Henry Wikoff of Philadelphia—afterwards, with the titular embellishment of “Chevalier,” a familiar, not to say flamboyant, figure in several European capitals, and the winner of fame at home as the importer of Fanny Elssler and founder of the “New York Republic”—happened to be in New Haven during the summer of 1827. He was preparing to enter college, which he did with the class of ’31, but was prematurely graduated by reason of sundry irregularities. In his amusing “Reminiscences of an Idler,” published in 1880, he gave the following description of two undergraduates with whom he was subsequently more nearly associated:—
“I also remember two men who graduated in the class of 1827, that were frequently pointed out to me as its most conspicuous members. One was the son of a very prominent statesman, which, in fact, explained the notice he attracted; but there was enough of individuality about John Van Buren to command attention. He had already revealed the traits which distinguished him in after life—easy and careless in manner, bold in character, and of an aggressive turn of mind. His rival in notoriety had no hereditary claims to support him, but he was gifted with a rare poetical talent that had already secured him distinction both in and out of college. His tone and bearing were aristocratic, not unmixed with hauteur, and though admired for his abilities he never commanded the sympathies of his comrades. Such was N. P. Willis, and such he remained to the end of his life. Neither of these graduates, if I remember, bore off ‘honors;’ but Willis was requested by his class, with the approval of the faculty, to deliver a poem at the Commencement of 1827. I was too young to approach these Titans, as I regarded them, and was content to gaze on them with deference as they swept by me in the street. In after years I became intimate with them both.”
The genial chevalier’s memory misled him slightly in placing “Prince John,” as he was called, in the same class with Willis. He was a member of ’28, which he joined in junior year, and like Willis was a great wit and a great beau. These three contemporaries, senior, junior, and sub-freshman, were strangely juggled together again by Time, the conjurer. They met in the famous Forrest trial, where Van Buren figured as the defendant’s counsel, and Willis as a particeps criminis and witness for the plaintiff. Wikoff, who had known Forrest intimately before and after his marriage, and had traveled extensively with him in Russia and elsewhere, was at first made a party in the actor’s charges against his wife, but his name was withdrawn from the case before it came to trial.
Yale was then under the mild government of President Day. Silliman, Knight, Kingsley, Fitch, and Goodrich were among the professors, and among the tutors were Theodore Woolsey and Edward Beecher. The last afterwards sustained another relation to Willis, as pastor of Park Street Church. Student life in the twenties was a much simpler existence than it is in the eighties. That network of interests which makes the college world of to-day such a stirring microcosm—with its athletic and social clubs, its regattas, promenade concerts, and class-day gayeties, its undergraduate newspapers and magazines, and its lavish expenditure upon society halls, boat-houses, ball-grounds, etc.—was all undreamed of. Far from owning a yacht or a dog-cart, the Yalensian of those days seldom owned a carpet or a paper-hanging. When those unwonted luxuries were introduced into his room by Freshman Wikoff, the rumor of this offense against the unwritten sumptuary laws of the college reached the ear of Professor Silliman. He visited the apartment, and after inspecting it gravely said, with a frown, to its abashed occupant, “All this love of externals, young man, argues indifference to the more necessary furniture of the brain, which is your spiritual business here.” The time-honored paragraph in the catalogue on “necessary expenses” gave the annual maximum as two hundred dollars. That paragraph has always been oversanguine, but probably four or five hundred a year was the average cost of a college education in 1825. During each of his last two years Willis spent about six hundred. Life in college was not only plain, but decidedly rough. It was the era of “Bully Clubs,” town and gown rows, “Bread and Butter Rebellions,” etc. It was the thing to paint the president’s horse red, white, and blue, and to put a cow in the belfry. In 1824 a mob threatened the Medical School because a body had been dug up by resurrectionists. The Southerners, then a large element at Yale, were particularly wild and turbulent. Christmas, which the Puritan college refused to make a holiday of, was their recognized Saturnalia.
“The day,” wrote Willis in a freshman letter to his father, “is the greatest of the year at the South, and our Southern students seem disposed to be restless under the restriction of a lesson on playday. There were many of them drunk last evening, and still more to-day. Christmas has always been, ever since the establishment of the college, emphatically a day of tricks: windows broken, bell-rope cut, freshmen squirted, and every imaginable scene of dissipation acted out in full. Last night they barred the entry doors of the South College, to exclude the government, and then illuminated the building. This morning the recitation-room doors were locked and the key stolen, and we were obliged to knock down the doors to get in; and then we were not much better off, for the lamps were full of water and the wicks gone. However, we procured others, and went on with the lesson.”
Wikoff tells of a fight in a college room, in which a dirk was used, between a South Carolina student named Albert Smith and another Southerner, which resulted in the expulsion of both. Smith, who stood at the head of his class, afterwards changed his name to Rhett, and became a member of his state’s legislature, but died prematurely.
New Haven in 1823–27 was not the considerable manufacturing city of to-day, but a rural town with a population of about nine thousand. West of the college yard only two streets were laid out. Beyond these, along the Derby turnpike, stretched a level of sandy pastures, alive with grasshoppers, where the young orators, practicing for debates in “Linonia” or “Brothers,” or for declamations before the Professor of Rhetoric, used to go to “explode the elements.” Down by the bay, in a region now occupied by great factories, stood the old “Pavilion,” a famous seaside hotel much resorted to by Southern families. The first railroad from New Haven was laid in 1839. As yet even the Farmington Canal was only projected. Willis and the Boston contingent used to come all the way by stage-coach, passing through Framingham, Worcester, and Hartford—in which last he had acquaintances, with whom he sometimes spent a day en route. Anthracite coal was not in use in New Haven before 1827. Citizens and students alike depended on wood, the latter buying theirs at the regular wood-stand near South College, and having it cut in the yard behind the colleges, wood-saws not being in general vogue. The habits of the collegians, from a hygienic point of view, were usually bad. They sat up late drinking strong coffee in their rooms, rose very early perforce, prayed and recited on an empty stomach, and took little regular exercise. Dyspepsia was naturally rife.
But en revanche New Haven was a beautiful little city, with a homogeneous population and a charming society, and better fitted in some respects for the seat of a university than it is to-day. It was already, thanks to the public spirit of Governor Hillhouse, the City of Elms; and it is hard to walk through Temple Street of a moonlight evening without a regretful recollection of Willis’s “Rosa Matilda description,” in “Edith Linsey,” of a place that must have been all Temple Streets—a dream-city of shaded squares and white—piazzaed mansions shining among cool green gardens. In “The Cherokee’s Threat” he has recorded his first eager impressions of the new community that he was entering, as he stood and looked about him in the side aisle of the old chapel on the opening day of the term: “It was the only republic I have ever known—that class of freshmen. It was a fair arena. … Of the feelings that stir the heart in our youth—of the few, the very few, that have no recoil and leave no repentance—this leaping