
comrades, who had been killed in battle. Blackford, it
was said, could speak as effectively to a whole class on the
most sacred and intimate topics of personal life and conduct
as to a single boy with whom he might be conversing
in the seclusion of his private office. He had a keen admiration
for the half paternal, wholly manly, system of
supervision and instruction which had been adopted in the
famous English public schools. Passing most of his summers
in England, he rarely failed, during his stay in that
country, to visit Eton, Harrow, and especially Rugby,
whose great headmaster, Arnold, always seemed to him
to be the finest exemplar in spirit and achievement alike of
their common calling. He studied the principles which
had given those splendid foundations their far-flung reputation,
and dilated upon them, with unreserved sympathy
and approval, in his numerous addresses to his own pupils.
To him, as to the most thoughtful of the English
leaders in his profession, education was not simply a
course in scholarship,—it was also a religious course;
and last, but not far behind, an athletic course also

Like McCabe, Blackford was a loyal alumnus of the
University of Virginia; and like McCabe also, he sought
to model his school upon those fundamental principles
of Honor and Thoroughness which that institution had
always so earnestly inculcated. He held up the merits
of the Honor System, as practised there, as the highest
platform upon which a college can take its stand; and at
every examination in his own school, the pledge which the
University used confronted the eyes of his pupils in
the form of a vividly painted legend on a large board,
which all could see. In drilling these youths, his aim,
like McCabe's was to carry them so far in their studies
that they would be able, with ease, to enter the senior

classes of the University. But, as we have already said,
his purpose in instructing a boy was not confined to mere
improvement in scholarship. "He built up his school,"
says Willoughby Read, one of the masters, "by developing
that which was noblest and highest in the pupil, by
teaching him that character is the foundation of all that is
best in life,—that duty well done is its own reward,—
that knowledge is power,—that labor is worship,—that
idleness is a sin,—and that it is better to die than to lie.
He seems to have taken for his motto the speech of
Charles Dickens, 'Boys, just do all the good you can, and
don't make a fuss about it.'"

One of the principal reasons for his success in his great
calling was his unconscious employment of the personal
element. "He made of us," we are told by Professor
Echols, "one big family; all took their meals together,
—the father, the older brothers, and the boys. Above
all, he emphasized that saying which we cannot quote
too often,—Arnold of Rugby's famous wish for his boys,
—that they should be first, Christians, then gentlemen,
then scholars. By precept, and by example, he inculcated
the principles which make the highest type of man,
—the Christian gentleman. And so he ever stood before
us, a man four-square to all the winds that blow.
Through the force of example, and the power of love, this
great teacher moulded his boys' lives all to his high purposes.
He loved them with a love which their thoughtlessness
could not chill,—love that, like the love of God,
followed the erring as well as the true and faithful; and
few of the many thousands that have known him as
teacher and friend, have gone out uninspired, and none uninfluenced,
by that unchanging and Christ-like love."

Of John Peyton McGuire, headmaster of the famous
school in Richmond which bore his name, it was said by

one who had long known the man, "A teacher for forty
years, his vision was never narrowed to the four walls of
that familiar upper chamber where he taught. At sixty-five,
bald and gray, he had all the ardour of the young
missionary, all the fire of the most stalwart soldier of
the cross. Somehow, it mattered not how wild they
were, his boys understood this, and they reverenced him,
not only as master, but as friend and father. Can any
of his boys ever forget his morning prayer, and those
Friday afternoon speeches? Can anyone who listened
once, fail not to hear his clear, friendly voice, ringing
through the silence of that great schoolroom, where one
hundred and fifty awed and youthful faces were turned
to him? None could tell him a lie, none dared to discredit
the good name of the school he founded.Fides
Intacta, his motto, was the rule of his life, and the ideal of
his lads. For John Peyton McGuire was a man to whom
truth and honor were living things, the mandate of the
God he served, laws inexorable and compelling; all else
to them was insubordinate, even scholarship, even culture.
A mediaeval chronicler, writing of a teacher who
had died, concluded his tribute with these touching words:
'For the scholar also is a martyr, if he had a pure life
and labored diligently.' John Peyton McGuire was a
martyr to his work, living purely, laboring diligently, and
by his sacrifices in the teaching of boys, many a man has
been fixed in his faith."

"In all his long teaching career," another witness of
that lofty life has recorded, "he stood for high ideals,
worthy principles, noble views, and above all, a clear and
uncompromising recognition of the value and power of
a Christian life. His men, wherever they have gone,
have carried the high sense of Christian honor that he
taught them, and have in business, and in social and professional

life, exemplified the power of a Christian life
and Christian example in a teacher. In a commercial
age, and in materialistic environments, he stood steadfastly
for things spiritual and ideal in the best and highest
sense of the word. In a time when the struggle for
prosperity is almost universal, he stood for the things,
which, while they make for the development of the highest
and best in men, do not universally lead to material
prosperity, but testify steadfastly there is something far
nobler than mere material prosperity."

William R. Abbot, the headmaster of the Bellevue
High School in Bedford county, was one of that heroic
company of eight thousand battered veterans who surrendered
at Appomattox with arms still in their hands,
after having fought, until, as General Gordon said, their
ranks had been "worn to a frazzle." Professor Thornton,
at one time his assistant, has limned the following
portrait of this distinguished teacher as he appeared under
his own roof: "In person he was alert, erect, vigorous
and tall; with the courteous manners of a more polished
age softened by the geniality of a companionable
disposition; to his schoolboys, kindly, sympathetic, and
helpful at the very moment that he enforced a strict discipline
and frowned sternly upon offenses; solicitous for
the health and physical comfort of his pupils, and not
insisting so rigidly upon the claims of scholarship as to
exclude them from the amusement of the baseball and
football fields; a man of highly cultivated literary taste,
with a keen appreciation of the beauties of the ancient
classics, but equally versed in the masterpieces of modern
times; and with all this scholarship, deeply interested in
the course of contemporary affairs, in current politics, in
current history. As the clear light from the Virginian
skies streamed in through his broad library windows, so

the red glow from the burning activities of the great
world outside streamed in through his mind in the little
Bellevue world."

The deeply religious spirit of the man was the cornerstone
upon which all his other varied interests in life
securely rested. Born and reared in the fold of the
Protestant Episcopal Church, it was his custom to turn his
library into a chapel on Sunday morning; and here, at that
hour, all the pupils of the school, of every age, were required
to assemble to take a direct part in religious services,
which the principal led, and which he closed by reading
to his attentive audience a moving sermon chosen from
the works of some great ecclesiastical master. Scepticism
he denounced as "the ignoble refuge of the modern
mollycoddle, too cowardly to live like a pagan, too weak
to live like a saint."

"As I have reflected on the character of William R.
Abbot," says Professor Thornton, "it has seemed to
me that the central quality of his nature was a deep
and abiding loyalty to the things he felt to be true and
beautiful and good. In this lay his strength; in this, his
fineness; in this, the true nobleness of his soul. It made
his father's memory sacred to him, and the comfort and
happiness of his mother's old age an affectionate and
delightful care. It made him a devoted churchman, and
the doctrines of his religion the bedrock foundation of
his thought. The batteries of modern criticism could
not shake them; the explorations of modern scepticism
could not undermine them. It made him a faithful and
earnest son of his alma mater, constant in his devotion to
her ideals, generous in his contributions to her needs. It
elevated his belief in the cause of the South into a creed,
and lent to the service which she claimed of him a consecration.
It gave to the Democratic doctrine of representative

government in his mind the force of a body of
demonstrated theorems."