William Barton Rogers and the Southern Sieve: Revisiting Science, Slavery, and Higher Learning in the Old South

Abstract

conceptual founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pursued two interrelated careers in nineteenth-century America: one centered on his activities in science and the other on his higher educational reform efforts. His scientific peers knew him as a geologist and natural philosopher, director of the first geological survey of Viiginia, author of over one hundred publications in science, and promoter of professionalization.His colleagues in higher education, meanwhile, thought of him as the reformminded professor at the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia, who later left the South and established one of America's first technological institutes. Comparatively little has been written about either of these areas of Rogers's life and career. We know much more about the scientific and educational thought of such figures as Louis Agassiz at Harvard, Benjamin Silliman at Yale, Joseph Henry at Princeton, and Alexander Dallas Bache at the helm of the Coast Survey. The litemture on Rogers, by comparison, has offered little insight into his life and even less about his relationship to broader developments in nineteenth-century science and higher learning.' A. J. Angulo is an assistant professor a t Winthrop University. He is currently writing a biographical study of William Barton Rogers that focuses on the intersection of history of education and history of science in nineteenth-century America. He would like to give special thanks to Julie Reuben, Thomas G. Dyer, Catherine Z. Elgin, and the late William E. Gienapp for their instructive comments on earlier versions of this essay. 'Albert E. Moyer,@qb Henry: The lzlie ofan Ameriuzn Scjentirt (Washington: Smithsonian ). Several mbutes, obituaries, and chapters h m institutional histories have been published on William Barton Rogers and vary widely in quality and accuracy. Scholarly articles are few and center mostly on his geological research.