History of Randolph-Macon College

Jefferson Davis offered the College Presidency

While he declined for the present to allow his name to be used, he intimated that the situation would be very agreeable to him. He stated that he had had offers that were better pecuniarily but none that suited his feelings so well.

We will have to give Mr. D. a large salary, but, ...if we can get a man to fill the public mind, we can afford to offer him a large salary.

Another Boydton correspondent wrote to Mrs. William A. Smith, giving a feminine, i.e., more practical, prognosis: It is kept a great secret that Mr Davis is proposed-and I think myself it is very idle, for there is no telling when the Yankees will try him, or what they will do with him.

William A. Smith was incensed at the suggestion of Davis for president. He objected to him not only on religious grounds, for Davis was an Episcopalian, but on more philosophical grounds. The success Washington College had gained from having Robert E. Lee as president could not be duplicated by Randolph-Macon with Davis.

Gnl. Lee represents an idea-and a great one indeed! Success-in the broadest sense, is associated every where with his name. He is not considered a Conquered-a fallen man, but an unfortunate General who was overthrown by the brute force of his enemy....Mr Davis represents one idea also. This is true[.] But it is the idea of defeat. More than this, he, for the present at least, represents that entire system of Statesmanship, the imperfection and failure of which resulted in the loss of our liberties!

Smith goes on to say that while time will eventually justify Davis as a martyr, he was not popular at that moment.

Washington College had suffered a drop in enrollment after the war, and like Randolph-Macon it suffered from bad communications. Conferring the presidency on Lee, although not explicitly stated in Crenshaw's history of the institution, probably saved the school. Lee turned it into a regional school, not just a Virginia one, by attracting the attention of ex-soldiers from all over the South. Their only legacy to their sons, it seemed, would be an education, and they wished it to be under Marse Robert. Lee, an Episcopalian, gave the school grounds for asserting that it was nonsectarian, although the faculty and board remained Presbyterian.

The futile attempt to get ex-president Davis as president of the college must be seen as a last-ditch effort to save the school and to keep it in Mecklenburg County. With Davis's refusal of the offer in the spring of 1868, the board had to face some grim prospects.

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