Campus Novels and the Nation of Peers

Abstract

Happy, happy college-days! When are friendships so ardent, so unquestioning! When does the wine of life sparkle so brightly, so enticingly! Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1893 Donald Marcy begins, as do many postbellum campus novels, with the annual freshmen–sophomore football match. Unlike her genre cohorts, however, Phelps uses the sporting event—and, indeed, her narrative as a whole—to reenact the horrors of slavery, the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and, ultimately, white sectional reconciliation. During the match, Southerner Lee Calhoun, “white with rage,” strikes down George Washington Clay, “[a] colored student,” who “played quite fair, and dealt no foul blows” (28–29). Calhoun provides a simple and, for him, sufficient explanation: “He is a nigger, and I knocked him down” (29). The northern white students react swiftly and punitively. Trouncey O'Grian, a prizefighter's son, knocks Calhoun “flat upon the ground” and instructs him in the ways of northern justice: “‘This is a free college and a free country’” (29–30). Reconstruction proceeds apace: “Calhoun was subjected to almost every indignity that Harle”—Harvard + Yale = Harle—“Sophomores, in those long-past days, ever inflicted upon an unpopular Freshman” (44). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Calhoun's resentful threat to “shoot every man of you down as I would so many niggers” fails to win him any reprieve (45); nor does a letter from the elder Calhoun to Harle's President (“My son complains to me that he is required to sit by the side of a negro student” [32]). Calhoun's actions, we're told, constitute not merely racism but “snobbishness,” “the last fault which a college full of sturdy young democrats will overlook,” and we're led to believe that he will endure continued punishment until he can thoroughly reform his ways (38).

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