BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS, DELIVERED DECEMBER 17, 1836. AT THE FIFTH ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF ALABAMA

[Tuscaloosa]: Published by Request of the Trustees, 1836.. 12pp. Original rear wrapper present (but the top third detached, and present) front wrapper lacking, stitched as issued. Foxing throughout. About very good. An early baccalaureate address from the University of Alabama, delivered by Alva Woods, the first president of the university, which had been founded just five years early. Woods delivered this address in 1836, the year before he resigned in the face of a violent student rebellion. Woods was a minister, professor, and university president. Born in Vermont in 1794, he studied at Harvard, graduating in 1817 before attending Andover Theological Seminary. He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1821 and shortly thereafter was appointed professor of mathematics, natural philosophy, and ecclesiastical history at Columbian College (now George Washington University). Woods served briefly as interim president at Brown University and as president at Transylvania University before accepting an offer to become the first president of the University of Alabama, where his tenure was nothing if not turbulent. Eager to replicate the moral and educational culture that he had known in New England, Woods instituted a strict system of discipline, but however appropriate such a system may have seemed to the descendants of Puritans, it was ill-suited to the frontier culture and Southern code of honor then prevailing at Alabama. There such attempts at imposing discipline were met with open hostility and even violence, with Woods himself becoming the target of attacks by knife-, whip-, and pistol-wielding students. No doubt fed up with the abuse, Woods resigned his presidency in 1837, citing his health and a desire to educate his son in the North.

On its surface, the present text appears to read like any other baccalaureate address, with Woods calling on graduates to pledge their "talents and attainments to the cause of knowledge, of freedom, and of christian morality." But, reading between the lines, one quickly gets a sense of the volatile context in which the address was given. That year, in an effort to crack down on student misbehavior, Woods had implemented a stricter code of regulations, and though "the certainty of punishment, in case of a known violation of the laws, is now more fully established than at any former period," Woods was compelled to admit in his address that - between "the lawless violence of the mob," the "national vice" of "Intemperance," and the "seductive snares" of "Gambling" - there was "much vice and much moral degeneracy still to deplore" both at the university and throughout the nation. A fascinating document offering insights into the tensions that brewed - and occasionally boiled over - between faculty and students on antebellum college campuses. AMERICAN IMPRINTS 42564. SABIN 105121 (note). ELLISON III:271. AII (ALABAMA) 231. DAB XX, pp.500-1. A. James Fuller, Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manly and Baptist Life in the Old South (Baton Rouge. 2000), pp.154-6. Robert F. Pace, Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South (Baton Rouge. 2004).