There is a plot line we all recognize. At ten in the morning on November 11, 1918, a unit goes into battle. Some unlucky soul will be the last man killed in the First World War. The chronological irony is too much to bear.
On April 4, 1865, Union troops under General John T. Croxton crossed the Black Warrior from Northport and quickly seized the town of Tuscaloosa. There was little resistance and the invaders created little destruction. Then the federal troops moved east to the campus and burned everything to the ground except the President’s Mansion and the Gorgas House.
Union troops invading the South did not burn other universities to the ground, but in 1859 the state legislature had designated the university a “military Institution.” All students were “cadets.” On April 4, a number fought and were casualties. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox would come on April 9, five days after the destruction of the university.
There are numerous histories of the University of Alabama but this one focusses only on the next six years—1865 to 1871, and the repeated failed attempts to get the university open and running. This book is heavily researched and detailed and the prose is sometimes not smooth, but there is a compelling story here, a sad story, and one that can be a source of pride to no one.
With the surrender, Reconstruction was established and with it Black citizens, almost half the population of the state, were enfranchised and the Republican party took control. Rogers, in his summary, tells of the power of fear. The Republicans feared that the university and the state would sink back into a “neo-slavocracy” and “pseudo-secessionist mentality.” Democrats feared that the newly appointed professors, some of them Republicans, were chosen for their radical views, not their academic qualifications.
In fact, the pre-war faculty was let go and many of the new faculty were Republicans and had no previous affiliation with the university. It was hardly mentioned by any of them that the university might be open to women or freedmen. Nevertheless, they were harassed, threatened, even assaulted.
Resistance to Reconstruction was strong everywhere in Alabama but Tuscaloosa and the surrounding country was rife with Klan activity and violence: beatings, lynchings and even murder of freedmen. Much of the violence was spurred on by a vile newspaper editor, Ryland Randolph, who attacked professors mercilessly, by name. Rogers suggests a contributing factor was the utter isolation of Tuscaloosa, with no railroad and intermittent river access, making Tuscaloosa a violent little island.
Besides the toxic political atmosphere of course, the state was broke, there were almost no students, and it took about five attempts to find a person willing to be president. Arad Lakin came to preside and the local paper ran a cartoon of him hanging from a tree. He left without spending one night in the mansion.
