Virginia Vignettes

Brafferton was the College of William and Mary’s school for American Indians, after Harvard likely the second oldest in British North America. The College’s 1693 charter provided that the new “place of universal study” educate not only English but also American Indian youth. College founder James Blair arranged financing using income from Brafferton Manor in [...]

Although the College of William and Mary had been chartered in 1693, it was competition among the Protestant churches in the 18th and 19th centuries that contributed to advances in higher education in Virginia. Each denomination had to have a college, primarily for the instruction of its ministers. Following the lead of the Presbyterians, who [...]

The Morrill Land-Grant Act transformed American education, establishing what became a network of state-run colleges and universities combining practical and academic teaching. Two Virginia universities owe their beginnings to it, and a third benefited as well.
Proposed by Rep. Justin Morrill (Vermont), it passed Congress in 1859 but President Buchanan vetoed it. Enacted in 1862 under [...]

With no statewide public education system before the Civil War, the Underwood Constitution of 1868 mandated public schools. Over the objections of the traditionalists, one of whom labeled universal education a “Yankee error,” the new system was created in 1870 with enthusiastic support from freedpeople, poor whites, and middle-class groups, the very people for whom there [...]