University of Virginia Library

XXVI. Diversions

During the whole of the Seventh Period, 1865–95,
the equality between the students, whether they were in
their first, second, or third year, or even in their sixth,
was never disputed. This condition arose at the very
beginning, in consequence of the University's elective
system; and from decade to decade, it was maintained
without any perceptible modification. The claim to
superiority supposed in our own day to be justified by
mere length of time passed in the institution, had its seed
in ideas that had stolen in from without. The collegiate
body,—during the first seventy-five years certainly,
—was a thoroughly democratic body in the recognition

of personal equality at least. The student might be a
member of a senior class or of a junior; he might be
pursuing the undergraduate course or the graduate; he
might belong to the academic department, or the department
of law, or medicine, or engineering, or agriculture,
and yet none of these differences of grade and class and
school exercised any influence whatever on his social
status. It was as if all the young men were registered in
their first or sixth year, and in the same school, and in the
same department. Every artificial and traditional line of
demarcation, for the one reason or the other, was completely
discarded. The student occupied the place in
the ranks to which his character, talents, and industry,
—not the length of his connection with the University,
—entitled him. The possession of wealth carried, in
such a detached atmosphere as this, no perceptible weight.

One of the results of this equality of bearing was to
create an appreciable degree of personal isolation.
There was no class system, as in the curriculum colleges,
to draw the student voluntarily or involuntarily into constant
intercourse with a large body of his fellows. His
social relations were usually confined to the circle of his
fraternity, or, at most, to his quarter of the University;
and his acquaintanceship was narrow at best beyond the
bounds of those two contracted spheres. This condition
of restriction, while it tended to foster in him a
spirit of virile independence and self-reliance, tended also
to impoverish his social life. A distinct formality in
the general mingling of the students as a mass was its
most obvious consequence. The only strong ties were
the ties of small groups, which might or might not represent
the richer side of the University commonwealth.
This spirit was particularly conspicuous in the interval
between 1865 and 1875, when the poverty resulting from

the war led the great majority of the young men to concentrate
their powers upon their books to a degree not
observed in later years. "There seems," says a writer
in the magazine for March, 1876, "but one idea in the
mind of every student at the University, and that is a
diploma. We are lamentably deficient in divers deviltries.
There have been one or two initiations into the
Sons of Temperance, two wretched attempts at playing
funny by hoisting an old wood-wagon on to the roof of
the chapel, and, finally, an organized expedition of fifteen
men to tie a poor unoffending calf to a professor's door.
bell."

There was now no college song, no college cheer. A
coarse yell or a cat-call seems to have been the only vocal
expression, on public occasions, of collegiate loyalty and
enthusiasm.

The extraordinary increase in the interest shown in
athletic sports had a tendency to draw closer the personal
associations of the young men by creating a pastime
that appealed equally strongly to all; but it also
had a tendency to alienate them from the society of the
families residing in the same community by making them
independent of its charm. "I believe," says Professor
Raleigh C. Minor, in his recollections of the eighth
decade, "that the student of our day is not quite so
versatile in conversation, nor so well read, nor so
thoughtful, as was his average predecessor. He is certainly
not so much addicted to 'calico'."[18]

If there was a perceptible narrowness in that earlier
student's social round, it was not attributable to the absence
from the general University life of this period of

opportunities to gratify every taste. Was he of a religious
cast? Then he had the Young Men's Christian
Association, the Wednesday morning prayers, and the
Friday evening services, to soothe his sense of piety.
Did he have a passion for athletic games? Then there
were the gymnasium, the track-walk, and the football
and baseball fields, in which to demonstrate his physical
prowess. Was his propensity for the oar? Then, during
many sessions, there was the Rives Boat Club to
harden his muscles and test his lungs. Was he fond of
dancing, and acting, and music? There were the entertainments
of the German Club, the Dramatic Club, and
the Musical Club,—not to count the balls in private
houses,—to throw open to him, hour after hour, the
most delightful recreation. Was his taste for reading?
There was the library to furnish him with books of
amusement, and the newspaper and magazine room to
supply him with the latest periodical literature. Did
he like to leap into a debate? There were the two societies,
with their weekly sessions, to give him all the
occasions he could wish for to discuss all sorts of knotty
questions to the limit of his verbosity. There were also
a billiard hall with refreshments, and a temperance hall
without them, and in one or the other, he could follow
whichever happened to be his personal leaning—a temperate
indulgence or a total abstinence. To those who
preferred the society of their elders, or were not averse
to flirtations with young ladies, the families of the professors,
with their stream of guests, together with the
social circle of the neighboring town of Charlottesville,
offered all the inexhaustible pleasures of the most refined
and cultivated drawing-rooms.[19]

Let us look more closely, in a general way, into the
character of these varied diversions. Apart from the
social gratifications of their periodical meetings, the
members of the several fraternities enjoyed the high
frolic which always accompanied an initiation of
"goats." A portion of this ceremony took place in the
public eye, which gave it an increased fillip. Thus, in
the initiations to the Pi Mu Society, composed of medical
students, the closing scene consisted of a torch-light
parade from one end of the precincts to the other, in
which the old members, enveloped in immaculately white
gowns, marched at the head of the procession, followed
by the "goats," robed in the most sombre black vestments,
relieved only by a white skull-and-bones badge.
Floating high above these picturesque figures, there was
visible the transparency of a large coffin decorated with
numerous symbols. Every right hand grasped a flaming
and smoking firebrand; and in addition to the wavering
light from this source, there were the constant flashes
from the exploding Roman candles and cannon-crackers,
which were carried along to give the animation of a
mighty noise to the moving picture. A stag cotillion in
the portico of the Rotunda, dimly illuminated by the
rays of the dull red torches, terminated the drama of the
night.

The banquet, as the fraternity's supper was grandiosely
called, was an occasion of unrestrained mirth and
enjoyment. The room in which it was usually held,
during the eighth decade, was an apartment in Ambroselli's
restaurant. This establishment possessed a great
local reputation for the excellence of its oysters and waffles;

and under the same roof was a full bar and a billiard
hall. Here each of the more prosperous fraternities
foregathered once a fortnight, the cost of the eating
and drinking being defrayed by every member in turn.
Friends of the banqueters were often invited to take part
in the feast and the fun. "These suppers," says Judge
R. T. W. Duke, Jr., in his recorded recollections of these
times, "were delightful. There were no songs, but a
lot of chaff and wit and humor. No speeches were allowed.
Discussions in history, classics, French and German
literatures, or geology and astronomy, followed.
There were some good talkers. Occasionally, a joyous
member led us astray. Once we did decorate various
professors' houses with signs borrowed from Charlottesville
stores. They were applied to fit each case. A
barber's pole adorned Schele's. He was unusually careful
with his dress and used pomatum. A hardware and
cutlery sign was put over the door of another—a man
whose cutting satire did not spare the dull and idle, although
at bottom he was of a tender heart. When he
met his class that afternoon, he said, 'That was a very
small shot perpetrated last night, gentlemen, and this remark
is not intended to be irony even if it does come
from a dealer in hardware.'" Over the doorway of
Holmes's pavilion was raised a sign filched from a small
Hebrew shop, and inscribed with the following legend:
"Cheap dry goods sold here." The professor of history
and literature, with all his enormous erudition,—
or, perhaps, because of it,—made no pretension, in the
rusty garments that hung about his tall, lank form, to
that exquisite fitness considered indispensable by the
disciples of Beau Brummel. Maupin habitually wore a
long black coat, and it was, therefore, thought pertinent
to place above the entrance to his pavilion the figure of
a crow, which had previously perched on the pole of a
barber's shop.

If we accept as true the testimony recorded in the
most famous parody ever printed in the Virginia University
Magazine, the parody of Ulalume entitled,
"That Evening at Ambro's," some of these club-men
were not in a physical condition to carry tradesmen's signs
as far as the Lawn. The heroes of this particular episode,
having drunk a "bumper titanic" of Ambroselli's
headiest bourbon whiskey, followed up by a "duplicate
horn" of the same exhilarating spirits, wandered off, on
very wabbly legs, in search of the home, not the tomb,
of Diana,—the daughter, in this instance, of a professor.
Her face and form had been rendered doubly
lovely by the artificially inflamed and distorted imaginations
of the youthful and tipsy knights-errant.

There was a flavor of whimsicality in the amusements
of some of the social clubs. Thus the members of the
Samuel Johnson Club, which assembled as often as three
times a week, instead of spending their hours of meeting
in grave, and exhaustive, and philosophical discussions,
as was to have been expected from their association's
ponderously intellectual name, limited their conversation
to the less elevated, but perhaps more lively, topics of
horse-racing, dog-fighting, and local politics. The Ugly
Club was reorganized in March, 1872. Again was the
pair of boots presented to the homeliest student in college,
the hat to the prettiest, the slippers to the most conceited,
and the enormous stick of candy to the most diminutive;
and again the recipients, in return for these
symbolical awards for their personal characteristics, delivered
very humorous and eloquent speeches of appreciation.
In 1873, a club was organized to celebrate in
a flamboyant manner the arrival of Christmas. The

Faculty, in anticipation of that festival, having positively
refused to grant a longer interval of suspension
of lectures than twelve hours, the most resourceful of
the young men conspired to make this particular holiday
forever memorable in the University's annals. A
miniature reproduction of the New Orleans Mardi Gras
was the device adopted. The participants, dressed in
the most fantastic costumes, and with their horses correspondingly
decorated, rode around the precincts in a
tumultuous procession, gesticulating, and contorting, and
shouting, and blowing horns, as they moved forward
from point to point on their predetermined route.

The Calathumpian band was reorganized after the
war; but it failed to win the full measure of its former
prominence, although, on the night of Christmas, 1868,
it seems to have thrown the University into a state of
the most alarming commotion. "The young gentlemen
who conducted this affair," said the editors of the magazine
at this time, "made more noise in the world than
they will ever make again." By the session of 1870–71,
the boisterous Calathumpians had been merged into the
congenial ranks of the mysterious Nippers. The Nippers
appear to have been a purely bacchanalian association,
who, when inflamed by strong potations, did not scruple
to damage the property of the University. This was
illustrated in the instance, already mentioned, of their
destroying the young trees on the Lawn. The proctor
had planted on either side of that part of the precincts a
row of rare spruces. These flourishing shoots they
ruthlessly pulled out of the ground one night, and having
piled them up in front of the proctor's door, tacked the
following doggerel lines to its panels: