1868 - The University Closes for an Academic Year
Having invested in Confederate securities and bank stocks, the University now found them worthless and was over $100,000 in debt and $7,000 in arrears for faculty salaries (Battle I: 754). Because most families could ill afford to send their sons to college, tuition receipts were not forthcoming. Many Chapel Hill stores and boarding houses, dependent on students, went out of business. Several faculty members left the University for work elsewhere.
Enslaved people whose labor had supported the local economy were now free, and many left their former enslavers, worked out arrangements to be paid for their work, or turned to farming. The years between 1867 and 1870 were also a period of intense Ku Klux Klan activity in the region. Masked raiders rode through town at night, their horses' hooves muffled, to terrorize Black Americans. They stoned houses, beat those who attempted to stand up to the Klan, and intimidated Black American inmates at a local poorhouse.
The institution was on the brink of failure. By July 1868 North Carolina had been readmitted to the Union, but a new Board of Trustees called for the resignations of all University faculty members and declared their positions vacant. President Swain protested the move but died on August 27, 1968, after a carriage accident.
SOURCES
Battle, Kemp P. History of the University of North Carolina, vol. I: From Its Beginning to the Death of President Swain, 1789-1868. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Co., 1907. 309, 513, 660, 715, 754. Rpt. in Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/battle1/battle1.html.
Battle, Kemp P. History of the University of North Carolina, vol. II: From 1868 to 1912. Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Co., 1912. 19. Rpt. in Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/battle2/battle2.html.
Lindemann, Erika. “Aftermath of the Civil War.” True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina. 2005. Documenting the American South. University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://docsouth.unc.edu/true/chapter/chp06-02/chp06-02.html.