ment officials in the British colonies. In these places, young men who
succeeded were those who could persuade, manipulate and intimidate their
fellows around them, and these were skills that had to be be learned. Some
read advice manuals like Lord Chesterfield’s. But others honed their social
skills at school in fisticuffs or worse. Increasingly in the second half of the
nineteenth century, however, violence in schools and colleges throughout the
Atlantic world subsided in favor of structured competitions – debating
societies and sports, for example – that mimicked that earlier brutality, but
also differed from it in significant ways. These became modern, bureaucratic
venues in which students could persuade, manipulate and sometimes
intimidate their peers, and in so doing produce a reputation for leadership.$
South African College was established to solve an imperial political
problem at the Cape, not as a result of any great demand from residents of
the colony. Opened in , the college was intended chiefly to draw the next
generation of settlers, both Afrikaner and English, into the service of the
empire. The idea was to anglicize the sons of Afrikaner farmers and send
them back into the countryside as magistrates and ministers, spreading
English language and culture as they went. The sons of English settlers for
the most part were expected to serve as clerks in the merchant houses in Cape
Town and as petty bureaucrats in the colonial government. It was never,
however, supposed that the college’s graduates would rise to positions of real
power, and in the first generation they did not. Those positions went to
bureaucrats sent out from London.% Appropriately, then, South African
College was a venture of modest size and conservative purposes when it came
into being. It was hoped that the college would attract about students,
but it seldom did. Enrollments ranged from a high of students in ,
a level that was not surpassed until , to a low of sixteen students in .
The college was also intended to have four professors: one English-speaking
specialist in the classics, one Dutch-speaking classicist, one who could teach
moral philosophy, and another to deal with all aspects of the natural world.
In fact, the college seldom employed more than two men before mid-
century, although their efforts were supplemented by a writing master who
taught mainly penmanship – a very useful skill for aspiring clerks – and
$
On the means for manufacturing elite status, see Letters to His Son by the Earl of
Chesterfield, On the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (ed. Oliver
H. Leigh, New York, ), esp. –, –; and George Brauer Jr., The Education
of a Gentleman: Theories of Gentlemanly Education in England, –ꢀ (New York,
), ch. . See also Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural
Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville, ); Judy Hilkey, Character is
Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in the Gilded Age in America (Chapel Hill, );
Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York,
), ch. , ; and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and
Women of the English Middle Class, –ꢀ (Chicago, ), ch. . On students and
violence at South Carolina College, Harvard and Princeton, see Daniel Walker Hollis,
South Carolina College (Columbia, SC, ), –, –, –, –; Thomas
Jefferson Wertenbaker, Princeton, – (Princeton, NJ, ), –, –,
–, –; and Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge, MA,
), –.
%
On the administrative history of South African College, see Ritchie, History, Vol. .
On the introduction of representative and responsible government, see Newton and
Benians, Cambridge History of the British Empire, Vol. , ch. and .