In this in-depth and detailed history, Timothy J. Williams reveals
that antebellum southern higher education did more than train
future secessionists and proslavery ideologues. It also fostered a
growing world of intellectualism flexible enough to marry the era's
middle-class value system to the honor-bound worldview of the
southern gentry. By focusing on the students' perspective and
drawing from a rich trove of their letters, diaries, essays,
speeches, and memoirs, Williams narrates the under examined story
of education and manhood at the University of North Carolina, the
nation's first public university.
Every aspect of student life is considered, from the formal
classroom and the vibrant curriculum of private literary societies
to students' personal relationships with each other, their
families, young women, and college slaves. In each of these areas,
Williams sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual history
of young southern men, and in the process dispels commonly held
misunderstandings of southern history. Williams's fresh perspective
reveals that students of this era produced a distinctly southern
form of intellectual masculinity and maturity that laid the
foundation for the formulation of the post–Civil War
South.