Remembering Reconstruction
at Carolina

"Remembering Cornelia Phillips Spencer"
by Harry L. Watson

Professor of History
Director of the Center for the Study of the American South
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Prepared for delivery at the “Remembering Reconstruction at Carolina:
A Community Conversation,”
October 2, 2004

© Copyright 2004 by Harry L. Watson. All rights reserved.

One of Cornelia Phillips Spencer’s early memorialists paid her a backhanded compliment by declaring that “Whatever Mrs. Spencer’s faults were, she was not a maddeningly perfect person.”1 Here I think we can all agree. “Miss Cornie,” as her friends called her, was certainly not perfect, yet her life demands our attention, and not only because of the questions that have been raised about her last spring and at this conference. She played a remarkable part in reestablishing the University of North Carolina and in opening a new public role for North Carolina women in the aftermath of the Civil War. For good and ill, her legacy is all around us and, like the rest of the past, if we do not remember it and understand it accurately, it will manipulate us without mercy until we do. We therefore owe a large debt of gratitude to Yonni Chapman and the signatories who have called on us to reconsider the career of this remarkable woman. At the same time, we must take care to state the facts correctly. We will not make progress if we simply exchange one version of propaganda for another.

Cornelia Phillips was born in 1825 in Harlem, New York, the third child of schoolmaster James Phillips and his wife Julia. Soon after his daughter’s birth, James Phillips accepted an invitation to teach mathematics at the University of North Carolina, so Cornelia and her older brothers Charles and Samuel grew up far to the south, in the isolated village of Chapel Hill. The family lived in what was known as the “Widow Puckett House” on East Franklin Street, next door to what is now the Tri Delt sorority house. They owned two slaves, Ben and Dilsey Craig, with whom Cornelia maintained a lifelong and intimate relationship.

Unlike most young women of the antebellum South, Cornelia received a thorough education from her mother, who kept a small boarding school in the home. The curriculum offered “English, Latin, Greek, and French languages, Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Natural History, Natural Philosophy, Music, Drawing, and Needlework.”2 Cornelia mastered it all, from the needlework right through the Greek, and rounded out her education by voracious reading from the University’s libraries. Unlike her brothers, Cornelia’s sex forbade any consideration of attendance at the University, and she never received any other formal education.

The University that the Phillips children grew up around bore little resemblance to the one we belong to today, though many of its buildings remain, including this one. The faculty numbered less than a dozen and the student body never exceeded 500 before 1860, with about half coming from other southern states. The curriculum stressed rote memorization of classical languages, mathematics, and moral philosophy, with scant emphasis on academic research or the application of scholarship to contemporary human problems. The president, former Whig governor David Lowry Swain, defended farsighted public policies and maintained a high standard of intelligent oral conversation but he had little use for abstract learning or superior academic standards.3

Yet the University played a genuinely vital role in the public life of the state. Swain’s predecessor Joseph Caldwell had been an eloquent advocate of common schools and state-funded transportation improvements. Every student belonged to one of the two debating societies, the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, and their weekly exercises compelled students to think and speak on their feet, to marshal facts and arguments on significant contemporary questions, and to learn the rudiments of leading public affairs. Most of the prominent politicians of the state were University graduates, and most returned every year at Commencement for a round of parties, speeches, and conversations helped to create a sense of common state purpose and public enterprise. Faculty members joined freely in the ongoing conversation, and students seem to have mingled freely with faculty families, forming friendships that could last a lifetime.

The antebellum University clearly played a central role in training and upholding North Carolina’s slaveholding elite, though it did so from the moderate perspective of the Whig Party rather than Southern Rights extremism. Unlike the University of South Carolina, for example, the University of North Carolina was never a center of proslavery theorizing or sectional agitation, and modern observers will not be surprised to learn that Chapel Hill and the other Orange County precincts delivered landslide margins to Unionist candidates in the secession referendum of February 1861.4 Chief Justice William Gaston’s ever-so-cautious criticism of slavery was tolerated on campus and repeatedly reprinted in pamphlet form, though Professor Benjamin Hedrick’s 1856 endorsement of the Republican Party’s presidential candidate brought him instant dismissal.5 In other words, when Reconstruction governor William W. Holden later denounced the University as a “hotbed of aristocracy and secession,” he may have been right about the aristocracy, but he was dead wrong about the secessionism.6

With clear limits on dissent then, antebellum Chapel Hill still enjoyed a greater measure of intellectual freedom and dynamism than other small towns around North Carolina and the South. This was the world where young Cornelia Phillips reached maturity, gaining a superior education, forming scores of friendships with influential men, and somehow gaining the confidence and presence of mind that would later lead Governor Zebulon Vance to proclaim her “the smartest woman in the state—and the smartest man too!”

That recognition still lay far beyond the 1840s, however, when Cornelia’s two brothers graduated, married, and moved into homes of their own. Charles, the oldest, followed his father as Professor of Mathematics at the University. Samuel became a lawyer and legislator. Cornelia remained with her parents, giving the impression that she would never wed, until, at the age of thirty, she married a law graduate, James Munroe Spencer, and moved to his home in Clinton, Alabama. The couple had one child, June, before James Spencer died of a mysterious lingering illness two months after the Civil War began in April 1861. His heartsick widow, now on the threshold of middle age, returned to Chapel Hill and took up the family calling by teaching pupils in her parents’ home as war raged in the outside world. She also began to feel her way towards a public voice by becoming a prolific diarist and letter writer, addressing a voluminous correspondence to family and friends while maintaining an active friendship with Governor Swain, who continued as president of the University throughout the war.

By culture and family connections, Cornelia Phillips Spencer enjoyed superior ties to North Carolina’s elite but she was no plantation mistress. Strictly speaking, she was not a slaveholder, never owned a home of her own, and lived in genteel poverty for most of her life, piecing together a meager living from teaching, writing, and the charity of her relatives. Ultimately, however, she turned her poverty, widowhood, culture, and connections to good advantage, as they liberated her from conventional responsibilities and freed her to take a leading role in the unfolding drama of North Carolina’s Reconstruction.7

Spencer’s public life took shape as she was both burdened and liberated by Confederate defeat. Like most North Carolina Whigs, Spencer had opposed secession for as long as she could, and then threw herself into support of the Confederacy as friends and loved ones died in its defense and northern invaders like General Sherman began the slow, methodical destruction of slaveholding society. As wartime conditions had deteriorated, some North Carolinians had turned against the Confederacy and rallied to a Peace Movement led by Raleigh editor William W. Holden. Spencer rejected this course and embraced the policies of wartime Governor Zebulon Vance, who faithfully supported the goal of Confederate independence even as he quarreled endlessly with the Richmond government of Jefferson Davis.

At war’s end, Vance and Spencer both felt bitterly vindicated, hating the reality of defeat but denying all responsibility for the debacle. “The beginning was bad, but I had no hand in it,” Vance confided to Swain near the end of 1864. “If the end be bad I shall with God’s help be equally blameless.”8 Spencer shared these feelings exactly, agonized by the war’s calamities while blaming everyone but herself and her friends and utterly rejecting self-criticism. “I hate a brutal, ignorant, hard-hearted and vulgar slave-driver,” she confided to her journal, “and I hate an intelligent, sprightly, eager, malicious and vicious abolitionist. I hardly know which I have the least charity for. Between them they have crushed the sunny South.”9 While she likewise blamed the sin of pride for the South’s downfall, her only rebuke of the sin of slavery in 1866 was a Whiggish critique of its economic effects and a racist dismissal of its victims. “[Slaves] have always been an awful drag upon the prosperity and development of the South,” she explained to a northern friend, “and because I love the white man better than I do the black, I am glad they are free.” 10

In sum, like many North Carolina moderates then and later, Spencer refused to identify with the worst forms of racial oppression or sectional extremism, but she also refused to admit the necessity for any fundamental transformation of the state or its institutions. Though northerners had been told that North Carolina had remained loyal at heart, it is not surprising that the victors found the equivocal and self-exculpatory “moderation” of the state’s former Unionists both maddening and indefensible. The same considerations undoubtedly affect our own difficulty today in understanding or sympathizing with Spencer’s own positions.

As the immediate shock of surrender receded and the lenient policies of President Andrew Johnson began to take hold, prominent North Carolinians began to reclaim a public voice. Black leaders came forward to insist on genuine equality, and whites who were willing to support them began the personal journeys that would take them to the Republican Party. Whether they were former Whigs or Democrats, whites who could not go that far began to coalesce under the label of Conservatives. Cornelia’s devoted brother Samuel took the first course while she pursued the second.

Spencer’s first assignment as a conservative public intellectual came from Governors Vance and Swain, who recruited her to write a defense of their conduct in the events leading to North Carolina’s surrender. The result, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina, disappointed Spencer by its modest sales, but she joyfully embraced the role of public activist and turned her eager attention to the condition of the University and its village of Chapel Hill.11

The University of North Carolina had continued to operate with a shrunken student body throughout the Civil War, and it continued to do so under Presidential Reconstruction, though widespread poverty still kept many students away. Over the course of 1867, the friends of the University obtained a badly-needed $7000 appropriation from the General Assembly and also a promise of the state’s share of federal money from the land grant college system. Despite these measures, the endowment was gone, the debts were immense, and the University’s financial difficulties remained severe. Soberly facing these problems, several leading trustees and faculty members, including Charles Phillips and future president Kemp Plummer Battle, concluded that a full solution would require new leadership and thorough reform. Now aged 66, Governor Swain was too closely linked to slack academic standards, a rigid classical curriculum, and the pervasive neglect of scientific or practical subjects, so the reformers tried to use the financial crisis to force his retirement and overhaul the entire institution in a last-ditch effort to restore its viability. In the fall of 1867, Phillips and Battle persuaded Swain and the entire faculty to resign, effective at the end of the academic year, arguing that an institutional facelift would stave off an otherwise inevitable collapse, and allow them to reclaim their posts later.12

Before these plans matured, however, Congressional Republicans intervened and overthrew Presidential Reconstruction, demanding that North Carolina and the other seceding states adopt new state constitutions based on black male suffrage. New elections gave North Carolina’s governorship to Republican William W. Holden, the humbly-born pre-war Democrat and Peace Movement leader who had long resented the condescension of Chapel Hill’s Whig establishment. The new constitution gave the Governor the power to appoint a new Board of Trustees, and Holden quickly used it to install a largely Republican body which accepted the preexisting resignations of Swain and the faculty and closed the University for the fall term of 1868. Soon after his dismissal, President Swain died from a buggy accident and the old faculty began to disperse.

All these changes drastically affected Cornelia Phillips Spencer. Most immediately, her brother Charles lost his job. More generally, the village of Chapel Hill suffered acutely from the loss of University business, leading Spencer to worry that weeds would overtake the streets.13 Most fundamentally, it is obvious from her writings that Spencer loved the intellectual stimulation of a college town and genuinely believed in the value of a strong university for the state at large, despite the fact that, as a woman, she could no more enroll in it than vote.

When the University reopened in the spring of 1869, Mrs. Spencer’s feelings changed from sadness to fury. The administration and the six faculty members were all Republicans, apparently chosen for their family and political connections. Spencer had nothing but contempt for the new president, a former mathematics tutor and Methodist minister named Solomon Pool who had publicly demanded that the old University “should be thoroughly loyalized. Better close it than have it a nursery of treason, to foster and perpetuate the feelings of disloyalty. Let the present Board of Trustees be superseded by a loyal Board, and the University will be a blessing, instead of a curse." President Battle later admitted that Pool was “narrow in his views” but “a man of decided ability and a good writer,” but Mrs. Spencer was never so evenhanded, and condemned him as “a bogus president” with “faculty men unfit for their office and unworthy of public confidence.”14

It is difficult to make a fair and independent assessment of President Pool and his faculty. No one preserved their letters and papers, and unlike Spencer, no uncritical relatives published volumes in their defense. At least one of them, Professor of Greek Fisk P. Brewer, was a truly able scholar who was primarily hated for his faith in racial equality. Another, Alexander McIver, the mathematician who replaced Charles Phillips, eventually won Spencer’s grudging respect when he sided with her against the other Republicans. Others on the new faculty were apparently just as undistinguished as their enemies claimed. They did adopt a reformed curriculum, but with meager results because most of the few students who arrived were not ready for college work and joined the preparatory department instead.

North Carolina’s elite antebellum families responded to the new administration with implacable hostility and largely refused to enroll their sons, even when they could afford the costs. Pool and the Trustees responded with attempts to provide scholarships and broaden the base of admission to include boys from poor white families, but few of these students were prepared for college. On at least one occasion, Pool threatened to fill the school with blacks if whites continued their boycott, but the Trustees never considered such a move and even Mrs. Spencer believed that Pool had only intended “to exasperate” his adversaries.15 The Trustees explicitly rejected the admission of female students, but they did recommend that a “separate but equal” branch of the University be established for black students in Wake County. A generation would pass before anything came of this proposal.16

In short, there is little reason to think that the Republican administration of the University of North Carolina was a fountain of academic brilliance or even reformist zeal in the pivotal years of Radical Reconstruction. I can find no evidence that Pool or his supporters ever attempted to rally support for the University around the state, to recruit paying students from out-of-state, or to articulate a compelling mission for a transformed University in a reconstructing South. Instead, Pool seems to have treated his office as a partial sinecure, and kept his paid position in the Internal Revenue Service while he served as president. Certainly Pool was guilty of inflammatory distortion when he suggested that the University under his predecessor had been a “nursery of treason” and “curse” to the state.

More conscientious Republicans than Pool spared little attention to the problems of higher education, as they struggled with violent class and racial conflict in the midst of bitterest poverty, political collapse, and continued physical destruction. Republican legislators never granted money to the struggling University, for example, though they were notoriously generous to other claimants, especially railroad corporations. The most urgent struggles for a truly free society in North Carolina were taking place far outside the University, in the Union Leagues, the militia units, the churches, the townships, and the common schools.17

Whether North Carolina should have made the University a top priority in this context is obviously debatable, but the Republicans left it to Mrs. Spencer and Conservatives to make a persuasive case for the University’s bare existence. For the most part, Spencer based her attacks on the alleged incompetence of the Pool administration and the fundamental importance of a sound university to the life of the state, not simply on appeals to race, class, or party. At least a handful of Republicans agreed with her, supporting the impression that her charges of incompetence and timeserving had at least some merit beyond racial and partisan prejudice.

Merited or not, Spencer marshaled her attack with skilled determination. She began with a series of newspaper sketches of University history designed inspire negative comparisons between the past and the present and then launched a blizzard of essays, pseudonymous letters, and planted editorials in the Conservative press. Her fundamental message was that Pool and his faculty were all incompetent and ought to be replaced. Her rhetoric was unsparing, referring to Pool, for example, as “a little formal arrogant prig.” Her tactics could take devious directions, as she sometimes wrote anonymous pieces praising the University, just to create the occasion for a scathing rebuttal a few days later.18 She openly urged “respectable” North Carolina families to send their sons elsewhere and she poured contempt on the poverty, the unpreparedness, and the alleged lack of racial prejudice among the poor white students who managed to enroll. She took grim satisfaction as enrollment dwindled, hoping that the boycott would force the Trustees or the legislature to change course.19

The writings of Cornelia Phillips Spencer surely contributed to the enrollment decline that ultimately forced the University to close. Despite her vitriol, however, I have found no evidence that Spencer desired or intended this result. It is a matter of record that Solomon Pool declared that it would be better to close the campus than surrender it to his opponents. By contrast, Spencer always insisted that she wanted to save the University. What she really wanted was to do to the Republicans what they had done the Conservatives: fire them all for political reasons and replace them with her own partisans. It is safe to say that neither party’s policies would live up to modern standards of academic freedom.

Pool’s administration hung on for a year and a half, from the spring of 1869 through the fall of 1870, but enrollments continued to suffer and unpaid faculty members further infuriated Spencer by cutting down University trees for fuel and for sale. At least one black University groundskeeper petitioned Spencer for help in finding a new job since the Republicans would not pay him.20 At the end of 1870, the Trustees bowed to fiscal reality and closed the University once more, though Solomon Pool continued to insist that he retained the office of President.

Let me be plain: the leaders of the protest against Mrs. Spencer and the Bell Award have badly misstated the facts.21 In truth, neither Cornelia Phillips Spencer nor her Conservative allies ever closed or conspired to close the University of North Carolina. Both closures were ordered by their mortal enemies in the Republican Party. And the closures were not undertaken for reasons of white supremacy because the Reconstruction University made no serious challenge to white supremacy. Instead, the University closed because it simply had no money.

In the fall of 1871, roughly nine months after the University’s second closure, the Secretary-Treasurer of the Republican Board of Trustees bowed to Mrs. Spencer’s influence and approached her for a compromise plan to reopen the University on a bipartisan basis. Spencer would have none of it. Rather than reopen the University with the enemy still in charge, she preferred to keep it closed until they surrendered entirely. To my knowledge, this was the closest she ever came to supporting the closure of the University. The Republican emissary left disappointed and talk of compromise died away.22

Closure only intensified Spencer’s campaign for the University. In scores of letters to influential men, she demanded that it be reopened under the leadership of the alumni, most of whom were naturally Conservatives. Her campaign gained ground after her party reclaimed the legislature in 1870, impeached and removed Governor Holden from office, and stripped his successor of the power to control the Trustees. The new governor, Tod R. Caldwell, was still a Republican, but he was also a former Whig and law student of David Lowry Swain and thus sympathetic to Mrs. Spencer’s views. Alexander McIver, another Republican ally, became the new Superintendent of Public Instruction and these moderate Republicans began to cooperate with Conservative legislators and alumni to straighten out the University’s tangled finances. Success arrived on March 20, 1875, Mrs. Spencer’s fiftieth birthday, when she famously sounded the university’s bell to celebrate the news of an appropriation to reopen. Classes began again the following fall.

Reopening the University was Cornelia Spencer’s most conspicuous lifetime achievement, but it hardly completed the list. In 1869, she began to support herself as a widely-read and paid weekly columnist for her denominational newspaper, The North Carolinian Presbyterian. She used this position to campaign vigorously for female employment opportunities, for female education, including college education, and for common schools, including common schools for black children, taught by black teachers. She briefly served as editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly Ledger in 1879. She remained a fixture of village society and University affairs for two decades after 1875, though the nearly total loss of her hearing kept her more and more isolated. In 1894, she sought medical care in Boston and afterwards remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts with June and her husband James Lee Love, a mathematics professor at Harvard University. She died there in 1908 and her body lies in the Chapel Hill town cemetery.

In her work as a professional journalist and public advocate, Spencer championed women’s interests but she also took positions that would come to seen hopelessly backward. She wanted to expand the role of women in public life, for example, but worried that the right to vote and hold office or even the practice of speaking in public would “unsex” women and destroy their usefulness.23 She and her daughter June were the first women admitted as auditors to UNC lectures, moreover, but she did not seek the admission of female students to the University, first declaring that “coeducation will never do in these latitudes” and then arguing that mixed classes were too distracting for youths of either sex below the age of twenty.24 In contrast to modern feminists, Spencer firmly believed in fixed and naturalized gender roles, though she did believe that their boundaries should be stretched beyond the accepted conventions of her society.

Was Cornelia Phillips Spencer also a racist? Of course she was. Her belief in fixed and naturalized racial categories was even firmer than her convictions about the nature of men and women. Confronted by displays of “social equality” between the races, she consoled herself that “the laws of nature are immutable.”25 When she contemplated the Civil Rights Bill of 1875, which briefly outlawed segregation in public accommodations, she denounced the effort “to obliterate distinctions of color and race” and admitted that “I cannot write of it coolly or without a shudder.”26 She accepted emancipation but not the political reforms of Reconstruction, including black voting and office holding. “I hope to be forgiven for saying I don’t believe any amount of training will ever fit [the Negro] to adorn” the political status granted by the Fifteenth Amendment, she reflected in 1879, yet we are here today, in a sense, because we cannot forgive her saying that.27

As it happens, Spencer’s racism cannot claim the customary historical apology that family background and social context gave her no choice. Exposed to the same family and social influences, her beloved brother Samuel became an active Republican and served with distinction as U.S. Solicitor General in the Grant Administration. As late as 1896, he battled racial segregation with North Carolina carpetbagger Albion W. Tourgée as plaintiff’s attorneys in the pivotal case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Spencer’s racial views are more precisely described as paternalist. She could never accept the principle of black equality, but she insisted that “the very first and prime requisite in dealing with the emancipated negro is kindness.”28 By her own lights she worked hard to practice this maxim in her private life—with Ben and Dilsey Craig, for example—and she urged her readers to do likewise. She could bring a black woman into her home, seat her at the fireside, offer her coffee, and listen to her troubles without hesitation, but she could never grant such treatment as matter of right instead of charity.29 Unlike her near-contemporary Rebecca Lattimer Felton, Spencer never endorsed lynching as a tool of racial control, but she never denounced it either. She took little notice of the Ku Klux Klan, even when masked terrorism was exploding all around her in Orange and its neighboring counties in 1868-70. When North Carolina’s conservative Democrats resolved on complete black disfranchisement at the end of the nineteenth century, Spencer was living in Massachusetts and made no public comment.

Cornelia Philips Spencer passed judgment on her own racial record in a letter to a black friend near the end of her life. “I have always lived in peace with colored people,” she wrote, “and am proud now in my old age to think they are my friends and remember me with kindness. I hope to meet many of them on the other side of the dark river on whose shore I am now standing.” 30 As American race relations approached their nadir in the 1890s, these aspirations may have compared favorably to the worst that white society could offer, but no one can argue for their adequacy as a genuine basis for racial justice, even in Spencer’s own lifetime.

How then should we remember the life of Cornelia Phillips Spencer and the Reconstruction era of which she was a part? I would put it this way. First of all, historical memory must be based on the facts. Slipshod research and snap judgments can only mislead us and reinforce our preconceptions. Going further, we must remember that the antebellum University of North Carolina was part of a massively unjust society. It also laid the foundation of the University we have today. Reconstruction created a brief moment of opportunity to democratize the state and the University, but for many complex reasons, the effort to make the most of that moment fell short. Cornelia Phillips Spencer attacked the Reconstruction University without mercy, but not entirely without cause. She did not seek to close it, but when her enemies did so, she served us all by seeking to reverse their decision. In my judgment, it is easier to build a university that is both democratic and academically superior when you start with something rather than nothing.

Cornelia Philips Spencer was a deeply flawed human being, but there are dozens of white men honored on this campus whose treatment of African Americans, of workers, and of women was far worse than hers. On balance, she was a benefactor to the University of North Carolina, and it seems shallow and ungrateful to pretend otherwise. To go even further and to misstate the facts of her life is worse than ungrateful, and confuses history with propaganda. By now, however, the shortcomings of Cornelia Phillips Spencer should be obvious to all of us. Whether she is thus the right woman to represent the University’s highest aspirations for its third century remains a fair and open question.

Notes

1. Hope Summerell Chamberlain, Old Days in Chapel Hill: Being the Life and Letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (Chapel Hill, UNC Press, 1926), 230.
2. Phillips Russell, The Woman Who Rang the Bell: The Story of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), 20.
3. Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina. Volume I: From Its Beginning to the Death of President Swain, 1789-1868 (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards & Broughton Print. Co., 1907), 780-83.
4. Fayetteville Observer, March 4, 1861.R
5. William Gaston, “Address Delivered Before the Philanthropic and Dialectic Societies, At Chapel-Hill: June 20, 1832,” (Raleigh: Jos. Gales & Son, 1832). Gaston’s pamphlet saw at least five editions between 1832 and 1858. John Spencer Bassett, Anti-Slavery Leaders of North Carolina, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, series XVI, No. 6 ( Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1898), 29-47.
6. Russell, 125. `
7. Annette C. Wright, “The Grown-Up Daughter : The Case Of North Carolina's Cornelia Phillips Spencer,” The North Carolina Historical Review (July 1997), 260-283.
8. Zebulon Vance to David Lowry Swain, September 22, 1864, reprinted in Cornelia Phillips Spencer, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina (New York: Watchman Publishing Company, 1866), 28.
9. Russell, 79.
10. Cornelia Phillips Spencer to Eliza North, March 10, 1866, reprinted in Chamberlain, 130.
11. Cornelia Phillips Spencer, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina (New York: Watchman Publishing Company, 1866).
12. Robin Brabham, “Defining the American University: The University of North Carolina, 1865-1875,” The North Carolina Historical Review (October 1980), 427-55.
13. Chamberlain, 144.
14. Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina. Volume II: From 1868 to 1912 (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Company, 1912), 9-10; Russell, 112.
15. Chamberlain, 103.
16. “It may be as well to state that there never was any proposal to admit the colored youth into the University at Chapel Hill, nor to have co-education of the races in any way.” Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. II, 8.
17. Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 85-135; W. McKee Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower Cape Fear (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967).
18. See “[Shall $12,000 Be Appropriated for University Expenses?]” Raleigh Sentinel, March 31, 1869, and “[More concerning the Proposed Appropriation],” Raleigh Sentinel, April 6, 1869, both in Wilson, ed., Selected Papers, 613-616.
19. Wilson, ed., Selected Papers, 612-56.
20 . Cornelia Phillips Spencer to Laura Phillips, April 13, 1869, reprinted in 20. Chamberlain, 159-61.
21. E.g., “The Bell Award, in fact, honors a woman who was a prime mover in the forced closing of the University by white supremacists in 1871. Spencer helped lead and organize the white supremacy campaign to close UNC…. The Bell Award honors a woman who forced the closing of the University in 1871 because she opposed the racial justice reforms we cherish today,” Yonni Chapman to Chancellor James Moeser, February 24, 2004, email message in the author’s possession.
22. Cornelia Phillips Spencer to William A. Graham, September 26, 1871, in Louis Round Wilson, ed., Selected Papers of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 656-58.
23. “Woman’s Rights [no.1],” The North Carolina Presbyterian January 19, 1870, reprinted in Wilson, ed., Selected Papers, 158-161.
24. Russell, 161-63; “The University Normal School [no. 8],” August 22, 1877, in Wilson, ed., Selected Papers, 316-19.
25. “[Kindness to the Negro,]” Wilson, ed., Selected Papers, 119.
26. Wilson, ed., “Free and Equal,” North Carolina Presbyterian, February 26, 1875, Selected Papers, 128.
27. “[Kindness to the Negro,]” Wilson, ed., Selected Papers, 117.
28. Ibid., 117.
29. “Free and Equal,” North Carolina Presbyterian, February 26, 1875, Wilson, ed., Selected Papers, 129.
30. Cornelia Philips Spencer to Cinderella Shepard, n.d., reprinted in Russell,